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would choose to live together as upperclassmen, visit one another on vacations, stay in touch after graduation, attend the other members’ nuptials—maybe two of us would even get married. We would rate the hors d’oeuvres at the wedding reception and ponder what brunch would be.
    My cowardly instinct was to cling to them. But not for too long: powerful clans are never this diverse and scattered. Only the outcast are.
    I got up to scoop myself a bowl of sugary cereal amid the symphony of fork tines scraping white ceramic plates, wending past tables populated by students who appeared to have happily found their tribes: girls with chemically blond hair; an octet of preppy black students; football behemoths with phalanxes of neon sports drinks; chicly dressed Asians; outdoorsy types toting bumper-stickered Nalgene bottles; future Undergraduate Council presidents and their cabinet members; legacy WASPs with Roman numerals appended to their names and swoops of hair soldered to their foreheads.
    When I sat back down, there you were at last, coming into the dining hall late.
    You stood in the roped-off line near my table among the clutch of students you’d arrived with, engaged in a whispery tête-à-tête with another girl, already having things worth saying in confidence. The rest of your group possessed a similar ease, as though they’d hung out together for years. A uniformity of physical desirability differentiated by grace notes: that girl’s raven tresses and alabaster skin against your coppery tones, that boy’s cultivated stubble, the one black guy wearing a gauzy scarf in August. I watched them—you, really—in slow motion, cinematographer of the hackneyed movie sequence in which the cafeteria’s din silences and a languorous song spills in as your moving lips swallow up the frame.
    I could tell that you all had not only gone through high school as one should but had done so precociously in seventh and eighth grades; your secondary education had featured the unfettered experimentation typically associated with college; and now you were, compared with the rest of us, bona fide adults.
    One other thing was obvious, from your clothes, your body language, the impervious confidence you projected, as if any affrontwould bounce off you like a battleship deflecting a BB pellet: you came from money.
    My parents made good salaries practicing law, but nothing close to the assets of yourfamilies, where a crack about tuition and parking would never even come to mind, let alone be verbalized. Yet your crowd didn’t reveal its class by stock emblems of ­affluence: navy blazers with brass buttons and chinos, pearl necklaces, the plumage of those crimson-and-blue-blooded WASPs who looked like they’d been born wearing a pair of boat shoes. Yours was ­subtler and pitted against that bloated, decaying archetype. You had ­traveled widely, dined at Michelin-starred restaurants without parental ­supervision, matriculated at schools with single-name ­national reputations, ingested designer drugs and maybe had a cushy stint in rehab.
    It wasn’t just your financial capital that set you apart; it was your worldliness, your taste, your social capital. What my respectable, professional parents had deprived me of by their conventional ambitions and absence of imagination.
    I’d done everything I was supposed to my whole life, played by all the rules. It had gotten me into Harvard, but look where I was sitting: with Subatomic Steven and the rest of our lost-and-found bin.
    As I hovered over my bowl of Lucky Charms with soy milk, your conversation with the girl concluded. You took an ­eyedropper out of your pocket, reclined your head, and squeezed a couple of times into both sides. Then you closed your eyes and massaged the corners, as if the public world were too pedestrian to bear witness to and necessitated a retreat into your private one. You blinked several times, your