The Best Four Years of Adam Becker - 5. Freshman Year - Chapter 5

“She’s just smoking, man,” Erik was telling us the next afternoon, as he loaded up Facebook pictures of Erica Strout on Tripp’s laptop. After Tripp had gone back from The Boot with his girl--whose name no one could remember, Tripp included--and I had gone back with Michaela, Erik stayed out with the Iota Chi guys. And somehow met and successfully seduced Erica Strout, a knockout sophomore from Psi Lambda, because it was Erik and the living was easy. “It was awesome.” He held up the laptop, so we could see--neither of us especially cared; Tripp was playing Battlescar 3 on one-player, and I was myself. “Isn’t she, like, the hottest girl you’ve ever seen?”

Tripp and I both grunted in forced affirmation.

This was my second time hearing an iteration of this story. He and Tripp had gone to get bagels earlier after his water polo practice, so I imagined he was as well-informed on the topic as I was. We were both paying little attention: Tripp absently shooting AI soldiers, me checking my phone for the twentieth time to see if Sarah Bernard had acknowledged a cripplingly embarrassing text from me last night (she hadn’t.)

“Her tits,” Erik continued. “Damn. They were just like.” He demonstrated with his hands, far too generously, considering the pictures he’d shown us. “Seriously. I swear, good thing we have the seventh floor. Popped out the door vent in one of the rooms, and crawled in. Easy.”

The seventh floor of Sharp was empty, because our freshman class was about half the normal size--Katrina babies. Floors five and six were also empty, but the RAs on patrol seemed to lose stamina by the time they got up to the seventh, so it became a notorious bordello, of empty mattresses and poorly secured doors.

“Didn’t want to wake up Barry?” I asked.

“Well, we stopped by my place, just to see, but of course Barry almost ruined everything. Bastard literally threw my travel mug at the door and cracked it.”

“Sounds dire,” I muttered, from across the room. I was on my bed, surfing ManFind--my first time time logging in since forever--but I hadn’t had any luck playing musical torsos yet.

“Well, you’re an idiot,” Tripp told him, riddling an AI soldier with gratuitous bullets. He had attempt to start the conversation about girls from last night several times during brunch, and wasn’t pleased that Erik kept hijacking the conversation topic; now he was stuck in a sour mood. “What made you think think waking up your creepy roommate so you could have sex was a workable idea?”

“I mean, I could’ve just banged her while he slept six feet away from me,” Erik said, eyes darting vengefully, “but that would’ve been too inappropriate.”

Tripp looked at me, his eyes wide, and then shot Erik the nastiest look I’d ever seen cross Tripp’s face. It caught Erik off-guard, too. I played dumb. There was no reason not to play dumb, for all of our sake.

“Seventh floor is a good choice,” I said, to diffuse.

“Yeah, well, we got caught,” Erik said. He shook his head. “I mean, not in the act. While we were escaping.”

Tripp snorted with schadenfreude at that. “Student conduct board hearing?”

“No,” Erik said. “We got off with just a warning. What’s his face--Pagliacci, from Iota Chi--was the RA on duty, and he just told me to not be such a fucktard, and let us go.”

“Well, he didn’t meet Barry,” I added. “He would’ve understood then.”

The third 45-year-old man with a lumpy, pasty body messaged me--“U horny”--and I figured I’d give up on today, so I closed my laptop. “Next game, Tripp?”

“I can’t,” Tripp said, running down a dank stone hallway, the edge of the screen blood-red with implied injury. “I have to go to studio in a second.”

“Studio,” Erik mocked. “You might as well just bring a sleeping bag.”

“No shit,” Tripp said, tapping X as hard as he could as someone darted out into the hall in front of him. “Sorry you get to coast until med school.” He was still steaming from being nearly outed as having had sex with me sleeping in the room--he said that last bit with such disdain that it caught me a little off-guard. To be fair, Erik’s biology major seemed to be a bit on the light side--even me, with my undeclared liberal arts, seemed a little more active. He was in here, playing PlayStation virtually around the clock.

“Well,” Erik said, lazily, “when I’m making a hundred grand as a doctor and you’re designing a fucking toilet seat in Little Rock, you can continue to go fuck yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tripp said.

My phone buzzed. Sarah Bernard, a very diplomatic: “Miss you too! ” which was far nicer than she could’ve been, I figured.

 

Somehow, we neglected to tell Erik that Michaela was single until a few weeks later, almost Halloween. The schadenfreude of her being dumped, along with the fact that he was knee-deep in Erica Strout, had greatly improved his politeness towards Michaela.

Erik talked about Erica frequently, fervently, but underscored that he wanted to keep it casual. Which, in Erik parlance, meant Erica wanted to keep it casual. Their non-bedroom appointments had consisted of two impromptu meals in the Bubble food court, both because they ran into each other accidentally and Erik asked her to stay.

“Erica is like Erik’s biggest, most twisted fantasy,” Jordan had giggled at lunch on the second one of those days, when we were watching them from the safety of our table--Erik had selected the furthest open table from us. “Because she looks exactly like Michaela but has the same name as Erik.”

“She does not look like me,” Michaela hissed, bitterly, looking out across the Bubble. Erik and Erica were having the most awkward lunch ever--she was there grabbing food, looking a little rough in yoga pants and a Psi Lambda shirt after the gym, and he was there with us; they both felt obligated to sit and eat, so they were both working their sandwiches as fast as they could.

“She so does,” Jordan said, picking at her big salad.

Michaela grunted bitchily. “Um, no, she’s all fat and with that grizzled hair. I just can’t.”

I cracked a laugh at that; Michaela glared.

