It. Made. Him. Crazy.
“This? Again?” he’d said for the first time—but not for the last time!—in second grade when he realized that Freedom Summer was scheduled to take up fully a month of the spring term. “We did this last year,” he’d informed the teacher, hoping a simple mistake must have been made. （The teacher was new and possibly didn’t know they’d already covered the entire Civil Rights Movement the year before.） A little girl in the back began to cry, and a boy stood up to begin talking about how Harrison’s comment made him feel. This unburdening would eventually spread to the entire class, after which Harrison himself asked if he could go talk to the head of school, who liked for the students to call him Aaron.
“We did Freedom Summer last year,” he’d explained to Aaron.
“You know, Harrison, there are some events in history that are so important they are turning points in our shared humanity. We can’t study them too much or too deeply.”
Yes we can, Harrison had thought.
“I would like to study something new every year,” he tried.
“But we ourselves are new every year. We can see new things in the material.”
Harrison wondered briefly whether it might not be a good idea to let Aaron know how he felt about that. But in the end he went back to the classroom, and back to the Civil Rights Movement.
He would spend a lot of time in Aaron’s office, though never for the typical reasons a restless boy might be compelled to see the principal: cheating, pot brownies, AOL unkindness. Harrison’s issues （default obnoxiousness toward everyone at school） mainly derived from his own belief that he was not just smarter than his siblings （a low bar, in his opinion） but smarter than his classmates, his teachers, and the head of school, himself. Tragically, it was far worse than that. He was a superior student trapped in a school without grades （so no one could tell!）， a school where no one was ever deemed a “winner” （designed to take the sting out of not being a winner!）， a school in which every student marched in lockstep to his or her mandated different drummer. He raged for years, first at his parents （who would not consider letting him go to boarding school, or even to Collegiate, where Salo himself had gone!）， and at his teachers （who declined to acknowledge his superiority!）， and always at his siblings （because they were there, and so passive, and it was so convenient to do so）。
In calmer moments, he attempted to set his own curriculum （one that did not repeat, annually, the same few topics dredged through a muck of human feeling）， stringing together classics, history, Latin, philosophy, and religion （religion was taught at Walden, but mainly in a spiritual drum-banging way）。 But it was all so hard without capable guidance and similarly engaged fellow students to push him, and there were moments—not infrequent moments, either—when it seemed to Harrison that he might actually be struggling with the material: concepts that didn’t click through the synapses in his head, arguments that fell apart as he attempted to build them, pieces of writing he understood to be eloquent and brilliant but which spun in verbal tapioca as he tried to get through them. For the first time he was forced to wonder if he might actually have been wrong all this time, if—and this was horrible to contemplate—he might not, after all, be that superior specimen of Oppenheimer, only an ordinary teenager, perhaps a little brighter than some but nothing to attract the notice of the world. It was a horrifying concept.
In the end, Harrison managed to get through the eternity of Walden: dressed in a white suit, holding hands with his white-clad classmates in the Community Room on the top floor of Walden’s massive stone building as the school song was tearily sung and the students “commenced” down the wide staircase and onto Joralemon Street. And then he was out, with only the summer to get through until he could go off to Roarke, where his people, he hoped, awaited him.
Roarke was the precious object in the secret box, and the secret box had been opened to him by a person named Vernon Loring, BA Harvard, MA Oxon, PhD Princeton, and author of six scholarly works of moral philosophy. Loring, a six-foot-three crane of a man, had turned up at Walden one afternoon the previous fall for what was meant to be an enlightening and civil all-school discussion entitled “How Should We Define and Experience Spirituality?”