I didn’t say anything.

“Is that your problem? Or is it theirs?”

“I’m graduating in less than a week,” I said. “And I’m this person who aired the school’s dirty laundry.” (I aired the school’s dirty laundry and there was proof. There’s still proof-go to a library, find the microfiche from the month and year I graduated.)

“You’re in a really insular community,” she said. “But I’ve gotten a ton of terrific feedback for the article, including from other boarding-school graduates. It might be frustrating now, but I’m confident that you’ll look back and know you did the right thing. This’ll be something you really feel proud of.”

Listening to her, I realized how foolish I had been to call-I had imagined she might say something that would actually make the situation better.

“Your classmates are defensive,” she said. “It’s hard for anyone, and especially for the privileged, to see themselves objectively. I’ll tell you a story. I did my undergrad at Harvard. When I was a freshman, I had a roommate who bought a beautiful black wool coat with a black velvet collar. Now, less than a week-”

The automated voice of the phone company requested that I insert another ninety cents. Angie was still talking; perhaps on her end, she couldn’t hear the voice. The pack of quarters on my lap was two-thirds full, but I simply sat there listening, motionless, until the call got disconnected.

There was a special dinner on Wednesday for the faculty and the seniors, welcoming us into the alumni association. In our room beforehand, I sat on the futon, dressed but paralyzed, and Martha said, “We’re not even talking about it. Just follow me.” Walking to the terrace outside the dining hall, I fought the impulse to clutch Martha’s arm. At first, it wasn’t so bad, it was almost possible to pretend this was an ordinary event at which I felt ordinarily skittish, but when I got in the buffet line, I heard Hunter Jergenson, who was two people in front of me, say,”-then she could have left. No one was holding her hostage, so it’s not like-” and then Sally Bishop jabbed Hunter in the back. “What?” Hunter said and turned around, and our eyes met. Three days had passed since the publication of the article, but if anything, people seemed to be talking about it more. I’d heard that Mr. Byden had been flooded with calls from alumni, that the admissions office was being contacted by students who’d registered to come for the following year and were having second thoughts, that on Monday Mr. Corning’s second-period class abandoned their review session to discuss the article.

When we’d gotten our food, Martha and I went to sit on a low stone wall. After we’d eaten, we threw away our paper plates, and as we passed Horton Kinnelly on the way back from the trash can, she said, “You’re going to the University of Michigan, aren’t you, Lee?”

I nodded.

“That’s what I thought,” she said and kept walking.

I looked at Martha. “What did that mean? Does she think that because I didn’t get into a better college, that’s why I insulted Ault?”

“Lee, it’s not worth thinking about.”

“I’m going back to the room.”

“But the juniors are about to come sing to us.” Martha’s eyes searched my face. “Want me to go with you?”

Of course I wanted her to go with me. I also wanted, as I’d wanted before at Ault, to be a different person-this time, to be a person for whom it was perfectly fine to stand there and watch the juniors sing. “You should stay,” I said.

On the edge of the terrace, Mrs. Stanchak, my college counselor, stopped me. “I think you’re very brave,” Mrs. Stanchak said, and I began to weep. All around me I could hear my classmates talking and laughing. It was a warm evening in early June. Mrs. Stanchak enfolded me in a hug, and I shook against her.

I had cried plenty of times at Ault, but never this publicly; my eyes were shut, and I feared that I couldn’t open them ever. Then I felt another pair of hands on my back, a familiar voice saying, “Let’s get you out of here.”

At some point as we walked down the terrace steps and onto the path leading to my dorm, I realized the person with me, his arm still set against my back, was Darden Pittard. I realized this in a factual way; I was too distraught to consider the oddness of it or the way it looked. I simply accepted his presence and it was a moment, I thought later, when perhaps I knew what it felt like to be someone else, a person who experienced life without dissecting it.

At the arch leading to the dorm courtyard, I was still crying fresh tears, and my shoulders were heaving. “You want to keep walking?” Darden said. “Let’s keep walking.” He guided me past the dorms, and at the schoolhouse we sat side by side on steps outside the entrance. Across the circle, our classmates ate dessert on the terrace. “You just need some time,” Darden said. “But you’ll be fine. You’ll be totally fine.”