But she was wrong: Erica Strout actually did look uncannily like Michaela Birdrock, though not quite as striking, not quite as ethereal. She was a beautiful girl, though. I had only actually met her once, because of the nature of their “relationship”--mostly physical, certainly not social. But she’d allowed Erik’s interest in Michaela to wane, at the very least. He was getting laid, he would talk about it at every opportunity he got, and as annoying as we found it, it was better than him bitching about Michaela Birdrock.

Michaela was less than pleased with this whole setup.

“Oh, she doesn’t want him,” Jordan told me, after I raised the question some time later. “She wants him to want her, so she can feel better about herself when she smacks him down.”

 

Chris Baker invited Tripp, Erik, and I over to the Iota Chi house to watch the Saints-Eagles game.

“Small group,” he said. “Just me, Morton, Malley. Maybe a couple others.”

I’d been in the Iota Chi house a bunch of times--even twice for private parties, where it was just brothers and a bunch of girls and some close friends--but never for something this intimate. Never during the day. It looked almost surreal, light streaming through the windows, two of the couches were tugged to the middle of the room, in a semicircle around the TV. It still smelled like stale beer, like it always did, but the windows were open and there was a bit of a breeze; it was just starting to get less than disgusting in New Orleans.

Tripp was ecstatic about the invitation, like we’d been invited to the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s ring. We were only invited, casually, because Baker mentioned they were watching the game the night before and Tripp mentioned he was a Saints fan, and I happened to be standing there.

“No, it’s a big deal,” Tripp had told me. “It means we’re on the shortlist for a bid. It has to.”

Erik had been nonchalant, telling Baker he’d come later, maybe, because he was taking Erica Strout out for lunch. Or, rather, she was taking him out to lunch, because she had the car and her dad’s Amex, and he was living below the poverty line until the next check from his mom came in.

He played it so cool, to Tripp’s earnest appreciation.

“It’s because he’s good-looking,” Tripp had said, presumably only just then realizing the frustrating obvious. “They think he’ll bring around hot chicks. He knows he’s in.”

I was somewhere between in my level of enthusiasm for Iota Chi. But I wanted a bid. I really wanted a bid, because I knew Tripp and Erik would get them and I knew that, if I didn’t, things would change very dramatically. Chris Baker had already let it slip that it was a time commitment--not that I doubted it was, before he said that--and I just pictured Tripp and Erik drifting into a different sphere, me bitterly clinging to the past.

Of course, I liked the Iota Chi guys. Before I came to college, my only experience with fraternities had been the ones hazily depicted in porn, where there was always some pervy older brother, played by a thirty-year-old musclehead with lots of tattoos, ready to sexually assault some twinky pledges.

Chris Baker or Brett Morton doing something like that was practically laughable.

Case in point: Morton had unearthed a roll of duct tape, and was taping each empty beer can to the bottom, creating what he dubbed a “beer staff.”

“Sure, it’s small now,” he told us, cracking open his third beer, “but just wait until the end of the game.”

There were footsteps down the stairs--Matt Rowen, and a hot blonde girl behind him, dragging a rolling suitcase. They both gave a quick wave to us, as they made their way across the foyer.

Tripp was lingering on the girl as she slipped out the door.

“His sister,” Morton explained. “Courtney. Senior in high school, just here for the weekend. So hot I want to die.”

“She already rejected Morton last night,” Kevin added.

The smile didn’t move from Morton’s face. “Just laying the groundwork,” he told us, as he took a sip of beer. “Shit. She’s definitely replaced Meghan Pereira as the gold standard of sister.”

“Who also rejected Morton,” Chris Baker said.

“She was a bitch,” Morton offered. “It’s because she’s in med school and thinks she’s hot shit. If we got her as a seventeen-year-old, she’d have been horizontal all weekend.”

This did not make me especially anticipatory about Justine, my sister, visiting sometime next semester. She was still a senior at the Harrington School, and was applying to Tulane for next fall.

"I'm just glad I don't have a sister," Chris replied, taping a fresh beer to the end of his beer staff.

“I feel for you,” Morton said. “Have you seen Amy? She looks like me with a wig. I'd probably make fun of the guy who porked that, myself."

"Becker's sister is applying here," Tripp said. He only called me Becker when we were around Iota Chis, because they liked using last names. Tripp was perpetually frustrated that they never called him "Callender" but that didn't really roll off the tongue like Tripp. “So she might be around.”

I wished he hadn’t said that. I had been trying my best to dissuade Justine from picking Tulane, and I think my only hope of avoiding her enrolling was her getting into Stanford, which was a reach.

It’s not that I didn’t want Justine in my life. We had always been very close growing up. But Tulane was my space. Not hers. I didn’t want it to be like it was before. There was nothing worse than meeting someone--say, some gorgeous baseball player at the Harrington School who you’d admired from afar for four years--and having him say, “I didn’t know Justine and Philip had a brother,” when you finally met him.

Besides, she would put my life under the microscope. Justine was a notorious buttinsky, and she’d want to know who I was hooking up with or why I wasn’t. And I didn’t want to invite that conversation. It was easy to avoid at the Harrington School--it would not be easy to ignore at Tulane.

Worse, Justine was objectively attractive, and I didn’t have faith in her to rebuff the attempts of the thousands of horny Tulane guys who would be clawing for a piece for a weekend next semester, let alone full-time in August. I know--getting all big brother, but still.

“Hot, too,” said Tripp, because he had no idea when to shut up around Iota Chi guys.

Everyone’s interest was piqued by that. Of course it was.

"Oh, man, get my laptop," Chris said, to no one in particular, as he grabbed his computer from the end table next to him. He typed frantically for a second, then smiled proudly. “Alright, got Becker’s summer album. ‘Fourth of July in Nevada.’”

