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the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind’ in ninth grade!”
    “And the girls,” I said.
    “What’s that?” said God, who had trouble hearing female voices.
    “The boys and the girls. Everyone reads it.”
    “So they do,” said God.
    “If
you
don’t lead the way, who will?” said Mei-Mei. “Did you read that book by the teacher who was fired for reading a Langston Hughes poem to his students in Roxbury?”
    God’s eyes lit up. “Kozol! I taught him English,” he said.
    “Exactly. If you aren’t out front on attacking inequity and segregation, who will be?”
    God sipped his drink, puffed up a little.
    “Besides, who isn’t ungrateful, hostile and sexed-up? It’s like a viral infection.”
    “Hup.”
    I knew Carole Faust from God’s stories; I think I remember every word he ever said about her, every chapter from their existential agon. God and Carole were opposites, drawn to each other for the purpose of some struggle that took place almost before my eyes and formed my consciousness. (I wanted to be him, and wanted to be her.) I was nine her first year—the year ofthe first girl—and ten her second year, when Carole was sixteen. But I never met her in person until much later, long after we’d left God’s house, when Mei-Mei and I attended her final project, an answer to the question posed to every senior at Goode: “Is the history of mankind a relentless search for freedom?” Her answer was a series of portrait paintings of the fourteen heads of the school, from 1827 down to the present—fourteen men in high middle age—ending with Goddard Byrd. Carole painted them formally, under the direction of Julia Singer. In the absence of a studio art department—the school emphasized history, though it maintained a potter’s wheel for troubled boys—Carole set up paints and an easel in a disused alcove in the basement near the girls’ bathroom.
    She painted from old etchings, drawings or photographs, with particular, almost obsessive attention to their facial features—beaks, brows and jowls. Because God was, in contrast to her other subjects, alive, she’d gone to his office one afternoon in the fall of her senior year to take his picture herself. She loosened him up by asking questions: “What’s your favorite animal, Mr. Byrd?” (A tiger.) “Favorite vegetable?” (Corn on the cob.) She encouraged him to recite poetry—Shakespeare’s sonnets, that John Masefield chestnut about the seas. I imagined how he would become more real, reciting. Before Carole began painting a week later, she showed him the photograph—God at his desk, his watery blue eyes scanning the playing fields, his mouth pensively ajar—which he approved.
    She mounted her portrait series at a regular Friday-evening soirée in the castle, an event that also featured a musician named Ray—a prodigy God had plucked himself from Roxbury—who played a Bach cello suite entitled “Falling Down Stairs.” There was also a symposium on “The Goode School Experience from the Perspective of the Black Day Boy,” organized by God himself in response to statistical reports that boarders earned better grades, liked school more and were substantially more likely tocontribute to the annual fund in the future than those who lived at home. At the last minute, the air filled with static—faculty, girls and students of color objected to the word
boy
. Ms. Inge, who taught American History, proposed that everyone correct “her or his” programs to read “students.”
    “What’s this?” God asked, his eyes glittering. “In what kind of a school is a head not permitted to use the word
boy
?” His words hung in the air of the chilly castle (imported brick by brick from Scotland by Dick Whitehead, ’18) while God looked around the Great Hall and waited for someone to agree with him.
    In the second part of the evening, Julia Singer stepped forward and introduced Carole Faust and her project: “The Venerable