All this while she had resisted mentioning Bud Scully by name, though none of them could have been unaware of the intended parallel. Now, after a formal salute to the flag in the corner, Mrs. Norberg abandoned all pretense of objectivity. She went to the blackboard and wrote out, in gigantic letters, the martyr’s name. BUD SCULLY. Then she went to her desk, secured herself behind her folded hands, and, glowering, defied the world to do its worst.

Boadicea raised her hand.

Mrs. Norberg called on her.

“Do you mean,” Boadicea asked, with a disingenuous smile, “that Bud Scully is another John Brown? And that what he did was right?”

“Did I say that?” the Iceberg demanded. “Let me ask you, Miss Whiting: is that your opinion? Is Bud Scully’s case analagous to that of John Brown?”

“In the sense that he’s gone to jail for his convictions you might say so. But otherwise? One man tried to stop slavery, and the other is trying to stop popular music radio stations. At least that’s what I understand from the newspaper.”

“Which newspaper would that be? I ask, you see, because I gave up reading the papers some time ago. My experiences (especially when I was on the Hill) have shown me that they’re not at all reliable.”

“It was the Star-Tribune.”

“The Star-Tribune,” the Iceberg repeated, turning to Daniel with a knowing look.

“And what it said,” Boadicea continued, “in its editorial, was that everyone must obey the law just because it is the law, and the only way we’re ever going to live together peacefully is to respect the law. Even when it grates against us.”

“That seems quite sound on the face of it. The question John Brown poses, though, remains to be answered. Are we required to obey an unjust law?” The Iceberg threw back her head, glittering with righteousness.

Boadicea persisted. “According to the polls, most people thought the old law was unjust, the law that kept them from reading out-of-state newspapers and from listening to out-of-state broadcasts.”

“According,” Mrs. Norberg said scornfully, “to the polls in those same newspapers.”

“Well, the Supreme Court felt it was unjust too, or they wouldn’t have overturned it. And as I understand it, short of a constitutional amendment, the Supreme Court has the last word on the rightness or the wrongness of laws.”

Mrs. Norberg’s views on the Supreme Court were well known, and accordingly there was a tacit understanding among her students to steer clear of the reefs of this subject. But Boadicea was beyond compassion or prudence. She wanted to demolish the woman’s mind and send her back to Dubuque in a strait-jacket. She deserved nothing else.

It wasn’t going to be that easy, however. Mrs. Norberg had a paranoid’s instinct for knowing when she was being persecuted. She stepped aside and Boadicea’s missile passed by harmlessly.

“It is a knotty question, I agree. And highly complex. Everyone will be affected by it in a different way, and that is bound to color our attitudes. Right here in this room we have someone whose life was touched very directly by the decision Miss Whiting speaks of. Daniel, what is your opinion?”

“About what?” Daniel asked.

“Does the State of Iowa have the right, the sovereign right, to bar potentially harmful and disruptive material from being publicly available, or does that represent an interference with our constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech?”

“I can’t say I ever thought much about it.”

“Surely, Daniel, having gone to prison for breaking the state’s law…” She paused for the benefit of anyone in the class who might not have known this. Of course there was no one who hadn’t heard Daniel’s legend by now. It was nearly of the magnitude of Mrs. Norberg’s, which probably, more than the principles involved, accounted for her relentless, attentive dislike. “Surely, when you’re then released because the Supreme Court—” She lifted her eybrows sardonically, “—rules, that, after all, the law is not the law and never has been… surely, you must have some opinion on such a subject.”

“I guess my opinion is that it doesn’t make much difference one way or the other.”

“Not make much difference! A change that big?”

“I got out two weeks earlier, and that’s about it.”

“Really, Daniel, I don’t know what you can mean.”

“I mean I still don’t think it’s safe to express an honest opinion anywhere in the state of Iowa. And so far as I know, there’s no law that says I have to. And I’m not about to.”

First there was a silence. Then, led by Boadicea, a smattering of applause. Even with that unprecedented provocation, Mrs. Norberg did not take her eyes from Daniel. You could almost see the calculations going on behind that fixed stare: was his insolence defensible, in theory, as candor? Or might he be made to pay for it? Nothing less than expulsion would be worth a head-on contest, and at last, with evident reluctance, she decided not to risk it. There would always be another time.

After the class Boadicea lay in wait for Daniel at the entrance to the lunchroom.

“That was terrific,” she told him in a stage-whisper, as she slipped into place behind him in the cafeteria line. “A regular adventure movie.”

“It was a mistake.”

“Oh no! You were completely, universally right. The only way to deal with the Iceberg is silence. Let her talk to her eight echoes.”

He just smiled. Not the fleshy, unforgettable smile of the Elmore Roller-Rink Roadhouse, but a smile that was all mind and meaning. She felt abashed, as though, by making no reply, he meant to show that he considered her one of the people it wasn’t safe to talk to. The smile faltered.

“Hey,” he said, “this is a dumb argument — you telling me I’m right, and me saying I’m wrong.”

“Well, you are right.”

“Maybe, but what’s right for me isn’t necessarily what’s right for you. If you stop sniping at her, what’ll there be for the rest of us to listen to?”

“You mean I can afford to be brave because I’m safe.”

“And I can’t afford it. Which wasn’t something I should have spelled out. That’s the mistake. One of the first things you learn in prison is that the guards like to think that you like them. Norberg’s no different.”

Boadicea wanted to wrap her arms around him, to leap up and cheer for him like some silly cheerleader, to buy him something terrifically expensive and appropriate, such was the enormity of her agreement and of her gratitude at having anyone to be agreeing with.

“School is a prison,” she agreed earnestly. “You know, I used to think I was the only person in the world who understood that. I was in Switzerland at this awful so-called finishing school, and I wrote a letter home, to my father, explaining all the ways it was a prison, and he wrote back saying, ‘Of course, my dear Bobo — school is a prison for the very good reason that all children are criminals.’”

“Uh-huh.”

They’d reached the food. Daniel took a dish of cole slaw onto his tray and pointed at the fishsticks.

“Actually,” she went on, “that isn’t exactly what he said. What he said was that teenagers aren’t fully civilized yet, and so they’re dangerous. Not here in Iowa, perhaps, but in the cities certainly. But one of the differences between here and the cities… oh, just soup for me, please… is the degree to which people here do live by the official code. That’s what my father says anyhow.”

Daniel gave his school credit card to the check-out girl. The machine fizzed with the prices of his lunch, and the girl handed him back his card. He picked up his tray.

“Daniel?”

He stopped and she asked, with her eyes, for him to wait till they were out of earshot of the check-out girl. When they were, she asked him, “Are you having lunch with anyone else today?”