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bearing the words “
Sacrifucium
,
Sanctimonia
, and
Scientia
”—over a white dress shirt, with blue and gold stripes slanting down the length of the school-issue polyester tie. His first night in the four-story dormitory saw him march onto the first-year students’ basement floor, evict one of the boys from the room nearest the communal bathroom and showers, and relocate the poor kid to Gordon’s own assigned room at the hallway’s end.
    The hand-lettered sign outside the desired room bore the names Wildman and Harness.
    “Hey, Wild Man, pack up. You’re moving,” Gordon commanded. He’d eyeballed the single person inside the room and had correctly identified the one to whom the name Wildman belonged.
    “Fuck you” was the response of the soon-to-be-expatriatedboy, who remained crouched with his back to Gordon while he fidgeted with computer cables.
    “Don’t flatter yourself, stud,” Gordon answered in an exaggerated lisp.
    When Wildman rose, he stood two inches taller than Gordon and at least twenty-five pounds heavier. He was a middle linebacker who’d already been promoted to the varsity football team.
    Having heard homophobic horror stories of life in an all-boys prep school dormitory, “Wild Man,” as Gordon had baptized him, turned around with his fists balled and ready to pummel, but there was something unsettling about Gordon’s cocksure stare that set off warning bells in Wild Man’s head and emasculated his violent intentions.
    After a pause, Wild Man marched from the room toward his new digs in the nether lands of Harrow Hall. Carrying a box of trophies from home, he muttered something about a “faggot for a roommate” and about returning for the rest of his stuff later.
    It was then that Gordon spotted a thin, delicate waif of a boy standing timidly in the corner behind the bunk beds. The boy was, apparently, a portion of Gordon’s booty of conquest. His name was William Harness.
    When Willie emerged from his niche, he did so with a limping gait.
    Gordon’s eyes opened wide, and Willie intuited the question. “I have a bad leg. I was born with a club—”
    “—foot,” Gordon finished, and a friendship was born. “What’s your name?” he asked, and extended his hand.
    “William. I’m new here.”
    “I’ll tell you what, William I’m-new-here. I’ll just call you Willie, and if anyone here bullies you, tell me and I’ll take care of it.”
    Despite his personal shame, Gordon’s relative wealth, fame, athleticism, and good looks would always be more than enough “cool” currency to compensate for the derision that might have otherwise been directed toward him because of his clubfoot. Willie, however, with his diminutive stature, introverted nature, and tendency toward all things geek, possessed no such bankroll.
    Turned out that, like Gordon, Willie was a bit of an artistic prodigy. He had already held gallery showings of his more conservative paintings: still lifes, seascapes, and portraits. For a short time, he had secretly operated his own fantasy art website—filled with rendition after rendition of chiseled heroes, often naked, always male, in throes of various combats with mythical monsters—until his parents discovered his little side project. Appalled by the homoeroticism, but without a sniff of irony, they enrolled William at the Rood. Willie had the Web page up and running under a new URL address and domain name within an hour.
    Over the single academic year that Gordon would spend at the Rood, he would discover that a disproportionate number of the boys had been sent there because of parental revulsion for their offspring, not because the boys had been called to an education in “Sacrifice, Virtue, and Knowledge.” In his freshman class alone were any number of avariety of deviants, ranging from the simply neurotic to the violent to the perverted, and some who were a little bit of all three.
    Gordon had never even seen a game of lacrosse prior to his arrival