I thought about the assembly.
Heroes’ Week at Northwood always ended with an assembly — the whole school together in the auditorium, honored guests from the community, the kind of event that was mostly administrative but occasionally, when the guest list was right, became something else.
I had seen the program. I hadn’t paid it much attention.
I went back to my tray.
Admiral William Carter.
Even in a school where most students divided the world into things that directly affected them and things that didn’t, Admiral Carter’s name had a gravitational pull. He had been in the news — not in the constant breathless way of celebrities, but in the way of someone whose actions had consequences that reached beyond the immediate, who had made decisions in rooms where decisions mattered and whose name appeared in the kinds of sentences that also contained words like command and operations and distinction.
