Now both of them want to postpone it. But already he’s tying off the condom and she’s making sure she finds the wrapper, and they want to kiss goodbye, but outside in the air they can’t, and then it’s time for them to go along separate paths toward their dorms, and she clings to his arm and he pulls her into his body almost as hard as he can, both of them walking in the warm-cold trying to tell the other silently that they are still in love, even though they’re too embarrassed to look at each other and too embarrassed to say the other’s name.

*  *  *

After talking with Tommy, Ben went to dinner, then came back to the room and found Ahmed cleaning his ears with a Q-tip. Ahmed wore an expression of listening intently for a sound just out of range, and he spun the swab slowly between his thumb and forefinger. This person, this defenseless person cleaning his ears, was now fully enmeshed in the most hidden, tender parts of Ben’s self.

Ben looked away from Ahmed and thought about the woman who came to clean their house at home, Marisol. Whenever Ben discovered his swim trunks neatly folded on his neatly made bed, he would imagine Marisol in his bedroom alone—with her carefully dyed hair and the darknesses between her teeth—cleaning. Ben imagined her imagining him: a little boy who left his swim trunks on the floor and had been given an entire room to himself. You could imagine a person like Marisol—what she saw and what she thought of you—but you could also let that person fade away. And then when you came back to your clean room, it was the room itself that had become neater in its own course, and the trunks had appeared there folded like that because that is how swim trunks end up.

Maybe this was supposed to fade in that same way. Maybe tuitions are paid because that is how tuitions end up.

But now as Ben walked to Chapel in the fevery mornings, he couldn’t keep these thoughts out of his head. He came inside without taking his scarf off his face. He passed Aston’s seat. For the hundredth time he passed Markson, and Dennett—Price was all the way down at the other end of the nave; thankfully he didn’t have to pass Price—and the rest of the faculty, all of them looking out over the students. How long before the news spread? Again, the inevitable litany: druggie, stress case, kid with the rich expat paying for him, anorexic, smug jock, slut…How long until all the students knew? It would be so much worse than being on scholarship and having people find that out, so much more abject a disgrace if Russell knew he had had to resort to this.

*  *  *