Harrison’s ability to consume chicken would probably be the greatest casualty of that day: permanent, and certainly inconvenient, given the many rubber chicken dinners in his future. It was not compassion for the bird, or belief in the sanctity of its life; it was the filth and the crap and the flying feathers and the smells and the sounds and the interminable squawking which were to be his lot for the foreseeable future. Or at least until he was allowed to hand off his burden to the next horrified Roarke man.
Sometimes, on those cold mornings, he warmed himself by imagining his siblings at their own pathetically conventional institute of higher education. Fragile Lewyn and caustic Sally, who aspired to nothing and who had produced not one original idea throughout their （enforced） years together; Harrison tried to imagine what they did with themselves all day, in their overheated dorm rooms, alongside their video game–playing, blow-drying, chugging-and-puking classmates. He thought of his siblings in their massive survey courses, doodling their way through PowerPoint lectures, receiving inflated As, learning absolutely nothing. Lewyn and Sally had entered the great education con in which students and their families paid in for four years and were rewarded with a piece of paper, suitable for framing, in return （along with, for those who were not Oppenheimers or of similar alignment, a whole lot of debt）。 And this appalling proxy for an actual education was what Lewyn and Sally had signed up for while he was here at Roarke! He felt elated when he considered his own fellow students, and the conversations that overran their seminars, trailing them to their chores, their meals, the bunkroom, even the showers. These were men who fell asleep reading then woke up and began reading again. Like him. And he was at home with them, far more than he had ever been with those other two.
A couple of years earlier, tiny Roarke had become more broadly known, courtesy of an influential guidebook called Colleges That Change Lives, which appealed to the reader to look beyond brand-name institutions for an exhilarating array of less-well-known colleges and universities. Harrison, who had come home one day during his junior year to find this very book on the dining room table, assumed it had been purchased for Lewyn and Sally, since he himself would obviously be going to one of those selfsame brand-name institutions; still, when he troubled himself to open the guidebook a few months later, he found that Roarke was actually listed among those justly obscure institutions, and praised for its quirky insistence on the canon, its tiny size, and purist intellectualism. The book had led directly to a sharp spike in applications for its fourteen annual places, and while Harrison had no way of knowing exactly how superior he and his classmates had been to the rest of their applicant pool, there was no disputing that they were a bluntly impressive group. Nearly all of them had declined or deferred admission to the most selective universities in the country, for reasons that soon came to light. Carlos （Princeton, Yale） had anchored last year’s national champion debate team for his high school in Louisiana. One of the Justins （MIT, Stanford） had made it to the finals of the Siemens Competition the previous year. Bryce （Harvard, West Point） had spent the past couple of years essentially explaining policy papers to the dim-witted congressman from his district in suburban Minneapolis and writing first drafts of much of the congressman’s correspondence （not excluding a bill bearing the congressman’s name that had recently passed the House）。 Emmanuel （MIT, Stanford, Caltech） had won the national Math Olympiad, and Gordon （Columbia, Yale, Dartmouth） had coauthored a monograph with his mentor, the chief justice of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Even Tony （Dartmouth, Princeton）， the New Hampshire farm kid Harrison had assumed to be some kind of keeping-the-locals-happy recruit, was deeply immersed in semiotics and intended an academic career.
And then, of course, there was Eli Absalom Stone （Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Stanford, Columbia）。
At no point had Eli been precisely friendly to Harrison, but neither was he notably warm to any of the others. Harrison wondered if his celebrated classmate might show a preference for Roarke’s other students of color—a profoundly cerebral second-year from Atlanta named Tyquan, Jonathan Jackson from Nevada, and their classmate Carlos Flores from Louisiana—but he seemed to hold them at the same arm’s length as everyone else. Still, Eli was never the least bit snobbish, as—with all of his accomplishments—he might reasonably have been. He stepped up as much as the rest of them when there was some task requiring community effort, and listened respectfully to differences of opinion and even thoughtful criticism, so long as it was properly supported. In the classroom, of course, he was glorious, and watching him eviscerate somebody else’s position from the other side of a seminar table—often using only a prodigious memory for printed material, a pincer-like grasp of the relevance of any given passage, and a hypnotically calm voice—was a thing of beauty. The rest of their fellow Roarke men might someday impact scholarship, business, and politics but Eli Absalom Stone, Harrison saw, would require the world to orient itself to him.