Chapter 6

The kitchen was the warmest room in the house.

Not just in temperature, though it was that too. Quinn felt it the moment he came through the door and saw a warm, welcoming smile from the woman stirring a big pot on the stove.

She was small and broad-shouldered, with dark hair shot through with gray pulled back under a white kerchief. She had turned when she heard him come in, and her face opened into a warm welcoming smile.

She said something in rapid Spanish and gestured at the stool pulled up to the kitchen counter. He sat.

The soup arrived in front of him two minutes later. Tortilla soup, deep and rust-colored, with strips of fried tortilla laid across the top, a crumble of white cheese, and a small dish of sliced avocado on the side, which she indicated he should add himself, which he did. There was a sandwich beside it--brown bread with chicken and something green in it that he identified after the first bite as roasted poblano.

He ate.

Quinn was not a boy who showed emotion. But the soup was unbelievable. It was the best thing he had eaten--ever. The broth had such a depth of richness and flavor that he closed his eyes in reverence. He ate with a focus that was utterly genuine.

He finished. He sat for a moment, sadly looking at the empty bowl.

Then he got up, picked up the bowl, the spoon, and the plate, and carried them to the dishwasher. He found where the dishes went by looking at what was already loaded, placed them accordingly and then straightened up.

The woman was watching him from the stove with a mild, pleased expression of appraisal.

Quinn said, "Gracias, abuela, por la deliciosa sopa."

The laugh that came out of her was full and genuine and filled the kitchen. She crossed the kitchen in three steps, put her arms around him, and gave him a fierce hug. He stood for a moment basking in the hug with his arms at his sides, then he put them around her and patted her back softly, awkwardly.

"You are welcome, kid." Pure American Bronx, the accent landing like a friendly contradiction after the Spanish. She looked mischievous at his shock at hearing English. "My name is Maria."

"Quinn," he said.

"Welcome to this house." She patted his shoulder twice, firmly, and went back to her stove. She stirred the pot, and something in the set of her shoulders was thoughtful. She added, mostly to the pot, "I don't know what Himself is planning, but you're a welcome addition to our table."

Sullivan's voice came from the next room.

"Come on, kid. Time to get you registered for school."

Quinn looked once at Maria, who waved at him with her stirring spoon. He followed Sullivan out to the car.

Sullivan drove with careful attention. Hands at three and nine, his eyes constantly moving.

Quinn watched the city traffic move past the window: cars, school buses, delivery trucks, and people on sidewalks with their particular weekday purposes.

The atmosphere in the car was different. He turned this over for a while, trying to pinpoint the change. It wasn't warmth exactly, but the feeling of the man's silence had changed.

He didn't say anything about it; he simply noted it.

Sullivan spoke as they turned onto a wider road, "School you're going to is called St. Crispin's Preparatory Academy." Sullivan's voice was its usual measured instrument. "You'll be a freshman." A brief pause. "Families who send their kids there in some cases have been on waiting lists for years. It's an elite school."

"Okay," Quinn said.

"I'm emphasizing the waiting lists and the elite."

"Okay."

"These kids have grown up in a particular way." Sullivan's eyes moved to his in the rearview mirror. "Most of them have never wanted for anything in their lives. They are not accustomed to being told no or to meeting people whose lives were different from theirs."

Quinn looked out the window at the campus coming into view. The playing fields. The buildings with the ivy covering the walls. Kids in uniforms moved between buildings in clusters.

Ice cream kids.

He'd had a low-level current of anxiety running under everything ever since he'd been told, pack your things. The anxiety of a kid for whom change meant bad things were sure to follow, but he was not worried about a bunch of rich ice cream kids.

"Office is on the second floor," Sullivan said, pulling up to the curb at the edge of the campus. "Go in, get your schedule, whatever they give you. I'll be here."

Quinn put his hand on the door.

Another test. Quinn understood tests. This one was about whether he was able to go into an unfamiliar place without someone holding his hand, which he supposed was a reasonable thing to want to know. He filed it as information and got out of the car without a word.

The campus rang with the chaos of the school day ending: a mass of voices and laughter. There were kids in uniforms moving in every direction with the practiced ease of people who knew they belonged. Quinn moved through them in his new clothes.

He found a girl standing by her locker, looking at her phone, dark hair, tie askew. Not pretty in the obvious way, but she had an interesting face.

"Admin office?" he said.

She looked up and assessed him in the rapid, complete way of teens the world over. Whatever she concluded, she kept to herself.

"Second floor, Whitmore Building. That one." She pointed without drama. "Stairs are on the left when you go in."

"Thanks," Quinn said.

She was already back on her phone.

The woman at the reception desk of the headmaster's office sent him to the counselor, Mrs. Welkins. "Down the hall, second door, knock and wait."

Quinn did as he was told, knocked, and waited.

Mrs. Welkins was maybe fifty-five, well dressed. She looked up from her paperwork as he came in. Her expression did the thing he was used to -- the rapid inventory and a welcome that is technically welcome and absolutely the opposite of that.

He'd seen it enough times in enough offices of the bureaucracy of the System. She was obviously the kind that you had to navigate around. He sat down in the chair across from her desk without being invited to, folded his hands in his lap, and waited.

She had a file in front of her. She opened it with the careful precision.

"You are Quinn Norman."

"Yes, ma'am."

She looked at the file. She looked at him. She looked at the file again with the expression of a person reconciling two things that don't reconcile easily.

"You'll be joining us as a freshman," she said. "Your academic records have been reviewed." A pause that was doing some work. "They are irregular."

"Yes ma'am, I've had an irregular life," Quinn said, his voice even.

"Yes. I see that." She produced a printed schedule and slid it across the desk. "This is your course schedule: English, history, Spanish, biology, algebra, and a study period in the fifth slot that can be used for any subject requiring additional attention." Her tone suggested she expected most of his subjects to require a lot of additional attention.

Quinn looked at the schedule. He read it twice quickly, organizing it spatially in his head -- classroom locations he'd find on a map, sequence of the day, any conflicts.

Then he looked up. "The language requirement," he said. "the Spanish class."

"Yes, all freshmen take..."

"I'd like to test out of Spanish and take Japanese instead."

Mrs. Abernathy looked at him with the frown. "That's quite irregular. The placement test for language exemption..."

"I'm happy to take it. I can come tomorrow morning before first period if that's convenient."

