The Best Four Years of Adam Becker - 14. Freshman Year - Chapter 14

“No, no, of course you can have it back,” giggled a still-drunk Jackie Hughes, when I went to her dorm to confront her about the pilfered pledge pin later that evening. She pulled open the door, ushered me inside, without me saying a word.

She lived in Josephine Louise House, on fourth floor of the all-girls dorm, a floor above Jordan and Michaela, who swiped me into the building. She’d switched out of her white sundress by this point in the evening--it was curled into a ball on the foot of the bed--and now she was in pajama pants with a pattern of little cows on them, a bulky Vanderbilt sweatshirt, horn-rimmed glasses over her dark eyes.

“Vanderbilt,” she explained, motioning to the sweatshirt. “It became pajamas when I got rejected.”

I had been practicing my outrage as I trudged across Newcomb Quad, from Sharp to J.L., still in my suit and Kevin Malley’s Tulane tie.

But, this Jackie Hughes. It was all a game to Jackie, with her pleasant smile and infectious laugh and her cow pajamas and rejected-student sweatshirt. And it was a game, in this sense. I’d stolen my share of pins from the same party. Greek hijinx, though less fun when I was on the receiving end of it.

Still, I wasn’t looking forward to the threatened punishment from Harry Capuano. Less thrilled to find out that whatever punishment he concocted had the possibility of being shared with Patrick ManFind, Patrick Sullivan, whom I had already made it my goal to consciously avoid.

“I didn’t even know you took it,” I told her, as she went over to the jewelry box on top of her dresser. “Until I got back to the Iota Chi house.”

She stuck her tongue out at me, playful. “You were so concerned with our pins, you didn’t even see it coming. Lifts right off if you know what you’re doing.” She pulled it out of the box. “Good as new.”

She didn’t hand it to me; she walked over to me, grabbed a pinch full of my blazer, and stabbed it back on.

“I was always going to give it back,” she assured me. “We’re supposed to, because we know how much trouble you guys get in.”

“Yeah, they kind of flipped out on me and Patrick because we lost our pins,” I told her, but she looked a little concerned, so I just tried to downplay it all. “It’s not a huge deal. We’ve been given one of those a ‘to be determined’ punishments, but, you know, whatever. Roll with the punches.”

She had those kind of eyes that locked in on you, even glossy and a little drunk, behind glasses. Eyes that really portrayed her listening skills.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s really just fun for us. Veronica’s our new member chair and she called your new member chair to tell him we got your pins, right after you guys left.” She grinned. “We were the only two new members to get Iota Chi pins. Me and Annie.”

The fact that Patrick’s pin had been lifted by Annie Rue, the girl he had been sucking face off of for the last seventy-two hours, made me smile. He at least had that one coming.

“What a proud moment,” I told her.

“Oh, don’t sulk,” she said, mouth curving back into a warm smile, her one askew dimple popping out. “You were so much fun at the party.”

I wasn’t expecting that sort of compliment, because I didn’t think I’d turned on very much charm at the Tri-Gamma party--I was focused predominantly on accumulating their pins, and staying afloat during the tempest of my raging hangover. I wasn’t focused on playing nice with Jackie Hughes, although we did have a decent time, me, her, Tripp, and Michaela.

“Long day,” I told her. “Booze. Hangover.”

“Aw,” she said. “I’d give you a hug but, you know, you can’t trust me as far as you can throw me, I think you said.”

I returned her smile at that. “Something like that.”

“So,” she said, “supposing I could be trusted at some point, want to grab a drink sometime?”

Brazen little thief, wasn’t she.

So had never been actually asked out by a woman--the only girl I’d ever asked out myself was Sarah Bernard, and that was of course a trip over Niagara Falls in a Longaberger basket. And I had no desire to date a woman, not with Kevin Malley, who I saw six hours before, sitting in bed with his adorable face and wilting smile and poetic penis, somehow wanting me.

Still, Iota Chi pledge had some sort of cachet; Adam Becker was a reasonably okayish guy, in the right light, and maybe two or three drinks in--one drink too stiff, four drinks too limber, two or three a kind of Goldilocksian zen.

Okay, maybe Jackie Hughes wasn’t asking me out. In the romantic sense. Grab a drink sometime--the kind of thing that people asked other people.

She was breathtakingly pretty, even dressed down like this, and even if she was interested, that didn’t mean I had to be interested, that I had to agree whatever drinks were a date--just drinks, couldn’t they be? It took two to make a date a date.

I was convoluted.

