Next to her, Esther’s attention was bounding around the room like a puppy at a barbecue, as if she believed there was something more to discover.

Maybe there was.

“Um,” Daisy said.

No one heard her.

“Esther?”

No response.

Daisy tried to think how her friends went about commanding attention when they wanted it.

“Actually . . .” Daisy said in as confident a voice as possible, “I was thinking about going to the Activities Fair later.”

Esther redirected her attention, and Susan looked up from her conversation with Kully, who said, “Wasn’t that weeks ago?”

“Black mold. Health and safety,” Daisy said, remembering what Jonathan had said. “It got moved to today. I thought maybe we could all go together?”

She looked hopefully from Esther to Susan, who issued a disgusted snort.

“Clubs and societies are enforced fun for people who don’t have anything better to do with their lives than waste them.” Seeing how crestfallen Daisy was, Susan added a little more kindly, “Sorry, Daisy. I’m not much of a joiner.”

Esther was holding her fingers to make a crucifix and leaning away in fear. “Nuh-uh. I’ve had my brush with organized socializing, thanks, and all I got was a tattoo and an overwhelming sense of foreboding.”

Daisy had forgotten about that.

As they went to offload their breakfast things, Daisy reasoned that it shouldn’t matter whether her friends came with her. As a freshly hatched social butterfly, she would just have to spread her wings on her own.

Even if she still felt more like a caterpillar.

On her way out of breakfast, Esther had found Ed Gemmell. Somehow they had ended up in the library.

“I can’t believe you’re doing actual work,” Esther said, giving a slightly demonic expression to a skull she’d just drawn on the back of her hand. “The whole point of university is to learn to develop our own theories through experience and contemplation, not by copying out other people’s ideas.”

“I think the point is that we have to know what theories already exist; otherwise we won’t know whether our ideas are original,” Ed Gemmell said without looking up from the book he was studying.

Esther reached out and flipped the book over to a black-and-white photo on the dust jacket. The man in it was wearing a turtleneck and a stern expression, wiry hair cascading down either side of a shiny bald head.

“If Rupert Chalfont-Debray’s theories are so original, how come he looks exactly like all the other dusty white male academics? You could have subbed him in for the man who gave that lecture.”

“By ‘that lecture,’ do you mean the series of six compulsory lectures we’ve had on early twentieth-century prose?”

“Yes. Six. Totally what I meant.” SIX?!

“That would be because they’re one and the same person. Rupert Chalfont-Debray is the head of the faculty.”

“And how compulsory were those lectures, exactly?”