The roommate finally arrived on Sunday, lugging a waterlogged suitcase that left a trail of dark, foul-smelling water across both 79 and 79A. His name was Neal. He said he'd been in Hayes since Wednesday, but a pipe burst Saturday night and flooded his room. It would be weeks before it was habitable again. The higher-ups at DUH discovered that, through some clerical error, only one resident had been assigned to Wintertree 79A. So here he was. Tim's first class was at 8 a.m., so there was no time for late-night getting-to-know-yous. Tim settled into his bed - the good one - and tried to remain as quiet as possible until he fell asleep; if he was still and silent, then this intruder in his room might not realize he was there.

The first day of fall semester dawned hot and muggy after a night of rain. A wet haze hung in the air, diffusing the light of the sun rising behind Tim as he walked to the bus stop on Suttledge. Everything glowed around the edges. Tim felt like he was wearing a bathrobe that had been soaked in boiling water. By the time he reached the bus stop he was blinking away salt from the sweat dripping down his forehead. He had contemplated just walking all the way to Thorn Hall, but no way. Not like this.

The bus deposited Tim on Milligan, just south of Thorn, in front of the grove of magnolias and the path that led up the hill to the Founders' Garden. Through the magnolias Tim could just make out the dark entrance of the tunnel. Since his encounter with Joanie Thursday night, the yawning portal had loomed ominously in his dreams. If he stepped through it, he would find himself in a different world. He might even find himself in a different self.

But here in this morning sunlight that gleamed off the dewy leaves of the magnolias, his dreams seemed ridiculous. Even the events of that long Thursday night now felt unreal at best; at worst they felt small and pointless, stripped of whatever significance Tim had given them in the moment. The King Milo carved into the FOUNDERS' GARDEN sign now looked like exactly what it was: a crude carving made by a bored teenager. It had no wisdom to impart, no guidance to offer. Students were walking in and out of the tunnel, and they exited the same as they entered, indifferent to anything that might change them.

Two minutes later Tim found a seat in 219 Thorn, near the middle of the room, for his first class. All around him the other students yawned and stretched or kept their heads down and eyes closed, trying to squeeze out every last drop of summer before they had to endure the fall.

The door slammed. Eyes opened, spines straightened. The professor strode to the podium, resplendent in a seersucker suit and an almost indecently pink bowtie. He dropped a leather satchel on the desk and surveyed the room from his perch behind the podium, a buzzard scanning a field in the wake of battle. His bald head shined like it had been polished, and his white moustache was so perfect it looked like it had been painted on. It turned up just slightly at the corners, giving him the look of a self-satisfied cat. Tim couldn't help but feel like a mouse.

"Welcome to American Literature Since 1865," the professor said, in a syrupy drawl that, like everything about his look, felt so fake it had to be real. "My name is Dr. Albert Dade, and I'm sure at some point I shall learn yours. And congratulations! What you have so groggily stumbled into this morning is the one American literature survey course that is not indistinguishable from your mother's Tuesday-night book club. If you haven't noticed, 'Since 1865' is rather a broad expanse of time, and it gets broader every year. So we will be reading quite a lot, and at a fast pace, and if you do not come to class prepared to discuss what you have read, then I guarantee you will not enjoy the consequences. We will write papers in this class – a midterm paper and a final paper, as well as midterm and final essay tests. And before any of y'all ask, yes, spelling counts. You're all in college. You should goddamn well know how to spell."

The room was silent, which Dade seemed to revel in. He scanned the room for a victim. He fixed his violet eyes on Tim. "You. What's your name?"

Tim had to think for a second. "Tim."

Dade consulted a sheet of paper on his podium. "Timothy James Levitt?"

"Here. Yes. Tim."

Dade pulled a three inch-thick paperback out of his satchel. "Levitt, do you have one of these?"

"No."

"This is the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1865 to the present. This will be our bible for the rest of the semester. Get one." Dade dropped the Norton on his desk with a thud. He pointed at an Indian girl sitting a few seats up and to the left of Tim. "Name."

"Lata," the girl said.

Dade consulted the paper again. "Miss Khan, I take it?" She nodded. "This is a very early class, Miss Khan. Looking around this room, I see quite a few faces that appear as though they would like nothing more than to crawl back to their beds. Perhaps an afternoon class is more to their liking. Would you prefer an afternoon class?"