“Sure,” I said, knowing that was probably not the path of least resistance. I added, noncommitally: “Yeah, sometime.”

I thought immediately about Erik and Tripp. I could grab a drink with her. Was there harm in that?

Of course there was. I chose to ignore that.

“Okay, now we just need to find me a hot chick,” Tripp said, shooting down Erik on the Playstation, Battlescar 3, maybe fifteen minutes after I got back to the room and relayed the entire anecdote of mine and Jackie’s conversation. “Now that you’re going out with the girl who stole your pin, and Erik’s back with his creepily-named twin.”

“Erica is not my twin,” Erik said, bitterly. “Our names--” He paused. “I’m not back with her. I used her to get into the Psi Lambda house and steal her pin.”

“And get your dick wet,” Tripp replied, shooting him again.

“Fucking stop killing me!” Erik shouted, throwing the controller down at the carpet. “And yeah, I got my dick wet, but that was just a bonus, really. She’s a stupid bitch and I hate her.” He was shot again. “Fuck you, Tripp. I just respawned.”

A crumbled up empty bag of Doritos hit the back of my head.

"Do we have any more chips?" Jordan asked, from where she laid, curled up in a fetal ball in the red papasan chair with an organic chemistry textbook. Doritos crumbs lacing her tiny hands.

"No," Tripp replied, without looking at her. "You guys freaking come in here and eat all my food, and now I'm wasting away like an Ethiopian child."

The chips were technically mine, left over from lunch, but I didn’t point out that finer inconsistency in Tripp’s soliloquy.

"Becker, get us chips," Erik said.

I had no idea why I was selected for this particular reconnaissance mission, having supplied the most recent bag of chips--especially considering how few chips I ate and how ravenous the three of them generally were.

"Hell no," I said, settling back into my bed. I had a text: Kevin Malley.

“Hangover gone?” he asked.

I didn’t know exactly how to respond because, no, the remnants of the hangover had remained, even having shed my suit and brushed my teeth and bought a Gatorade and popped a small colony of Advil.

“Getting there,” I told him.

"Come on," Tripp begged me, as he slammed his thumb against X and pumped Erik’s avatar full of iron.

"Not that skipping a few bags of Doritos would be a bad idea, there, Tripper," Jordan said.

"Ditto, bitch," he replied.

He looked suddenly apologetic, darted his eyes away from the screen; Erik shot him, and Tripp fell to the floor; Erik threw his arms up in triumph.

It came off a lot meaner than it sounded, when you said it to a girl. Especially a girl like Jordan who wasn't fat, but wasn't Michaela thin--even though she was thinner than she was the semester before, the only person losing weight during freshman year.

Jordan’s face was unmoving; she didn’t comment; she went back to Organic Chemistry.

“Come and suck my dick,” Kevin told me, and I flipped my phone shut, and put it back in my pocket.

There was a thankful knock at the door.

“It’s open!” Erik called.

“Still not your room,” Tripp muttered. “It’s not open, either. Becker?”

“Not your maid,” I said, and there was another knock; Jordan slammed her book shut, irritatedly, presumably still over the inadvertent Doritos flap, and unwound herself from the papasan chair.

We all craned over to see who was on the other side of the door: Patrick Sullivan. I took out my phone, pretended to be very interested in Kevin’s latest text, though I hadn’t yet committed to any sort of sexual horseplay.

“Hey guys,” he said, brushing past Jordan, pointedly looking at everyone else in the room except for me.

Awkward.

“Come in, dude!” Erik called, even though Patrick was halfway in the room already.

“Not your room,” Tripp muttered. “Come in!” Which seemed to matter even less.

Patrick came in, looked at the papasan chair; Jordan deked around him, and sat down, claiming her turf; Patrick sat uncomfortably on the edge of Tripp’s bed, across from me, and diverted his eyes to the TV. “Awesome. Battlescar 3?”

“Yeah,” Erik said, without taking his eyes off the screen. “Tripp just unlocked all of the assault weapons.” He was shot, turned around to face Patrick. “Got your pin back? I need to see it. Officially. So I can report back.”

Power went to Erik’s head--even the low-octane power of pledge class president.

Patrick pointed to his chest. Erik nodded, authoritatively.

“Alright, cool,” Erik said. “I’ll text Harry and tell him we’re at full wattage again. That's good. I don't want him pissed going into Mardi Gras."

"Yeah," Patrick said. "I'm so stoked about Mardi Gras."

"Have anyone coming in?" Tripp asked.

"No," he said. "Everyone said they would, but you know what it's like committing to flights."

