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held the boy's right hand between his teeth. The king told the boy to make a joke now. The boy turned white. 'Go free, Ghost,' the king said, and the dog on the left flew forward and bit down on the boy's left hand.
     
         '' 'You see where tasteless remarks get you,' said the king. 'Begin to eat, my dogs.'
     
         ' 'Begin to eat, my dogs,'' Sherman repeated, shaking his head. 'I practically fell on the floor and puked. Lake the Snake just kept looking at me. 'Get out of here,' he said. 'Don't ever come back here again for a stupid reason. like this.' I sort of wobbled toward the door. Then I heard something growling, and I looked back and a great goddamned Doberman was getting to its feet beside his chair. 'Get out!' Lake the Snake shouted at me, and I ran out of that office like fiends were after me.'
     
         'Holy shit,' mumbled the folksinger. Shennan's girlfriend was staring at him limpidly, waiting for the punch line, and I knew he had told this story, which by now I remembered perfectly, many times before.
     
         Sherman was grinning at me. 'I see it's all come back to you. When I was nearly at the door, that sadist behind the desk said 'Alis volat propriis, Mr. Sherman.' I saw a signon the wall next to his door, where you'd see it every time you left his office. It said, 'Don't wait to be a great man. Be a great boy.''
     
         'Be a fuckin' son-of-a-bitch bastard,' the folksinger said, and then looked up confused because Sherman and I were both laughing. The country-house blond was laughing too: Sherman could always make women laugh. I had learned a long time before that this ability was a large part of his undoubted sexual success.
     
       
     
       
     
      5
     
       
     
      Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale had picked up their freshman beanies like the rest of us from the carton just inside the library doors, and at the end of Registration Day they stood for a moment together at the entrance to the school, trying them on. 'I think they're one-size-fits-none,' Tom said. Both boys' beanies were a quarter-size too large and swam on their heads. 'Don't worry, we can swap them tomorrow,' Tom said. 'There were a lot left over in that box. Do you know how to wear these, by the way? This little bill is supposed to be two fingers above the bridge of your nose.' Using the first two fingers of his right hand to demonstrate, he adjusted the cap with his right. Nightingale imitated him, and brought the brim down to the level of his topmost finger.
     
         'Well, it's only for the first semester,' Tomsaid. But then, at the beginning, they shared a secret pleasure in wearing the absurd caps: Tom because it meant that he was in the Upper School — the entrance to adulthood. If Tom thought of the Upper School as the realm of beings who were almost men — the seniors did look alarmingly like real adults — for Del it was something simpler and more comprehensive. He thought of it, without being quite aware of the thought, as a place which might become home. Tom at least was at home in it.
     
         At that moment, he wanted Tom Flanagan to befriend him more than anything else in the world.
     
       
     
      Of course I am ascribing to the fourteen-year-old Del Nightingale emotions which I cannot be sure he possessed. Yet he must have been very lonely in these first weeks at Carson; and I have Tom's later statement to me that 'Del Nightingale needed a friend more than anyone else I'd ever met. I didn't even know, this is how innocent I was, that anyone could need a friend as badly as that. And you know how schools are: if you want something, security or affection, very badly, it means that you're not going to get it. I didn't see why that should always be true.' The statement shows that Tom was more sensitive than his appearance ever indicated. With his gingery hair, his short wiry athletic body, his good clothes a little scuffed and rumpled, he looked chiefly as though he wished he