“So it was tough getting used to it, like homesickness, or what?”

“It’s a year in and I still feel like I’m trying to get used to it.”

“Huh.”

“Do you have a roommate?” she asked.

Ben lowered his voice. “See Mr. Smooth over there with the orthopedic shoes and the camera and the freaking satchel? That’s my roommate.”

Alice turned to look, then smiled to Ben without warmth, and he worried he was coming off churlish.

Alice studied Ben as he sat there on his towel, his flat-black hair and his long, smooth, almost snakelike body.

He was too unsure to fill out his looks, but Alice knew that soon he’d get over his self-consciousness. Soon he’d build up some ease—he’d get a few quizzes back and realize he could hang with the work, he’d see girls smile to him after Seated even if his joke wasn’t so funny, whatever team he was on would win a few games, he would wear his shoes the right way—and then he’d disappear into that ease. Alice had seen so many of them make the same change, from glowing with discomfort along the walls of a dance or drifting back from the football fields under planetary helmets, to folding into the language, draping themselves across the chairs in the Dish Common Room, hooting and shouting in the dining hall when a group dared each other to say “penis,” each louder than the last, going with the hunch that if they leaned in to kiss that girl she would likely reciprocate.

They would launch into speaking during class, trusting that cogency would emerge along the way, letting the act of talking itself lend shape to their thoughts. She could almost feel it happening in Ben moment by moment there beside her. She wished occasionally that she could break off a piece of this confidence, sneak up on one of them and snip it off like a lock of hair.

Alice looked again at Ahmed, then returned her eyes to Ben.

“Did he really have two servants helping him set up his room?”

“You know about that?”

“Everyone knows about that.”

Ben suddenly was convinced that Ahmed had overheard them, but when he turned to check, Ahmed was looking the other way at a few other kids who were coming up the steps.

“Oh well. You win some, you lose some,” she said. “How’d you chip your tooth?”

“A Hawley newb is a quiet newb,” he said.

She didn’t laugh.