Chapter 1 October 2003
前情提要：Eduardo被邀请参加了The Phoenix S.K. Club的派对，作为加入俱乐部的第一轮考验。此时，他正试着用自己通过预测天气从石油期货中挣了三十万美元的事给俱乐部成员留下好印象。
译文
“对冲基金只是我的一个爱好，真的。”当他的话吸引了那些俱乐部成员的注意力时，Eduardo谦虚地告诉他们，”我们主要专注于石油期货。你看，我一直对天气很着迷，于是做了几个不错的飓风预测，市场上的其他人都没怎么注意到这一点。”
Eduardo知道，他正在小心翼翼地试图将他如何真正地预测石油市场这件事里的专业内容降到最低；他知道这位俱乐部成员想听的是赚了三十万美金的石油交易，而不是对气象学的书呆子般的痴迷，哪怕正是这种痴迷才让石油交易成功。但Eduardo也想炫耀一下；Darron提到Eduardo的”对冲基金”，这只能证实Eduardo已经猜到的事，那就是他当初之所以会出现在那个房间里，只是因为他有着商界新秀的名声。
该死，他知道他没有什么其他优势。他不是一个运动员，并非来自一个显赫的家庭，当然也没有成为派对之王的能力。他的手臂对他的身体来说有点太长了，他只有在喝醉的时候才能真正放松。但是，他还是在那里，在那个房间里。晚了一年——大多数人都是在大二的秋季学期被邀请的，而不是像Eduardo那样的大三学生——但他还是在那里。
收到邀请的过程让他大吃一惊。就在前两天晚上，Eduardo坐在寝室的书桌前，正在写一篇二十多页的论文，写的是关于生活在亚马逊雨林中的一些奇异部落的故事，就在这时一张邀请函突然出现在他的门下。这并不是童话故事中的黄金门票（Golden Ticket）——在两百多名大二学生中，只有二十多人被邀请参加第一次派对，但那一刻对Eduardo来说，就像他打开哈佛大学录取通知书时一样激动人心。自从到了哈佛，他就一直希望能有机会进入终极俱乐部，现在，他终于得到了这个机会。
（中间省略）
他以饱满的热情带着他人钻进了那堆精心准备的场面话中。他在大一和大二的时候就已经磨练出了他的场面话技巧；关键是忘记这不再是一次排练——这是真正重要的场合。在他的脑海中，他试图假装自己回到了那些不那么重要的聚会里，当他没有被他人评判的时候，当他没有试图让自己出现在某个重要名单上的时候。特别地，他还记得有一次非常成功的聚会，一个以加勒比海为主题的聚会，有着棕榈树和沙子。他试着把自己放回到那里，回忆起那些不那么气派的装饰细节，回忆起那时的交谈是多么的简单和轻松。瞬间，他觉得自己更放松了，于是沉浸在自己的故事里，自己的声音里。
他又回到了那个加勒比海派对上，回忆着每一个细节。他记得雷鬼音乐仿佛在墙壁上跳动，钢鼓的声音咬着他的耳朵。他还记得朗姆酒的冲劲，穿着饰有花朵图案的比基尼的女孩们。
他甚至还记得那个留着卷发的孩子，一直站在房间的一个角落里，离他现在的位置只有十几米远，看着他的脚步，想鼓起勇气跟在他后面，趁着还来得及时走近其中一个年长的凤凰俱乐部会员。但那小子一直没有从角落里挪动过；事实上，他那自我保护的笨拙感太明显了，已经像一个力场一样，在他周围的房间里划出了一片区域，形成了一种反向的磁力，把附近的任何人都推开。
但那时，和现在一样，Eduardo一直忙于实现自己的目标，没有太多时间去想角落里那个笨拙的男孩。
Eduardo当时感到了一丝同情，因为他已经认出了那个卷发的孩子——也因为这样的孩子根本不可能进入凤凰俱乐部。像这样的孩子，根本不可能进入任何终极俱乐部——只有上帝知道他当初出现在派对上是来干什么。哈佛大学有很多适合这样的人的地点；计算机实验室、国际象棋协会、几十个地下组织和兴趣爱好组织，适合各种各样可以想象出的社交障碍人士。Eduardo看了那男孩一眼，很明显，这个男孩根本不知道首先必须要掌握什么样的“社交网络”，才能进入像凤凰俱乐部这样的社交网络。
当然，Eduardo当时和现在都没法知道，那个卷发的孩子有一天将会颠覆整个社交网络的概念。那一天，那个在预热派对上挣扎着的卷发男孩，将要改变Eduardo的人生，比任何一个终极俱乐部更甚。
原文
“The hedge fund is a hobby, really,” Eduardo humbly confided as the small group of blazers hung on his words. “We focus mostly on oil futures. See, I’ve always been obsessed with the weather, and I made a few good hurricane predictions that the rest of the market hadn’t quite picked up on.”