Tripp asked everyone if they had people coming in for Mardi Gras. He had his high school friend, Marshall, flying in from Duke; Ted was supposed to come join him, which had briefly filled my imagination with him wandering around our room in skimpy briefs and that round ass, four days’ worth. The idea that maybe Tripp would be out of the room with Marshall, and Teddy and I would be alone in the room, and stuff, and you know, shy.

“I might be obliged,” I texted Kevin Malley.

At any rate, Ted was not coming for Mardi Gras--some sort of problem with one of his big classes--and it was probably for the best. Say something happened between us--then what? Tripp would probably walk in; things would be obscene. And I’d be, like, the gay kid. Ryan Wyatt. Only distinguishable feature.

"So," Erik said, "do you want some chips while you’re here?”

“Sure,” Patrick said.

Erik turned to me, narrowed his eyes with mock anger, and grunted: “Store.”

“Becker was just running to get them," Jordan clarified, with an excited smile, at the prospect of the supply chain being reopened. I hated when the two of them were in collusion. To me, she added, "McAlister Market is so close."

“Fuck off,” I replied, breezily, but I tried to estimate how quickly I could get to and from Kevin’s apartment--maybe if he had a bag of chips I could borrow, even though McAlister Market was practically visible from our window.

“Of course, I’d make it worth your while,” Kevin texted back, “though you do have that proliferating debt.”

I was about to respond; instead, I heard Erik: “Becker’s going out with some hot Tri-Gamma pledge, and even that can’t fix his mood.”

Patrick looked like a child at Christmas, over that damning little tidbit. And Jackie Hughes was not something I downplayed, when it came to Tripp and Erik--that was the kind of story I didn’t mind getting around, when it came to people who didn’t know about me. She was objectively hot. Nice girl, petty theft aside. The kind of girl I'd like people to think I could get. Or would want to get, if I wanted to get it.

Patrick knowing about her, however, was a firm no.

I made my punitive eye contact with Patrick, who was suddenly all too eager to boast about my quiet hypocrisy. “That’s excellent,” he said, with suddenly outsized interest in the ladies of my life. “Who is she?”

He could barely keep the grin off his face, that bastard.

“It’s not really going out,” I told him. “She said we should grab a drink, I said maybe, yeah, and that was it.”

“Please,” Erik said, instead going back to the somewhat more decorated version I’d rolled out a little earlier in the evening. “Of course Becker’s going to nail her. He’s the second most sexually frustrated person in this room.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tripp said. He hacked off Erik’s head with a machete. “Die, motherfucker. You had that one coming.” He turned to Patrick. “I’ve hooked up more than Becker.”

Not quite, Tripp. Patrick and I locked eyes again; I looked away uncomfortably.

“Who is she?” Patrick asked again, more to Erik than to me.

“Jackie Hughes,” Jordan offered, more interested in how this was playing out than organic chemistry. "Tri-Gamma pledge from J.L. Four."

“The chick who stole my pin,” I told him, trying to diffuse everything, as best I could; I was caught between Patrick, and Erik, Tripp, and Jordan--caught between trying to upsell Jackie Hughes’s interest, downplay my intentions, without destroying either narrative beyond repair. “Whatever.”

“Look at you,” Patrick said, more concerned than congratulatory.

“I love how embarrassed he is,” Erik said, going back to Battlescar. “It’s why you can’t land a biddy, Becker. You’re worse than Tripp.”

Tripp seemed more irritated by that than I was, and he lacked sufficient sightlines on Erik to kill him, his usual way of shifting the conversation; he was running through what appeared to be a burning hospital room, picking up Health.

“That what’s-her-face, that redhead, sucked me off,” Tripp protested, instead. “From the Boot. Becker remembers being sexiled.”

"Not recalling," I joked.

Tripp was looking concerned. "No, it was in like, what beginning of November? I’m sorry if I was too much of a gentleman to brag about it forever like you two--”

Kevin had texted me back: “I’m ordering Favori, delivery. Meatball sub and then a meatball sub?”

I appreciated Kevin trying to strike a double-entendre, although I didn’t quite get the provenance of that one.

Neither did he; he immediately responded: “That made more sense in my head. Dick and a sandwich?”

“On that note, I’m off,” I said, standing up, clapping my phone shut. "Going to grab Favori with Kevin Malley."

"Bring back chips?" Jordan asked, straining her neck up at me.

"Doritos again?"

"Let's do Ruffles," Tripp said. "Do they have, like, sour cream and onion?"

"Oh, good choice," Jordan congratulated, settling back into organic chemistry.

