Excluded by the 16s: "cretinous and cruel," and the burnt-cats suspicion

pivotal · by 17 Nov YDAU (cats found ~early Nov)

• When: state of affairs as of 17 Nov YDAU; the burnt corpses were found "during pre-drill sprints a couple weeks back" (~early Nov). The exclusion is "more recently" than the 16s' standing exclusion of Stice.
• What: The narrator's anatomy of the male 16s — "E.T.A.'s male 16s were as a group inbent, conspiratorial, glandular, cliqueish. They excluded anyone not in their set." — with "techniques and strategems of exclusion way more advanced than the 18s or 14s" — records that they excluded Stice (for rooming with Coyle and drilling up with the 18s) "and more recently Kornspan, excluded, basically because he was cretinous and cruel and now consensually suspected of having tortured and killed the two collarless cats whose burnt corpses had been found on the hillside during pre-drill sprints a couple weeks back." This is the book's only window on Kornspan's character as his peers read it, and it is double-sourced to rumor: "consensually suspected" is the 16s' verdict, not the narrator's. No scene shows Kornspan harming an animal, and the suspicion is carried here as suspicion — the identity of the cats' actual killer is left open here (see Dating notes for the open cross-thread). What the note does establish outright is the exclusion itself, which retroactively recolors the isolation the other scenes show: the table nobody will share, the sink nobody goes near.