The Talisman

limousine – just beginning to swing through the main front gates and whisper up the long drive to the quad. He thought that maybe whatever sat behind the tinted windows of the limousine was nothing so ordinary as the parent of a Thayer School sophomore.
    The long black car eased forward, insolently slow.
    No, Jack thought. I’m spooking myself.
    Still he could not move. Jack watched the limousine pull up to the bottom of the quad and stop, its motor running. A black chauffeur with the shoulders of a running back got out of the front seat and opened the rear passenger door. An old white-haired man, a stranger, effortfully got out of the limousine’s back seat. He wore a black topcoat which revealed an immaculate white shirtfront and a solid dark tie. The man nodded to his chauffeur and began to toil across the quad in the direction of the main building. He never even looked in Jack’s direction. The chauffeur elaborately craned his neck and looked upward, as if speculating about the possibility of snow. Jack stepped backward and watched while the old man made it to the steps of Thayer Hall. The chauffeur continued his specious examination of the sky. Jack melted backward down the path until the side of the building shielded him, and then he turned around and began to trot.
     
    Nelson House was a three-story brick building on the other side of the quadrangle. Two windows on the ground floor showed him a dozen seniors exercising their privileges: reading while sprawled on couches, playing a desultory game of cards on a coffee table; others stared lazily at what must have been a television set parked beneath the windows.
    An unseen door slammed shut a little farther up the hill, and Jack caught a glimpse of the tall blond senior, Etheridge, stalking back to his own building after dealing with the freshmen’s crimes.
    Jack cut across the front of the building and a gust of cold wind smacked up against him as soon as he reached its side. And around the corner was a narrow door and a plaque (wooden this time, white with Gothic black lettering) saying ENTRY 5. A series of windows stretched down to the next corner.
    And here, at the third window – relief. For here was Richard Sloat, his eyeglasses firmly hooked around his ears, his necktie knotted, his hands only slightly stained with ink, sitting erect at his desk and reading some fat book as if for dear life. He was positioned sideways to Jack, who had time to take in Richard’s dear, well-known profile before he rapped on the glass.
    Richard’s head jerked up from the book. He stared wildly about him, frightened and surprised by the sudden noise.
    ‘Richard,’ Jack said softly, and was rewarded by the sight of his friend’s astonished face turning toward him. Richard looked almost moronic with surprise.
    ‘Open the window,’ Jack said, mouthing the words with exaggerated care so that his friend could read his lips.
    Richard stood up from his desk, still moving with the slowness of shock. Jack mimed pushing the window up. When Richard reached the window he put his hands on the frame and looked down severely at Jack for a moment – in that short and critical glance was a judgement about Jack’s dirty face and unwashed, lank hair, his unorthodox arrival, much else. What on earth are you up to now? Finally he pushed up the window.
    ‘Well,’ Richard said. ‘Most people use the door.’
    ‘Great,’ Jack said, almost laughing. ‘When I’m like most people, I probably will too. Stand back, okay?’
    Looking very much as though he had been caught off-guard, Richard stepped a few paces back.
    Jack hoisted himself up onto the sill and slid through the window head-first. ‘Oof.’
    ‘Okay, hi,’ Richard said. ‘I suppose it’s even sort of nice to see you. But I have to go to lunch pretty soon. You could take a shower, I guess. Everybody else’ll be down in the dining room.’ He stopped talking, as if startled that he had said so much.
    Richard, Jack saw, would require delicate handling. ‘Could you bring some food back for me? I’m really starving.’
    ‘Great,’ Richard said. ‘First you get everybody crazy, including my dad, by running away, then you break in here like a burglar, and now you want me to steal food for you. Fine, sure. Okay. Great.’
    ‘We have a lot to talk about,’ Jack said.
    ‘ If ,’ Richard said, leaning slightly forward with his hands in his pockets, ‘ if you’ll start going back to New Hampshire today, or if