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sense of her?” I was leading the witness ham-fistedly, but I couldn’t stop myself.
    â€œNot really. She and her crowd seem a bit too-cool-for-school.”
    â€œDoes she have gatherings in your room?”
    â€œNo, thank God.”
    A spastic “Hey, guys!” interrupted us. It was Steven, in the second physics-pun T-shirt he’d worn that week ( MAY THE M • A BE WITH YOU ).
    With breathless excitement, he informed us that there was a proctor in Grays who wasn’t cracking down on freshman parties, and they were having a big one tonight, the other Marauders were being lame, but did we want to come?
    â€œI’d better stay in,” Sara said, taking a skittish step back.
    You and your too-cool-for-school friends might be there, at an unsanctioned event. Sara and you clearly weren’t friends, but shecould nevertheless provide a bridge, rickety though it was. And thus far hardly anyone else was even talking to me.
    â€œC’mon,” I said. “I thought groups were your thing. What are you, a closet psychopath?”
    The reference was just enough of a gesture toward intimacy to elicit a giggle. Parroting something a person had previously said in a different context, I was figuring out, was a winning tactic. The subject is flattered you paid such close attention in the first place and commends her own intelligence for catching the allusion.
    â€œWhen in Rome,” she said, hands clenching the straps of her backpack like a soldier preparing to parachute into enemy ­territory.

    Inside the rain forest fug of the dorm room, we leaked through a strainer of bodies toward a desk that had been transformed into a bar. I poured myself half a cup of gin and glazed it with tonic water; Sara reached into a cooler of beer cans bobbing in a slushy bath. A poster of Bob Marley exhaling miasmically presided over the festivities. Clubby music blared a beat resembling a spaceship’s self-­destruct alarm.
    I scanned the room. You weren’t there. But it was early.
    Steven ambled off to find some people he knew; he had already gotten himself elected mayor of Harvard’s nerdy township, of which the Matthews Marauders was one of many districts.
    Sara and I were left alone. In between baby sips of her beer, she confessed she’d hardly drunk alcohol before this week.
    â€œI wasn’t what you’d call Miss Popular in high school.” She wiggled the tab on her beer can like a loose tooth. “Unless ‘mispopular’ became a word. Thank God for Becky and Ruma. Those were my two best friends.”
    I had always envied the depth of female friendships—even theabjectly ostracized seemed to have a soul mate on the margins with them. I’d have traded that for my tenuous coterie of fools.
    â€œI was sort of the same,” I said. “I had two hundred classmates, and I bet half of them wouldn’t even remember me.”
    The tab on Sara’s can snapped off and, with no garbage nearby, she slipped it into her pocket. “But the anonymity is kind of nice,” she reflected. “I always felt a little sorry for the kids at the top. Everyone’s watching them. That can’t be easy. If no one’s paying attention to you, at least you can be yourself, do your own thing.”
    I was about to counter that whatever things the anonymous accomplished, they were of little consequence, since nobody noticed. But she had a point. Unseen, you could take your time, slowly amass knowledge and skills. For years everyone could believe you were a faceless foot soldier; they hadn’t investigated more closely, or they simply lacked the necessary powers of discernment. Then, in a single stroke, you could prove them all wrong.
    Someone jostled my arm as he passed, spilling gin and tonic on my wrist.
    â€œNo one paying attention to you.” I licked my sticky skin like a cat. “I guess that’s something I identify