"No, sir."

"Do you plan on attending every session of this class, barring catastrophic illness or injury?"

"Yes?"

"Good! Because as this is a discussion class, attendance is mandatory. If you miss two sessions, your grade will be dropped ten points. If you miss three, you may as well not show up for any more." Dade leaned back against his desk, clasped his hands together in front of his trim stomach, and smiled, sending the corners of his moustache curling up even further. "Now. I hope I have sufficiently explained to you the rigor with which I expect you to approach this class. If you come to every session, participate in discussions, write compelling papers and do well on your midterms, you may reach the lofty heights of a B. Only the truly exceptional will earn an A. But if you are not truly exceptional, then don't despair! There is still time!"

Dade walked to the door in two long steps and flung it open. "The door is open! Leave now, before I learn your names! No one will ever know you were here!" Dade turned around, his back to the class. "Your shame will be your own!"

The students exchanged worried glances, wondering if they should leave – wondering if, perhaps, they should all leave.

Dade turned back around and scanned the still-full classroom. He tiptoed over to Lata's desk and asked, in a stage whisper, "Miss Khan – did anyone leave?" She shook her head. Dade pointed at Tim. "Levitt's still here. That's surprising."

Dade walked back to the door, shut it, and returned to his podium. "Well," he said. "Looks like I didn't scare you enough after all. I suspect, then, that this shall be an enjoyable fifteen weeks. Let's begin by examining how American authors reacted and responded to the Civil War..."

As Tim opened his notebook, Lata glanced back at him, to see who else had been singled out. She half-smiled and raised an eyebrow in sympathy, then turned back to face Dade.

*******************************

Dade released them at 8:50, and Tim joined the throng of students streaming into the second-floor corridor of Thorn. His next class wasn't till 11, and he wanted to get back to Weston before they stopped serving breakfast. As he pushed upstream through the packed hall, buffeted on all sides by backpacks crammed to capacity, he saw a face floating above the masses at the end of the hall: Joanie.

Tim had only seen Joanie once since he and Alex departed Mary Rutherford on their fool's errand for Gatorade. He spent all day Friday vacillating between paranoid guilt over not doing everything he could to save her – that she had slipped into a coma or suffered permanent brain damage or even died because he was too chickenshit to take synthetic gunpowder, whatever the hell that was, with some stoner doofus sophomore and a weirdo who hung out in the observatory – and the logical rationalization that, if he thought about it for just a second, none of that craziness would have helped "save" Joanie in any way, and that what was best for her was what her actual friends were already doing, namely taking her to get professional medical help. But as he sat outside Wintertree, watching a half-assed pickup Ultimate game and arguing these two points endlessly in his head, he saw her, walking across the far end of the quad, flanked by Kenya and Audrey. Her true friends. She looked okay, at least from a distance, and "a distance" was probably as close as he needed to get to her. Whatever the Handbook said, it was just a book, and a book only meant what you wanted it to mean.

Tim pushed closer to the stairs in the middle of the hall. As the crowd thinned a bit, he saw that Joanie was talking to a professor, a guy in his thirties or maybe forties, just outside an office. They were both reading a paper that he was holding, and he was pointing things out to her. She nodded in agreement. He kept inching closer to her and stealing glances at her chest as she focused on the paper. Something in the paper made him laugh, and he touched her arm. Joanie flinched, just a little.

The professor handed the paper to Joanie, and she started walking away, toward Tim and the stairs. Tim caught the professor staring at her ass in the second before he ducked into a bathroom, so that she wouldn't see him.

Tim went into a stall, the farthest from the door, to think for a minute. He sat down on the toilet and closed his eyes. He could feel blood shooting to his head. His body felt weightless, but his head was boiling, heat radiating off his face in waves. The guilt returned, but it wasn't alone. He was angry – at the handsy professor, but most of all at himself, for his cowardice, and for seeing in the professor a reflection of his own worst impulses.

He took a few deep breaths, to calm himself down, but after a minute he realized that he was being watched. He opened his eyes and looked to his left. There, carved into the wooden divider of the stall, King Milo was staring at him.

