The bus discovery: Freer, Longley, and the Adidas blanket

texture · Sept YDAU; surfaced 6-7 Nov

• When: September YDAU, on the bus to the East Coast Clays in Providence; narrated retrospectively during the 6-7 Nov ride home from Port Washington.
• What: Thode's signature disciplinary catch: it was prorector Mary Esther Thode who discovered Keith Freer "more or less Xing poor Bernadette Longley under an Adidas blanket" in the very back seat of the September bus — "and it had been a nasty scene," some basic Academy-license rules being unfloutable under the nose of staff. The institutional consequence stuck: since September all the females sit in the bus's front half. Two months later the affair is still live enough that "a Gothic-fonted leaflet offering the kingdom of prehistoric England to the man who could pull Keith Freer out of Bernadette Longley" circulates on the ride home, and Longley buries her face in her hands and flushes to the back of her neck. Thode as the staff eye it is genuinely unwise to flout.