Alex lived in a closet-sized room when the fall semester began. The panorama of students making their way to class with downcast eyes on cell phones, girls with tight bellies lying out in the sun on top of jerseys, and lonely kids humping their way back to the dorms with loaded backpacks was gone. Since he had served as a summer conference counselor he had been assigned to the honors dorm to live with the best and brightest students. It was an honor he neither understood nor appreciated, and instead felt filed away in the wrong drawer. Bendit hadn’t returned, and his father hadn’t sent a letter or a check in months. The fact that he was wasting time, that his experiment remained unfinished, weighed down on him. The great absence of purpose, the why of it all...

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