The weight of another man's expectations arrives before the man himself. John North is back at Harvard for his third year, sweating through an August Cambridge that smells of brick dust and potential. He's survived two years, made his place, found his stride. But this year comes with a complication: Phillip Ryerson, a reckless Virginia boy with a sharp tongue and no idea what he's walked into, has been placed in John's charge. The word is "look after." The reality is something more complicated, a mentorship John never asked for, written into the social contracts of college life. What begins as obligation becomes something else entirely as the semester unfolds and these two men learn, through humor and friction, what it means to be responsible for another person's happiness. This is early twentieth-century campus fiction at its most perceptive: less about the romping pranks of popular myth and more about the genuine work of becoming yourself, and the unexpected friendships that make that work bearable.