Tripp and Morton both leaned over, to see the screen. Kevin and I made eye contact; he rolled his eyes and offered me a shrugging smile, which I returned with an appreciative one, but then he leaned over too to check out Chris Baker’s laptop.

I stayed in my seat, mean-mugging them as much as possible, but no one was paying any attention to me, over the din of Justine. I knew exactly what pictures they were looking at. I certainly wasn’t going to look. We’d spent Fourth of July out at our ranch in Pahrump, Nevada--Fourth of July was always a special hell because it was a hundred and fifty degrees out, and we had to stand behind my parents at some sweltering event as happy familial window dressing--but mostly it was just me and Justine lying around the pool for a week.

“She is, damn,” Morton said. He jabbed the screen "Look--pearls, so you know she's one of those classy girls you have to order call drinks for. Glass bottle vodka girl."

"Okay," I said hotly.

"Oh shit," Chris said, clicking again. “Swimsuit.”

“Moneyshot,” Morton agreed.

“Well, sure,” Kevin said, leaning back over to his side of the couch, cracking open another Natty Light. “Nevada’s got to be a million degrees in the summer.”

"When's she visiting again?" Morton interrupted.

Just then, just as I was about to respond with something that I hoped was pithy and cutting, without severely limited my chances for a bid to Iota Chi, someone on the Saints defensive line caught an interception, began running it down the field. Welcome distraction. Chris shut his laptop, put it on the floor next to him, and stood up. "Holy shit," he hollered at the TV. "Go! Touchdown!"

Morton began a drunk chorus of "Who Dat," joined only by Tripp, and Justine Becker in a bikini by the pool at our ranch in Nevada became a forgotten memory.

Kevin Malley smiled at me. “Saved by the bell,” he muttered.

 

We all went to Old Bruno’s on Maple Street after the game. I was a little drunk--the sunlight was searing; it was just after four o’clock.

“Old Bruno’s,” Chris said, pointing to a run-down bar on the uptown lakeside corner, as we approached. “Not to be confused with New Bruno’s.” He pointed to the other one--a new brick building, tall and gleaming, catty-corner.

Old Bruno’s was on the tail-end of a multiyear lease. New Bruno’s would be the surviving Bruno’s, built a year or two before Katrina. I hadn’t been to either--they were both nineteen-plus--but the Iota Chi brothers had claimed New Bruno’s “wasn’t the same.” Ostensibly because it wasn’t a shithole.

“I have to go to dinner,” I told Chris, as we all started walking over from the Iota Chi house. “Michaela and Jordan.”

“Oh, just tell Birdrock and Company to meet us,” he said. “I’ll buy you a beer if you come. Come on.”

“It’s nineteen-plus,” I said. “I can’t get in.”

“We’ll pass-back,” he offered, and I was drunk enough where that seemed like a tangible idea. So I texted Michaela and told her that I couldn’t make dinner, but told her that they should come to Old Bruno’s. She didn’t text back, which I assumed meant she was annoyed at being stood up. I was also drunk enough not really to care.

Matt Rowen, Tommy Pereira, Paul Pryce, and a few upperclassmen Iota Chis were allegedly already there. Erik met us outside, and we waited around the corner for Baker to come out with everyone’s passed-back IDs.

“Okay,” he said, fanning the IDs out like a hand of cards. “Fontenot, you can be Rowen. Becker, take Morton. And, uh, Tripp gets Pagliacci.”

Erik busted out laughing. Tripp looked horrified. “He’s like a foot taller than me. And--” He sketched out a bulging stomach with his arms. “--wider.”

“It’s a Sunday,” Chris said, dismissively, handing it to him anyway. “No one’s going to notice. Just say you shaved and did Jenny Craig.”

Tripp looked at the ID, disgusted, and kept trying to crane over to look at Morton’s ID, in my hand.

“Whatever,” I said, yanking it away from him. “Just be happy you can get into a bar.”

We got inside without a second look--even Tripp, who was trying his best to look nonchalant.

I’d never been to either Bruno’s before, but Old Bruno’s was pretty run-down. The floors were concrete, and the bar was all the way in the back. In the middle of the room was a brick fireplace, two-sided, that was mostly buried underneath a cavalcade of neon beer signs. The Iota Chi brothers were all standing, in several clusters, on the other side of the fireplace, near the pool tables and the dart boards.

I could, for the most part, only tell who was Iota Chi because of the preponderance of branded hats and jerseys and t-shirts. Aside from Pagliacci, Matt Rowen, Tommy, and Morton, I really didn’t know anyone. Familiar faces, sure, but I’d only, really, ever met sophomore brothers before. Actually, only sophomores who were in Chris Baker’s circle of friends.

And it seemed so easy that Chris Baker was our point of contact, that he’d invite us to things, but suddenly I thought about what he said about being antisocial outside his element. For all the face time we were getting with Baker, I wondered if he was actually doing a poor job of rushing us, by not introducing us around to meet people with actual clout. Maybe he was talking us up, behind the scenes, but that didn’t seem very much like Chris Baker.

Even in this group, in his alleged element, after making us all come to the bar, Baker was hanging back next to the Photohunt machine, watching everyone else.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him, hopping up onto the stool next to him.

“No, nothing,” he said. He was chewing on the rim of his beer bottle, eyes sagging with weltschmerz. “I’m just tired, I think.”

He hadn’t been tired fifteen minutes before.

“Saints won,” I offered. “It’s a good day! Don’t start talking about collegiate mortality again.”

He cracked only a slight smile at that.

“It’s not that,” he said. He thought for a moment, perked himself up. “Yeah, no, you’re right.”

“I’m always right,” I told him. “Better you learn that now.”

