Tim left a return message that sure it would be great to meet at the HMV on Route 44—maybe they could do one o’clock the following day. When he read the message, Ben was taken over by it. With Tim he could leap out into the uncertainty of a joke and not worry if it wasn’t quite right, and so maybe a great joke would happen. He wished he could drive so his mother wouldn’t have to be anywhere around them, but she said she was happy to take a break from dissertation stuff, to sit at the little tea place and read her novel.

Tim saw Ben first, standing up out of his mom’s car and squinting into the bright overcast sky. You could still so clearly discern the bones under the skin of Ben’s face, but he looked different, too. His matte-black hair had grown out; it followed fewer rules now. Tim wouldn’t have thought Ben could get thinner, but he was, and still more tempered; a childish softness had left him.

Before he could help it, Tim felt a shiver of aversion. Why was it so hard to bear up under being with Ben sometimes?

Ben said goodbye to his mom and she waved to him as though they had a fun shared secret. There Tim was, a new cowrie-shell necklace visible at his throat behind his unzipped fleece. His molasses-colored hair was a lot longer, and there was a much-encouraged start of a beard under his chin and over his upper lip.

They ordered what they thought was the right thing at a coffee place. Tim said he was playing in a band at Sussex, the private day school he was going to, that they had performed a couple times at dances. Ben said cool, and imagined Tim feeling a preshow anxiety like Ben had felt in the hallway before the wrestling match. He wanted to say something to establish between them the shared stage fright, the sensation of pushing yourself over the precipice into some act.

Tim said, “I got to school and the first day I saw this flyer in the hall that said, ‘Guitar player needed. Zeppelin, Stones, Bowie, Hendrix, Allmans. No Dead. No fucking Phish.’ Except the ‘u’ and ‘c’ in ‘fucking’ were a number sign and asterisk. And I was like, exactly. These guys, they’d been playing together for two years and their guitar player graduated. But I could hang, and just before Christmas we had this semester-end concert. My ears are still ringing.”

Tim asked how St. James was, and they both heard the slight unkindness in his tone.

“It’s good. There’s a ton of work, and I’m still like figuring out the whole place. But it’s amazing. I quit squash, though.”

Tim put down his paper cup. “No.”

“Too much pressure.”