The Education of Bet by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

school."
    "Actually, it is my fifth," I said, adopting Will's biography with no small degree of pride.
    I felt James's eyes boring into me from the side, but I kept my eyes steadily on Hamish.
    "Your
fifth?
" His eyebrows rose up nearly to his hairline. "Why, even Mercy and me've only been at three, including here." He waved his fork at me. "What sorts of things were you sent down for?"
    I studied the ceiling, hoping to get the order right.
    "Let's see ... cheating, lying ... no, that's the wrong order. Lying, cheating, general mischief, and setting the headmaster's house on fire."
    Hamish stared at me. They all did. Then Hamish threw back his head and roared.
    "Well, at least you've got the lying part right," he said. "I've never heard anything more ridiculous in my life."
    "Ridiculous?"
    "Yes, ridiculous. Who'd ever believe someone like you capable of all that?"
    All right, so maybe I had appropriated someone else's record as my own, but Will Gardener
had
done all those things, and I felt unaccountably offended at this accusation.
    "If you don't believe me," I said, showing more steel than I knew I had, "then why don't you have Mr. Winter look into my history?"
    Hamish stared at me so long and hard, I thought my own eyes would fall out from the effort of staring back just as long, just as hard.
    "Never mind," he said, his gaze dropping before mine did. "No need to embarrass you by catching you out in a lie. I will say one thing, though."
    "And that is?" I asked.
    "You've got spirit."
    Little leaned across the table, and I heard him speak for the first time, in a voice that squeaked. "Hamish hates people with spirit," he whispered helpfully.
    ***
    As soon as dinner ended, Hamish asked with an inscrutable smile if James and I would like to join him and some of the others for a stroll. I confess that, given what had gone before, I was more than a little startled at this overture of friendship. But figuring that it would not do to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth and not wanting to make an enemy of him, or more of an enemy than he already appeared to be, I opened my mouth to accept. Perhaps he wanted to start fresh?
    That's when my roommate, almost silent throughout dinner, spoke up to decline. For both of us.
    "Thank you for the kind offer, MacPherson," he said evenly. "But I'm afraid Gardener and I already have plans."
    Hamish's eyebrows shot up at this, as did my own.
    We had plans?
    "Fine," Hamish said at last, smiling as though not bothered in the slightest although the tightness of that smile and the firm set of his jaw said otherwise. "Suit yourselves."
    "We have plans?" I asked James, having followed him out of the dining hall and practically scampering to keep up as he strode briskly across the commons toward Proctor Hall.
    "Yes," he said, his tone matching his stride. "We have plans
not
to get caught up in any of MacPherson's idiocy on our first night here."
    "Oh." I hadn't imagined that there was going to be any idiocy. But now I was curious. "What sort of idiocy will there be?"
    "They will drink. They will smoke."
    "But isn't that what everyone does here?" I asked, remembering what Will had told me of school. "Why, I drink and smoke all the time," I bluffed. "Don't you do those things?"
    He stopped walking, eyed me with disbelief. "Sometimes," he finally allowed. "But when MacPherson and Mercy do it, someone always gets hurt. Usually it's Little who winds up with his head shoved in the privy hole down by the playing fields. But since it's your first night here and MacPherson has already warmed to you so much"—he barked a bitter laugh at this—"I thought this time they might choose to pick on
you
instead. Is that what you want?"
    I shook my head, although I doubted he could see the vehemence of that headshake in the gloom of the gathering night.
    "No, I didn't think so," he said, as though he had seen me. "Besides which, you seem like a good sort"—he paused, then added—"even if you don't appear to