Silence followed as she searched her mind for the procedural objection, a rule that would let her say no simply by citing something rather than having to make a judgment call.

Quinn watched and waited.

"Tomorrow morning," she said finally, "Seven thirty. If you pass the exemption test to the required standard, we'll discuss the Japanese option."

"Thank you," Quinn said politely.

She gave him a map of the campus, a locker assignment, a code for the locker, and a copy of the student handbook. He took all of these things, thanked her again in a tone that was polite and respectful without being warm, and left.

The locker was on the first floor of the main building. He found the locker, tested the combination twice, stored the handbook and kept the map and the schedule. He stood at the locker for a moment and looked down the hallway: the notice boards, the trophy cases. He slipped the map into his back pocket and went exploring.

He was methodical about it. The kids by now were mostly gone for the day. He walked the first floor east to west, reading room numbers. He noted the library, then took the stairs up to the second floor where the science rooms were. Third floor was the arts, music coming thinly through a closed doors. He moved casually and quietly and tried to look as though he was doing anything more purposeful than existing.

The voice caught him on the third floor past the practice rooms.

"You there. Excuse me." The voice of someone who expects to be taken seriously and generally is. "What are you doing up here?"

The man was maybe forty, compact and sharp-featured in a blazer with a small pin on the lapel. Quinn clocked him as admin, maybe vice principal or equivalent. He was looking at Quinn with suspicion.

Quinn looked at him without alarm. "Exploring," he said. "I start tomorrow."

"You..." The man recalibrated. "You're a new student?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, students are not in the building after four-fifteen unless they're in a supervised activity." He looked at his watch, which made a point about the time. "You need to be off campus."

"Understood," Quinn said. "I was just getting my bearings."

"Get your bearings tomorrow during the school day."

"Yes, sir."

He went back down the three flights, he had the building's layout in his head, which was what he'd come for.

Sullivan was out front. The Bentley was at the curb, engine running, the big man reading a newspaper while he waited.

Quinn got in.

Sullivan folded the paper and looked at him in the rearview mirror. "How'd it go?"

"Fine." Quinn considered. "The counselor doesn't want me there."

"Huh," Sullivan said, without apparent surprise. "That bother you?"

"Nope."

Sullivan nodded and pulled away from the curb. A pause. "You get everything?"

"Yeah. I'm testing out of Spanish tomorrow morning so I can take Japanese."

Sullivan said nothing for a moment. Then, very briefly, something that wasn't quite a smile moved across his face in the rearview mirror. It was gone quickly.

As they drove back through the city, Quinn looked at the schedule and mapped the day in his head: class sequence and the layout of the building now organized behind his eyes as a usable thing. He thought about the test tomorrow and whether Spanish he had taught himself would be enough.

He looked out the window and thought about the Colonel and those pale eyes trying to measure something in him that he couldn't name.

The Bentley turned onto the long street that would take them to the iron gates. Quinn folded the schedule, put it in his pocket and sat quietly.

Chapter 7

Quinn had used computers in libraries, but those had been institutional machines with restricted access and the wear-and-tear quality of things that belong to everyone and therefore to no one.

This one was his, or at least it was in his room on his desk. It was newer than anything he'd worked on before. He sat in the desk chair in the early evening quiet of his room and found his way around it with methodical patience. He loaded the updates along with Chrome. Within half an hour, he was able to open Google Maps and enter the school's address.

St. Crispin's Preparatory Academy sat four miles from the Colonel's house. The walking route he picked threaded through two residential neighborhoods, crossed a main artery at a signaled intersection, then ran along a street named Walnut Street for the final stretch to the campus gates. Quinn checked the route twice, traced it with his finger on the screen, then found a satellite view and read it a third time, noting the landmarks.

Four miles. Forty-five minutes at a reasonable pace, maybe a bit more if the weather was bad. He did the arithmetic backward from the seven thirty appointment and landed on a departure time of six thirty to give himself the buffer he preferred. Enough margin that a delay didn't become a problem, not so much that he was standing around waiting. He could do that.

He wrote the time on a legal pad he found in a drawer. 6:30. Underlined once.

There was a backpack hanging from the hook in the closet. It was dark blue, stocked with supplies: notebooks, pens, pencils, a calculator, index cards.

Someone had put some thought into what a kid would need and provided it without being asked, which seemed to be a pattern in this place. He put the schedule in the side pocket, along with the map and hung the bag on a hook on the door.

Then he went outside to explore.

The grounds were bigger than he'd expected, which was saying something. Quinn came out through the side door off the main hallway and stood for a moment on the flagstone path. The property opened up in three directions: straight ahead was the formal garden with a fountain in the center. The east side was an acre or so of lawn bordered by a low stone wall. To the west, the grounds were less formal with mature trees.

He walked for an hour.

He was methodical about it, working outward from the house in a rough spiral, not rushing, giving himself time to become familiar. Some paths were flagstone, laid with the same precision as everything else about this property, with benches at intervals. A greenhouse occupied the back corner of the property. When he looked through the glass, he saw rows of green plantings in organized stages of growth. A well-traveled dirt path led to an orchard of twelve trees, apple and pear, the last fruit of the season hanging heavy on the lower branches.

More space, he thought, than most people ever lived in their entire lives, and here it was attached to one house occupied by four people and one old man.

He sat for a while on one of the stone benches near the back wall and looked at nothing in particular, letting the day settle around him. So far. Not bad. There was a lot, for sure. But so far, not bad.

Keep alert. Pay attention.

He thought about Maria's kitchen and the soup and the way her laugh had filled the room. Food so unbelievably good. He decided to let it be. Enjoy it while it lasted.

He got up, walked back to the house, went upstairs, washed his face, put on a clean shirt, and went down for dinner at six twenty-five.

The dining room had a big table that could have seated twelve comfortably and tonight seated four. The Colonel's chair at the head of the table was empty. Sullivan sat at the far end, Maria and Ms. O'Toole across from each other at the middle, and Quinn was placed beside Ms. O'Toole with a table setting that had a lot of silverware. A real cloth napkin lay beside it.

He sat quietly and carefully watched the others for clues on how to behave.

Maria brought out a big platter of roast beef and roasted vegetables arranged around it. The smell of it had his mouth watering immediately. There were two gravy boats and a big bowl of salad with toasted croutons.

While Quinn watched carefully, Sullivan held the platter so Maria could serve herself and then served himself. Quinn held the platter so Ms. O'Toole could serve herself, and then she did the same for him.

