Wayne Facieux had placed the filing cabinet out from the wall so that it formed a room divider. This, he explained, would give the editors of The Quill some smattering of privacy in case any teacher ever did have time to come in and lounge. One reason no teacher ever came there, Kate supposed, was that Mr. Skelton’s office was right across the hall, and all doors were left open. Two Morris chairs and a maple table surrounded by straight chairs, and several metal ashtrays that stood on their own pedestals, were all the furniture in the lounge part. Long ago, by the looks of them, someone had hung some white faille curtains across the big institutional window at the end, and these looked out of place there, almost like filmy women’s clothes. Everything was dusty in this room, and she wondered if it wasn’t the pupils themselves, constantly sitting and rubbing and handling all the other furniture and objects in the school, that kept it reasonably dusted. Certainly Mr. Grand, the janitor, could be seen doing little except distributing chalk and erasers and emptying wastebaskets as he walked about with a flickering, hazy sort of smile on his face—this generally attributed to drink.
