In the dining hall that evening, she walks right over to me—the dark-haired girl from class.

“It’s Will, right?” She sits down close enough that I can smell her perfume, something faint and musky, with a hint of creaminess, like vanilla. It mixes well with her body chemistry, the natural scent of her skin, as she offers her hand. “I’m Andrea Dufresne.”

“Oh,” I say, and look up, smiling, and we shake. Her grip is cool, smooth, and firm, with scarlet fingernails. “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” she says, and for a second we just sit there across from each other, neither of us saying anything while the rest of the students chatter around us, largely ignoring their food. According to the material that the admissions office sends out, Connaughton offers a half-dozen dining options every meal, with vegan and dietary-specific choices. There’s a farmers’ market on Saturdays, featuring locally grown produce, along with luaus in the spring and fall, and gourmet representations of all different nationalities throughout the year, “spotlighting our culture of diversity,” although the only diversifying that’s going on here is in stock portfolios. It’s the only boarding school in the country that routinely poaches its chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants in New York, Paris, and Hong Kong. Picking up my fork, I look down at the thin-cut prime rib arranged on my plate along with fresh asparagus and new potatoes, spear a piece of everything together, and pop it into my mouth. It tastes so good that for a second my tongue doesn’t know what to do with it, like a foreign language composed exclusively of deliciousness.

“Not a talker,” Andrea says after a moment. “That’s cool.” She’s got some kind of complicated salad in front of her, something involving grilled salmon and slivered avocado, but for the moment she doesn’t seem particularly interested in it. “So what do you think of Connaughton so far?”

“This place?” I chew, swallow, and shake my head. “It’s unreal. It’s a dream come true.”

“You like it?”

“Are you kidding me?” I motion toward the kids around us, one sweeping gesture that I hope takes in the campus, the dorms, the student library that supposedly contains an original Gutenberg Bible—everything from the riding stables to the duck pond to the oh-so-secluded wedge of New Hampshire coastline where the sailing club keeps its boathouses—all the sights that my tour guide showed me this morning. “I’m still in a state of shock.”

She sits back and trims off a bit of salmon. “Not much like home, huh?”

“Um, no.”

“What’s the name of the island that you came from, again? eBay?”

“Ebeye,” I say, and then I realize she’s joking and manage a smile of my own. “It’s part of the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.”

“And you were born there?”

“Yep.”

“No offense, Will”—she cocks her head slightly to one side—“but you don’t look like a native islander.”

“My parents moved back there when my mom was pregnant with me.” After picking up my fork, I shift my food around on my plate, forming complex algebraic equations with my asparagus and potatoes. It gives me something to look at besides Andrea’s penetrating stare. “My grandmother was Polynesian, and my mother was born there—she met my dad in medical school, and they went back to work at the public health clinic.” My fork tumbles from my fingers and hits the plate with a clank. “You don’t want to hear this stuff.”

“You’re right,” she says. “Shut up, already.”

I smile again and it’s actually easier this time, closer to natural. She gazes at me straight-faced and takes a bite of egg, chewing slowly, thoughtfully.

“So, what?” she says. “You’re going to make me squeeze it out of you?”

“You’re serious? You actually want to hear my whole life story?”

A sigh, accompanied by the slightest of exasperated eye rolls. “Okay, Coy Boy, in case you haven’t noticed, you’re swimming in a sea of boring rich kids whose backgrounds are so identical that if they intermarry, their offspring might be born with eleven fingers,” she says. “So yeah. Color me captivated.”

“Okay,” I say. “Back in the fifties—have you ever heard of the Bikini Atoll?”

“Sounds vaguely familiar.”

“It’s an island chain in the middle of the northern Pacific Ocean. The government dropped a fifteen-megaton dry-fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb on the island back in 1954.”

Her eyes get big. “Seriously?”

“It was the most powerful nuclear device ever deployed,” I say, “about a thousand times more powerful than the ones Enola Gay dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War Two. Radioactive fallout from the mushroom cloud poisoned the entire Marshall Islands chain for more than seven thousand square miles of the Pacific. Eventually Greenpeace got involved, and islanders from all the surrounding areas started evacuating to Ebeye, but it was too late for most of them. They were already dying of radiation poisoning . . . including my grandmother.”

“Whoa,” she says, and most of the smart-aleck bravado has gone out of her voice. “That really happened?”

I nod, staring down at my meal. “My mom left the island to come to the States when she was a teenager, but she promised her mother she’d get medical training and go back—to help where she could. By the time she finished med school, her mom had passed away.” I glance up, just for a second. “I never knew her.”

“What about your parents?” Andrea asks. “Were they . . . ?”

I look back down at my plate. “There was an accident. A small plane—they were flying antibiotics to a children’s orphanage on a nearby island, but the weather conditions weren’t ideal. They knew the risks—”

My voice breaks off and I push my chair back and stand up.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and my voice sounds thick and awkward. “This is stupid. You don’t even know me and here I am—”

“Will.” Andrea reaches out and takes my hand, holding on. Her fingers feel different from when we shook hands—warmer somehow, and soft. “Just chill, okay?”

“It’s just . . .” I sink back down into my seat. “Everybody here has been so nice. And I’ve never been anywhere like this before.” I take in a breath. “It feels unreal. Like a dream.”

Andrea just watches me with that same quiet, inscrutable interest. “When you were in class today, you kept looking over your shoulder. Why?”

“I was looking for a map,” I say. “I just . . . I thought maybe I could at least show everybody where I came from. I mean”—I shake my head—“I know it was English Lit and not Geography, but I thought it would be cool if I could at least point out how far away Ebeye is from . . . all of this.”

Andrea is still holding on to my hand, and her voice is soft now too.

“I’ve got a map in my room,” she says.

My dorm is closer, so we end up walking over there instead. As a late transfer student, I’ve got my own little single at the end of the first floor of Cardiff Hall, one of the oldest dorms on campus. According to the housing brochure, it was built in the early 1900s in the Arts and Crafts style, all oak and dyed leather, with Prairie School bronze sconces on the walls and Gustav Stickley chairs in the lobby. Old money, and lots of it.

“They put you on the first floor?” Andrea asks.

“I don’t like heights.”

We follow the hallway to my room, which I unlock with the heavy brass key that the housing officer gave me earlier today with an air of weighty solemnity.

“I haven’t really had a chance to unpack,” I say apologetically as we step inside. The room still feels vacant, with just a few framed photos on the otherwise empty desk. Andrea stands there looking at them, picking up a faded beach photograph of a happy couple standing next to a palm tree with a two-year-old boy between them.

“Your folks?” she asks.