The day before, being the day I'd met him, he'd smiled at me.
I stared down at my writing "A smile is always a gift - though of very variable value. Always they're ephemeral, and all too often automatic, thoughtless, not meant and as such, quickly forgotten." I'd composed this possibly overcooked verbiage trying to work it out, exorcise the effect that smile had left me with. (I do this sometimes; often it puts the matter out of my head, or at least into perspective and lets me get on with things.) Sensing no change, I crumpled the page and threw it away.
Too late. He and his smile were lodged by then, fixed in my head. A bright spot in a dull place. Why resist?
Had anyone else had ever offered me anything like it? Maybe my mother, grandmother - but no, that had been something else entirely. Here, it was as if this stranger had assayed with his smile my true value, and I had been found, well, rather more than adequate.
Probably, if I'd known his lack of skill at assessing me or most anyone else, he would have given less pleasure and left less of an impression, and as with 98% of everything, everyone, gone unremembered.
However, doubts were not immediately entertained. For a while, glimpses of him in passing, finding his face right in front of me or far in the distance became a high point of any given day. (At this time, we'd shared no classes, so seeing him regularly was not a given.) I looked forward to another one-on-one moment, but, despite often finding myself on the playing fields, even sometimes being willingly inserted in the same group as him, none came.
Gradually, with his persisting distance the smile's memory faded some; and I thought of him less often. Summer came, the semester ended, I went home, and so did he.
He was only another boy at Devon, one of many, he was just someone who'd been careless enough to, one cold morning, to flatter me with that smile. We were on one another's periphery; I would vanish unnoticed from his life, would vanish and my absence would leave no mark.
Hitler was sweeping into Russia. Everywhere was talk of war - but there was no war; not here, not yet. Finny's surname was paired with mine on the dorm floor plan, it was September 1941.