I shook my head in disgust.

“I’m going too,” Patrick said, with a lazy half-wave. “See you guys.”

I tried to keep the disgust off of my face, of having to wander out of the room with Patrick--because I knew for a fact that he’d lay into Jackie Hughes once he got me alone. And, worse, delay me from having Kevin Malley’s mouth wrapped around my dick.

I was on death row; the door latched behind us, we walked Spanish down the hallway.

“Well, that’s good,” he said, finally, as we reached the elevators. “Jackie Hughes is pretty hot. I’ve seen her around J.L.”

I didn’t offer a response, just an affirmative, unopinionated grunt.

“I just,” he continued--I could tell he was trying to search for some sort of delicate word, but there wasn’t a word delicate enough for this uncomfortable situation--“I didn’t see her as your type.”

I pressed the elevator button three times, in quick succession, in the vain hope that it would rankle the beast a little faster.

“She's just as much my type as your type," I told him, as chipperly as I could, but obviously the meaning was not lost on either of us.

The hallway fell to a chilly silence; the elevator was lounging around up on the seventh floor.

“Well, okay,” he said, finally. “I just didn’t think you were also being all--” He paused. “--experimental.”

Patrick was the most irritating person on the planet, and it was exactly because of that double standard. He did not think for a moment that I was anything but gay--solely because I’d hooked up with him--but here he was, acting as if what he had done was somehow so much more forgivable, so much more boys-will-be-boys.

If he could experiment, why couldn’t I? Why was it that he could have sex with Annie Rue in J.L., and suck me off in his dorm room, but I wasn’t allowed to grab an innocent drink with Jackie Hughes?

Patrick hit the elevator button again; finally, it sprang open, and we both went inside.

As soon as the doors closed, as soon as privacy was guaranteed, her turned to me and said, “You know, you can either stand there hating me for knowing what I know, or we can just realize it’s mutually-assured destruction and just bury the hatchet.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just said, “Fine,” in the least convincing way I could, as the doors opened downstairs in the lobby.

We walked, with Patrick about a pace ahead of me so I didn’t have to talk to him--we both pretended to be impeccably interested in our phones, reading old text messages--when I heard Brett Morton scream, “Becker! Sullivan!”

We both turned around; en route to Bruff, apparently, was Morton and Pagliacci, because campus was too fucking small.

“Where are you two going?” he asked, hustling over to us, as if Patrick and I were going to anyplace remotely the same.

“I’m going to the library,” Patrick said. He stuck out a thumb at me. “Becker’s meeting Kevin for dinner.”

“Text Malley,” Morton ordered. “Tell him to get his ass over to Bruff. I want to throw a little business his way.”

I toddled there for a second, uncomfortably, not sure if I was actually expected to text Kevin Malley, but Morton kept staring at me, so I took out my phone: “Awkward,” I texted, “but Morton wants you to come to Bruff, with stuff.”

I hoped “stuff” would be descriptive enough; with the full realization that Kevin had used phrases like “suck my dick” in a literal sense about fifteen minutes prior, I at least didn’t want to add illegal substances to my rap sheet, at least in the mind of whoever was reading my text messages in some dingy Washington office building or in my dad’s Senate office or, worse, in his opponents’ campaign offices--you never knew.

“Ughhhhhh,” Kevin replied, lots of Hs. “You have to get better at lying. Fine. I’m adding on to your debt.”

I smiled a bit at that, closed my phone. “He’s coming.”

Dining with Patrick, even in the company of our esteemed brothers, was less than scintillating.

And then, of course, once we sat down, Kevin came into the cafeteria, looking ruggedly gorgeous, backwards Tulane hat over his short hair, gray tank top, basketball shorts that offered the suggestion of what lied beneath, to those lucky enough to have seen it.

It absolutely crushed me that we weren’t in his bed, wrapped in each others’ sweaty arms, the smell of a Favori meatball sub and fresh semen wafting through the indelicate air.

He didn’t get food; he sat down at the head of our table.

“I hear someone wants Santa to add him to the ‘nice’ list,” he said.

“My weed dealer is Kevin Malley,” Morton deadpanned. “I’m officially white.”

Pagliacci snickered at that, snorted out a not terribly small meteor of grits through his nose.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kevin said. He looked at me. “I don’t have enough for you too, Becker, so you’ll have to come back to my place after.”

My eyes darted over to Patrick, who didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, and then back to Kevin, whose face wore that broken half-smile again, curled up in promise of what I hoped I would have enough time to do before Erik and Tripp and Jordan started wondering when in the hell their Ruffles were coming.

