“Well, I think English is a great major,” I remarked.

“Thank you. See, Jonas? Not everyone is a total philistine.”

“I warn you,” he told her, wagging a finger my direction, “you’re talking to another dreary scientist.”

She made a face of exasperation. “Suddenly in my life it’s raining scientists. Tell me, Tim, what kind of science do you do?”

“Biochemistry.”

“Which is…? I’ve always wondered.”

I found myself strangely happy to be asked this question. Perhaps it was just a matter of who was asking it.

“The building blocks of life, basically. What makes things live, what makes them work, what makes them die. That’s about all there is to it.”

She nodded approvingly. “Well, that’s nicely said. I’d say there’s a bit of the poet in you after all. I’m beginning to like you, Tim from Ohio.” She polished off her drink and set it aside. “As for me, I’m really here to form a philosophy of life. An expensive way to do it, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and I’ve decided to go with it.”

This luxurious ambition—four years of college at twenty-three grand a pop to amass a personality—struck me as another alien aspect of her that I was hoping to learn more about. I say alien, but what I mean is angelic. By this point, I was utterly convinced that she was a creature of the spheres.

“You don’t approve?”

Something in my face must have said so. I felt my cheeks grow warm. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t say anything. Piece of advice. ‘That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, if with his tongue he cannot win a woman.’ ”

“I’m sorry?”

“Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona. In plain English, when a woman asks you a question, you better answer.”

“If you want to get her into bed,” Lear added. He looked at me. “You’ll have to excuse her. She’s like the Shakespeare channel. I don’t understand half the things she says.”

I knew almost nothing about Shakespeare. My experience of the bard was limited, like many people’s, to a dutiful slog through Julius Caesar (violent, occasionally exciting) and Romeo and Juliet (which, until that moment, I’d found patently ridiculous).

“I just meant I’ve never met anybody who thinks that way.”

She laughed. “Well, if you want to hang around with me, bub, better bone up. And with that,” she said, rising from the bed, “and speaking of which, I must be off.”

“But you’re not half as drunk as we are,” Lear protested. “I was hoping to have my way with you.”

“Weren’t you just.” At the doorway, she looked back at me. “I forgot to ask. Which are you?”

One more question I had no answer for. “Come again?”

“Fly? Owl? A.D.? Tell me you’re not Porcellian.”

Lear answered in my stead: “Actually, our boy here, though technically a junior, has yet to experience this aspect of Harvard life. It’s a complicated story I’m much too drunk to explain.”

“So, you’re not in a club?” she said to me.

“There are clubs?”

“Final clubs. Somebody pinch me. You really don’t know what they are?”

I had heard the term, but that was all. “Are they some kind of fraternity?”

“Um, not exactly,” Lear said.

“What they are,” Liz explained, “are anachronistic dinosaurs, elitist to the core. Which also happen to throw the best parties. Jonas is in the Spee Club. Like his daddy and his daddy’s daddy and all the Lear daddies since fish grew legs. He’s also the whattayacallit. Jonas, what do you call it?”

“The punchmaster.”

She rolled her eyes. “And what a title that is. Basically, it means he’s in charge of who gets in. Honeybunch, do something.”

“I only just met the guy. Maybe he’s not interested.”

“Sure I am,” I said, though I wasn’t sure at all. What was I letting myself in for? And what did something like that cost? But if it meant spending more time in Liz’s company, I would have walked through fire. “Absolutely. I’d definitely be interested in something like that.”

“Good.” She smiled victoriously. “Saturday night. Black tie. See, Jonas? It’s settled.”

I had no doubt that it was.

—

The first problem: I didn’t own a tuxedo.

I had worn one once in my life, a powder-blue rental with navy velvet accents, paired with a ruffled shirt that only a pirate could have loved and a clip-on bow tie fat as a fist. Perfect for the island-themed senior prom at Mercy Regional High School (“A Night in Paradise!”) but not the rarefied chambers of the Spee Club.

I intended to rent one, but Jonas convinced me otherwise. “Your tuxedo life,” he explained, “has only just begun. What you need, my friend, is a battle tux.” The shop he took me to was called Keezer’s, which specialized in recycled formal wear cheap enough to vomit on without compunction. A vast room, unfancy as a bus station, with moth-eaten animal heads on the walls and air so choked with naphthalene it made my sinuses sting: from its voluminous racks I selected a plain black tux, a pleated shirt with yellow stains under the arms, a box of cheap studs and cuff links, and patent leather dress shoes that hurt only when I walked or stood. In the days leading up to the party, Jonas had adopted a persona that was somewhere between a wise young uncle and a guide dog for the blind. The selection of the tux was mine, but he insisted on choosing my tie and cummerbund, examining dozens before settling on pink silk with a pattern of tiny green diamonds.