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though lit from below.
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    N at called campus security from his room and was told to file a report in the morning. He locked the door to the hall, went into Wags’s bedroom, took in the disarray, no worse than before, and the coffee cup on the windowsill, still half full but now cold, satisfied himself that nothing else was missing. Back in the outer room, he picked up Wags’s lab notes and piled them neatly on his desk, even trying to arrange them in some sort of order.
    Nat sat on the couch that Bloomingdale’s had delivered after the visit of Wags’s parents and reopened
Young Goodman Brown
. This time he followed Goodman Brown out of Salem to his meeting in the forest with what Nat supposed was the devil. He paused at the sentence “But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.” Nat read it several times and was reaching for his yellow highlighter when he thought:
unmarred.
    Snow unmarred. And therefore? Nat went downstairs, out to the quad. The night was cold and still, the only movement his own rising breath. He circled the dorm, snow up to his knees, sometimes higher. The only footprints were his, a shadow-filled trench he tramped around the building like a moat in miniature. His feet, still in the sneakers he’d slept in, got cold and then cold and wet. Other than that, no result. Back in his room, he called security again.
    This time he reached a recording that gave him a choice between voice mail and an emergency number. Was this an emergency? No footprints except his own: didn’t that mean the thief was still in the dorm, and had been there before the snowfall? A student, then, some other student still on campus, like him, possibly a resident of the dorm, and therefore a freshman, like him, possibly without money to go home, like him. Better to find him in the morning, get him to return the TV without a fuss, without involving security. Nat hung up the phone.
    Were there any freshmen who looked like that, big with ponytails? Nat couldn’t recall any, but there were five hundred people in the class, many he still hadn’t even seen. He flipped through the freshman directory, useless because he’d had only a back view of the thief. He came to his own picture—the graduation picture, wearing Mr. Beaman’s blazer—knew with certainty that he didn’t look at all like that anymore. He checked in the mirror and found that he did.
    Nat thought of calling Wags in Sewickley, but it was almost one, and he could imagine Wags’s mother picking up the phone. He made sure the front door was locked, took off his wet shoes, put them on the radiator to dry, and went to bed.
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    N at’s mother had a funny story she liked to tell about him. When Nattie was very young, before he could talk, he couldn’t bear to go to sleep if any of the dresser drawers in his room were open, even a crack. She didn’t always remember to close them, and would sometimes poke her head in the room to find him laboriously climbing out of his crib and crawling across the floor toward the dresser. Nat thought of this story about half an hour later when he gave up on sleep, unlocked the door, and stepped into the hall.
    Plessey Hall had three floors, ten rooms on each, most of them doubles, a few triples, and a single for the RA. Nat started at number thirty on the third floor. He checked for light leaking under the door, listened for any sound, knocked, tried the knob. No light, no sound, no answer to his knock, door locked. All the rooms were just like that down to number one, except for seventeen, his own.
    Nat went back to bed, first locking the door. He turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes. Once, climbing out of his crib, he’d somehow tangled the back of his Dr. Denton’s on the corner of the guardrail and hung there outside the crib, not strangling or anything, but helpless. He’d heard his parents shouting at