Substance-clique member; the I-Day-Eve duBois ritual

texture · STANDING

• When: STANDING — ongoing membership; the ritual is a two-year custom with a dated instance on 7 Nov YDAU (I-Day Eve)
• What: Struck is a core member of the Academy's substance-using upperclassmen — grouped among those who suffer "thinly disguised psychological fallout," fluent in the clique's drug argot. The Interdependence-Day-Eve custom splits into two precise rosters the text keeps distinct: for two years running, Hal, Pemulis, Struck, Troeltsch, and sometimes B. Boone nip out to the hidden clearing behind the West House dumpsters to share an obscene cigar-sized duBois, while Schacht and sometimes Stice sit inside the tow truck warming it up; the wider supper-out-and-Unexamined-Life blowout-gala party is Hal, Pemulis, Struck, Axford, Troeltsch, Schacht, and sometimes Stice. In that same 11/7 window's C-vs-A challenge play Struck pulls a characteristic stunt — beating Gloeckner in forty minutes, then theatrically revealing the 3-kilo ankle-weights he'd worn under his socks the whole time.