It had been raining all day, the air dense and tropical, the sidewalks strewn with earthworms giving themselves up to ecstasy—or trying to keep from drowning. He stepped round them, careful not to track anything in on his shoes, and started up the familiar stairs of the psych building. Fitz could hear the ding and rattle of Tim’s typewriter as he came striding down the hall, rhythmically rapping his still-dripping umbrella against one calf and floating so high on the euphoria that set in each year at the end of the semester he actually found himself whistling. Summer break. Was there a happier term in the dictionary? He’d been going to school in one capacity or another since kindergarten and no matter how long the slog or how dreary the year, summer was always there before him like a shining promise.

He remembered one year—he must have been ten or so, younger than Corey anyway—when he spent the first morning of summer vacation playing ball with a dozen kids from the development, then went off into the woods by himself to sit up in the crotch of a tree, wash down his peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a Coke from the service station and indulge in a little philosophy. The morning might have been gone, he remembered thinking, but it was just the first in a long succession that stretched so far into the future he couldn’t really wrap his mind around it. He was safe, he was free, it was summer. Right: And where had that summer gone? And all the rest of them too? He broke off in mid-whistle and laughed aloud. He’d have to tell Corey about it, because there was a lesson there, though Corey wouldn’t get it, couldn’t get it, he supposed—not till he was in his thirties too.

The door was open, but Tim was so absorbed he didn’t even turn round when Fitz knocked. The keys tapped, a cigarette fumed in the ashtray. From down the hallway came the odd sound of a door creaking open, footsteps, indistinct voices. Fitz knocked again, a bit more sharply this time, and all at once the strangest thing happened: Tim seemed to blur into a geometric array of neon colors and then reformulate himself like a deck of shuffled cards. It took him a moment to realize he was having a flashback, as Charlie and Tim called the experience, a brief neural replay of a moment randomly selected from a previous trip, nothing to worry about, nothing more than a trompe l’oeil of the mind, and he wouldn’t even have remarked it except that it was his first. When Tim finally did turn around, the first thing Fitz said was, “Weird.”