"Collaborate With Choate? Did the Sky Turn Red?"

I recognize the reply. It is what I say when my wife suggests we have the family across the street over for dinner. We have now had them over twice, and the sky has remained, technically, blue.

The Choate editor had a confession of her own. She had spent the summer working at Deerfield, at a residential youth program, and felt, she wrote, like a "sleeper agent." She spent hours at the Deerfield River making sure Choate's waterfall was cooler. She examined every ordinary door she passed in case it was The Door. She climbed to The Rock planning for a bear encounter and thinking, "I never have to worry about bears in Wallingford."

Then she made friends with a Deerfield intern who had edited the Scroll, read a Scroll piece about a DoorDash incident written up as a crime scene, and loved it. A summer of espionage ended the way most espionage ends at seventeen: she read their newspaper and liked it. She did note that their website could use some work.

The joint issue came out in November with both mastheads. Rivalry survived it in the opinion pages. Choate's student council president allowed that Deerfield can cite a Taylor Swift ex in its footnotes, which he called adorable, before claiming Choate for Gilmore Girls and Family Guy. He signed off hoping that on Deerfield Day the seats aren't assigned. Deerfield, where students eat family-style dinners at assigned tables, had already defended the practice a few pages earlier.

Two weeks later, The Choate News ran its own front page: "BOARS BREAK DOORS ON DEERFIELD DAY." At the pep rally the night before, a student said, the highlight had been the signature reenactment in which Choate's boar mascot smashes through the green Deerfield door. A prop door. I mention this because the Choate editor spent a summer looking for the real one and did not find it.

The family across the street has invited us back. My wife accepted. I said we'd see what we could do.