“Yeah, I bet,” he said. He was still scanning the room. “Have you seen Charlie recently?”

I hadn’t, really. In passing, maybe a week ago, but he really hadn’t been around much. He’d been gravitating more towards the guys on the other side of our floor recently. There was no falling out, no moment we stopped hanging out, but it was freshman year. You come together fast, you fall away fast.

“No,” I said.

“You should bring him out more,” Baker said, shuffling a bit on his barstool, “to stuff like this.”

That didn’t seem to make very much sense to me. Sure, Charlie was one of our floormates, one of our friends, but Chris was his brother. I told him as much, delicately as I can.

“I mean,” he said, “it’s just different when it’s your brother, you know?”

If I was a year younger than Philip, at Yale, and Philip had been aggressively rushing me to his fraternity, I would’ve been ecstatic. I would’ve come to everything.

Of course, that would never happen with me and Philip--I knew Philip wouldn’t want me there for longer than a weekend.

On the other hand, “Maybe if you didn’t call him Baby Baker.”

Baker made a face. “I don’t call him that. Morton calls him that.”

“Collective you,” I clarified.

He took a long drink of his beer, kept staring out at the bar. “Have you met Veronica Tandy?”

Following a train of thought. He was the one that brought up his brother in the first place, not me. I couldn’t quite figure out the Baker family dynamic. Chris and Charlie had a strange relationship, for the few times I’d seen them interact with each other. It was cold, almost, uncomfortable.

“I have not,” I said. “But I’ve heard the name. She here?”

“No,” he said. He stared down at his phone for a few seconds, then flipped it shut and slid it back in his pocket. “She’s not coming.”

Across the bar, the bouncer let Michaela, Jordan, and two other girls from their floor inside. Michaela was overdressed, in a black cocktail dress, and Jordan was wearing a Giants jersey and jeans.

“Well, here’s some other girls,” I suggested, as they spotted us and pushed their way through the crowd. “Michaela? You like her.”

“Yeah,” Baker said, cracking a smile. As they approached, he said, “Glad you guys made it out.”

“How’d you get in without an ID?” I asked.

“Rachel,” Michaela said, pointing in the vague direction of the door, presumably referring to one of the girls who had since dissipated, “slept with the bouncer a few weeks ago.”

“Sexual favors,” Chris Baker said, setting his empty bottle down on the bar, “are the best. Does anyone want a drink?”

“I’ll have a vodka-soda,” I said. Baker scowled at me.

“Anyone want a two-dollar Bud Light,” he clarified. “From my bucket. Of course you would demand a mixed-drink.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be nice? I’m a rushee.”

“You’re such a mooch,” he replied, but with a smile so I didn’t take it to heart. He ordered a bucket of beer from the bartender, then turned back to me. “Don’t you have politician money? Shouldn’t you be buying us shit?”

“Do you want a two-dollar Bud Light?”

He thought for a second. “No.”

“Good,” I said, plucking one of the beers out of his bucket. “I wasn’t really offering. I’m the freshman. I’m supposed to be spoiled.”

“We make it all back,” he said, raising his own beer to his lips, “when you’re a pledge.”

There was a pained collective shout from across the room, over at one of the TVs. I couldn’t see, from this angle, what game was playing, but I let out a groan for good measure.

“Becker’s feeling sympathy pains,” Baker noted. “Quick, Becker, what’s playing?”

Or maybe he said, “Who’s playing,” but I didn’t know the answer to that question, so I just grunted out, “Football.”

Which I figured was not the right answer, because Baker started giggling. “Enjoy your beer, bro.”

 

A few drinks in, I couldn't help but notice Kevin Malley was staring at me, looking away abruptly every time I tried to meet his eyes.

Or maybe I was just imagining it. I was already a little drunk and maybe Erik's ego was contagious.

I tried to think about whether or not I had seen him on ManFind, but I didn’t think I had. He might’ve been one of those especially A-grade torsos that never chatted me back, but I didn’t think I’d seen his face on there.

He finished his beer, went up to the bar, so I chugged the remnants of mine and chased after him, leaning up in the empty space right next to him as he ordered.

“Drinking beer,” he said. “You’ve come a long way since your Sex on the Beach days.”

“It was a vodka-cranberry,” I told him.

“Whatever,” Kevin replied.

“I don’t know why you take such personal umbrage at my drink choices anyway.”

He smirked. “It’s not personal umbrage. I’m just giving you some friendly advice that people see you drinking a girly drink and they don’t take you seriously. I know Iota Chi as good as anyone, and they’re all great guys, don’t get me wrong, but.”

“Well, I’ve been hanging with them, and they think I’m fine, I guess.”

Kevin shrugged. “Then maybe you know better than me.”

“Maybe I do,” I said, and we both knew I didn’t. I gnawed myself free. “Is that why you didn’t go Iota Chi? Didn’t want to give up your appletinis.”

"Not quite,” he said. "I don't know. You know if you want to be a frat guy, and I didn't. I'm friends with, like, all of them. Chris wants me to pledge this year."

"Are you going to?"

"I doubt it," he said. "You feel bad turning down Chris, though, because he's like a puppy. Like he's all happy and loyal and so glad to see you. Tail wagging."

"He doesn't like people, he said," I replied. "Except the people he likes."

"He makes it sound like he’s an asshole," Kevin said. "He gets intimidated by people he doesn’t know, and doesn’t know what to do with himself. That's why he never gets laid. He either freezes up and looks like a moron, or he gets comfortable after a while and friend-zones himself. He's still a virgin, but he doesn't like anyone to know that because he feels ridiculous."

"How do you know that?"

