Page 4 of The Headmaster’s Binding

I got the notebook.

Item eight: light in the ROOF VOID building, 12:20 a.m., third floor, window to window, north to south, walking pace. Somebody's in there. Somebody's in there who knows it.

Item nine: the fog does not move when wind goes through it. Confirmed personally, like an idiot, with my hand.

Item ten: the Headmaster knew where I lived, knew what my window looks at, and told me I'd stop noticing.

I read item ten back twice. Then I turned off my own lamp, and stood at the dark window in the dark room like a man in a play, and watched the closed building not have anybody in it for another half hour.

At some point the fog reached the service lane below my window and stood there, level, patient, the exact height of a person. I checked the deadbolt on my door, which I will defend as the single most rational act of my first week, and I got into a bed that smelled of old dust, stale wool, and the lavender polish of previous tenants, and did not sleep through the twenty-three entries I drafted before dawn. The radiator ticked. Below the window, the fog held its level like water finding a line someone had drawn for it. Twice I heard footsteps in the lane, unhurried, and both times they stopped somewhere short of where my window could see, and did not start again.

The last item is the only one I'm ashamed of.

Item eleven: gray eyes. Gray like the stone. What does he look like when he actually laughs?

I did not strike item eleven.

I want that noted too.

Chapter 2

Adrian

Two letters came to my desk on the day of the welcome dinner, under seals that do not exist. I burned both before dinner.

They were still only the second and third most dangerous things to arrive at my college that week.

This college keeps two sets of books. I am the man who keeps the second.

Rosalind brought the intake folders at noon, with a pot of tea and the observation that I had not eaten.

"There's soup."

"There is always soup."

"There's soup today," she said, and set the tray on the one place on my desk where a tray does not interfere with the blotter. It took her three weeks to learn that in her first term. She has not missed since, and I have never told her I noticed, and that arrangement is the closest thing to friendship I permit myself with a woman I would trust with my life.

Intake review is sixteen hours of work in two days. The folders come in three colors. Blue is academic and goes back down to the deans. Green is medical and does not open on my desk; it goes to the health center under my initials. The third color has no name in any handbook this college prints. Rosalind calls them the mustard ones. She has called them that for nine years and has never once asked why they come to me instead of to anyone else, which is either discretion or wisdom, and in my experience the two are the same thing worn at different angles.

There were four mustard folders. Three were continuations, routine, the paperwork of holding steady.

The fourth had a name typed on the tab in the registrar's old machine face: MARSH, CALEB J. Graduate, second year, twenty-five. A town forty miles east with one road in it. Flagged twice in the same fortnight, once by a residence advisor, once by the chaplain, and the pattern matters more than the words, because one report is a bad week and two is a bad week that other people can see.

Under the standard sheet there is a second sheet. It uses a vocabulary that appears on no other paper this college produces, and I have been reading that vocabulary since I was twenty-two, and I have a way of reading it that keeps me from absorbing their full meaning all at once. You look at the shape of the term and take the meaning out of it sideways, the way a splinter comes out sideways. It is not a skill I am proud of. It is a skill.

Level three. Interval holding. Maintained since March.

Hands flat on his knees, I thought, for no reason I permitted to become a reason.

I wrote Thursday next, 4 p.m. on the cover in pencil, and set the pencil down parallel with the drawer runner, and closed the drawer on the whole question. Eight days. A boy who has held since March will hold eight more days, and the first week of term is a poor week in which to take a student out of circulation.

The soup was leek. It had gone cold. I ate it anyway, because Rosalind counts the bowls.

* * *

The second post came at four, which is when the second post comes, except that what was in it had not come through any post.

Two items, both under the sort of seal that does not exist.