Eventually, I stopped sobbing. I thought-I had never thought this about a guy my age-that Darden would be a good father. We watched as juniors emerged from the dorms and the library and walked toward the terrace.

“She was trouble,” Darden said.

At first, I didn’t know who he meant, and then I did.

“I can’t really blame her.” It was the first thing I’d said in at least fifteen minutes, and my voice was croaky. “Unless you tell the reporter something is off-the-record, everything you say to them is fair game.”

“Whatever. She had an agenda. She wanted me to be an angry black guy. She had us all pigeonholed before we set foot in Fletcher’s classroom.”

“But you’re not angry.” I glanced at him. “Are you?”

“No more than most people.”

“So why-why did I fall for Angie’s act when you didn’t?”

“Because you’re white.”

I looked at him to see if he was joking; he gave no indication that he was.

“Black people who live in a white world learn to be careful,” he said. “You learn not to make waves.” The only time I had ever heard anyone, including Darden himself, discuss his race was the time sophomore year in Ms. Moray’s class when he and Dede and Aspeth had gotten in trouble for their Uncle Tom skit. “Or let me put it this way. You don’t make waves unless there’s a reason, and it better be good. Because once you do, that’s it. You’re a troublemaker, and they never think of you any other way.”

“Then the opposite must be true, too,” I said. “Mr. Byden must love you now. He probably wants to make you a trustee.”

Darden laughed.

“Did he say anything to you? He hasn’t said anything to me.”

“In passing,” Darden said. “Nothing major.”

“He’s probably so mad at me.” I’d been a little surprised, actually, not to hear from Mr. Byden at all; leaving roll call the previous morning, I’d made eye contact with him, and he’d simply looked away.

“If it’s weighing on you, write him a letter this summer,” Darden said. “For now, let it blow over.”

On the terrace, the juniors had assembled. “I don’t want to make you miss the singing,” I said.

“I’ll live,” Darden said.

Then we could hear them-not the specific words, but the sound of a piano, and voices. It sounded farther away than it was.

“I can’t believe we’re graduating,” I said.

“I’m ready.” He smiled, and it seemed to me a sad smile. There was so much I didn’t know about Darden.

We stopped talking and just listened to the music, the lyrics we couldn’t decipher. When the song had ended, every senior got a white balloon, and they walked onto the circle and released them, all at the same time. The sky was darkening, and the balloons as they floated up were like dozens of tiny glowing moons; people stood on the grass with their necks craned, watching the balloons until they vanished. That wasn’t the last year Ault released balloons, but it was the second to last. They stopped because it was bad for the environment, which isn’t something you can argue with, at least not persuasively. It’s just that-the balloons were so pretty. I’m not saying they should have kept the tradition. But they really were pretty. And it seems like a lot of other things stopped around then, too, like my classmates and I were at the tail end of something. We still listened to music from the sixties and seventies, but kids a few years younger than us, including my brothers, had their own music. And clothes, too. Through my senior year, I wore floral dresses that came to my shins, sometimes with a belt of fabric at the waist, sometimes with puffy sleeves, with a square neck, or a lace collar, or a corduroy Peter Pan collar. Everyone wore these, even the prettiest girls-I wore them because the prettiest girls wore them. A few years after college, I gave away all the dresses, though it was hard to imagine who would want them-someone’s grandmother, maybe. By then, teenage girls wore short skirts, fitted shirts and sweaters, and in the years after that, they wore really short skirts and really fitted tops. And technology-I guess e-mail existed when I was at Ault, but I had never heard of it. No one had voice mail, either, because we didn’t have phones in our rooms, and certainly no student had a cell phone. When I think of how a whole dorm would share a pay phone, how most of the time when our parents called either the phone rang and rang without getting answered or else it was busy, it feels as if I’m remembering the 1950s. And I know the world always changes; it just seems like for us it changed kind of fast.