Maria began talking to Ms. O'Toole about what Quinn gathered was their favorite TV program--a show about a hospital. The latest episode had apparently produced a development that Ms. O'Toole found fake while Maria defended it.

Quinn forced himself to eat slowly.

The roast beef was--he didn't have the vocabulary for it. He had eaten roast beef before, a meal that had been called that in group home kitchens and school cafeterias. Those overcooked slices of gray-brown meat with tasteless gravy were nothing like this. This had depth. Maria had prepared and seasoned it so that it had become something more than its ingredients. The gravy carried the same intense depth of flavor.

Quinn forced himself to eat slowly, which he did with the focused attention of someone experiencing something close to nirvana.

He watched his manners. He watched Sullivan's handling of the cutlery and matched it without making the matching obvious. He kept his elbows off the table. He chewed with his mouth closed, his fork in his right hand, and his left in his lap when he wasn't using it, which must have been correct because Ms. O'Toole didn't look at him the way she'd looked at his first attempts at shirt-folding.

Maria and Ms. O'Toole's argument about the television program moved through several phases: heated, affectionate, technical, and then affectionately heated again. Sullivan ate through all of it with the expression of a man who has sat through this argument in several previous forms and has made his peace with it.

Quinn desperately wanted more but was afraid to ask. He set his utensils down and looked sadly at the empty plate for a moment.

He looked up at Maria.

"That was...," he said, his tone reverent, "... Abuela, that was the best meal I ever ate."

Maria's cheeks went pink. She made a sound that was dismissive and pleased simultaneously.

Sullivan said, with the nearest thing to lightness Quinn had heard from him, "Teenage boys and their food."

"You hush, Mr. Sullivan." Maria shook her fork at him. "It's nice that someone around appreciates my cooking."

Ms. O'Toole said nothing, but her silence suggested agreement.

Quinn picked up his plate.

"Where do you keep the chore list?"

They looked at him like people who have heard a word they recognize but in an arrangement they don't understand.

"I want to make sure I don't fall behind," Quinn said. He was standing with his plate and Sullivan's empty plate, which Sullivan had looked at when Quinn reached for it and then released without comment. "What are my jobs? Dishes, cleaning the bathrooms, yard work, whatever it is. I don't want to get behind."

Silence.

"Quinn," Ms. O'Toole said carefully. "There is no chore list."

He looked at her steadily. "But there has to be."

"It's not, that's not how the household operates. We are the staff who..."

"But you always pay for what you get. That's the rule."

Another silence. This one longer.

Maria and Ms. O'Toole were watching him with an expression he couldn't fully read--something warm in it and something that was more serious underneath the warmth.

"That's a firm position," Sullivan said slowly.

"It's the rule," Quinn said again. "I don't mean it like I'm complaining. I mean it like--it's not right to get things and not pay for them."

They didn't realize that he was not making a show of virtue or angling for a particular response. He had lived in places where the exchange was unbalanced. Where things were given with invisible strings. There was always a price to be paid. You needed to keep the ledger balanced. That was the only arrangement that left you free.

Sullivan looked at him for a long moment. Something moved in the big man's face that came and went too quickly to name.

"I'll talk to the Colonel," he said finally. "When he gets back."

"Okay," Quinn said.

He excused himself and took the plates to the kitchen, loaded them in the dishwasher with the same attention he'd given to the lunch dishes. He thanked Maria again at the kitchen door, a small sincere thanks, and went upstairs.

The room was exactly as he'd left it.

This still registered, faintly--the expectation, built over years, that your absence created an opportunity. He stood in the doorway for a moment, noting the unchanged quality of the space, and then went in and sat on the window seat and looked at the fountain lit in the dark below.

You always pay for what you get.

He reached for the book on the shelf. The book opened, the spine still new, he found where he'd left off and read about the sad fate of Edmond Dantes.

He read for two hours.

When he stopped, his back was stiff from the window seat. The house was quiet. He put the book on the shelf and went into the bathroom, and flossed and brushed his teeth.

Then he did what he'd done on the first nights of every new placement since he was seven years old.

He pulled the covers down on the bed, absently noting how amazingly dense and heavy the crisp white sheets felt. He tested the mattress; it was like a firm cloud. He stuffed a couple of pillows under the covers to make the bed look occupied. The performance had to hold if someone looked in, they'd see someone sleeping and therefore vulnerable.

He wasn't taking chances about this place, about what might happen after dark.

He unlatched the window and pushed it open slightly, just enough to ensure that a shove would open it all the way quickly. Then he took the other pillow and one of the extra blankets from the bathroom closet, the heavy, good-quality ones, went into the walk-in closet and made himself a nest. He pulled the closet door most of the way closed, making sure he had a clear view of the door to his room. Then he lay down with the pillow under his head, the blanket under him for padding, and his jacket over him for extra warmth. His shoes were on, laced tight. He verified, by feel, that the soap sock was beside him.

He watched for a long time until he finally slept.

Chapter 8

Quinn woke at four thirty, his usual time. His internal clock still thought he was living on the street. Back then, four in the morning was when the city was safest, neither the night crowd nor the early risers around. He lay still for a moment in the dark of the closet and listened to the house. Nothing.

He got up, used the bathroom, washed his hands, and looked in the mirror. at fading bruise on his face from the fight. He went back to the closet, grabbed the blanket, folded it precisely the way Ms. O'Toole had shown him and returned it to its shelf in the bathroom. He made the bed, fluffed the pillows, put them where they belonged, and stuffed the sock under one. He checked the result from the doorway and found it acceptable.

Then he shut and latched the window.

He sat at the desk in the dark and thought about the day ahead for a while before he turned on the lamp to read. When he heard people start to move around, he changed into his school uniform, checked his backpack one final time, and went downstairs.

The kitchen at six in the morning was warm, heavy with the smell of brewing coffee and bacon cooking. Maria was at the stove. Sullivan was at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. He looked up when Quinn came in, silently nodded, and went back to the newspaper.

Quinn sat at the counter. Maria turned and looked at him, blessing him again with a cheerful good morning smile.

"Breakfast?"

"Yes, ma'am. Please," Quinn said.

She put a plate in front of him twelve minutes later--scrambled eggs with peppers and some shredded cheese folded in, wheat toast, and a big glass of orange juice.

