Chapter One

1.


The bedeviling notion that his new roommates would be in any position to mock him was instantly dispelled when Matt pushed open the door of Room 403. There at the end of a dim corridor, two figures stood silhouetted against a bright white wall: one large and broad-chested, his crossed arms fanning open now for a grand fool’s wave, the other lumpish, painfully hunched, even from this distance visibly a noncontender. Matt moved closer, tennis sneakers smacking on the waxed wooden floor, eyes adjusting from the fluorescence of the dorm’s outer hall. The big guy was actually wearing—dear God!—that purple freebie WELCOME NYU CLASS OF 1999 T-shirt they were giving away downstairs, a pair of khakis, puffy running sneakers, and a sublimely cheerful hick’s grin. The smaller one, idol-still, was dressed in a brown button-down that hung over graying black jeans, his feet encased in orthopedicky black shoes, his pale head protruding like a mushroom. From the vector of his glasses, he seemed to be staring at the back of the first guy’s head, an embarrassing, dreamy smile on his soft lips.

For a moment—ah, blessed moment, like hanging upside down on a swing while the whole blue-sky world spins, dizzyingly far below—Matt’s stomach somersaulted, and everything warm and kind in him went gushing toward these two strangers. To think that as late as an hour ago, skimming above the steel-blue Hudson on the George Washington Bridge, he’d still been earnestly praying for a reprieve from this Dwight Smeethman of Somewhere, Minnesota, and Joshua Cohn of Brooklyn, that some miracle could blind them from whatever chink there might b