But now, in the middle 1990s, this design, this intentional remoteness, was starting to break down, and it would only continue to break down. The majority of St. James kids already had email addresses, and in a few years, the dorms would be wired for broadband Internet. And then hip-hop slang would sound cooler than what had bloomed in this particular Galápagos of Grateful Dead dialect. And the kids would start looking at the same amount of porn as everyone else, Gchat with their friends from home, check Facebook between classes, tend Instagram, and get calls from their parents on their phones every day. And their parents would call their teachers and wonder about that grade on that quiz, or that decision not to start the kid for the second half of the game.

But not quite yet. Still, as Ben and his father drove toward campus, you could go an entire semester without seeing a newscast or hearing commercial radio, and each dorm shared one pay phone in the basement. Even though N.W.A CDs and Peter North on VHS had passed the gates since Ben’s dad had graduated, the remoteness still functioned as remoteness; it was still easier to escape distraction here. To what end?

And then the simple white sign between granite posts appeared: ST. JAMES SCHOOL.

Ben’s dad braked and pulled off into the spur of the entrance lane. Untrained evergreen hedges grew tall on either side, blocking for a moment the powerful sun, and the car drove slowly between them.

The St. James admissions packet—the sight of its thickness had washed Ben with relief—told him he would have a roommate, but it hadn’t given him any information about who the roommate would be. Ben loved that he would have a roommate. This kid would give Ben a place to deploy the expertise he’d learned from Teddy. When he had visited St. James before, met Teddy’s friends, he’d learned that if a kid’s last name sounded familiar, it wasn’t a coincidence. Yes, that food company, that steelmaker, that bank. Ben and his roommate would know St. James slang together, they would have inside jokes, they would go talk to girls together and compare notes after. Ben would let the roommate know how to act at Seated Meal and at the Den, what no one wore, how to make upper-formers think you were cool enough for a newb but not trying to be too cool. When you went to someone’s room you never knocked on the door because only faculty were required to knock, and so anyone who knocked was faculty.