“No! That’s the home of Adult Swim!” Mr. Pang answered with a tone of obviousness.

Apollo grinned and continued following Zed, who was leading. Mr. Pang was so cool. Well, maybe, Apollo reconsidered. He probably just watches Family Guy, Apollo decided, declining to verify. He liked his categories to remain stable.

“Where are we headed, Zadie?” Mr. Pang asked.

“Zed! Zed!” she yelled. A group of startled students gawked from the front yard of a Greek dormitory. Apollo found their matching T-shirts to be uniquely embarrassing. They looked like a successful dodgeball team: triumphant, but united in uncoolness.

Mr. Pang sighed, speaking slowly. “Where are we going, Zed?” The “d” in her name was noticeably blunt, offensively percussive.

“The Ferst Art Center,” she said, cloyingly pleasant.

“Where is that?”

“About ten minutes away.”

“Christ.”

“Dad, it’s just walking. You’ll survive.”

Mr. Pang sighed and continued forward. The campus designers clearly didn’t believe in grids. After banking left down Techwood and winding down Fourth Street, passing students and filled parking spaces and manicured greenery, they found other conspicuously lost first-year families and filed behind them, proceeding to the Ferst building.

Entering the building, Apollo felt overwhelmed as they were herded into a swank auditorium with cozy red seats. From the door to his chair, he had received a pencil, a mug, a ream of glossy brochures, a T-shirt, a pin, and at least four high fives, none of them solicited. Why was college so welcoming?

The room filled quickly as families continued to arrive, their voices incrementally escalating to cut through the loud, ambient chatter. Apollo struggled to hear Zed, who was whispering to him about potential majors. It took him a full minute to realize she was actually shouting.

“How can they call it the College of Computing when they only have two majors?” she asked.

Apollo shrugged, suddenly distracted by movement on the stage. Two young white women in gray pantsuits mounted it calmly, one sitting down in a chair near the edge of the stage and the other walking to the center. The arms of one of the women shot up then slowly descended, adjusting the volume. A few resilient pockets of noise held out, but they were quickly snuffed by an explosion of shhs that came from all across the room. Her pantsuit was fitted and spectacularly crisp, each line and edge starched into a spike.

“Quiet, a white woman is speaking,” Zed whispered into his ear, making Apollo vomit out a shrill laugh. He was shunned so quickly and decisively that his laugh didn’t even stretch past one syllable. Stalling out, his mouth remained agape, his eyes down. Maybe welcoming isn’t the right word, he thought.