Quinn thanked her and ate with the same focused sincerity he'd brought to last night's meal.

He looked at Sullivan. "I'll be heading out now, Mr. Sullivan"

Sullivan turned a page of the newspaper. "Okay."

Quinn waited to see if there was more. There wasn't. He filed this as acceptance and moved on.

"The Colonel will be back today," Maria said from the stove.

Quinn thought about the Colonel. The pale eyes, the measured questions. The why him still undefined.

"Thank you for the food, ma'am. It was real good," he said and left.

He didn't ask about a lunch. If there was any, they would have told him. He collected his backpack from by the door. He was on the front path at six thirty exactly.

The walk was good. The morning was cool and clear. Quinn walked at an even pace with the backpack comfortable on his shoulders and watched the city wake.

The neighborhood changed as he walked. The houses grew larger and then larger still, the lawns changing to estates like the Colonel's. Probably the world his classmates came from.

The campus gates were open. He had five minutes to find the Whitmore Building, the second floor, and the counselor's office. He was standing in front of her desk at exactly seven thirty. She looked up at him with the same disapproving expression she had yesterday.

She wordlessly slid the test across the desk to him.

He picked it up, took it over to the table by the window and read through it entirely before writing a single answer. He paid careful attention to the directions. That was the way he did tests: know the full shape of the thing before you start any part of it. It was the Spanish Two final, with written and reading comprehension, a grammar section, and a written response prompt. He went through it in order, working cleanly, and set his pen down at eight twenty.

He slid the completed test back across her desk.

Mrs. Abernathy looked at the test, at the clock, at Quinn, and then at the test again. She began marking it with tight, efficient movements.

Quinn sat with his hands folded and waited.

She set the pen down.

"Ninety-four," she said. The word seemed to give her some difficulty.

Quinn didn't comment. He waited for her to go on.

"The Japanese language program," she said finally, "is taught by Mr. Nakamura. He has his own placement requirements. You'll need to speak with him directly."

"I will," Quinn said. "Thank you, ma'am."

He found his homeroom with three minutes to spare.

They looked at him. Of course, they looked at him, but he was used to being looked at in new places. His way was to ignore them and go about his business. He found a desk and sat.

Twenty-two kids. Uniforms, all of them, in the same navy and white that he was wearing. He knew he was odd looking, had been for about eight months. His body was in the middle of a growth spurt. He had grown four inches in less than a year. His hands were enormous. His feet didn't seem to be connected to his brain. Plus, he was skinny in the way of a kid who had not always had enough to eat.

Scarecrow. The word drifted through his head. He sat in an empty seat near the window, took out a notebook and a pen and waited for the day to begin.

It didn't take long for the looks to go away. Quinn was new but not all that interesting. He quickly became background.

The social architecture of the room was pretty much the same as other schools he'd been in. The same hierarchies, the same careful choreography of people performing their chosen roles for each other.

So far, so good. He could work with recognizable.

Two hours later.

The lacrosse player was a senior. It was second and third period in the main corridor, with two hundred kids moving in both directions in narrow hallways. Quinn was moving with the current close to the right-hand wall, reading the classroom numbers when he became aware of the laughter behind him. Three tall seniors were walking and laughing like they were kings of the school.

Quinn clocked the change in their laughter. He turned slightly and spotted the tallest one's open palm coming at the back of his head. Just a slap; the goal was casual dominance directed at the new kid. He was expected to absorb it and keep walking.

A bit of entertainment.

But Quinn's hand was already moving.

He turned and caught the kid's wrist just before the palm connected. He grabbed with his right hand while his left found the notch just under the thumb, pressed, and twisted up. He'd learned this hold from a Mexican kid named Ortega one time in jail.

He applied the hold, and the senior went down on his knees, squalling at the sudden, shocking pain of the hold.

The corridor went quiet.

Quinn looked down at him. His voice was cold.

"Do not lay hands on me."

He released the wrist and walked away.

The corridor remained quiet for a moment, then sound came back, tentative at first, then at full volume, the frequency of two hundred people processing something unexpected.

Nobody laid hands on him after that. Not that day. Not in the days that followed.

Since he had no money for lunch, he went to the library instead and found The Count of Monte Cristo and read. He was hungry, but he had been hungry before. He ignored it.

The afternoon classes were good. Better than good, way better than any classes he'd attended in any school. The history teacher, a small man named Ferretti, had a genuine passion for his material. He spent forty minutes talking about the Black Plague in a way that made Quinn forget to take notes. Next period in English, the teacher, Mrs. Callahan, talked about "The Lord of the Flies." She went around the room probing for genuine critical thought about human cultures in isolation all the while challenging clichéd answers. You had to think in her class just to survive.

The math class was the only one that he found boring. He was far ahead of where the class was. Quinn thought of asking the counselor lady to switch to calculus, but he was pretty sure he'd used up the last of her goodwill. So, he amused himself by working the problems at the of the chapters, while the teacher wrote equations on the board and droned on about their solutions.

It was during the last period that a student aide appeared at the classroom door with a note that said his presence was requested in the headmaster's office after class. He felt the first stirrings of unease move through him.

Crap, that didn't take long. Kicked out of school on his first day. That was a new record.

The headmaster's office was large and arranged for authority, with diplomas on the wall and pictures showing him with people Quinn presumed were famous.

The headmaster was behind his desk, and everyone else was seated in front of him.

The tall senior was there with his parents. He sat with the confidence of a kid who has called in significant support. His father, a man in a suit that announced his importance, was a lawyer, Quinn decided--high-priced one at that. His mother was expensively dressed and vibrating with justified anger. She looked at Quinn when he walked in, and her eyes narrowed.

At the other end of the room was the Colonel.

Shit.

The Colonel was dressed in slacks and a golf shirt. He nodded to Quinn when he came in. His expression offered nothing but mild curiosity.

The headmaster spoke about the school standards and the expectation of conduct befitting a St. Crispin's student. He went on about the serious consequences of physical aggression on school grounds.

Quinn stood and listened with his hands clasped behind him.

The lawyer spoke about his concern for his son's safety, the seriousness of the incident, and how the school had failed in its responsibilities to protect his son.

The woman spoke about assault and about scum that didn't belong. Her voice cracked on the words. She repeated "scum" three times in case there was any doubt about her position on the matter.

The Colonel said nothing.

The headmaster concluded that the rules were clear: assault called for automatic expulsion, but before he passed sentence would Quinn like to respond.

