was printed on the cover in stout, gold-embossed letters, and the page edges were stained red. Ben chose the bed and desk on the left, and he slipped the book into the desk’s pencil drawer.

Outside, older kids were hugging each other and laughing. Ben carried a standing lamp and his dad carried one bookshelf speaker under each arm. They set up the stereo and hung the Escher poster of ants crawling along a Möbius strip. Ben’s dad had given him a three-by-five reproduction of an Audubon drawing of the Great Auk, a sort of penguin that looked like an affronted London aristocrat. The little print was in a worn-out, gold-painted frame, and Ben jammed a thumbtack into the outside of the room’s door and hung the frame on the tack. Ben kept imagining a short-haired girl coming to visit him. The last thing she saw before their eyes met would be this quirky, charming picture.

Now in the parking lot it was sweat-hot. The leaves flashed white as they faced the sun. Cicadas ground off and on as though theirs was the noise of the heat itself.

As they made trips to and from the car carrying things in, Ben nodding and half smiling to every new person he passed, girls were doing the same thing, moving with their parents between the cars in the quad parking lot and the neighboring dorms.

Ben looked at the girls but tried not to look too hard. He noticed the pretty girls, but he also saw the cusp-pretty girls. Even in hurried glances with his arms full, Ben could tell which of these St. James girls had been awkward. There had been a couple girls like this at Sidney, his school at home. Their long necks just now belonged with the rest of their bodies, or their eyes weren’t quite so close together anymore, and even though Ben couldn’t know its precise history, the unaccustomedness was clear.

The always-pretty girls seemed to consume attention as a matter of routine, or even as a nuisance, and Ben couldn’t blame them for that. But the cusp-pretty girls had never before been looked at so hard—by boys, by men, and by the always-pretty girls—and it seemed to make them aware of their surroundings in a way that appeared exhilarating and slightly painful for them.

Ben felt kinship with those cusp-pretty girls, slight kinship, because now for the first time people were starting to look at him with a story in their minds too. Because Ben had in the past year gone from being a pretty good squash player to being maybe the best boys’ squash player in the country. Even in a world so tiny—he played a sport that most of America would never know about—that new celebrity, the way the coaches and parents and other players actively reassessed him, stood out clearly to him.