"I shared a room with him," he said. "Please--I know. He’s too romantic. He’ll, like, fixate on someone who won’t give him the time of day, and won’t be able to move on to someone else. He had this big crush on Veronica Tandy last year, but she friend-zoned him and he just never got over it.” He grinned uncomfortably. “Obviously, don't tell him I told you any of that."

“Secret’s safe with me,” I replied.

"Thanks.” The bartender came back with a check, along with another bucket of beer. "What are you doing next weekend?”

“Usual shit,” I told him. “You?”

"Iota Chi has a party for Halloween," he told me. “Figured I’d loot them for free booze.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I’ll be at that.”

He leaned over the bar, surveying his check. He did the tip in his head, mouthing the numbers to himself, which I wondered if he knew he did. He finished off with a dramatic scribbling of his signature. Big loops, utterly unreadable, and I wondered how long he spent perfecting that kind of signature; mine was still a sloppily cursive Peter Adam Becker.

"Well, good,” he replied. “I’ll be there too. Some of the older brothers hate that I come to the parties because I didn't pledge, but I don't really care. I know enough of the sophomores that they don’t say too much.” He looked at me. “Well, I might have a pre-game at my place before, though, if you want to come.” He paused. “Like, all three of you.” He paused again, and I wasn’t sure if I had to respond; instead, he just barreled forward with, “Here, give me your number."

I rattled off my phone number, and he punched it into his phone and smiled. "Alright, man, I'll be in touch."

 

“I don’t know,” Jordan was telling me. I was a swaying a bit, perched on the edge of a barstool because I’d lost the ability to stand convincingly by that point. Jordan didn’t really seem to care if I was coherent--just that I was listening. “It’s just a lot of work, you know? And I always wanted to be a doctor, but.” She stiffened, looked down at her vodka-cranberry, her first drink, scarcely touched, then back at me. “I just know it’s only going to get harder.”

“You could always head over to good old Undeclared,” I offered. “We’re not fancy, but we’re fun.” I paused. “No. We’re fancy too.”

“You’re not fancy,” she replied. “You were right the first time.”

I gave a long, plaintive sigh. “Oh.”

Jordan had this very satisfied smile on her face. She was a very good drunk wrangler, but she seemed to be enjoying the fact that I didn’t need to be wrangled--that I required, at this point, very little, aside from the occasional refill that I’d managed to sneak out of adjacent buckets without yet being caught.

“Well,” she said, settling back into the conversation, because apparently she really wanted to talk about her degree crisis at Old Bruno’s on a Sunday afternoon. “It’d just be horrible if I had to tell my parents I couldn’t do it. My dad’s a doctor, and Ari’s going to med school next year.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I just always wanted to save lives,” she continued. “Work in the E.R. or something. I always thought it was the noblest damn thing in the world, you know? To have someone put their life in your hands, and you able to fix it for them?” She shook her head, settled back down out of the clouds. “Maybe I’ll do something radical and reckless. Like Art History.”

“Art History isn’t radical,” I pointed out. “Or reckless.”

She scoffed, because clearly I’d picked the wrong moment to weigh in with something coherent.

“Compared to pre-med,” she replied. “In the eyes of Phil and Rita Fleischer, it’s both. I don’t know. What are you going to major in?”

I thought for a moment. “Pledging.” And, even in my current shape, I thought I said that word especially drunkenly; my lips had gotten caught on the initial P, my voice oozed out like maple syrup.

She grinned at me. “Uh-huh. And when that’s over?”

I thought for another moment. I didn’t really have any idea. Or I did, rather--I would do English, or maybe History, or maybe Political Science. Catherine and David Becker were no Phil and Rita Fleischer--they’d be fine with a liberal art--but it would come with the caveat of eventual law school, which seemed especially unpalatable at the moment, and not only because I was drunk.

“Math,” I said, even though I hated math.

“Uh-huh,” she said again, leaning back against the bar. “Because you’re so mathy.”

“I’m mathy,” I replied, meekly.

“Whats eleven-times-eleven?”

“A hundred and forty-four,” I replied, giving a triumphant snap centimeters away from her face, which she took without flinching. “Bitch. I know my times tables. Tables of time.”

“That’s actually twelve-times-twelve,” she replied, still smiling at me, incredulously. And then she added, of course, for good measure: “Bitch.”

I folded my arms, in mock annoyance--or I hoped it was mock annoyance; my sarcasm and my acting skills were the first casualty of the drink. “Well, maybe not math.”

“Maybe not,” she agreed.

And she started talking, again, about whatever she had been talking about--I couldn’t really backtrack enough to remember how we got on the topic of math equations--when Kevin Malley re-entered my line of sight. He had been on the other side of the bar, playing darts--he was returning them to the bartender.

“Look who’s having fun,” he slurred, which was a little rich because his face was flushed and his eyes were so red they looked almost diseased.

“I thought you were leaving,” I said.

“I did,” he replied. “I went to smoke a bowl, and now I’m back.” He looked down at the darts, which were placed between each other fingers on his right hand. “Do you play darts, Becker?”

I shook my head. “Sometimes.”

“Is that a no, or a sometimes?” he asked me, setting them down on the bar.

“If the right partner comes along,” I replied, and his eyes snapped up towards me. I suddenly regretted that, even in my drunken state--and I wondered if I was being too flirty, too forward, so I backtracked that. “You know, like Tripp or some shit.”

“Right,” he replied, looking back to the bar. “Tripp.”

“Do you know Jordan?” I asked, grabbing onto Jordan’s shoulder; she wriggled free, not like it was especially difficult. “She’s Jordan.”

“I’m Jordan,” Jordan echoed. “We met, a while back.”

Kevin looked at her, blankly, like he had no idea who this person was. “Right,” he said, because he was polite enough.