Quinn looked at the headmaster, glanced at the lacrosse player, who met his gaze for a moment with a faint grin. He looked at the lawyer and the mother. He didn't look at the Colonel.

"There was a security camera there. Could you check it? The main corridor one," Quinn said. "Between second and third period this morning, near room two-fourteen."

The silence that followed was the silence of a room in which multiple people were suddenly revising their positions.

The lacrosse player paled.

The headmaster called his assistant. There was a wait of four minutes, during which the lawyer whispered to his son quietly. The mother had gone from vibrating to still.

Quinn continued to stand.

The assistant came in with a laptop. They all watched the corridor footage together.

The camera angle was good--slightly elevated, facing down the corridor, capturing the grinning faces of the lacrosse player and his buddies. It showed the attempted slap, Quinn's catch, the wrist-hold, and the lacrosse player falling to his knees with his face twisted in pain. It showed the quick release and Quinn walking away.

The headmaster ran it twice.

The lawyer watched it once; his face went blank.

The woman mother watched it, her face changed to resignation.

The headmaster began to say something about unfortunate misunderstandings and the importance of...

"Apologize," the Colonel's voice snapped out a command.

It was the first time he'd spoken. The people in the room stiffened at the command voice.

The headmaster's mouth snapped shut.

"Your wife called the boy scum," the Colonel said. "I think he needs an apology. Don't you?"

The lawyer had the look of a man cutting his losses. He managed it well.

"Certainly. I apologize," he said, looking at Quinn. "That was uncalled for."

His wife said, in a tiny voice, "I'm sorry I said that."

Quinn nodded. He didn't say, it's fine because it wasn't fine, and he didn't say, thank you for apologizing.

The headmaster made further remarks to which Quinn listened, nodded, that he understood the "don't let me see you in this office again."

The Colonel and Quinn left. Apparently, the senior was going to get his ass chewing in private.

The Colonel fell into step beside him.

They walked through the building in silence, out through the main entrance, down the steps to the drive where Sullivan and Bentley waited at the curb. The Colonel walked with a straight-backed, deliberate stride, and Quinn matched his pace. Neither spoke.

Sullivan held the rear door, and they got in.

The gates of the campus receded in the window.

"You were fortunate," the Colonel said. "The camera."

Quinn considered this. "Yeah," he said. "I got lucky."

A pause. The city outside went by.

"But?" the Colonel looked at him.

"But it didn't change what needed to be done," Quinn said. "If you let someone put their hands on you once, they don't stop. They never stop. Somebody else tries it next. You spend the whole year absorbing it, and it keeps coming. Things escalate." He looked at his own hands in his lap--the oversized, bony hands of his mismatched body. "I'd rather have the problem with the headmaster than the other problem."

He said it without heat. It was simply reality, offered as information rather than justification.

The Colonel was quiet for a moment.

"And if there had been no camera," he said.

Quinn looked out the window.

"Still had to be done," he said.

He felt the Colonel look at him from the side, the same quality of attention he'd brought to the library interview--not judgment, something else. Quinn turned away and watched the city pass by the window and wondered what Maria was making for dinner.

The Colonel said nothing further.

But when Sullivan's eyes caught his in the rearview mirror, they had that quality again, the thing that came and went; this time it stayed long enough that Quinn could almost name it: respect.

Chapter 9

Quinn had come down at 6:00 as usual. He found Sullivan with his newspaper and Maria at the stove fixing his breakfast. While he was eating, the Colonel appeared in the kitchen doorway in a gray suit. He looked at him with those pale, assessing eyes and said:

"Your room and your belongings are to be kept in a state of readiness for inspection at all times."

Quinn looked at him. "Yes sir."

"I may look in. I may not. The standard is the same either way." He picked up the coffee cup Ms. O'Toole had placed at the counter's edge for him. "A craftsman takes care of his tools. His tools are an extension of his capability. A neglected tool is a statement about the man who uses it."

He drank his coffee and looked out the kitchen window at the grounds.

"That is all," he said.

He left.

Quinn stood with his backpack and thought about this for a moment, then went upstairs and checked the room. Bed made, clothes in the closet in their proper order, desk clear. Shoes on the floor of the closet with their toes out at the consistent angle Ms. O'Toole had established. He made one adjustment--the desk chair was a degree off from parallel with the desk--and went back downstairs and out the door.

He thought about it on the walk to school. A craftsman takes care of his tools. It was not, when he turned it over, a statement about tidiness. It was a statement about the relationship between a person and the things they used, and what that relationship said about the quality of their character. He filed it alongside Ms. O'Toole's clothing is a tool to be maintained. They were the same instructions, delivered from different angles.

He still kept the sock under the pillow handy.

The Colonel left books for him to read/study.

The first one appeared on his desk the second day, a slim volume, dark green cover, the Letters of Seneca. No note. No instruction. Just the book on the desk where the desk had been clear the night before, which meant either the Colonel or Ms. O'Toole had been in his room.

He read the Seneca that night after homework and found it fascinating. Seneca wrote about time.

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.

Quinn read that sentence three times and thought about the year on the streets, and about all the waiting until you aged out of the system. He thought that Seneca had written something true.

At dinner, the Colonel had returned from wherever he'd been. The food was fantastic again. Maria had made something with pork and chilies with refried beans that Quinn had eaten with the focused reverence it deserved. The Colonel had waited until the main conversation between Maria and Ms. O'Toole about a neighbor's fence dispute had run its course He looked at Quinn.

"Seneca," he said.

Quinn set down his fork. "He's mad," he said.

The Colonel's expression turned interested. "Expand."

"The letters read like a man who's mad," Quinn said, thinking through it as he spoke. "Not at other people. He's mad at the way people spend their time on things that don't matter and then die without having used what time they had." He paused. "He keeps telling Lucilius to hurry up. Like he's worried the kid's going to run out of time before he figures it out."

"And do you think he's right to be worried?"

Quinn thought about Lucilius, the young man on the other end of these letters from two thousand years ago, being instructed, pushed, and occasionally scolded by an old man. "I think Lucilius had money," Quinn said. "Rich kids take longer to figure out what matters because they can afford to. They've got the time to waste." A beat. "The ones I've met, anyway."

Sullivan made a sound that might have been a laugh, quickly converted into something else.

The Colonel looked at Quinn for a long moment. "Continue reading," he said, and picked up his fork.

