He wanted to say, ‘Even if you were completely flat, Alice, I’d still come and see you.’ He hoped that was true. Telling her about her smell wouldn’t help. “Do you really think that I think I have a chance with you?”

She laughed. “This place is teaching you: always with the graceful thing to say.” Abruptly she seemed close to tears.

She wasn’t touching the camera now, and instead was looking down at the floor.

He got off the stool and went over to where she was standing, and through torrents of resistance put his hand lightly on her shoulder. She took in a breath and gave a ragged exhale. As they stood there, he looked past her to the table where her binder and equipment sat, and saw several prints spread out in a sloppy grid. Among several instantly identifiable faces he saw a photo of Hutch: that lion’s head was looking down and to the side, all his swagger gone. Ben remembered Hutch starting to jump up and down after Chapel the first night, how invincible he seemed then, how fully in the stream of self-assured knowingness. He looked young in the photo.

“Wow, Alice, these are really good.”

“Stop.”

“I’m not kidding. These are good.”

And there was Gray, too. Alice hadn’t been able to break through his smiling for the camera; he just looked like a boy hoping to please his parents.

Ben said, “What if I took some of you sometime?”

“I’ve already been taking self-portraits. Those you will never see. And you’re not allowed to see yours until the exhibit.”

“I can accept that.”

“Let’s take a couple more.”

He went back to sit on the stool.

*  *  *

And then Ahmed got caught, exactly the way Ben had expected him to get caught. Tommy’s advisor, the junior faculty member in Gordon, had come to talk to him at eight p.m. about a quiz he had failed, and Graham hadn’t been able to put the bong away fast enough. Ahmed was there on the couch, also clearly high. When the advisor asked to look in the closet, he found almost a pound of marijuana.

Ben wished something more spectacular had happened: that they had been caught by the state police, that they had run afoul of some syndicate that then sent a couple guys onto campus, that there had been a system of wiretaps. Instead it was bong water on the braided rug. Ben asked Hutch to hold on to his vodka in case the administration searched their room.

Ben felt cold when he saw Ahmed’s face as he came into the room from the meeting in Phelps’s office. Ahmed didn’t seem to notice Ben at all; he went to his desk and sat down in the chair facing the inside of his loft enclosure. Still there from the day before was Ben’s Tintin book, Prisoners of the Sun.