It was nearly four when the Oppenheimers arrived at the rendezvous in New Hampshire. The parking lot belonged to the Red Arrow Diner, and the bus was an ordinary yellow school bus, not even a Greyhound with video players and a bathroom. The person in charge was apparently a redheaded guy with a clipboard, only he seemed awfully young. Some of the other boys—other men—stood around, already chatting or hoisting their boxes and duffels up the steps of the bus and onto its rearmost seats. One had a military haircut and was built like a boulder, another reminded Harrison of his own brother: pudgy and ducking. Looking around the lot, he briefly allowed some misgivings of his own to slip past his considerable defenses. He hadn’t been expecting a solemn procession under crossed swords, he told himself. Except that he had, or at least something solemn, something ritualistic. Was he heading for camp here? Or the army? Or some backward cult of the Granite State?
But then Harrison thought of Professor Loring, who had once made this same journey, on—quite possibly, from the looks of it—this very same bus. He introduced himself to the person with the clipboard and formed a chain with the others to swiftly load the contents of the Oppenheimer Volvo onto the bus. He did not like to think of the impression all this stuff was making—he had, in the past weeks, allowed Johanna to assuage her own anxiety by buying him things “for college”—but making a scene with his mother, telling her she’d been wrong to pile on so many purchases, seemed like an unwise use of their final moments together. After this he stoically allowed his parents to hug him and moments later the Volvo did successfully depart without him: south to Brooklyn and their own absurd new lives as parents of a squalling infant.
Alone. At last.
Harrison shook the hands of the others: Paul, Bryce, two Justins, Emmanuel, Gordon. The boulder was named Tony; he was the only one actually from New Hampshire. The one who reminded Harrison of Lewyn （though less and less of Lewyn as he began to speak, since he functioned, quite plainly, far above Lewyn’s negative intellectuality） was called Carlos Flores; he had come all the way from Louisiana and seemed excessively interested in everything he saw, even the terribly mundane Red Arrow Diner.
The final student, a slender, fawn-colored young man with a distinct southern accent, introduced himself to Harrison and the others as Eli Absalom Stone. Holy crap, Harrison thought, shaking Eli Absalom Stone’s cool hand. It was him! Actually Eli Absalom Stone! The boy from the shack in the south, the boy who had written a book even Harrison had found remarkable, the boy who had declined an author photo establishing him as anything but a person who’d set down his ideas for the world to take or leave alone. Here: in a parking lot in New Hampshire, boarding the bus with the rest of them, and with the second-year student named John-Peter who wielded the clipboard, and with the actual driver, introduced as Mr. Boudreaux. Shortly after five, they stowed the last of the boxes and duffels and drove north.
John-Peter bounced up and down the aisle, chatting away, delineating his own trajectory （Wisconsin public school, then a year as a congressional page in Washington where a member of his state’s delegation took him aside and told him about Roarke）。 He was planning to transfer to Yale in a year’s time and then fast-track to Yale Law, unless he got a Marshall or a Rhodes. Across the aisle, one of the Justins and Emmanuel were discussing New Wave Cinema as if they were seated at Les Deux Magots, not jolting over New Hampshire roads. Eli Absalom Stone was alone in his double seat a few rows ahead. Harrison watched the darkening forests slip by, and in spite of the landlocked circumstances, the term he kept reaching for, the one that best conveyed—to himself—the terror and thrill of today’s events, was outward-bound. Outward-bound with these other travelers who, just like him, had opted for actual ideas over the empty rituals of the modern college experience. They might be strangers, but they already had that one very rare thing in common, and it was enough. Or so he hoped it would be.
Chapter Twelve
213 Balch
In which Sally Oppenheimer is once more unsettled
Balch Hall was home to over two hundred freshmen women, most of them clad in Juicy Couture tracksuits and shod in Ugg boots. Their small dormitory rooms were festooned with posters and crowded with text-adorned picture frames （Sisters Are Best Friends Forever!）， the beds dotted with stuffed animals and jacked up on plastic risers so that extra cases of Diet Snapple could be shoved underneath. That was how at least one half of room 213 began, but barely a week into term Sally began to dispose of many objects supposedly indispensable for dormitory living that she’d allowed her mother to buy. Over the next weeks, mugs, frames, lights, and even items of clothing were carried down the long hallway to the second-floor lounge and left on a table with a handwritten sign: FREE. The women of Balch Hall soon learned to keep their eyes peeled for these expunged items, which began to disperse throughout the building.