He frowned. “Helium is tiny.”
“Oh, right.”
“No, that’s sodium. Which you generally know in part as salt. Everyone in my lab will know you’re working with a salt there. Good luck.”
I sat the Ferguson exams. Religion was first. I began printing each essay with my salt ball, but it was slow and my thumb ached. I switched to my left hand and used a normal pen to write several more paragraphs on that side. Finally, running out of time, full of frustrated ideas, I turned my pages upside down and left the room. It was worse in the afternoon, for English, when my hand was already sore. Back in my dorm, I tossed the silly salt pencil into my footlocker before dragging it back across the door.
On Sunday evenings at seven o’clock, a small, optional Vespers service was held in the Old Chapel. The cornerstone of this building had been laid in 1858, in the field alongside the Lower School Pond. Ten years later they’d sawed the place in half and expanded it north and south, adding a transept. The cross shape it formed was still contained by the roundness of the space, wholly unlike the enormous thrust of the new chapel just up the grassy way, which had itself been deconsecrated, sawed apart, expanded, and made holy again, as the school grew in size and stature. We did not use the Old Chapel often. Until the spring of my fifth-form year, I’d been inside only twice: for the First Night Service, when the rector gathered us newbs to bind us up and attempt to distract us with prayer from the car doors slamming in the lowering light; and on the cold night in January 1991 when the United States invaded Iraq, and the tolling chapel bell invited students to gather there. Where the new chapel was magnificent, it was also domineering, and the site of too much daily turmoil to offer solace. I didn’t even need to enter the Old Chapel to draw a sense of quiet—just its shape in the middle of campus, curled and impervious as a sleeping cat, was enough.
Sometimes I’d thought about going into the Old Chapel by myself to sit. Maybe I’d try to pray. But I was worried I’d be discovered there and forced to reveal something I’d rather not. I never so much as tried the door. Was it unlocked? Could we go there whenever we wished? I wouldn’t have known whom to ask.
I took a long run almost daily that spring, and each time I would finish jogging just as the path turned past the Old Chapel. I used my runs to begin to dream of a world not colored by St. Paul’s—surely there were cities not dominated by alumni, offices where I could work, little coffee shops I could waitress in where nobody would care. I pictured one by the beach, maybe in California, which I had never seen. Another in a European city, likewise unseen, its narrow street ribbed with light. If one of the great sources of misery for all high schoolers is the illusion that high school will never end, the reach of power implied (and wielded) by the alumni and trustees of St. Paul’s School threatened that in our particular case, that nightmare was real. It’s odd, because the Old Chapel was an original building—core to the campus and its history—and might have been the root of the place. But with the completion of the new chapel, it seemed to me that the school’s soul had jumped across the green to inhabit the soaring new expanse. Ritual always did love majesty. What was left in the Old Chapel was humble and patient. I aspired to both virtues. And I sympathized with a space that seemed unmoved by spectacle.
I was finishing a late run on a Sunday in April when I emerged from the woods to find Marion, our choir’s star soprano, walking alone down the path to Vespers. I called out to her.
Marion offered me her trademark smile: gap-toothed, wholly sincere. When she sang she tilted her head and softened her eyes, as a mother does singing a lullaby, so that her sound was made more beautiful by the pleasure you saw on her face. I was always embarrassed to be singing alongside her, but she encouraged me.
“How far’d you go?” she asked. It was exactly the right question.
“I don’t know. I ran for ninety minutes.”
“Blinking Light?”
“Fisk Hill, then around and back to Long Ponds.”
“Wow,” she said. “Want to come to Vespers?”
“Now?”
“Yeah. At seven.”
“But—” I gestured to my sweaty clothes, my dumb pink plaster cast.
“Oh, who cares about that? Come on.” She took my good arm. “Nobody goes anyway.”
I pictured the priest. “Is it Reverend S.?”
She screwed up her face. “God, no. Do you think I’d be going? Radley.”
It was rumored that Marion’s parents were geniuses who were also unwell, and that she might have had her own apartment in New York, or Boston, or Maine. Her aunt was a powerful trustee of the school, and Marion seemed to have special knowledge of everyone on campus, from the third-form Japanese exchange student whom she knew because they were both virtuosos on the violin to the women who sorted our mail in the post office. “Marion!” I’d heard one of them rasp, seeing her enter. The postmistress was usually glimpsed only through your open metal box, if she happened to shuffle past at just the moment you were peering in.
“I’ll sit far away, then,” I said. Between my shirt and my cast, I was pretty sure I smelled horrible.
“You’ll sit right next to me,” said Marion.
Inside, the chapel smelled softly of dust. It was still warm—the day had been sunny, the wood had taken it in—but I knew it would be cold by the time we left. Ms. Radley stood quietly with her prayer book in her hands. I recognized that the slim,