“The night Erik’s roommate came out with us,” she offered.

“Oh, shit,” Kevin said, nodding along forcefully. He remembered the night. And then he looked at Jordan again, bit his lip ever so slightly, because he clearly did not at all remember her, still. “Yeah. Sure. You’re Becker’s friend.”

Jordan didn’t respond; she looked over to Tripp who was also barreling over from the dart board.

“We need the darts back,” Tripp told Kevin. “I found another partner. Winslow wanted in.”

“Let me get my ID back,” Kevin replied, without looking over at him. “You can pay for your own half-hour.” There were a few short seconds, then his mouth snaked into a grin. “Don’t you play with Becker?”

“Becker doesn’t play darts,” Tripp said. “Becker can’t throw a ball of paper into a garbage can.”

“Tripp can barely throw insults,” I offered back, which I thought was funny but, conspicuously, no one laughed. “Tripp, I’ll play darts.”

“I’m already playing with Winslow,” Tripp replied. “Next time, bud.” He leaned into Jordan, made eye contact with me. “Maybe you should, you know. Walk him back.”

“I’m fine,” I said, wobbling a bit--the bar stool picked the wrong second, exactly, to be uncooperative. “I’m ready for another beer.” I glanced around the bar; there was a bucket on the other side of Kevin, with one beer left in it. It had been unattended for quite some time--I’d gotten the last few from there, too, and no one noticed yet. I checked both ways, canalled my hand in front of his torso, and snatched the beer out of the bucket, cat burglar style.

“He doesn’t think he’s stealing that beer, does he?” Kevin asked Jordan, as if she was my spokesman--my Ari Fleischer--at this point of the evening, which she certainly wasn’t.

“Damn right I am,” I said. “I’m sneaky. Sneaky bastard.”

“Drunk bastard,” Kevin Malley smirked, handing the darts back to the bartender, and taking his driver’s license in exchange. “That’s your bucket.”

He was right, and even under the peeling layers of alcohol, I felt embarrassment rising in my face, not helped by the fact that Tripp and Kevin both started cracking up at me.

I let out another long sigh. “Oh.”

“Maybe it’s time to bed Becker,” Kevin said, and I wondered if he realized the semantics he had chosen for that sentence, but I figured he didn’t.

“Yeah, I got it,” Jordan said. “Come on, Becker. Walk me home.”

My eyes latched onto Kevin Malley, who was looking from side to side, not at me.

“Kevin, are you going home?” I asked. “You can walk me back.”

He held up his hands, grit his teeth, and shook his head in a firm statement of refusal, and then turned around and beelined back to the Iota Chi booths on the side of the bar.

 

“I wanted to leave anyway,” Jordan said, as she dragged me by the collar down Maple Street, dog on a leash. “I don’t mind. Kevin wanted to stay.”

“He’s very good at walking back,” I replied. “That’s all.” That was my best attempt to diffuse the situation, but I figured I might’ve overcompensated and went too far in the other extreme, so I added, “You’re good at walking back, too, though.”

Jordan exhaled a kernel of laughter, the kind of disbelieving, smirking laughter she used whenever we tossed random drunk comments her way. “Thanks, Becker.” She tugged on my collar again; I threw my arm around her neck and let her half-carry me down the street. “You’re actually terrible at walking.”

“Am not.”

She didn’t say anything else. I was looking up, as we moved glacially down the street towards Broadway. It was dark out, which I only noticed when we crossed over Hillary Street, where one of the streetlights was burnt out. “Spooky,” I said, as we passed down the chunk of sidewalk that was mostly hidden by an overgrown hedge row between the concrete and the curb.

“Real spooky,” she humored.

And then it did get spooky--and I sobered up almost immediately, because of the two hulking shadows I saw, waiting for us at the end of the sidewalk.

We were halfway between Hillary and Lowerline, on Maple, which was where all the muggings happened--thugs would lie in wait, ready to pick money off of unsuspecting Tulane students who would come back any time of day or night drunk from the bars on Maple. I thought about what would happen, how I’d have to tell my parents what happened, how much cash I had sitting at the bottom of my wallet.

No. It was too late to go back--I couldn’t move that fast. It was too black guys, in tandem, walking, skulking, towards us, but Jordan kept moving us forward, same pace, as if nothing happened.

“No,” I said, my voice shrill and quivering with fear, the most sense of impending doom I’d ever felt in my life. “No, no, stop. They’re going to--”

And I paused, my voice tapered off, my voice box shut down, aside from a few fruitless squeaks for help.

And then, they passed by. One of them was wearing a Loyola t-shirt, and I spun around, watched them go, watched them keep walking down towards the bars.

Which is when Jordan started cracking up. “Oh my God,” she cackled, between gulps of air. “You’re such a drunken idiot.”

 

I woke up the next morning, and the room was bleached, the light diffused and painful. I let out of bitter moan. It was Monday morning, wasn’t it. I had class at ten. I had no idea what time it was. I rolled over to check my clock but, instead, I saw Jordan Fleischer.

She was in the red papasan chair, curled into a ball in the fetal position, still wearing the same clothes she had on last night. She was using my laptop; I hoped, desperately, she was using Firefox, because Explorer was where I kept all of my damning websites and I couldn’t remember if I’d deleted the history.

But she didn’t seem to notice; she was sitting on Facebook, scrolling through other people’s statuses and photos. “This Newsfeed thing’s grown on me,” she declared, her morning greeting. “I’m not too proud to admit that.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked. I looked over to Tripp’s bed, which was occupied by the decaying remains of Tripp. He was still fully dressed in his Saints jersey and jeans, which was meant he must’ve come back as drunk as I was at some point.

