“Things are different on the East Coast.” I tried to sound noncommittal.

“That’s an understatement.” Conchita laughed. “When I got here, I thought I’d landed on another planet. One night the dining hall was serving Mexican food, and I was real excited, and then I show up and the salsa is, like, ketchup with onions in it.”

I actually remembered this night-not because of how the food had tasted, but because I had spilled that very salsa on my shirt and sat for the rest of dinner with a red stain just below my collarbone.

“My mom is Mexican,” Conchita said. “I’m spoiled by her cooking.”

This actually did interest me. “Is your dad Mexican, too?” I asked.

“No, he’s American. They met through work after my mom immigrated. And I have two half-sisters, but they’re way older. They’re, like, adults.”

For the first time, I caught the ball in my webbing.

“Nice job,” Conchita said. “So do you like it here?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“What do you like about it?”

“I think that’s a really weird question,” I said. “Do you not like it or something?”

Conchita appeared unruffled by my rudeness. “Hmm.” She set the tip of her stick against the grass, like a cane. “I can’t tell if we’ve decided to be honest. At first, I thought you and I were going to. I’d gotten the impression you weren’t the same as everyone else, but now I’m thinking I might’ve been wrong.” She seemed perhaps a little sad but still not angry, not at all-she was a lot slyer than I’d given her credit for.

“Since we’ve never met,” I said, “I don’t know how you could have any impression of me.”

“Please, Lee. You’re not going to act like we don’t all have ideas about each other, are you?”

The remark shocked me. Certainly, I had ideas about other people, but Conchita was the first person I’d encountered who seemed to have ideas about me. Besides, in spite of my zest for gathering information about other students, I would never have revealed what I’d learned to the people whom it concerned; I knew enough to know that if, say, over dinner you said to some guy you’d never spoken to before, Yeah, you have a sister who went to Ault, too, right? Alice? Who graduated in 1983? it would only creep him out. Not that I personally felt creeped out by Conchita’s research; mostly I felt curious. “Fine,” I said. “What are your ideas about me?”

She could have gamed me in this moment in the way that I was gaming her, but she didn’t. “I have a hard time believing you like it here,” she said. “That’s the first thing.” She hoisted her stick into the air again and shot the ball forward, and it thunked against the ground midway between us. “You’re always walking around with your head down. Or at roll call, you just study and don’t talk to people.”

Abruptly, I felt myself sink into another mood. I didn’t retrieve the ball but just stood there, with the base of my stick propped against my right hip-not the right way, not even the right side, to hold it, I later learned-and stared at the manufacturer’s logo painted over the aluminum.

“You seem thoughtful,” Conchita said. “And I don’t see how any thoughtful person couldn’t have some problems with this school.”

I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That reminder that it can be different, that you need not go through your life unknown but that you probably still will-that is the part that’s almost unbearable.

“Maybe we’re alike,” Conchita said.

I looked up. I wasn’t sure I wanted to make this leap.

“I’ve always thought, I bet I could be friends with her,” Conchita said. “You know how you just get that feeling? But if I’m wrong, you can tell me.”

I thought of the day she’d worn the beret, its bright purple woolly fabric; if I had noticed it, surely other people had. Then I thought of how my life at Ault was a series of interactions and avoidance of interactions in which I pretended not to mind that I was almost always by myself. I could not last for long this way, certainly not for the next three years; I’d been at Ault only seven months, and already, my loneliness felt physically exhausting.

But then the whistle blew-Ms. Barrett was summoning us-and in the shifting activity, I managed not to give Conchita an answer.

Gates was running roll call alone the next morning, but near the end, Henry Thorpe came and stood on the platform. Gates moved aside, and Henry stepped in front of the desk, and even though he hadn’t said a thing, people started laughing-he seemed to be imitating himself running roll call on another day. A lot of times students performed skits as announcements, and occasionally, if the senior class had a big test, they’d filibuster by performing lots and lots of skits, or making joke announcements; once, nearly twenty members of the senior class came up, one by one, to wish Dean Fletcher a happy birthday.

“So I guess that’s it for today,” Henry said. “I’ll just ring the bell now.” With exaggerated gestures, practically in slow motion, he reached to the left side of the desk where the button for the schoolwide bell was, but before he pressed it, a figure stepped forward from the fireplace near the front of the hall. The person was wearing a black robe with a black hood and carrying an oversized water gun, and when he aimed the gun at Henry, an arc of water shot over the heads of all the students sitting at the desks between the fireplace and the platform. The water hit Henry near the heart, soaking his shirt.

“Ach!” he cried. “I’m down! I’m down! They got me.” He grabbed his chest and staggered around the platform-I looked at Gates, who was standing behind Henry smiling at him like an indulgent older sister-and then Henry stepped forward and fell face-first onto the desk, his arms hanging limply in front of him.

Students cheered wildly. Not so much around me, because I sat in front with the other freshmen, and most of my classmates didn’t seem to know any better than I did what was going on. But the farther back you got in the room, the more loudly people were yelling and clapping. The person in the cloak pulled back his hood-it was Adam Rabinovitz, a senior-then threw his fists in the air. He said, or this was what I thought he said, though it was hard to hear, “Victory is mine.”

I knew three things about Adam Rabinovitz, all of which intrigued me without inspiring any desire ever to speak to him. The first was a bit of lore from two years before I’d gotten to Ault. Often at roll call people made announcements about missing notebooks or lost articles of clothing-I left a green fleece jacket in the library on Monday afternoon–and as a sophomore Adam had come up to the platform one morning, said in a completely normal voice, “Last night, Jimmy Galloway lost his virginity in the music wing, so if you find it, please return it to him,” and then stepped off the platform, while Mr. Byden glowered and students turned to each other in shock and delight. Jimmy was Adam’s roommate, a good-looking blond guy, and I wondered, though this bit of information never got included when the story was told, who the girl had been.

The second thing I knew about Adam also had, in a way, to do with sex. In the fall, a plaster-of-Paris display had gone up in the art wing, a joint project by two senior girls who both wore sheer scarves around their necks and silver hoop earrings and lots of black and who probably smoked, or would start when they got to college. They were serious about their art, and that must have been why they were allowed to include in the display a variety of plaster body parts, including a breast and a penis; the breast was never identified, but after great speculation, the dominant theory on campus was that the penis belonged to Adam Rabinovitz. The third thing I knew about him, and this made the other two all the more interesting, was that supposedly he had the highest GPA in his class; at any rate, he was headed to Yale.