We had stopped twice on the way once to look at the map when we realized we were headed for New Hampshire, once to urinate in a snowdrift. But now we were there.

The plan was to paint giant H's all over campus. That was the extent of it. There was no contingency plan.

We would divide into three groups and meet back at the car an hour later. If we detected any police cars, we would call it all off. That would be okay, we decided.

H H H

If you are a freshman at Harvard University and the Yale game hasn't happened yet, then you have been to New Haven. Conn only once in your life. We looked for the only place all of us had visited before: The Yale University office of undergraduate admissions. We parked near there in a vacant lot around the block.

Jamie turned off the tape deck and the engine, and everyone stopped talking and we were in New Haven. Conn., at four o'clock in the morning with eight cans of spray paint and a few beers and my brother's car. And it was time.

We made sure we were wearing dark clothes. We put our bursar's cards in the glove compartment, we divided into three groups, and we started looking for Yale.

Everyone knew the name of one building, maybe two--the Cross Campus Library or Saybrook College or the Durfee Sweet Shop. But New Haven, we found, all looks about the same. Our biggest problem was that we couldn't tell the difference between New Haven and Yale. So we walked for a while. I was with Beth and Mark. I kept hoping to see a police car so we could abort the whole thing. But we kept walking.

H H H

Firearms.

That was the thing that really got me. They told us all kinds of things at those meetings during Freshman Week. I forgot it all.

But I remember our proctor read through a list of regulations about plagiarism and the Core requirements and what to do if there was a fire in your room. And one more thing: Anyone caught with a firearm in a dorm room would be suspended. Everyone laughed.

I laughed for long enough to miss the next couple of things he read.

H H H

By 4:30 there was a glow to the cast. We saw it--Mark and Both and I--from inside the station wagon in that parking lot. We had painted exactly two rod H's--small ones, at that--on a door to a big building that looked like it must have been Yale's. When we drove past it a few hours later in the daylight, it looked more like a church. Those two H's were enough to scare us into rushing back to the car to wait for the others.