Convocation took the form of a rowdy cocktail hour on the vice-chancellor’s lawn, which was still soft and muddy from the rain earlier that day. Despite the mud and poor weather conditions, the party was well attended. There were large canvas tents pitched in the yard, people milling about between them, grasping sweaty cocktail glasses, exchanging furtive glances. It was easy to tell the first years from the upperclassmen and faculty, who possessed a distinct ease that the newcomers lacked. The first years clustered together, in odd little groups of three and four. There weren’t many of them, especially given that the party was being thrown to welcome them, and Lennon began to wonder just how many of them had even passed the written portion of the exam, and what had become of those who hadn’t.

(What she did not know then, but came to discover, was that those who had failed to pass the test had woken in their own beds, at home, wherever home was then. They would’ve been aware of the fuzzy memory of a dream, or the dream of a dream, and as they rose out of bed and began to brush their teeth or carry on with the rituals that structured their mornings, the dream of Drayton, a dream they had lived and breathed in the flesh, would have been fast and quickly forgotten, the way that dreams often are.)

Somewhere during the course of the party, Lennon began to think of Wyatt. She came close to missing him, which felt like something of a betrayal. Here she was at the precipice of a new life, and all she could think about was the cheating ex she’d left behind in the suburbs. She realized then that she needed to erase him, once and for all, and sought a way to do just that.

After scanning the party once or twice, Lennon locked eyes with a man seated on the far edge of the garden. He was, perhaps, one of the more interesting characters gathered on the lawn that evening. He had a shaved head, and he was, like Lennon, almost worryingly thin, skinny to the point of scrawniness. There were bluish bags beneath his eyes, so dark that it took Lennon more than a minute to realize that the one under his left was actually a bruise.

Looking at him, Lennon thought, simply: He’ll do.

She approached him with a drink that he accepted. “How’d you find your way here? To Drayton?”

He shrugged and downed his drink in a single large swallow, rosemary sprig, ice, and all. “I couldn’t have found my way anywhere else if I’d tried. I’m Ian.”

“Lennon,” she said, sipping her own cocktail.

Ian, as it turned out, was from Columbus, Ohio. He’d worked as a convenience store clerk and had received the call from Drayton while on the clock. Ian had high cheekbones, a protruding Adam’s apple, and a blurry diamond tattooed beneath his left eye that looked, suspiciously, like a coverup for a teardrop. He looked like the sort of boy that Lennon would’ve dated in high school to piss off her mom.

As she listened to Ian speak—in a kind of drunken ramble—Lennon recognized that he wasn’t particularly kind. He spoke with the sort of inflated self-assurance that most deeply insecure people do. She was especially drawn to him for this reason—she had always liked men who had a point to prove to themselves or to her or the whole world—and as Ian rambled, she found herself leaning closer, sipping the froth off the top of her cocktail, posing the unspoken offers people are apt to when they’re just drunk and brave enough. Eventually, he asked her a few questions about her past, clearly trying to confirm she was single. And Lennon obliged, offering up the story of her newly ended relationship with Wyatt.

They didn’t bother to go back to her room at Ethos, or his at Pathos. Instead, they found a secluded corner of some overgrown courtyard far from the noise of the garden party. Quickly, and in the midnight dark, they did what they had come there to do. There were no words exchanged, no discussion, and it was rough and quick, and Lennon spent the time she wasn’t on her knees with her chest pressed painfully to the moss-eaten bricks of the crumbling courtyard wall as Ian moved behind her. When they finished, only a few moments after they’d first begun, Lennon stripped off her sweater and used it to wipe her inner thighs, then she tied that same sweater around her waist (a little gross, but she didn’t know what else to do with it), pulled up her pants, and buttoned them.

“This was fun,” she said, because it seemed like the sort of thing she was supposed to say after an encounter like that one. In truth, Lennon hadn’t had many hookups at all. The ones she remembered she’d been too drunk to say much of anything after the deed was done. She wasn’t like Wyatt and Sophia. She didn’t know how to be the sort of person who formed hidden attachments behind a front of nonchalance, who kept sex secret and apart from everything else in their lives. But she desperately wanted to be, if only to sever whatever threads still connected her and Wyatt. To prove—more to herself than anyone else—that she could do the same things he did. That she could hurt him too.

Ian broke into an easy smile, tucking himself back into his pants. He really was handsome, in his own way, and she could tell that he knew it. “See you around,” he said.

Lennon returned to the party and found that the atmosphere had turned strange and eerie in the brief time she’d been away. A fog hung low to the treetops. Students lay out on the lawn, stargazing and sipping green glasses of absinthe. The professors watched them, looking rather drunk themselves, cheeks ruddy from wine and the thick heat of the evening. In the tent, a few students were attempting to perform the Charleston with varying measures of success.

