Teddy Wayne - Loner

Sara talked about participating in the First-Year Urban Program for preorientation, whose main project had been “reconstructing furniture for low-income families in Boston.”

“I was pretty bad at it,” she admitted. “I think I ended up de constructing the furniture, to be honest. I was like the team’s Derrida.” She waited for us to laugh at the reference that neither of us yet knew. “You guys do any programs?”

“The Fall Clean-Up with Dorm Crew,” Carla said.

“I didn’t know about that option,” said Sara. “That sounds fun. What did you guys clean up?”

“Mostly bathrooms in the dorms. The pay was good, though.”

“Oh,” Sara said, clearly discomfited by the socioeconomic schism. “David, how about you?” she asked, her eyes meeting mine pleadingly.

“I stayed home,” I said.

I returned to my room shortly thereafter. In my bed, I sleuthed around the warrens of the free! Internet for your name, adding information from the Register (high school, address), modifying it with new data that cropped up (on the track team, with three-thousand-meter race times recorded in a few places; supporting cast in some plays and then, senior year, Lady Macbeth in your girls’ school’s production; a quote in a news item on Chapin’s website about your participation in Model UN: “ ‘It’s a wonderful opportunity for students to think about the world outside themselves,’ said junior Veronica Wells, representing Hungary.”). Progenitors: Lawrence, member of the senior brass at a household-name financial services firm and a Harvard Business School graduate, and Margaret, who, according to the New York Times , “sits on the board of various philanthropic organizations,” and whose willowy figure was photographed on a host of society websites. No siblings I could find.

And no other photos, except perhaps for those cached in your Facebook page, which was off-limits to me. (I couldn’t locate any additional social media accounts in your name.) You’d used the same profile picture as in the Register . I saved it to my computer and zoomed in.

You had no affiliation with Steven’s modest metric of cute . Cute didn’t fuel Romeo and Dante and Paris, couldn’t galvanize the unerring belief that their inamorata justified any sacrifice, that their quest for Juliet or Beatrice or Helen, successful or not, was itself a peerless achievement reflecting back on their own valor. There’s just one Everest, and only the most heroic can reach the summit.

You’d elected not to list your dorm room or any contact details in the student directory, so I combed the doors on my floor. I didn’t find your name and went upstairs. It was at the end of the hall, on room 505, a symmetrical number to match your symmetrical initials.

Yours was also a two-person suite. Headlining the sign was SARA COHEN, CLEVELAND, OH. Sara without an h .

I looked around for you on campus over the next few days, a blitz of tours, placement tests, and advisory meetings. With my placeholder friends, I endured a marathon of organized social outings: the Tin Man gyrations of the First Chance Dance; the Freshman Talent Show, dominated by music and juggling performances (Steven put on a well-received magic act); the annual screening of Love Story , interrupted with increasingly tedious commentary from Crimson Key members, the student group that ran much of Freshman Week; the A Cappella Jam, exactly as fun as it sounds. You were a consistent no-show. Sara, too, refrained from most activities.

To lend my bare walls some color, I bought a van Gogh print of sunflowers. After affixing it with dorm-approved putty, I recognized I was becoming a collegiate cliché and returned to the Harvard Coop, but saw that no matter what I might purchase — Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory , Munch’s The Scream , the couple kissing in Times Square, John Belushi in his COLLEGEsweatshirt, a kitten doing its best to hang in there —I’d at best be some potpourri of stereotypes. Hence I decided to transform my room into a self-aware caricature by full-throttling van Gogh, plastering the wall above my bed with a collection of his most famous yellow-hued paintings to complement the original sunflowers: a chair, café exteriors, straw hats, whorled wheat fields. I stood back and admired the results with a chuckle. (If anyone ever noticed my thematic curation, they didn’t say anything.)

When the opportunity presented itself, I made a few bumbling attempts to strike up conversations with other freshmen. None backfired as badly as with Jake and Phil, but they never led to anything, either. It was still better, I reasoned, to bide my time with my entryway companions than to sit by myself like a leper, and so I stuck with the clique, who had christened themselves the Matthews Marauders.

“We’re pregaming in our room again at eight o’clock,” Justin announced the fourth night at dinner.

“Technically speaking, we rarely go to any games,” Steven said. “So we’re stretching the definitional properties by calling it pregaming.”

“Who cares? The pregaming’s the best part,” said Kevin. “Not gonna lie: the actual game usually sucks.”

“Yeah,” Justin agreed. “If I spent my whole life just pregaming with you guys and never going to any games, I’d be cool with that.”

“Once we start going to parties,” Kevin proposed, “we should just think of them as pregaming for some other game.”

Justin raised his glass of soda. “To pregaming and never gaming.”

“Puk-chh,” said Kevin as he jerked his arm in two movements to toast with Justin. He punctuated much of his speech with sound effects of cinematic violence: guns loading and firing or cyborg combatants landing bone-pulverizing punches.

“You guys crack me up,” Ivana said, shaking her head fondly. “You’re so weird.”

They weren’t, in the slightest. They were completely ordinary, all of them, having already pledged their fealty to one another halfway through the first week of college, with no aspirations to maraud beyond the claustrophobic perimeter and dirty-sock musk of Justin and Kevin’s room.

Sara ate meals with us, but sat out the pregame sessions with various excuses: early wakeup for a meeting, scheduled phone call with her grandmother. She hadn’t referred to a long-distance boyfriend or other freshmen she’d befriended, so it appeared that she was just reclusing in her room. Or in her room with you. Perhaps she, too, saw our group as a parochial small town and was scheming to flee it with her roommate as her one-way Greyhound ticket — in which case I needed to guarantee I was also on board.

My only sightings of you were in the dining hall, where your friends had claimed a table in a far corner yet managed to make themselves the hub of attention and activity, with other social blocs frequently coming by to pay their respects, as if your preeminent coastal provenance had been directly transposed onto the map of Annenberg and the rest of us were flyover country. Over the course of the week I’d seen enough of their faces to locate the core members’ entries in the Freshman Register . Their footprints on the Internet were private or contained no tangential material about you. A few were from Los Angeles or abroad, but most had attended prep schools in New York. That explained your immediate alliance — your social scopes were not limited to your high schools but encompassed small-world networks of the well-heeled: second homes, clubs, family connections. That, or you’d simply identified your kin on sight, and if I ever attempted to breach your city walls, you would instantly peg me as a barbarian.