EVERYTHING I REMEMBER WRONG

THEN

If I close my eyes, the afternoon is amber.

That is the color I painted over it later, during the long, sterile winters when I needed a place to hide inside my own skull: a wash of warm September light cutting through the leaded glass of the Quad, turning the turning oak leaves into beaten copper, softening the sharp, predatory edges of the boys who had come to St. Jude to learn how to rule the world their fathers had already broken.

I know, rationally, that it was probably gray. Massachusetts in September is almost always gray, damp with the tail end of coastal hurricanes and smelling of dying lawns. But in the archive I built to keep myself sane, the sun never set on that first Tuesday.

I was seventeen, wearing an Italian navy blazer my mother had ordered through her tailor on Newbury Street, the wool so fine it felt like paper against my ribs. My Goyard luggage sat on the gravel outside North Hall, guarded by a junior proctor who had recognized my surname before I even handed him my registration packet.

“The Montgomery boy has the corner suite on the third floor,” my mother had told me in the limousine on the drive up from Boston, her gloved fingers resting lightly on the leather armrest, tapping out a rhythm that was not a suggestion. “His father sits on the judiciary committee. You will introduce yourself before dinner, Alexander. You will not loiter with the day students. You will remember why we have spent two hundred thousand dollars to keep you out of your father’s district.”

She had kissed my cheek—a dry, surgical pressure that smelled of Chanel No. 19 and peppermint—and left me to the wolves.

I did not go to the third floor. I did not introduce myself to Julian Montgomery, who was currently on the lawn demonstrating his lacrosse grip to an audience of terrified freshmen.

Instead, when the orientation mixer reached its crescendo of manufactured camaraderie and catered finger sandwiches, I slipped down the side staircase of the library, following the smell of old glue and calcified mortar down into the B-level stacks.

The classical archive at St. Jude was an unheated crypt of dead languages. No one went down there except the department fellows and the students on financial aid who were paid seven dollars an hour to reshelve folio volumes that hadn’t been checked out since the Korean War. The air was twelve degrees colder than the rest of the building, heavy with the scent of decaying leather, iron radiator dust, and pulverized cedar.

I walked down the narrow, dimly lit aisle for Greek history—Call Number 880 to 889—just to hear the sound of my own shoes on the linoleum, free from the crushing, expectant hum of the Quad.

And that was where I found him.

Kit Alderidge was sitting on a metal kick-stool at the far end of the aisle, one knee pulled up to his chest, wedged between a shelf of Attic orators and an oversized collection of Pausanias.

He was wearing an oversized cable-knit sweater the color of oatmeal that had unravelled entirely at the left wrist, exposing pale, ink-stained skin and the sharp knob of his wrist bone. A yellow wooden pencil was tucked behind his ear, threading through dark, unruly curls that looked as though they had never encountered a brush, and he was holding a massive, leather-bound volume across his lap with one hand while eating a crushed sleeve of saltines with the other.

He didn’t look up when my oxfords clicked against the floor. He just reached out, slid a folio into an empty slot with a dull thud, and said, “If you’re looking for the Loeb Classical Library, some legacy troglodyte stole the Symposium three weeks ago. Try the bookstore.”

His voice had the flat, hard vowels of Dorchester; unpolished, unbothered, and entirely out of place among the vaulted stone ceilings.

I stopped four feet from his stool, hands tucked into my pockets, deploying the smile I had practiced in bathroom mirrors since I was twelve. “I’m not looking for the Symposium.”

Kit turned his head then.

His eyes were gray; not the silver-blue of old portraits, but the cold, industrial gray of wet slate, heavy-lidded and sharp enough to peel the varnish off the oak shelves. He took in my blazer, the gold crest stamped on my mother’s buttons, my polished shoes, and the carefully parted hair that had taken twenty minutes to arrange.

His gaze lingered on my collar for half a second before flicking back to my face with an expression of profound, exquisite boredom.

“Right,” he said, popping another saltine into his mouth. “You’re a freshman.”

“Sophomore,” I corrected, bristling slightly. No one at St. Jude had ever looked at me and failed to see the Voss trust. “Transfer from Saint Mark’s.”

“Same difference. You still smell like dry cleaning and fear.” He swung his legs off the kick-stool, standing up.

He wasn’t tall. He was barely my height, maybe an inch shorter but he was built like a stray cat, all sinew and nervous, contained momentum. When he stepped into the center of the narrow aisle, the space shrank instantly.

“I’m Alexander,” I offered, taking a half-step forward and extending a hand. It was the standard protocol, the polite currency of our world. “Voss.”

Kit looked down at my hand. His fingers were smudged with black printer ink and graphite, the cuffs of his ruined sweater brushing his knuckles. He didn’t take it.

“Kit,” he said simply. “And I don’t care.”

“You don’t care about what?”

“Your name. Your dad’s name. Whatever building your granddad paid for so you didn’t have to take the entrance exam.” He reached past me, his forearm grazing the fine wool of my sleeve, pulling a heavy, green-bound text from the shelf behind my shoulder.

The contact was brief—less than a second—but the heat radiating through his frayed cuff was shocking in the damp chill of the basement. It felt like static electricity, a sharp, grounding snap that caught in my chest.