This became the pattern. A book appeared. Quinn read it. Dinner produced a conversation that was not quite a test and not quite a discussion but a mixture of both, with the Colonel doing the asking. His questions dug deep into the material. The questions forced Quinn to really think about what he was reading rather than just his first-level impressions. Marcus Aurelius followed Seneca. Then Thucydides, back to the Greeks. Then something unexpected--a modern book, thin, a collection of essays by a man named Orwell. Quinn read those in two evenings and arrived at dinner with more to say than the Colonel had yet drawn out of him, and the conversation ran past dessert. Mrs. O'Toole cleared the table around them without interrupting.

The Colonel never praised him; he just asked deeper questions. Quinn came to understand that the better questions were the praise.

The lunch situation came to a head on Friday, eight days into his new home.

Quinn had managed his usual way, quietly and without complaint. He spent the lunch hour in the library.

He came home that Friday afternoon to find Maria in the kitchen with her back stiff in a way that meant she was angry about something.

She looked at him when he came in.

"You don't like what I make?" she demanded.

Quinn stopped. "What?"

"The lunches. Every day I work hard to make a good lunch for you, and you ignore it. If you don't like my food, I need to know. I can make different things. I can..."

"Abula, I didn't know about lunches," Quinn said. He found he was embarrassingly close to tears that he had upset her.

She looked at him.

"I didn't know there were lunches," he said.

The kitchen was very quiet.

"The Sergeant was supposed to tell you," Ms. O'Toole said from the doorway; she'd apparently overheard the conversation.

Sullivan appeared, as if the mention of him had summoned him, in the kitchen doorway. He looked at Quinn, at Maria, and at the counter between them.

"Oh, I guess I forgot to mention it," he said.

Quinn looked at him. He looked back with the flat steadiness of a man whose story was simple and complete.

He set his backpack down.

"It was okay. I went without," he said. "I'm pretty used to going without."

It was the wrong thing to say. He knew it the moment it landed.

Maria made a sound--short, sharp, sob. The sound of someone who has taken something they weren't braced for. She turned and glared at Sullivan.

"I'm sorry, Quinn," Sullivan said. "I should have told you the first morning. That was wrong of me."

Quinn looked at him for a beat. He decided it was enough. He was practical about apologies even ones that are patently false.

"It's okay," he said.

He looked at Maria.

"Abuela, I would very much like the lunches," he said with utter sincerity. "Everything you make is better than anything else I've ever eaten in my whole life."

Maria pointed at Sullivan. "You. Get out of my kitchen." She pointed at Quinn. "Sit." She was already moving toward the refrigerator with the decisive energy of a woman repairing something. "You'll eat a little something now. Then we'll talk about what you like."

He sat and ate, and they talked about what he liked. She listened with focused interest.

The next Monday morning, his lunch was on the counter in a brown bag. It proved to be as delicious as her other meals.

The four boys found each other the way mismatched things find each other in new places.

Peter Sung was Korean American, the son of a tech executive in the hills above the city. He sat at the front-right corner desk in every class he was in. He was compact and wore his uniform with the slight dishevelment of a person whose mind is generally elsewhere. He'd looked at Quinn on the second day he showed up for lunch and said, without preamble, "You're the kid who put Brewster Holt down a couple of weeks ago."

"Yeah," Quinn said.

"Good, he's an asshole." He went back to his book and ate his lunch.

That was the beginning.

James Emeka came from Nigerian money. He was tall, almost as tall as Quinn. He had a total indifference to anything that wasn't mathematics or the elaborate fantasy board game he and Peter were creating. They discussed, bickered, and brainstormed about it every day at lunch.

Will Bennings was the child of an architect and a pediatric surgeon. He was a dreamer, quiet and thoughtful. Will sketched constantly, with margins of notebooks filled with precise architectural sketches of people or things from whatever room he was in. He listened way more than he spoke. But when he did, they all listened and sometimes laughed. He had a quirky dry sense of humor.

They were all nerds. They got good grades, played games, and had no interest in status. Quinn found them restful. He sat with them at lunch--Maria's brown bag producing, on the second day, a giant burrito wrapped in foil that all three of them smelled as soon as he unwrapped it, watching as he ate with poorly concealed envy.

Peter asked him once, toward the end of the second week, what his deal was. Where he'd come from, what the situation was. He asked directly.

Quinn told him the plain version: group homes, the Colonel, the new arrangement.

The three received this as interesting information, then dropped the subject and continued the debate about Star Wars vs. Star Trek.

Basketball tryouts were on a Wednesday in the third week.

Basketball was his sport. He'd played for years in inner-city parks on cracked asphalt courts. The games were rough, trash-talking semi-combat games where the rules were understood and their enforcement was physical. The quality of your ball handling and shooting were the only credentials that mattered.

Quinn had always been good until his oversized feet started to trip him at odd times. Basketball at this school was different. More genteel. Quinn registered in the first twenty minutes. He adjusted as best he could and toned down his aggressive play. The game here was more play-dependent, less improvisational. The coach, a Black man named Henderson, ran structured drills, called plays in shorthand, and watched how the players responded to direction.

Quinn could shoot. That was not the problem. His ball handling and passing were good; his court awareness was excellent -- better than most of the players here, a product of years in environments where not knowing where everyone was on the court cost you. He could pass with the intuitive accuracy of someone who had always had to create plays from nothing.

The problem was his feet.

The growth spurt had donated four inches to his height but had not yet donated the corresponding software update to his brain. The result was that he tended to move like a person operating a body he'd borrowed. He tripped on a fast break during the second drill and caught himself with his hands, coming up without visible embarrassment because embarrassment was a luxury and the drill was still running. He bricked a mid-range jumper off the back of his own ankle on a pivot and heard someone on the sideline make a sound. He made the next four shots.

He made the team. Henderson told him after the final cut with the directness of a good coach. "Your hands are good. Your shot is good. Your court sense is good. Your big feet are currently your enemy. We're going to work on that."

"Yes, sir. Sounds good," Quinn said.

"You play like someone's going to fight you for the ball."

Quinn considered this. "People usually were."

Henderson looked at him with understanding. "That was then. Not here. We can use a little of that, but you've got to learn the plays. You're too quick to take the problem yourself when you have teammates to help. You have to learn the game."

"I'll work on it," Quinn said.

