“Listen,” Tommy said, “no one’s going to hear it from me. Me and Ahmed got nimbo one night in here and he was telling me about this paper he got an H on, and he said he was glad you were still here. And I asked him what he meant and he told me.”

Each of them seemed to be by himself for a few moments. Ben tried to get used to this new loss of control.

“Listen, we’re his friends; we’re not going to let anything bad happen to him.”

*  *  *

The hookup blackout had been on for three weeks. But Henry Carter, the goalie whose abuse had caused the ban, was playing better than ever, and he wasn’t planning on apologizing until after the season was over. Everyone knew the ban was being broken here and there, but overall it had been much more effective than the school’s own no-sexual-contact policy. The Paige girls started to prowl through dorms during intervis, bursting into the rooms of known couples to try to catch them scrumping. Miraculously they had only caught one couple, but they then spilled maple syrup in the girl’s hair in the dining hall and stopped her every time they passed in the halls and measured her waist with a tailor’s tape.

And still, if years later you asked people what they remembered about that time, many would say it was the most intensely romantic period of their lives. To have another person’s body so off-limits seemed to make everything, all sense experience, almost painfully keen.

A boy and girl know a place, the Trophy Room, where the Paige girls can’t find them. So after dinner she packs notebook paper into the strike plate of the gym’s side door. They wait in the Den until an hour before check-in, ostentatiously sitting apart from each other.

Each of them gives a different reason for leaving: work for physics, friend with something to talk over in the dorm. She leaves first, and he slowly finishes the game of air hockey.

They meet up again behind the gym instead of at the side entrance, and they kiss there, sure they won’t be seen. They slip around the outside of the building toward the door, the most exposed they’ll be, each with delicious fearful impatience to get inside out of sight, each exaggerating the danger to goose that feeling.

Into the inner hallway glowing under the EXIT sign, through the double doors to the Trophy Room. Burgundy leather couches sit against three of the walls, and they choose the one farthest from the door. He sits, she kneels astride him. They have already decided, and they keep their precipice-feeling as he puts on the condom the wrong way and then laughs jaggedly and turns it over and rolls it down with fast graceless pushes.