For Harrison, it was the breakdown of camaraderie that hit him hardest. For the very first time in his life he’d found himself actually enjoying the company of male humans his own age, and this was after thirteen years of school, eight years of camp, and the incessant presence of a brother. At Roarke the clarifying notion that these men had first self-selected to apply to the school, then been selected by the school, and finally opted for the school （despite, in every case, such attractive alternatives） had gone a long way toward binding them together, and he had happily been a part of this group of twenty-four, eating with them and reading with them, treating cows for mastitis with them and discussing semiotics with them. For all the years he’d spent in the enforced comradeship of the Walden School, it was Roarke that had finally filled him with a sense of virtuous fellowship. Now all that was gone, or at least going fast.
It was just at this delicate moment that Harrison received a letter from the Harvard Admissions Office, asking whether he would like to matriculate that fall or whether he intended to extend his deferral, as originally indicated, and transfer the following year. He found himself giving this serious consideration, revisiting his earlier decision for the first time since he’d sat opposite Dr. Vernon Loring in that Naugahyde booth at Symposium. While he’d been chasing chickens and rolling hay, hadn’t his contemporaries at Harvard been forming lifelong bonds and getting a pretty good education of their own? Harrison was missing all that. If he transferred as planned the following year he’d be as legitimately enrolled as any other undergraduate, but the reality promised an experience that was decidedly off-brand. Harvard would probably slot him into a random suite with an opening, assigning him the room of some loser on academic warning or in a psych ward, and his new roommates would be guys who’d actually wanted to room with that selfsame loser! And also, what if the university wanted to burden him with all the prerequisites he’d have missed, meaning entry-level classes, probably with teaching assistants leading the seminar discussions. How annoying would that be, after a year of the education he’d been receiving here?
So it was tempting to just go now. This year at Roarke might still be recast as something quirky and transitional, a Gap Year Experience in which he learned about poultry production and agrarian self-rule and linguistics, deep in the New Hampshire forest. He could go off to Harvard only a few months from now as a sophomore or even a freshman with a few extra credits, a do-over his parents—certainly—would celebrate. He could, annoying as it might be, even to himself, change his mind.
But then, and suddenly, into this moment of uncharacteristic vacillation and self-questioning, there stepped a new, thrilling, and thoroughly unanticipated factor.
One morning, as Harrison was stamping his way out to the henhouse with his definitely emasculating egg basket, he was stunned to see the author of Against Youth giving every appearance of a person who was waiting for another person, and there was no person other than Harrison himself who might conceivably turn up at that place and time. He was just working this out when Eli Absalom Stone raised an arm in greeting.
“Harrison,” he said.
For some reason, Harrison’s idea of a proper response to this was to put his basket down on the chicken shit–stained ice.
“Oh, hi,” he said, just to ram that point home.
“I apologize for the intrusion,” said Eli. “I should have found a way to bring this up in a more pleasant setting.”
“More pleasant … than this?” Harrison said.
“It does have a certain bucolic charm.” Eli did not exactly smile as he said this, though there was a gesture toward the idea of a smile.
They were both breathing steam. Harrison, illogically, felt himself on the verge of offering some excuse. For the hens? Or the general state of tension?
“I feel as if I should have given you some warning before I brought my concerns about Carlos to the attention of the community,” Eli said.
“Oh?”