Here he was, finally. Rehearsal was over. The chapel was easily four stories high, its ceiling vaulted in deep, dark wood, chandeliers hanging down like giant brass thistles, each wall an acre of stained glass. How could you depict the crease at the corner of a lamb’s mouth in glass? Long parallel wooden pews ran the length of the building on either side of a center aisle facing in, letting the school see itself. New students in the first row, more senior students on the elevated rows behind, faculty along the walls in shallow mini-thrones. Ben knew that Price was in here somewhere but he couldn’t see him in any of the seats along the far wall in either direction. Maybe Price was sitting behind him.

The huge space was illuminated for this first night by white candles on slender wooden posts that fit over the slanted hymnal rests in front of each pew, and the points of flame formed lines that seemed to converge down the length of the space. When the student body had grown beyond the capacity of the chapel in the 1930s, the school didn’t cram folding chairs at the end of the nave or decide to take fewer students. Instead it broke the back wall free, mounted it on railroad tracks, rolled it back thirty yards, and built the necessary connecting walls and ceilings and stained glass and pews. Wealth hadn’t needed to explain itself to anyone.

Coming in, Ben had been handed a slim unlit taper with a paper hilt, and now he held the candle across his lap. All the third-formers, the newbs, looked indirectly at each other across the aisle, seeing the nervous and the self-assured, the girls like ships and the girls like finches. Which will be my friends? Which of the boys could be the boy?

If Ben just stayed on track, took the challenges presented to him and prevailed over them, then he would be on the correct course. It felt like he was still watching himself be here, but all he had to do was wait and it would feel right. This place was for him. All the times at Sidney when he had almost overcome his discomfort and surrendered to their dances or running down the hallways, he had reassured himself about his hesitancy, his withdrawal, by reminding himself that all the same stuff would happen at St. James, and would happen better there, with all rightness.

In the low plush light of the chapel he looked at and away from the pretty girls and again at the cusp-pretty girls. Would they come watch him play? There was Hutch in the front row down toward the Rector’s place.