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had been remembering how, on her college tour,
     skirting the lovely Green on which freshmen were building their towering stack of railroad ties for a traditional bonfire—one
     tie for each of the ninety-one years of their ’91 class—she had had a powerful surge of feeling. There had been a sense of
     great order, great beauty, with tendrils of that elusive thing
Tradition
wafting around the handsome students, like the smoke that would itself unfurl from those railroad ties a few days hence.
     The Dartmouth girls were—to a one—skinny and graceful, some degree of blond. The Dartmouth boys were not like the boys in
     her high school, who had mottled complexions and, more likely than not, hair tied back. Instead, they were like the students
     she sometimes saw on the Amherst College campus, where the past year or so she had developed a nervous habit of walking, or
     masquerading, to see if she could pass. (Amherst, in fact, would be the only college to reject her: a bitter, bitter pill.)
     But here were the same boys, two hours north, with perhaps an extra layer of clothing against the cooler air. And so, when
     the decision had to be made, she drew on the full complement of rational ammunition for her mother—the stunning campus, the
     brilliant faculty, the Ivy League, for Christ’s sake!—and hid the absolute truth. The truth was, she wanted to be one of those
     girls. And she wanted those boys.
    Portia would spend most of the next decade in the state of New Hampshire, first as a student and later in her first admissions
     job, which was also at Dartmouth and where her first assigned territory was northern New England. In those years, she would
     come to know every nook and cranny of the state, charged as she was not to miss a single promising native son (or daughter)
     who might not be with it enough to think of applying to Dartmouth. (The college had always looked out for its own backyard,
     an academic noblesse oblige that went back to its Daniel Webster days.) In those years she drove every road, paved or not,
     from the Presidentials to the shopping outlets along the Maine border, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it coastline, the prosperous
     little towns in the south. She might not remember the names of the roads, but she knew where they went, and she had been on
     this one before. There was, in fact, a distinct familiarity to the asphalt line coiling through forest, its spent foliage
     littering the roadsides, and the faint smell of burning leaves in the car.
    MapQuest hadn’t been entirely encouraging in its directions to the Quest School. There was something in the street address
     (One Inspiration Way) the Web site hadn’t liked, and Portia had read with some resignation the usual admonition to do a “reality
     check” to confirm the existence of the roads and intersections. She hadn’t done it, though. The town, North Plain, seemed
     likely to be small, and she figured the locals would know the way, if it came to that; but as she passed through Keene and
     north into deeper woods, she started to get a little concerned. It was nearly two, the time of her appointment, and she wasn’t
     sure where she was headed or where she was.
    When she found a gas station she pulled in, but her cell phone couldn’t get a signal. The teenage boy tending the gas pumps
     had never heard of Quest School, or Inspiration Way, for that matter, but the man whose gas he was pumping said, “Wait, it’s
     that hippie school, right?”
    “I couldn’t say,” Portia said. “I’m afraid that’s all the information I have.”
    “Oh,” said the kid. “I know that place. It’s up towards Gilsum, right? They took over that big dairy barn and fixed it up.
     I heard they, like, keep the cows.”
    “Yeah?” the man asked. “Why?”
    The kid didn’t know. Portia didn’t know.
    “Can you tell me how to get there?” she asked.
    They told her. The drive wasn’t long, but it was complex. The directions involved a red barn,