"I don’t think I had fully realized it until right then: I wasn’t the only one at Catherine on the run. None of my classmates spoke of their pasts, but I sensed them - all their misshapen histories - at dinner, as they chewed their carrot salads in silence, or when their voices laughed too loudly at a stupid joke, or later, in the many feverish hours they spent studying in the library. Everyone here was here desperately. All of us, for one reason or another, had nowhere else to go."

"What was Catherine, exactly? Let’s say, a community of minds. A crucible of experimental, reformist liberal arts study. Research-and-development institute for the most radical new materials sciences. A postsecondary school more selective than any Ivy League, and so terrifically endowed that tuition was free to any student lucky enough to be accepted. A tiny, pioneering, fanatically private place that by some miracle of chemistry produced some of the world’s best minds: prizewinning authors, artists and inventors, diplomats, senators, Supreme Court justices, two presidents of the United States. A school, and an estate: a complex confection of architecture and design, a house - a magnificent house - miles off the highway, in black woods, behind a long iron gate."