“I fell asleep,” she bristled, as if it was impolite for me to even question why she had spent the night in my papasan chair. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I wasn’t alcohol poisoning bad,” I said, hoping, assuming, that was true. Jordan didn’t look especially concerned--I figured she would’ve been the first one to call Tulane EMS if there was any sort of problem. And I was having trouble piecing together the entire night--I didn’t have enough memories to fill in every moment since the beginning of the Saints game--but I didn’t think I blacked out long enough to have been carted away by TEMS.

“Maybe not that bad,” she said, “but you always read those horror stories, you know?” She shrugged. “But I fell asleep waiting for Tripp to get back, and I woke up about a thirty minutes ago. Don’t think I stayed here all night intentionally.” She lifted one creaky shoulder, for good measure. “I like this chair, but not all night.”

My phone was ringing on the nightstand. Tripp let out a muffled groan of displeasure. I didn’t reach for it. Jordan plucked it up, stared at the front screen.

“It’s your mom,” she said. “And she called twenty minutes ago, too.”

“Voicemail,” I told her, and she tossed the phone back down onto the nightstand, casually. “I told her I’d call her after the Saints game, and she really doesn’t like the whole idea of me being in New Orleans, so, you know.”

“Right,” she said. “Good thing you didn’t call her while you were that wasted last night or she would’ve been on the next plane down.” She closed my laptop. “All right. It’s nine-forty, and I have to get to biology. You up for walking?”

I groaned, and Jordan giggled, and she said, “I’ll bring you lunch or something.”

 

My phone was buzzing for the next hour. A text from Sarah Bernard: “Haha, well, looks like you’re having fun at least!” I had deleted whatever I’d sent the night before. I didn’t remember texting her, but clearly it was another one of those emotionally-naked cryptic messages--one so terrible that, even though my brain had stopped manufacturing memories, I knew I wouldn’t want the evidence.

“Haha,” I replied. “Crazy night!” And I hoped that would downplay whatever horrible thing I’d wound up saying.

Next was a text from Kevin Malley: “Make it home okay?” Which I didn’t have a chance to respond to, because I got yet another missed call from my mother, followed immediately by another attempt at a call, which I answered because I thought there actually was a large possibility of her booking a flight to New Orleans to make sure I wasn’t dead.

“Did I wake you?” she asked, her voice heavy with anxious parental concern, the type my mom had patented long ago as our neurotic parent. “You sound awful.”

“I’m sick,” I tried. “Allergies. There’s a lot of mold.”

She let out a tragic sigh. “Have you been taking Zyrtec?”

One of the Target purchases we’d made during move-in was a lifetime supply of Zyrtec. I’d never suffered from allergies but she was convinced I’d have allergies in New Orleans, which hadn’t happened either. “No, I forgot last night. They’d been getting better.”

“You have to take them every night,” she said, but her voice was rapidly perking up, seemingly happy that I was only infirm and not actually dead. “Saints beat Philly. Barely.”

“Scraped by,” I agreed, trying to perk up my voice a little bit. “I’m actually just about to head to class, though.” She didn’t know my schedule; I was already supposed to be in the middle of class. “Can I call you later?”

“Only if you actually call,” she replied. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

And then I went to attack that text from Kevin Malley.

“Yeah,” I told him. “Sorry I was such a drunk mess. I’m not used to drinking all day long.”

“We were all a mess,” he sent back, almost immediately. I liked that he sent it back so quickly--I wondered where he was, if he was sitting in class, if he was sitting around in bed, in boxers or less, maybe just waiting for me to text back.

“I was a bigger mess.”

“Oh, by far,” he replied, and I could almost see the smirk behind that, Kevin Malley’s lopsided little smirk that seemed to be dripping with loving mockery. “But I won’t hold you responsible. You’re a freshman, and this won’t be your last night of getting wasted.”

“Totally my last,” I sent, which, in the moment, I felt had a 50-50 chance of being true, but figured that the long-term outlook was not especially bright. “Swearing off the sauce.”

“Not before my pre-game in two weeks,” he warned. “Not after you’ve come so far. Beer drinker and everything.”

“Your doing.”

“Of course my doing,” he said. “You can thank me when you’re an Iota Chi.”

“You seem awfully concerned with me getting a bid,” I told him.

“Not as concerned as you are,” he replied, and I felt that cut a little deep, because I wasn’t even sure what I wanted. I’d see what Tripp and Erik were doing, definitely, but I kept going back and forth in my head, generally based off the number of drinks I’d consumed. Which made me a little concerned that I’d played my hand a little prematurely last night at Old Bruno’s.

“I’m not concerned,” was all I could muster, and this was Kevin’s longest pause yet--long enough where I started debating what my next gambit should be, how I should try to bridge the gap between what I felt like the truth should be and whatever the hell I might’ve drooled out last night between beer thefts.

Instead, he sent back: “Think you’ll be up for lunch? I’m meeting Baker at Bruff at 12.”

“Wish I could, but can’t make it today,” and I hoped that would suffice--that I had plans, that I wasn’t available on such short notice, because I knew there was no way I was getting out of bed in the foreseeable future, with this landslide of hangover crushing through my skull.

“Can’t lift your head off the pillow, you mean,” he sent back, because apparently Kevin Malley thought he knew everything.

 

By the time Jordan made it back, it was around two o’clock, after I’d spent several agonizing hours writhing in discomfort and staring at the ceiling. She and Michaela came with chicken tenders for me from the Bubble food court, which in my current state was a gift on par with frankincense and myrrh.

By two, I was, at the very least, sitting up, attempting a poem on my computer for my Intro to Creative Writing class.

“You look a little less,” Jordan said, handing me my styrofoam box, “awful.”

