The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason Page B

more.”
    I scraped out a laugh, unsure if he wanted one.
    “I just wanted you to know what I meant,” he said. “About your dad . . .”
    “I understand.”
    “I only said it because—”
    Umbrellas bobbed past the bottom of the window like horseshoe crabs in the tide. The murmur in the coffee shop was louder now. Paul began talking, trying to mend things. He told me how, after his parents died, he’d been raised at a parochial school that boarded orphans and runaways. How, after spending most of high school in the company of books, he’d come to college determined to make something better of his life. How he was looking for friends who could talk back. Finally he fell quiet, an embarrassed look on his face, sensing that he’d killed the conversation.
    “So what dorm do you live in?” I asked him, knowing how he felt.
    “Holder. Same as you.”
    He pulled out a copy of the freshman face-book and showed me the dog-eared page.
    “How long have you been looking for me?” I asked.
    “I just found your name.”
    I looked out the window. A single red umbrella floated past. It paused at the coffee shop window and seemed to hover there before going on.
    I turned back to Paul. “Want another cup?”
    “Sure. Thanks.”
    And so it began.
     
    What a strange thing, to build a castle in the air. We made a friendship out of nothing, because nothing was the heart of what we shared. After that night it seemed more and more natural, talking to Paul. Before long I even started to feel the way he did about my father: that maybe we shared him too.
    “You know what he used to say?” I asked him one night in his bedroom when we talked about the accident.
    “What?”
    “The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.”
    Paul smiled.
    “There was an old Princeton basketball coach who used to say that,” I told him. “Freshman year in high school, I tried out for basketball. My dad would pick me up from practice every day, and when I would complain about how much shorter I was than everybody else, he would say, ‘It doesn’t matter how big they are, Tom. Remember:
The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.
’ Always the same thing.” I shook my head. “God, I got sick of that.”
    “Do you think it’s true?”
    “That the smart take from the strong?”
    “Yeah.”
    I laughed. “You’ve never seen me play basketball.”
    “Well,
I
believe it,” he said. “I definitely do.”
    “You’re kidding . . .”
    He’d been stuffed in more lockers and browbeaten by more bullies during high school than anyone I’d ever known.
    “No. Not at all.” He lifted his hands. “We’re here, aren’t we?”
    He placed the faintest emphasis on
we.
    In the silence, I looked at the three books on his desk. Strunk and White, the Bible,
The Belladonna Document.
Princeton was a gift to him. He could forget everything else.

Chapter 5
                           
     
    Paul, Gil, and I continue south from Holder into the belly of campus. To the east, the tall, thin windows of Firestone Library streak the snow with fiery light. At dark the building looks like an ancient furnace, stone walls insulating the outside world from the heat and blush of learning. In a dream once, I visited Firestone in the middle of the night and found it full of insects, thousands of bookworms wearing tiny glasses and sleeping caps, magically feeding themselves by reading stories. They wriggled from page to page, journeying through the words, and as tensions grew and lovers kissed and villains met their ends, the bookworms’ tails began to glow, until finally the whole library was a church of candles swaying gently from left to right.
    “Bill’s waiting for me in there,” Paul says, stopping short.
    “You want us to come with you?” Gil asks.
    Paul shakes his head. “It’s okay.”
    But I hear the catch in his voice.
    “I’ll come,” I say.
    “I’ll meet you guys back at the