Freshman

August 2033. The King chose Tempe at sunrise in Berlin because Phoenix was the one night in his life he had been nobody, and because there is a hill on the university's seal you can climb before class. Theo drives him in at a hundred and nine degrees. His roommate, Tyler Kowalczyk of Parma, Ohio, came to Arizona to get away from snow, is already on the bed by the window, and has never followed anything that was not on a screen. Two officers of the detail are enrolled down the corridor and get better grades than he does.

Freshman is a year of orientation speeches got wrong, a residence hall emptied into a gymnasium by the law of the March, a professor of the Charter who cannot stop asking questions, a letter A painted maroon in the first cool week, two football games and a long-distance boyfriend getting the chants wrong; and, underneath it and rising, a Queen in London with a failing valve who flies to Arizona to ask him to go to Uppsala instead, has to sit down on the stairs, and on Boxing Day, by telephone, tells him what she is going to do.