It wasn't the typical pocketknife-scratched rush job, either, but a detailed, polished bas-relief that probably took many hours, some sort of chisel and a Dremel Moto-Tool to finish. Milo's face had texture and feeling, and the crown was ornately filigreed and either gold-plated or at least painted. Eight smaller King Milos surrounded the larger face, curving out in two arms, the whole thing forming a lumpy "S," lying on its side, or a broken infinity symbol. The eight small Milos, though all bearing the same facial characteristics, seemed to display different personalities. Tim couldn't figure out exactly how the artist had accomplished this feat. One was happy to be dead, one bitter, another scheming a way to return to the living.

Tim studied the dead eyes of the largest face. It was looking at something intently, but not Tim. Something behind Tim. He turned around to find a mural painted on the bathroom wall: a heraldic shield, divided into four quadrants of purple, gold, white and black. And not just divided by lines, but literally split into four and exploded in a trompe l'oeil 3-D view, the four pieces of the shield appearing to burst out of the wall, each one with the apparent mass and thickness of a solid chunk of iron. Photorealistic renderings of Mary Rutherford, Hayes and Sluke Halls were on the purple, gold and white quadrants, but the fourth sector was completely black. An elephant and rhinoceros rampant stood to either side of the exploded shield. Underneath the shield, "LIFE MEANS NOTHING TO THE DEAD" was printed in burgundy script on a parchment scroll.

Behind and revealed by the exploded shield was a miniature landscape more convincing than any he had ever seen: a verdant field populated by hundreds of tiny elephants, rhinoceroses, ostriches and big cats of every species. Snowcapped mountains rose in the background, but between the field and the mountains was a city of ultramodern glass towers and Gothic spires. It appeared to be night in the mountains, dusk in the city, but midday in the field; the creatures glowed as if lit from within and from above. In the middle of the field stood a huge grey cube - Wintertree Hall, no doubt - overrun with ivy and flowering vines. Birds of prey nested in the tangle of foliage atop the cube. Tim imagined he could see the birds circling, preparing to dive for the kill.

Sitting between the two opposing sigils, Tim felt a sense of pulsing energy surrounding him, as if he were sitting between two giant electromagnets. They both pulled at him. He was sure that if the toilet wasn't there, he could still sit there floating in the middle of the stall, held aloft by their invisible attraction.

Tim turned back to King Milo. This time the dead eyes were looking right at him. Milo had a message for him, if he was willing to hear it.

The second-floor hall was once again quiet when Tim left the bathroom. He could hear the muffled sounds of professors taking care of day-one housekeeping with their classes from behind the closed classroom doors. He crept down the hall, past the stairs, until he came to the door outside which Joanie and the professor had been standing. It was closed. Someone had taped up a printout that said:

DR. JONAS BURTON

Office Hours

MWF 2-4

While Tim was reading the printout, the door opened. He spun around and leaned against the wall, his back to the door, trying to look nonchalant as he studied a bulletin board. As footsteps receded behind Tim, Tim peeked over his shoulder and saw the professor – Dr. Burton, he presumed – starting down the stairs, a large gym bag in his hand.

Tim followed, keeping what he hoped was a safe distance. He went downstairs to the first floor. Dr. Burton made a left at the bottom and headed toward the north end of the hall. Tim scrutinized room numbers and bulletin boards as he wandered up the hall, trying to look like a befuddled freshman who wasn't quite sure where his remedial composition class was. At the end of the hall, Dr. Burton made another left and exited the building through a side door. Tim hurried up to the door and watched through the wire mesh glass of its small window. Dr. Burton walked through the small faculty parking lot at Thorn's north end to a black car parked in the next-to-last spot. He opened the trunk, put the gym bag inside, and closed it, then headed up the path to West Campus.

Tim waited until Dr. Burton was out of sight, then exited into the parking lot. He found the car: a black Jetta, covered in a layer of dust and grime. Someone had drawn King Milo with a finger in the dust on the back driver's side door. Milo greeted Tim like a long-lost friend. Perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps he had experienced something significant on Thursday after all.

Tim looked around to see if anyone within view was paying attention to him. No one was. With his index finger, Tim traced out a message of his own under Milo's face: I SEE YOU.