Michaela giggled. “I heard you were a mess.”

“You should’ve seen Tripp,” I told them, motioning over to his vacant side of the bed. “I didn’t think he’d make it out of the room, but he had to go to studio for a review.”

“Sucks to be an architecture major,” Jordan said, settling herself down, Indian style, in the papasan chair; Michaela went over to Tripp’s bed to sit, and they both dug out black plastic bowls of salad. “I definitely won’t be doing that one, if I switch. What’d you miss today?”

“Psych and French this morning,” I said, “and Intro to Creative Writing right now, but I emailed the professor and told him I was sick. Which is good, because I had a poem due that I meant to write yesterday night after the game, but, you know.”

“Got wasted,” Jordan mumbled, as she tore open a packet of Thousand Island dressing with her teeth. “How’s the poem coming along?”

“It’s coming,” I said. “It’s called Nora Helmer.”

Jordan narrowed her eyes. “Who’s that?”

“You didn’t read A Doll’s House?” Michaela interrupted. “We did that play in high school. Sophomore year.”

“And let me guess,” Jordan said. “You starred as Nora Helmer.”

Michaela puffed a quick burst of air from her nostrils in contempt, and went back to her salad without a confirmation.

“Okay, well, if you want to hear it,” I said, because I thought it was pretty awful and wanted a second opinion before I gave it to my entire class. We had to do all three types of writing in the Intro class--creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction. I’d been able to bumble my way through creative nonfiction, as boring as my life was--I wrote about a party Philip threw, inserting myself as Philip--and I was looking forward to being able to write fiction, but poetry threw me for a loop.

No, Nora Helmer was sad. Simultaneously saccharine and stilted--it looked more like a block paragraph than anything resemble a poem.

“Sure,” Jordan said, finally, without seeming overly excited about this prospect.

I cleared my throat. “This is Nora Helmer by Peter Adam Becker.”

“Three names makes you sound pretentious,” Michaela said.

I ignored her, and started anyway.

“I gaze out the window,

My hot cheek pressed against the somber glass.”

“What’s somber glass?” Jordan asked, wrinkling her nose, as she stared up at me.

“How can glass be somber?” Michaela agreed.

“I don’t think glass has an emotional state,” Jordan said, mouth full of lettuce. “But what does Becker know--he skipped Psych today.”

I bristled at what I felt was stepping the line between constructive criticism and outright mockery. Not that I thought this poem was doing anything for my reputation as a writer, but I had at least expected a little more deference from two people who had never written anything before in their lives that didn’t have citations.

“It’s a metaphor,” I said, coming out slightly more defensive than I’d intended it. I didn’t want to get caught up with wordplay.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Jordan tried again.

Maybe glass could be somber, maybe glass couldn’t be somber, but I deleted somber anyway, and replaced it with frosted.

“Frosted doesn’t work,” Michaela told me.

“It does so.”

“No, she’s right,” Jordan said. “You can’t ‘gaze out’ a frosted glass window. It’s opaque.”

They were taking this all too seriously. It was poetry. It didn’t have to make complete real world sense, or at least that was my impression of poetry. Of course, I was just suffering through the introductory lessons to poetry so I could take the advanced fiction class next semester.

But they did have a point, and I figured my professor--and the entire class, which had a surprising tendency to sharpen their claws for workshop--would see through that.

Backspace, backspace.

Michaela tried something:

“I gaze out the window,

My hot cheek pressed against the unforgiving glass.”

“No,” I said. “No, that’s awful.”

She looked scandalized, as if she had been expecting me to cheer on her contribution. “I like that one!”

“No,” I said. “Too many syllables.”

Jordan, ever the pragmatist, tried:

“I gaze out the window,

My hot cheek pressed against the glass.”

“Fine,” I said. “Whatever, if that makes everyone happy.”

The door swung open, and Tripp stumbled in, looking like an apparition.

“Off the bed,” he hissed, and Michaela dove out of the way like he was shooting at her. He collapsed, face down, a second later, and let out a moan in agony. “This is the worst day of my life.”

Michaela reached over him to reclaim her salad, and sat down on the floor next to his bed. “I feel fresh as a daisy.”

“Of course you do,” I told her. “You were there for an hour.”

“You only remember me being there for an hour,” Michaela answered. Her eyes lit up, and she added, “I heard you hallucinated getting mugged last night.”

I bristled again. I’d forgotten about that part, up until now, and I looked over to Jordan, who was trying to suppress a very instinctive smile.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Shady black people came running towards us, and--”

“Walking,” Jordan said, “and I think one of them was wearing glasses.”

“How’s that relevant?” I asked.

“Muggers don’t wear glasses,” she said, as if she was some sort of sage on criminal optometry, but no, that actually did make some sense to me--I think I’d be more shocked if a guy in glasses tried to mug me than if I was getting mugged in the first place. I imagined myself just swatting away his glasses, his achilles heel like some sort of comic book villain, and him screeching, blind, back into the night on the corner of Maple and Lowerline.

It made sense to Michaela, too, who was nodding with casual understanding.

“It’s not like anyone’s going to mug you,” she said. “On a Sunday afternoon?”

“There’s a ton of muggings on Maple,” I told her. “I’m scrawny and white, and I could barely stand up on my own. What about that makes me an unattractive target for crime?”

“Eh,” she replied, wavering her hand back and forth, noncommittally.

We went silent, for about five seconds--new record for Jordan and Michaela--and I think they felt the sudden dearth of sound.

“I gaze out the window,” Jordan said, in a booming godlike voice. “My hot cheek--”

And so I killed off Nora Helmer with the backspace button, because she didn’t deserve to live in this current state.