Ben sensed the North Face jacket and the Marlboro Racing hat in the car behind him and almost shuddered with the anticipation of wearing them when the time came. Soon he would feel the right way. If he had come in on the first day wearing the hat, people would think he thought he was cool, but soon he would be able to wear it.

Driving in now, Ben saw kids along the paths in their hats, mostly the two-bar Game hats with the names of different colleges across the front, but he knew that his Marlboro hat was better because it was the same shape and structure as the Game hats, but it was distinct, one of a kind, and the curve of the brim was perfect. Hutch would immediately recognize that it was perfect, and Ben wished that Teddy had given it to him early enough to wear at Tongaheewin.

They kept driving, down a slight incline toward Founder’s Hall with its bleached-bright columns, then over the nameless brook that ran through campus. Usually his dad talked constantly when they came to St. James, pointing at places through the window and relating things he had done in each place, but now he was quiet, maybe also under the heaviness of his hope. He had been co-chair of the fundraising committee for the new squash courts, so at least Ben knew he would want to go see them. Maybe Manley Price would be there at the courts waiting for them.

Now they came to the parking lot behind the unlovely quad dorms, 1930s institutional Gothic built of brick and sandstone. Ben’s dorm, Hawley, did its part to confine an expanse of grass on the building’s far side. They parked amid the other cars and got out and stretched in the hot sun, and the chapel bells rang all four Westminster Quarters and then a single bong: one p.m.

The dorm thrummed with kids and parents intent on carrying things in and setting them up. Ben and his dad wore khaki shorts and polo shirts but not sunglasses because sunglasses were gauche. Room 24 was empty. Two beds, two surgical-green rubber-covered mattresses, two desks. Ben and his dad set the first bags on the floor. Three windows on the far wall looked out over the back parking lot and the stretch of grass to the Two-Laner, and then the cinder block gym beyond. Ben knew that if he stuck his head out the window he could see the squash courts just up the rise to the right. The wind pushed slowly through the heavy trees.

On both desks lay the folder with the line-drawn map of the school and the schedule of first days’ activities, and on top of that, a small, dark blue leatherette book.

THE ST. JAMES COMPANION