Several whiskey sours later, as fireworks erupted in the distance, and the last of the partygoers dispersed themselves to their dorms, Lennon stepped into one of the many phone booths scattered about the campus, all of them decidedly vintage, like the one she’d stumbled upon in the mall parking lot the night she’d received news of her acceptance. She dialed Wyatt’s number. It took her a few tries to get it right, as she could barely remember all of the digits. Like most people, she had come to rely on her cell phone to remember everything for her—phone numbers, dates, addresses, events. But she hadn’t seen a single working smartphone on campus. As far as she was concerned, it seemed like there was no service within the barriers of Drayton, no means for her to reach the world beyond it, apart from these strange black telephone booths. (At a later date, Lennon would realize just how lucky she was that her call had rung through at all. Most didn’t, and almost every other time she’d tried to make a call in one of these booths, the line had kept ringing and ringing with no answer, or she’d raised the receiver to her ear in wait of a dial tone but had heard nothing but the roar of static.)

Lennon cradled the phone to her ear with her shoulder, picked anxiously at her nails as she listened to the dial tone ring. Through the windows, she watched the fireworks erupting in the distance, casting the thinning crowds into sharply contrasting shadows.

Wyatt picked up just as she was about to go to voicemail.

“Hello?” he said thickly, and his voice sounded like she’d woken him up out of a dead sleep. She wondered if she had. Wondered what time it was beyond the confines of Drayton. Did time move differently within the campus? She wasn’t sure.

“Did I wake you?” she asked, and she hoped she didn’t sound as drunk or as frightened as she felt.

There was a long silence. “Len?”

“Yes,” she said, and felt the hot pressure of tears in her throat. “It’s me.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m at school.”

Strangely, Wyatt didn’t ask the expected question—What school and where and what are you studying there? It was less that he didn’t think to, and more that he wasn’t allowed to. As though the words that he might’ve asked with had been suddenly revoked. “When are you coming home?”

“Maybe soon. Maybe never.”

She asked him about Sophia.

He didn’t answer.

So she asked him again. “I saw you two. In the bathroom together. Why won’t you just admit it?”

The static on the line thickened in response to her question. Wyatt didn’t say anything for a very long time. Lennon considered hanging up.

“Are you there?”

“I want you to come home,” said Wyatt. “We’ll try this all again.”

“Wyatt—”

“We’ll go to therapy.”

“I was already in therapy.”

“No, I mean together. We’ll go together, and we’ll find a way to fix all of this.”

It was at this moment that Lennon began to consider the idea that Wyatt had, actually, loved her. Because what was love if not the desperation she heard in his voice? The plaintiveness. She had never—in all of the years she’d been with Wyatt—felt in possession of so much power. Nor had she ever wanted him less. The tables had turned now, and that was for the better. At least, it was better for her. What was better for Wyatt, she could not say. He would have to decide that for himself, alone.

“I need to go,” said Lennon, and the glare of the fireworks tinted the foggy panes of the telephone booth gold. “It’s late.”

“Lennon please…” he said, the high-pitched, tear-choked wheedling of a child. A little boy. And she saw then, for the first time, how pathetic he was. Before Drayton, Lennon used to believe that their relationship was a credit to Wyatt—his brilliance and charm, his intellect and singularity. But now she realized it was a credit to her, and her desire to prove to herself that she was worth loving. But no more.

Lennon set the phone back into its cradle and stepped out of the booth. Outside it was muggy. The air sat wet and hot and heavy in the pits of Lennon’s lungs. She looked down at her left hand, at the ring on her finger. Then she pulled it off and hurled it into the nearby bushes.

She walked back to Ethos College, through the thickening fog, and spotted Dante cutting across the green. He had his head dipped against the oncoming rain, and he was walking at a fast pace, like he was in pursuit of something, or late for an important meeting. But at this hour? And Lennon could’ve sworn he was…limping. But not in the way people limp when they’ve broken their leg or sprained an ankle. He limped like he’d forgotten how to walk, or like his leg was half-numb and barely able to hold the weight of him without buckling.

And then his leg did buckle, in the middle of one of his awkward strides, and Dante broke to one knee and caught himself on the cobblestones. He stayed there for a long time, breathing heavily. He shook his head slowly, and while it was hard to make out his expression at a distance, Lennon could’ve sworn he was smiling to himself. A canted and incredulous grin. Then he tilted his chin up, looked straight at Lennon, and smiled knowingly as though they shared in some nasty and shameful secret. Her throat went dry.

Lennon, who had almost moved to help him up, faltered at the sight of that wicked smile and kept her distance. She watched, breathless and still, as Dante pressed slowly to his feet, brushed his slacks clean of dirt, and, at the same hurried pace, continued on his way.