On the platform, Henry came back to life, and Adam joined him. “Okay, here’s the deal,” Adam said. “Assassin is starting again, and this is how we’re doing it this year. If you’re a student, we’re assuming you want to play, so if you don’t, cross your name off the class lists in the mail room by noon today. If you’re faculty, we’re assuming you don’t want to play”-here, Dean Fletcher made his own whooping cheer, eliciting laughter-“That means you do want to play, right, Fletchy?” Adam said. “Whoever gets Fletchy, remember: He’s really psyched for the game.”

People laughed more, and Adam continued. “So for you freshmen and freshwomen, I’ll give a rundown. The object of the game is, you kill all your classmates.” Again, there was laughter, laughter that makes this day and this game seem longer ago than it was; at the time, certain teachers and students expressed disapproval of Assassin, but they were viewed as the humorless minority.

“How you kill them is pretty simple,” Adam said. “The game starts at one p.m. tomorrow. Check your mailbox by twelve o’clock, and you’ll find a piece of paper with a name on it and a bunch of orange stickers. The name you get is your target, and that person won’t know that you have them. You have to kill them by putting a sticker on them without anyone seeing. If there’s a witness, you have to wait twenty-four hours before making another attempt. Once your target is dead, you take over their target, and you need to get their stickers. And don’t forget that someone else is targeting you. Any questions?”

“How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” a girl yelled.

“It depends on your tongue,” Adam said. “Is that the best you can do?”

“What’s the meaning of life?” someone else shouted.

Mr. Byden, who was standing next to Gates, tapped Henry on the shoulder, and Henry leaned in and whispered something to Adam.

Adam nodded. “I’m receiving word from on high that we need to wrap up. So, basically, watch your back and trust no one. And if you have any questions, find me, Galloway, or Thorpe.” He stepped off the platform, and Henry followed him.

“You should have told them whoever wins gets the title grand master assassin,” I heard Henry say as they passed my desk. The next announcement had begun, but I was still watching the two of them.

“Or they get to blow you,” Adam said. “Whichever they choose.” They both snickered, and I smiled, as if the joke had been meant for me, too.

At that point, listening to them, I wasn’t thinking much about Assassin. What the announcement left me with mostly-I couldn’t have articulated it then, and I might not have believed it if someone else had suggested it-was the sense that I wanted to be Adam Rabinovitz. The interest I felt in certain guys then confused me, because it wasn’t romantic, but I wasn’t sure what else it might be. But now I know: I wanted to take up people’s time making jokes, to tease the dean in front of the entire school, to call him by a nickname. What I wanted was to be a cocky high-school boy, so fucking sure of my place in the world.

I was leaving the gym after practice when I heard Conchita call my name. During the last twenty-four hours, I had recalled with embarrassment my earlier snottiness toward her. I waited for her to catch up with me, and when she did, we began walking up the flagstone path to the circle. “Hard practice,” she said.

I had noticed that when the team jogged to the boathouse and back, Conchita was one of the stragglers-as most of us were starting the return route, headed away from the river, she was still heading toward it, walking instead of running and breathing in through an asthma inhaler. For a split second, I’d considered stopping, but already Clara O’Hallahan was walking beside her.

“When I was down at the river, I thought about joining crew,” Conchita said. “Have you seen the coxes? They just sit there shouting orders.”

“But I heard your teammates throw you in the water when they win a race, and imagine being thrown in the Raymond River. You’d give birth to a two-headed baby.”

Conchita laughed. “I’m not giving birth to any baby unless it’s through immaculate conception.” As if I hadn’t understood, she added, “I’m a virgin, of course.”

I willed myself not to turn and stare at her. What kind of person advertised her virginity?

“Hey, want to come back to my room and listen to Bob Dylan?” she asked. We’d reached the end of the path-her dorm was on the west side of the circle, and mine was on the east.

“Now?” I said. It was one thing to leave the gym with Conchita because we were both headed in the same direction and another thing entirely to accompany her to her dorm, to go somewhere with her.

“It’s okay if you can’t.”

“No, I guess I could,” I said. “For a little while.”

As we climbed the staircase in Conchita’s dorm, I said, “Who are your roommates?”

“I have a single.”

“I thought you were a freshman.” Singles, in spite of their undesirability, were never assigned to freshmen.

“No, I am,” she said. “But I have insomnia, so they made an exception. Some nights I don’t sleep at all.”

“That’s horrible.” I’d never met an insomniac my own age.

“I nap when I can.”

We entered her room, and my first thought was that it had been furnished by someone who was trying to decorate for a teenage girl without ever having met one. There was something creepily professional about it, like the set of a television show: the ruffly pink curtains (typically, shades hung at the windows of dorm rooms), the pale blue throw rug spread over the standard tan carpet, the framed poster of the Eiffel Tower, the heart-shaped mirror encased in a heart-shaped frame of white wicker. There was a low white plastic table with a large dish of candy, a vase of fake pink and blue flowers, and white beanbags on either side. (All the whiteness did vaguely impress me because at home, my mother never bought anything white, not furniture or sheets or clothing. Every year until I was twelve, I’d asked for white patent leather shoes for Easter, and every year my mother had refused, saying, “They’d get dirty so fast it would make your head spin.”) Over Conchita’s bed, her name was spelled out in pink cursive neon; something about the neon being lit in the daytime, in an empty room, struck me as deeply depressing. On the bureau rested a stereo that was, improbably enough, also pink, but what was truly remarkable about the room, even more than the décor, was the size. It definitely wasn’t a single. It was a double with one bed in it.

“Sit anywhere,” she said, and I sat on one of the beanbags. “Are you hungry? I have some food.”

“I’m okay.”

Ignoring me, she perched on her tiptoes and reached for something on her closet shelf. When she pulled it down, I saw that it was a large basket containing-in unopened packaging-potato chips, sunflower seeds, macadamia nuts, chocolate chip cookies, animal crackers, and several pouches of cocoa powder. Even the arrangement of the food in the basket looked professional, and I felt, suddenly, like I was attending a slumber party to which everyone else who’d been invited had chosen not to come.

“I’ll just have some candy,” I said, gesturing toward the table. “But thanks for pulling that down.” As she hoisted it back up, I leaned forward and reached for a caramel. All the candy wrappers, I saw, were coated with a thin layer of dust.

“There’s something I have to do,” Conchita said. “Can you keep a secret?”

I perked up. “Of course.”

She lifted the dust ruffle from her bed and pulled out a telephone.

“I didn’t even know there were jacks in the rooms,” I said, though as secrets went, this wasn’t great. The kind I preferred were about specific people.

“We had it installed. Dean Fletcher and Mrs. Parnasset okayed it, but I’m not supposed to tell other students. My mom convinced them I needed it in case I have an asthma attack in the middle of the night.”