Arch had been given my class schedule; the ritual, it seemed, was for each of the big brothers to tour his protégé from room to room. As we walked, he spoke to me with genial familiarity, pausing on occasion to point something out or wave to someone across the quadrangle. I was too captivated by his allure to remember anything but the sound of his voice, the way he walked, the casual confidence with which he carried himself, how he inhabited the navy blazer and regimental tie as if he had been the model for which all prep school uniforms had been designed.

When we were finished, Arch led me back to the reception area outside the theater.

“It’s great to meet you, bud,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Again, we shook hands. The touch of his hand felt like an electric charge.

I found my mother sipping a cup of coffee and nodding along as one of the well-dressed mothers prattled about what made Yeatman superior to Montgomery Bell, Nashville’s other elite boys’ school. Even then, my mother may have been plotting her own escape from the low-down life of Montague Village. But I knew none of this, distracted as I was by my own ascension.

Heading home, my mother waited until we’d reached the highway before lighting a cigarette.

“I saw you through the window, talking with that boy,” she said.

I nodded.

“Who was he?”

“Arch,” I said. “My big brother.”

Two narrow funnels of smoke unfurled from her nostrils and wafted out the crack in the window.

“He’s cute,” she said.

three

The spell cast by that first hour with Arch took little time to break. The various cliques in my grade had all been established long before my arrival. The school’s idiosyncrasies and traditions only made me feel that much more the outsider—an impostor bound to be exposed at any moment. I was a year behind every other boy in my grade in math and Latin, and had to take both of those courses with junior schoolers. I went from being first in my class in almost everything to fighting to stay off the bottom among boys a year younger than me.

My greatest humiliations took place under the tutelage of my Latin teacher and advisor, Dean Varnadoe. In his late sixties, Walker Varnadoe was an elegant man, slim and rangy, with a sonorous baritone and pale-blue eyes that seemed to glimmer both when he recited a favorite aphorism and when he leveled his disapproval upon us. He carried a black cane with a polished brass head, which he used not to help him walk but, rather, to point and gesticulate at the board or around the classroom and to rap on the desks of drowsy students, startling them back to rigid, chastened attention.