Henderson nodded and wrote his name on the list, and Quinn walked back across the campus in the cool afternoon. He let himself feel the satisfaction of making the team, even if it was only the junior varsity.

He moved out of the closet and into the bed on the fourteenth night. Two weeks in the house had produced the following verified facts: the door was not tried at night. The household was what it appeared to be. The Colonel was stern and demanding but had not registered on any of the freak frequencies Quinn had learned to monitor. Sullivan was the same. Maria cooked with love and took it personally when you didn't eat, hugged you without warning. Ms. O'Toole maintained standards and gave him respect when those standards were met.

His practical judgment finally told him the closet is no longer necessary.

He moved the sock to the bedside table drawer instead of under the pillow. He got into bed, felt the quality of the mattress and the weight of the bedding, and let himself sleep in a proper bed for the first time in two weeks.

He slept like a rock

The window he left unlatched.

He was not reckless.

Maria took him for a haircut on a Saturday morning in the fourth week.

She appeared in the kitchen doorway while he was eating breakfast and looked at his hair with the expression of a woman whose patience has run out.

"You're coming with me," Maria said. "Eat fast."

Her sister Carmen lived twenty minutes away in a neighborhood that was loud and colorful, smelled of food from three different sources, and had a beauty salon on the ground floor of a building whose upper floors Carmen's family lived. Carmen was taller than Maria and broader, had the same laugh--just louder.

"Sit," she said, draping him in a cape before he'd fully processed the introduction.

They talked over him in Spanish while she worked -- a conversation that moved through at least four topics simultaneously, in the way of people who have been talking to each other their entire lives and have refined the practice into something very fast and very efficient. Quinn followed about sixty percent of it and found the sixty percent interesting. Maria's life before the Colonel's house had been in the Bronx. Carmen had been in the Bronx until ten years ago when she'd followed Maria west. The Colonel was el viejo in these conversations -- the old man, affectionate rather than dismissive -- and Sullivan was el oso, the bear, which Quinn thought was accurate.

Carmen's hands were expert and certain. She asked him twice how short he wanted it, then ignored his answer as too vague and cut it the way she thought it should be cut with the efficiency of a person who knows exactly what she's doing. Maria sat in the next chair reading People magazine and offering periodic commentary about the contents.

Quinn watched in the mirror. The person who emerged from Carmen's chair looked like a rich kid instead of a raggedy ass kid who lived a group home

When she was done, Carmen stood back and looked at him with her hands on her hips and nodded once, the nod of a professional satisfied with her work. "Handsome kid," she said to Maria, as though Quinn wasn't there.

Maria beamed like this was confirmation of something she'd known.

On the way back in the car, she was quiet.

Quinn looked out the window at the city and thought about the four weeks and all the things that had happened.

"Your haircut is good. You look nice," Maria said at a red light.

"Thank you," Quinn said. "For the haircut. And for..." he stopped and found that the end of the sentence was longer than he had room for.

Maria looked at him at the red light with her clear, warm eyes and smiled softly. She understood that some sentences are complete without their endings.

The light changed. She drove them home.

Chapter 10

The Colonel's next directive was delivered at breakfast. Quinn had come down at six, found Sullivan with his newspaper and Maria at the stove, eaten his eggs, and was collecting his backpack when the Colonel appeared in the kitchen doorway in his blue suit.

"After school, I would like to see you in my office. Say 4:00."

"Yes, sir," Quinn answered automatically.

He left.

Okay then. What's that all about.

Quinn stood with his backpack and thought about this for a moment, then went upstairs and double-checked his room.

Quinn thought about it more on the walk to school.

I knew it was too good to last.

Promptly at 4:00, he knocked on the door to the Colonel's office.

"Come in, Quinn."

The Colonel set his coffee cup down. "Quinn," he said, settling back in his chair, "what do you know about Plato?"

Quinn shrugged. "He was a Greek philosopher. Student of Socrates. He wrote about ideal forms, the cave thing -- shadows on the wall. That sort of thing."

The Colonel nodded slowly. "The cave thing," he repeated with distaste. "Where did you learn this?"

"School, I guess. Textbooks. I think we had a chapter on Ancient Greek philosophy back in seventh grade."

"A chapter." He let that sit in the air for a moment. "And in this chapter, did you read Plato?"

"We read about Plato."

"Hmm." The Colonel rose and walked to the window, hands clasped behind his back.

"That is precisely the problem I want to discuss with you today. It is perhaps the central dysfunction of modern education, and I use the word dysfunction without apology."

Quinn listened, relieved that he wasn't going to be sent back.

"When you read someone's summary of Plato, a textbook author or, God help us, a YouTube video. You are not receiving Plato. You are receiving some person's digestion of Plato. And digestion, as you know, is a process that extracts what the body finds useful and discards the rest." He turned from the window. "You are, in effect, eating someone else's leftovers and calling it a meal."

"But isn't a textbook helpful?"

"For context, yes. Guidance, in moderation. But there is a profound difference between a scholar who says here is the world and what was written and someone who says here is what this means and here is the conclusion you should reach."

"The first person is a guide. The second cheats you of the journey."

He sat back down.

Quinn leaned forward. This was interesting. "So, what gets lost?"

"Everything that doesn't fit that person's lesson plan or world view." The Colonel picked up his coffee again. "Plato is not a set of talking points. He was a real man who was thinking through real problems and arriving at conclusions that are sometimes uncomfortable, contradictory and often unresolved. That is precisely what makes him worth reading. A textbook gives you the answer. Plato gives you the question and the argument. And it is only in the argument that your own mind is engaged so it grows and develops. Otherwise, you are simply receiving and storing data like a warehouse."

Quinn was facinated.

"You also miss," the Colonel continued, "the thrill of encountering a great mind directly. It is the difference between someone telling you that Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 is beautiful and actually sitting in the concert hall in the dark when it is performed.

I can tell you Plato is extraordinary. Every worthwhile person who has ever read him will tell you the same. But that testimony is meaningless to you until you have the experience yourself." He set down his cup again. "You cannot have the experience through a middleman. Reading about sex is different from actually having sex."

"Yes, sir," Quinn said. "I think I see what you mean."

"A gentleman of the nineteenth century--I use the term not as a class designation but as an aspirational one. A man with a cultivated mind and character was expected to have Latin. Not a survey of Latin. Not Latin for Beginners abandoned after a semester. Functional Latin. Reading Latin. The kind of Latin that would have allowed you to sit down with Cicero or Caesar or Virgil and have a conversation."