“My grandfather built the boathouse,” I said, unable to stop the reflex, though the words tasted like ash the moment they left my mouth.

Kit snorted, a sharp, genuine sound that echoed off the metal shelving. “Naturally. Because God forbid a Voss has to row on a public river.” He turned to face me, holding the book against his ribs, tilting his head. “Look, Alexander. I have three hundred of these to shelve before six, and if I don’t finish, Mrs. Gable docks my work-study voucher, which means I eat dining hall oatmeal for dinner. Are you actually looking for something, or are you just hiding from your roommate?”

The accuracy of the hit left me breathless. I stared at him, fascinated.

In my mother’s house, every conversation was a chess match played with silk gloves and poisoned pawns; insults were delivered through polite inquiries about tennis rankings and trust distributions. No one had ever looked at me and simply said the plain, unvarnished truth.

“Thucydides,” I blurted out.

Kit arched an eyebrow. “What about him?”

“Book Five. The Melian Dialogue. I’m... I have an essay for Sterling’s placement seminar tomorrow morning, and I left my copy in my father’s car.”

It was a lie—the essay wasn’t due until Thursday—but I would have claimed to be writing a thesis on the agricultural tax codes of ancient Sparta if it kept him standing in that narrow corridor for another five minutes.

Kit studied me for a long, quiet moment, his slate-gray eyes narrowing as if he were cataloging every flaw in my armor. Then, with a sigh that was entirely theatrical, he turned and walked toward the small, isolated study carrel tucked beneath the staircase.

“Carrel Four,” he called over his shoulder, not checking to see if I was following. “The lamp flickers if you hit the desk, so don’t hit the desk.”

I followed him like an obedient dog.

The desk was scarred oak, carved with fifty years of initials from boys who had gone on to become senators, federal judges, and alcoholics. Above it, a single green glass banker’s lamp hummed with a low, hypnotic vibration.

Kit dropped a battered, cloth-bound copy of the Greek text onto the blotter, pulling out a wooden chair with a screech of iron legs against concrete. “Sit,” he commanded.

I sat.

Kit didn’t leave. Instead of returning to his cart of folios, he leaned against the side of the wooden partition, crossing his arms over his chest, the frayed wool of his sweater stretching tight across his shoulders. He watched as I opened the book, pulled a fountain pen from my inside pocket, and laid a piece of heavy parchment paper over the wood.

The silence between us was cold, but the space between our bodies felt extraordinarily, dangerously warm.

I turned to the famous passage—the Athenians laying out the brutal reality of empire to the doomed island of Melos.The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. It was the unofficial motto of the Voss family, though my mother would have phrased it with more references to fiduciary responsibility.

I bent over the page, translating aloud under my breath, my pen scratching against the paper. My Latin was near-perfect, but my Attic Greek was clumsy, over-formalized by private tutors who taught grammar like military drill.

“...since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power...” I muttered, hesitating over the participle in the second line. “Whereas the powerful exact what they are allowed, and the powerless accept it as law.”

“Wrong,” Kit’s voice cut through the hum of the lamp.

I froze, the nib of my pen hovering a millimeter above the parchment, a tiny drop of blue ink swelling at the tip. “What?”

“Wrong verb,” Kit said.

He didn’t stay by the partition. He stepped into the carrel, moving into my personal space with an ease that made my lungs seize. He placed his right hand flat on the oak desk, right beside my elbow—his skin pale, his knuckles scarred from what looked like an old fistfight, his fingers long and elegant despite the dirt beneath the nails.

He leaned down.

His shoulder pressed against mine, the coarse wool of his sweater catching against the smooth silk lining of my blazer. His breath was warm against my temple, smelling faintly of the clove-flavored tobacco he must have smoked on the walk over, mingled with the bitter salt of the crackers and the sharp, clean scent of cold skin.

He reached out with his left hand, his index finger coming down onto the ancient page, pointing directly at the Greek characters xynchōrousin.

His finger brushed mine.

The contact was an electric shock. I forgot the Greek. I forgot the room. I forgot my mother standing on the gravel four floors above us, telling me which boys were safe to touch and which boys were collateral damage.

Kit didn’t pull away. He stayed there, bent over me, his face so close I could see the tiny gold flecks drowning in the gray of his irises, the slight curve of his dark eyelashes, the sharp, perfect hollow above his collarbone where the knit of his sweater had slipped aside.

He tapped the paper with his ink-stained nail.

“It’s not accept it as law,” Kit whispered, his voice dropping an octave, brushing against the shell of my ear like a secret. His breath stirred the hair at my temple. “It’s yield to necessity. They don’t agree to it, Voss. They just don’t have a choice.”

I couldn’t look at the text. I was looking at his mouth—the sharp, cruel curve of his upper lip, the faint dry crack in the center of the lower one, the absolute, terrifying proximity of him.

“Is there a difference?” I managed to ask, my voice barely more than a scratch.

Kit didn’t blink. He held my gaze, his eyes locked on mine with a gravity that made the whole stone foundation of the academy feel like it was sliding into the earth.

“You’re translating what you want it to say, Voss,” Kit said softly, his lips hovering an inch from my cheek. “Not what’s actually written.”