And three times he had felt a thin-envelope pang, only to feel relieved when the letter turned out not to be from the Admissions Office but from the Bursar instead. Something was also not right with that, he knew what a bursar was, and the RESPONSE REQUIRED above the addressee block stayed with him like a raised stitch at his collar. But that worry was down under the heaviness of his desire to get into St. James, and then the thick packet came.

But the memory of those letters from the Bursar wouldn’t burn away as Ben anticipated coming to school. Something was off with how he had arrived. When he had come in previous years to help Teddy move in, there had been so many people—friends and younger kids and their parents—and so much laughter, hugging, swagger, feigned and genuine disbelief. Ben had hoped the quiet of his arrival was just because it was his first semester, with no one to come back to, but he knew that those Bursar letters were alive in the quiet driving onto campus with his dad.

And the letters had been there the day before the drive up to St. James, when Ben and his dad stood in EMS, the outdoor equipment store, engaged in a strange, quiet argument. Ben had lost his raincoat at Tongaheewin, and they were there to replace it. Ben loved outdoor stores; all the gear sat there ready to do huge, dangerous things. He wanted all of the bright sleeping bags and the tents with their curving poles and the rock-climbing harnesses with all the important metal clipped on and the kayaks and the boots and the folding knives in the glass case and the vacuum-sealed food in the shiny plastic envelopes.

They went to the jackets section. Each of the brands had its own rack, and each rack had four sloping studded bars so that the tops of the jacket fronts could be seen: North Face, Patagonia, EMS brand, Columbia. Ben stepped over to the North Face rack, but his dad picked up and started inspecting an EMS brand jacket.

Ben explained Gore-Tex and breathability. The snow skirt that snapped together under the hem of the jacket. The reinforced fabric at the shoulders and elbows, where contact with pack straps and ice axes demanded durability. His dad had never needed any of that—he wore a yellow slicker when it rained and a parka skiing. You couldn’t really go mountaineering without a jacket like this. When did Ben climb mountains? But Ben wanted to do that. He had always wanted to do NOLS. Ben had been taught not to waste money on cheap things. He would be ashamed to be seen in an EMS jacket.

“It’s not worth three hundred and eighty-five dollars, Ben.”

“You know how cold it gets up there.”

“It’s not even insulated! It’s a windbreaker!”