“Parents always stay too long on the first day,” his dad said, smiling to Ben. “That’s the problem.” So there on the Hawley doorstep, with two kids carrying in a futon frame behind them, Ben hugged his father goodbye. They came apart and his dad had his lips pressed together, and then the Volvo accelerated neatly out of the parking lot, and Ben’s connection to the outside world was broken.

2. These Spotted Tigers

2. These Spotted Tigers

BEN TURNED BACK TO THE DORM, FACING IT BY HIMSELF NOW, and then considered his roommate. Just conceiving of the two of them sitting together after check-in, talking about wherever the kid was from, dulled Ben’s sudden pervading homesickness.

Ben’s Old Boy, the student assigned to shepherd him through the first few days, showed up with a firm handshake and introduced himself as Avery. He was sorry he hadn’t been there to help move stuff. Avery was a rower with acne that was going to scar, and he seemed somehow proud to be sweating. They went over to the rectory to shake hands with Mr. Aston, the school’s new Rector. (Aston would have been called the Headmaster at another private school, but St. James had kept the word “Rector” from its religious beginnings.) Then Avery took Ben to get his school ID made. Avery dropped him back at Hawley and said he’d see Ben at Seated Meal that night.

Ben walked into the dorm. He pushed open the second-floor fire door with its broad chicken-wire window and walked down the hallway, looking at his ID and moving his thumb over the photo. He wished he weren’t so thin; there were light shadows under his cheekbones. Ben didn’t know that his nickname in Juniors was “the Sliver.”

As he put the ID in his pocket, he saw that the door to 24 was slightly ajar. Even though he didn’t hear anything, he anticipated that the kid would like the Allman Brothers and so he almost seemed to hear the Allman Brothers. But then he saw that the drawing of the Great Auk was gone from the door. From inside the room he now heard a drawn-out, grating metallic screech and a rhythmic pounding. He came up to the room’s threshold and saw that the door was held open with a gray rubber wedge. He stood looking into the room for several seconds before anyone noticed him.

The dark-skinned boy in a plum dress shirt sat at one of the room’s desks, his dry lips slightly parted, looking down at the welcome-packet map of the school. A bed was in pieces against the far wall, and two very slim, short men in dark coveralls were building something. One man knelt over a chop saw cutting a two-by-four and the other nailed a piece of two-by-four to the wall.