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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 COLLEGE sweatshirt, 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.
    â€œWe’re pregaming in our room again at eight o’clock,” Justin announced the fourth night at dinner.
    â€œTechnically speaking, we rarely go to any games,” Steven said. “So we’re stretching the definitional properties by calling it pregaming.”
    â€œWho cares? The pregaming’s the best part,” said Kevin. “Not gonna lie: the actual game usually sucks.”
    â€œYeah,” 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.”
    â€œOnce 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.”
    â€œPuk-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.
    â€œYou 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 halfwaythrough 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