Eduardo knew he was walking a fine line, trying to minimize the geekiness of how he’d actually outguessed the oil market; he knew the Phoenix member wanted to hear about the three hundred thousand dollars Eduardo had made trading oil, not the nerdish obsession with meteorology that had made the trades possible. But Eduardo also wanted to show off a little; Darron’s mention of his “hedge fund” only confirmed what Eduardo had already suspected, that the only reason he was in that room in the first place was his reputation as a budding businessman.
Hell, he knew he didn’t have much else going for him. He wasn’t an athlete, didn’t come from a long line of legacies, and certainly wasn’t burning up the social scene. He was gawky, his arms were a little too long for his body, and he only really relaxed when he drank. But still, he was there, in that room. A year late—most people were “punched” during the fall of their sophomore year, not as juniors like Eduardo—but he was there just the same.
The whole punch process had taken him by surprise. Just two nights before, Eduardo had been sitting at his desk in his dorm room, working on a twentypage paper about some bizarre tribe that lived in the Amazonian rain forest, when an invitation had suddenly appeared under his door. It wasn’t anything like a fairy-tale golden ticket—of the two hundred mostly sophomores who were invited to the first punch party, only twenty or so would emerge as new members of the Phoenix—but the moment was as thrilling to Eduardo as when he had opened his Harvard acceptance letter. He’d been hoping for a shot at one of the clubs since he’d gotten to Harvard, and now, finally, he’d gotten that shot.
……
He delved into the bullshit with full enthusiasm, carrying the whole group of blazers with him. He’d honed his bullshit skills over numerous prepunch parties as a freshman and sophomore; the trick was to forget that this was no longer a dry run—that this was the real thing. In his head, he tried to pretend he was back at one of those less important mixers, when he wasn’t yet being judged, when he wasn’t trying to end up on some all-important list. He could remember one, in particular, that had gone incredibly well; a Caribbean-themed party, with faux palm trees and sand on the floor. He tried to put himself back there— remembering the less imposing details of the decor, remembering how simple and easy the conversation had come. Within moments, he felt himself relaxing even more, allowing himself to become enrapt in his own story, the sound of his own voice.
He was back at that Caribbean party, down to the last detail. He remembered the reggae music bouncing off the walls, the sound of steel drums biting at his ears. He remembered the rum-based punch, the girls in flowered bikinis.
He even remembered the kid with the mop of curly hair who had been standing in a corner of the room, barely ten feet away from where he was now, watching his progress, trying to get up the nerve to follow his lead and approach one of the older Phoenix kids before it was too late. But the kid had never moved from the corner; in fact, his self-defeating awkwardness had been so palpable, it had acted like a force field, carving out an area of the room around him, a sort of reverse magnetism, pushing anyone nearby away.
But then, as now, Eduardo had been too busy chasing his dream to spend much time thinking about the awkward kid in the corner.
Eduardo had felt a tinge of sympathy at the time—because he had recogni?ed that kid with the curly hair—and because there was no way in hell a kid like that was ever going to get into the Phoenix. A kid like that had no business punching any of the Final Clubs—God only knew what he had been doing there at the prepunch party in the first place. Harvard had plenty of little niches for kids like that; computer labs, chess guilds, dozens of underground organizations and hobbies catering to every imaginable twist of social impairment. One look at the kid, and it had been obvious to Eduardo that he didn’t know the first thing about the sort of social networking one had to master to get into a club like the Phoenix.
Certainly, he had no way of knowing, then or now, that the kid with the curly hair was one day going to take the entire concept of a social network and turn it on its head. That one day, the kid with the curly hair struggling through that prepunch party was going to change Eduardo’s life more than any Final Club ever could