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bartender, and that bugged me enough—the way you feel weird the day before you get sick, and you don’t know why or what’s wrong—that I left.
    The fourth and last day of Erik’s visit, I ran into him outside the hut. It was six or seven a.m.; there was barely any light. I was back from a case-study group turned into dinner, drinks, all-night slouching, and smoking, with eggs and cheap champagne for breakfast. Erik was back from jogging—“training for the New York marathon,” he said. It was zero Celsius and he was in shorts, a T-shirt, and my sneakers. He was about to say something, but I cut in.
    â€œAny deer?” I asked.
    â€œJust a couple of wild boars.”
    â€œWanna get back to bed?”
    â€œWith you?” he half smiled. First time in four days.
    I stayed put. “Yes, with me.”
    We fucked on Alkis’ bed before I rushed into Finance late and red-eyed, so of course Muammar cold-called me. I couldn’t remember shit about the case study—something about Chrysler’s balance sheet before the Daimler acquisition—and I didn’t even try to fake it. I’d never been unable to answer a question before. Paul turned and gave me a stunned, happy look, as though I had finally done something right.
    â€œ What? ” I shrugged.
    TEN DAYS LATER, ERIK’S ARTICLE showed up in one of Oxford’s student newspapers. He took EBS head on:
    â€œFor the first couple of days, EBS seems liberated and open to pursuing its wishes, as opposed to US business schools, long ago sterilized by political correctness, no longer able to shortcut to ingenuity or enjoy themselves. Actually, and in spite of all the bright, beautiful worldsters, the democratized champagne flowing in the campus canteen, and the weekly balls in the impressionism-inspiring Fontainebleau villages, EBS is a devastating place full of old, decomposing souls and the children of unfulfilled industrials, bitter politicians, or indifferent parents, trapped between the American dream—glimpsed through cult and cliché movies like The Player and Jerry Maguire —and a European license to decadence, exploitation, and toxic private equity shrouded under energy, software, or real-estate project finance. It’s unclear whether it’s more dangerous or silly. As if colonialism had walked a mere hundred meters in three hundred years: from the courts of the François I palace to a campus down the street playing Studio 54 with McKinsey recruiters serving as bouncers.”
    If any of my classmates heard it as the voice of reason, they didn’t speak up. I wasn’t sure what intrigued me most: that a single paragraph gave my fascination with EBS a corrective slap, or that we had been exposed by a mere passerby. But it all became clear soon enough.
    In the hut’s freaking freezing extra bedroom, I was preparing for job interviews with Alkis. He was role-playing the recruiter, while I kept nodding without listening.
    â€œStathis, mate !” Alkis shouted. “I’m talking to you! You got into an early round with Bain, will you fucking concentrate?”
    I was thinking of that crazy communist and his article, of his Southie accent and his dick; I was thinking of Erik, nonstop. I was falling in love.

TWO
    I WAS ABOUT TO E-MAIL IN my Decision Traps and Tools homework when Erik’s handle showed up on my screen. I looked at his first and last names. Somehow they made more sense than the rest of the names in my in-box, as if the letters had been put together in a cubist structure that meant more than the sum of the letters.
    I clicked on the e-mail and saw a one-line note in its body, which made me pause—was that all? I silently protested against this laconic sugar high of a next step. I gazed at the message in the unfocused way I looked at my classmates from the podium seconds before I presented my solution to a case study.
    â€œBro, I passed out on Eurostar