“You be her jailer. I’m holding you to it.”

“Yes’m.”

School was back on, and as usual it felt like a long-running CW show that’s sprung back from hiatus. The same, only older and more emotionally promiscuous—more laughter, more tears, often both at once. New haircuts, new clothes and new backpacks to fit the better-defined character arcs everyone had acquired. They strove to open themselves up to new ideas and new friends, and there was always much mingling between the sexes, the cliques, the tribes, this first week.

By the second week, all the old storylines and allegiances would kick back in. Winners and losers would head to their respective turf; those who were neither to their former corners, sick for the long, unconfused days of August. But this was only the fifth day and the laissez-faire spirit hadn’t yet dissipated. Arik had on his faded Green Day T-shirt—now his “lucky shirt”—and Rosemary wore a peasant blouse with baggy blue jeans, and they walked side by side through the piazza around which the school revolved. Where they previously would have each taken elaborate detours to avoid this heartless runway, they now crossed it with nary a qualm. For years, the mock-Grecian balustrades on three sides of the quad had been claimed by the seniors, who text-messaged and people-watched until the last bell rang, sparing no one their withering commentaries, especially not the awkward freshmen in pastel sweaters dispatched by BMWs like unwanted Easter eggs and the pierced punks who drove their moms’ minivans. The ongoing remodel of the piazza had left these social predators homeless; without their perch, they now struggled to find pillars to lean against in order to look cool.

Rosemary and Arik sauntered to the Shakespeare wall, a garish mural (purportedly of Stratford-upon-Avon) created by talent-free sixth-graders bussed in from some “urban” pocket right after the 1992 riots. The Wall was where the ragtag theater geeks hung out—not that Rosemary and Arik belonged with them either—hunched around stone benches, exchanging sacred texts of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth and Playbills saved from trips to see Dame Judi Dench on Broadway. All of these kids, with the exception of Arik and Rosemary, dreamed of being on an HBO series. A handful absorbed the annoying tics of various characters from The Sopranos, though the person who did the most chillingly precise impression of Tony Soprano was a petite Latina named Ana Baretta. A couple of the kids had headshots made for their birthdays, and chattered about building up their resume of special skills; the boy who took juggling classes in London over the summer showed off with little beanbags (“English juggling’s more evolved than American juggling”), the girl who went to mime camp paddled through imaginary rapids, and the South Asian twins, Anil and Ashok, who called their comedy duo the Aryan Brotherhood, shared fresh material about “kikes” and “Chinks.”