He paused.

"Greek was considered the mark of a finer education still. A man who had his Greek could read Homer as Homer actually told the story. Not Chapman's Homer, not Pope's Homer--Homer. The poet Keats wrote a famous sonnet about the experience of encountering Homer in translation for the first time, as though it were a voyage of discovery. The educated men of that era would have found the sonnet charming but would have quietly noted among themselves that Keats was reading Chapman. The real experience, they would have said, was still ahead of him."

"That seems like a lot of time spent on old time languages," Quinn said.

"It was. Intentionally so." The Colonel was unmoved by the objection. "The study of Latin and Greek was not primarily practical. They were a discipline that trained the mind. Most importantly, they gave a man's mind access to twenty centuries of thought.

He stood and began to pace.

"Mathematics through at least the calculus. Euclidean geometry because the logical proof constructed step by careful step from premises to a rigorous conclusion was considered the fundamental model of reasoning.

"A gentleman who had worked through Euclid properly learned what an argument actually was. He had learned the difference between assertion and demonstration." The Colonel held up a finger. "That distinction alone would improve our public discourse considerably were it still taught."

"History," he continued, "not history as a sequence of dates and monarchs to be memorized for an examination, but history as the story of how human nature deals with challenges through time. The rise and fall of republics and the mechanics of tyranny. Recurring patterns that a well-read man could recognize in his own era because he had seen them play out in Athens, Rome, and Florence.

Quinn was quiet, watching him, wondering where he was going with this.

"The rhetoric," the Colonel said. "Not the mere tricks of persuasion, but classical rhetoric. The formal construction of an argument, the understanding of logical fallacies so that one could both avoid them or identify them when someone employed them.

"A gentleman was expected to be able to stand up and speak with clarity and structure. The fumbling, half-formed public speeches we have all grown accustomed to would have been considered a social embarrassment of the first order."

He sat back down.

"Writing was the same. A gentleman's letter was a demonstration of his mind. It was expected to be lucid. The letter as an art form is almost entirely lost now, which, in my humble opinion, is a significant cultural loss.

"Natural philosophy," he continued, "which is to say science, not at the level of the specialist, but at the level of the engaged layman. A gentleman was expected to be able to follow a scientific argument. Darwin was read by everyone. Lyell was read by everyone. A man who had no conception of geology or biology was considered to have a serious gap in his education."

He paused and looked at Quinn steadily.

"And then there was music. Not necessarily performance but the capacity to listen with comprehension. To know what one was hearing, to have some framework for understanding what a composer was doing and why. The same was true of painting, of architecture. A cultivated man moved through the world noticing it, having opinions about it that were grounded in knowledge that educated his taste. He could sit in a concert hall and follow the argument of a symphony."

"That is..." Quinn searched for the word.

"Quite a lot," the Colonel said. "Yes. It was and still is. It was quite deliberately a great deal.

"The well-stocked library in the private home was not for decoration. It was a working tool, added to consistently. He spread his hands and pointed to the surroundings. "This library will be your tool as it is mine."

He picked up his coffee cup, found it had gone cold, and set it back down without apparent concern.

"What the nineteenth century understood, and what we have largely abandoned, is that the purpose of education is not employment. It is not the acquisition of a credential. It is the formation of a person -- the construction of an interior life sufficiently rich and well-ordered that the person can think for himself and act wisely."

He looked at Quinn directly. "A man who has only professional training is unprepared for life. He can do his work. But when he is faced with a decision of real moral weight, he has no resources. He is, in the old phrase, a half-educated barbarian."

The Colonel picked up several sheets of paper from the desk and set it down on the table between them without ceremony, the way a man might present a bill.

"This," he said, "is your chore list."

Quinn looked at it. It was dense with writing, organized into columns and sections, annotated in the Colonel's compressed hand.

"I don't understand."

"You asked whether there were chores you were expected to perform. Responsibilities." The Colonel settled back. "This is your answer. This house is managed adequately. You will not be painting fences or splitting wood. Your work is this." He tapped the paper once.

"If you choose to stay here with us, you will be educated. That is your function here and I will expect you to perform it with the same seriousness that any other obligation demands."

Quinn waited for more. An explanation of why.

Nothing came.

"Your prep schooling," the Colonel said, "will continue. I expect you to excel." He paused briefly. "However, I want you to understand what that school is and what it is not. What that school offers you is not an education. It is, if you will forgive the comparison, cotton candy -- a sugary treat, nothing that will sustain you." He folded his hands. "What we will do here is the meat and potatoes. You will have both, but you should never mistake one for the other."

Quinn looked again at the paper.

"The gentleman's education is what I will give you," the Colonel said, "has a structure and purpose. It is a system -- one that is very old, tested over a very long time, and based on a particular idea that modern education has almost entirely abandoned."

"The Great Books," the Colonel continued, "will run alongside everything else, from the beginning. Ancient first -- Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle, Virgil. Then the Medieval thinkers: Augustine, Aquinas, Dante.

Then the Moderns: Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, Newton. In each case, you will read the book closest to the source, not a survey, not a chapter in a textbook explaining what the source contains."

"You are going to join a conversation that has been running for over three thousand years. The greatest minds of Western civilization have been arguing with one another across time -- Aristotle disagreeing with Plato, Aquinas arguing with Aristotle, Locke dismantling certain assumptions that Augustine had built, Newton standing on the shoulders of every mathematician who preceded him. This conversation your rightful inheritance. You have been through no fault of your own, kept from it."

He set his cup down. "We are going to remedy that." He gestured toward the chore list one final time.

"You will find it is organized by week. Each week has primary reading, supporting material and one written response. A reasoned response showing what you think. What arguments you find compelling and why. Where you disagree and on what grounds."

He looked at Quinn steadily. "I will read everything you write. We will discuss it. I will push back, and you will be expected to defend your position."

Quinn folded the list carefully and put it in a pocket.

"One more thing," the Colonel said as Quinn stood. "You asked me earlier why we were beginning with Plato."

"You answered."

"I gave you one answer. Here is a second." He settled back in his chair

"Socrates, on the day of his trial, knowing his death was a possible verdict, stood up told the truth." He paused. "That is the thing I want you to understand, before Aristotle before any of the great minds that followed, there was a man who did the work of thinking, said what he believed, even though it led to his death."

He picked up his book.

"That is all."