I know she means trouble the minute she walks in to homeroom.

There are places where a man goes to be silent among other men. Other places, a man goes to talk, or to hear other men talk, about war or women, the sea or the sky. I had been spending too much time in the first kind of place, in the years since I had lost my arm and the better part of my right lung in the air over New France. I was in danger of becoming an old soldier's ghost before I had the chance to become an old soldier. I did not much resist, then, when André, a friend of recent acquaintance, dragged me into the raucous confines of the Grouper's Nest.