“Kevin’s out of weed,” Pagliacci said, his voice falling into measured metronome, each syllable thoughtfully lingered over, as if this was some philosophical problem. “What does life entail if it doesn’t entail weed? I imagined Kevin as sort of a perpetual font, brimming with weed.”

Kevin seemed to beam a bit at the confidence, but seemed at least slightly trapped in the narrative, Jackie Hughes-style.

“Get scared,” Kevin replied. “It will do you good.”

“Smoke a bit,” Pagliacci finished. “Bang your head against the wall.”

I smiled at Kevin because I knew that was Camus; he smiled at me because he knew I knew that was Camus.

Morton looked bored; he looked to me for help, then to Patrick. “If a bear shits in the woods,” he said, his voice dripping with poetry, “does a bear shit in the woods?”

Kevin slapped a taped-shut pack of Orbitz gum on the table. “Go shit in the woods.”

Morton quickly grabbed the gum pack, slid it back into his pocket, trying to look casual but somehow looking even more suspicious.

“Thanks,” he said. “Not eating? Becker said you guys were grabbing dinner.”

“I was going to grab Favori,” he replied, stiffening a bit. “After that, Bruff just doesn’t satisfy a craving.” He looked at me. “You’re eating here?”

I wasn’t entirely sure what I was supposed to say with that, considering I had a half-eaten hamburger on my plate in front of me. I just shrugged. “I don’t know. I need to get back pretty soon.”

Kevin leaned back in his chair, looking less than pleased. “Got it.”

“But maybe one quick smoke,” I told him, and that seemed to bring his mood back to the forefront.

I didn’t know if Patrick--who had remained quiet for most of dinner, brushed to the side once Pagliacci and Kevin started discussing their philosophy homework and Morton engineered a conversation with the table of girls that had sat down behind him--knew what was going on with me and Kevin. I suspected not: Kevin was so slick and suave, slapping down gum wrappers full of weed on the table in the cafeteria.

We walked back to my house, and it was the first time I’d been alone with him, not in his room, since before any of this.

We’d hooked up exactly three times. I’d slept over once, that previous night, when we didn’t hook up but I instead vomited on him and passed out.

“I still owe you your tie,” I told him, as we walked up the steps to his porch. Kevin seemed unconcerned.

The lights were out in the house. He turned them on, then turned back around and pushed me towards the door. I wasn’t expecting a show of strength, his big hand; I stumbled backwards, and then he grabbed the back of my neck and kissed me.

“You don’t taste like vomit,” he congratulated.

“Aquafresh,” I told him.

“Mazel tov,” he said. He grabbed my hand. “Roommates are out,” he said, in case I was worried about that sort of thing--I would’ve been, but the lights had been out--and he he led me back down the dark hallway to his bedroom.

It reminded me of that first night, except we were both sober, and we weren’t entangled in euphemisms. Shy. We both knew where this was going; as soon as the door closed, Kevin’s shirt was tugged off over his head, thrown in a ball on the otherwise immaculate floor.

His room was dark, but his window was open; the soft glow of the streetlight illuminating his chest, making him look almost blue. He was sexy in the dim light. He was sexy in any light.

He was still holding my hand; he sat down on the bed, led me over to him, so I could straddle his legs, which I did, albeit a little awkwardly.

“I want to fuck you,” he whispered, as he nibbled around my ear. And that tore me out of the mood altogether.

“Um,” I said, “I don’t do that. I’m a top.”

Kevin continued kissing down my jawline; I involuntarily exhaled as he hit that exact spot that he’d hit before.

“No, you’re not,” he whispered, coming back to the front of my face, his lips just an inch away from mine. He gave me a quick peck on the lips. “You know you want it.”

Part of me did want it, kind of, but the idea of that giant ramrod--which I could feel ripening up underneath me--in such a delicate little space seemed less than kosher. I mean, in porn--in those grainy Sean Cody videos I’d downloaded off of LimeWire--they made it look easy and fun but porn made everything looked easy and fun and sexy.

Plus, I hadn’t showered in--by this point--more than thirty-six hours, so who knew what sort of condition I was in, south of the border.

“Maybe next time,” I told him instead, giving him another peck on the lips. “I’m too far in your blowjob debt to attempt something new.”

He bit his lip, silent approval; that sort of logic seemed to win him over, but I think he really just knew that he probably wasn’t going to get much better than a “maybe next time” when it came to me.

“Down he goes,” he told me, with a smile, putting his hand on top of my head.