The Best Four Years of Adam Becker - 18. Freshman Year - Chapter 18

We were blindfolded in the basement at the Iota Chi house, sitting in a circle on the concrete floor, holding hands. I was between Erik and Eddie Darien.

It was uncomfortably silent--we were told not to talk--and I knew Brett Morton was somewhere in the room. He would yell for someone to be quiet every so often; I’d hear the pages shuffling from whatever book he was reading, the occasional clink of a beer bottle or the bite of an apple.

Time seemed to stand still in the silence and darkness. We could’ve been down there twenty minutes, we could’ve been there two hours.

In the clarity of having no distractions, I thought about Kevin Malley. I hadn’t seen him in six days, since that fight in his bedroom in the bleary hours of Sunday morning. Part of me thought he would text, that roundabout and casual way he would give me a tacit apology. He did not.

I did not text him either, largely because I didn’t think I had all that much to apologize for. He said it: we were not a couple. We were friends, friends who had sex, and I had something come up when we were supposed to have sex. That was that. He should’ve understood. He should’ve let it go.

But I wanted to see him, see that reckless half-smile, have him hold me in his arms.

Eddie cracked his pinkie knuckle against my palm. His hand, like the rest of him, was gigantic; I felt like a toddler, like I could wrap my entire hand around his index finger.

Erik, meanwhile, kept squeezing my other hand in an attempt to communicate. Neither of us knew morse code; I couldn’t seem to decipher any of his signals.

I did not know what I would tell Kevin the next time I saw him, except that I missed him, that I wanted him. That I could handle our relationship the way it was. Or that I wanted him to be something else, something more. I didn’t know, exactly. But I did miss him. No matter what he was willing to be with me, I would cross that bridge.

The lights came on in the basement; I could feel the bright redness exploded through the black blindfold.

“Get up,” said Harry Capuano, business as usual. “Put your hands on the shoulder of the person to your right. We all scrambled upwards, my legs were gelatinous. I put my hands on Erik’s shoulders; I felt Eddie’s giant hands on my own, and then we were marched up the rickety stairs to the living room.

Immediately, Dragon started barking at us, and there was a lot of frantic, hissed orders at him to shut up from the rest of the room--the entire brotherhood, presumably. I could not see anyone but I could feel the volume of people surrounding me.

We were quickly separated from each other’s shoulders, lined up in the middle of the living room.

“Pledges,” said Harry, his voice now booming, directly in front of us. “Today marks the beginning of the final stage of your pledgeship. So far, we’ve asked very little of you--and somehow, you’ve all managed to hang on. But.” He paused, a flair for the dramatical. “But. Over these final few weeks, we will see who deserves to be here. Who thinks of this as a drinking club, and who thinks of this as a sacred bond, forged in brotherhood. It will not be easy. But the most important lesson you can learn is that your brothers will always be here to help you.”

He was pacing around us in a tight circle; he let the silence fall over us.

“But now,” he continued, “you will have someone that you can go to directly for guidance. Someone who will lend you a helping hand over these final few weeks, and through the rest of your time in the brotherhood of Iota Chi.”

“Pledges,” he continued. Another long pause. “Turn around and greet your big brother.”

The blindfold was torn off my head from behind, and a hand on my shoulder spun me around.

Of course, it was Chris Baker, looking uncharacteristically giddy and holding a shot glass. He grabbed my jaw, pulled it open before I could even realize what was going on, and proceeded to dump the shot down my throat without warning. It was cinnamon--Fireball. As I choked it down, he giggled.

“Surprised?”

There had been a very small part--maybe not that small of a part--that thought I would wind up with someone completely random, the kind of hot potato passed around the brotherhood. And I realized there was so much insecurity that went into that thought-process, but I couldn’t shake the idea that I would be unwanted when push came to shove.

But now that I was seeing Chris Baker: surprised? No. I was relieved, I was thankful, but I was not surprised to see him smiling behind me, wielding his shot of Fireball. But I did not quite know how to articulate any of that--nor did I want to--so I just smiled.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” he grinned, clapping me on the shoulder. “Let’s go meet the rest of the family.”

At this point, everyone had broken out of the neat circle, and sectioned off into the different corners of the room. Tripp was laughing over something with Brett Morton--another non-surprise--but Erik was with Louis Montgomery, which was baffling, because no one had ever really talked to him before.

I did a quick survey of the bromantic coupling of the rest of the room: Eddie Darien with Tommy Pereira, Ben Revis with John Carver, Will Connors with Josh Weinman. And there was Patrick with Matt Rowen, which was also a surprise: everyone thought Rowen and Erik were a lock.

Our family was over by the staircase: Harry Capuano, Josh Weinman, and Will Connors. On the top of the newell post was a bottle of Fireball and five empty shot glasses.

Aside from Chris Baker, I did not know anyone in our family especially well. Will and I had only hung out in large groups, Harry Capuano was still vaguely terrifying, and Josh Weinman I had only met once--he was one of those perennially busy people: president of Hillel and vice president of events for Student Government. He was a decent looking guy--about my height, maybe a little shorter, average build. Dark, curly hair; cute face. He had, according to other brothers, “lived in” his girlfriend’s vagina--they’d been dating each other for the past four years, since junior year in high school--and he rarely came out to play.

“So how the family tree works,” Harry explained, relishing his role as the apparent patriarch. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed genuinely excitable--not nearly as stone-faced and terrifying as when he was wearing the mask of pledgemaster. “I’m the oldest member of the family, and I got my first little back in ‘05. That’s Theo Bix, who’s studying abroad in Paris right now. He got his little was Chris Baker last year, in ‘06, and now that brings us to Becker. My second little, which I got in ‘05, was our very own Joshy here. And through him, we have Will.” He pointed back and forth between me and Will. “Which makes you guys cousins. In the context of our family.”

“Do you usually get two littles?” Will asked.

Harry looked immensely proud of himself. “Not usually,” he said. “I’m just that popular.”

Josh, a grin on his face, scoffed loudly in disapproval; Harry flipped him off without looking at him.

“Our family shot is Fireball,” Harry continued, reaching for the bottle, which he held up for us to see, as if we had not seen Fireball before. “Believe me, we got off easy that one. There’s a family that does tabasco and vodka.”

He unscrewed the cap from the bottle, and poured the five shots, in one theatrical motion--whiskey was splattering all over the newell post, but he didn’t seem especially concerned.

“And we do one,” he continued, raising one of the shot glasses; we all followed suit, “for everyone in the family. And if you have to drop out at any point, your big will take the rest of your shots.”

“Don’t drop out, Becker,” Baker told me, elbowing my arm.

Harry raised his glass even higher. “First one’s for me, Harry Capuano.”

I looked to Baker to follow his lead; we all cheersed, repeated, “For Harry,” and then took the shot. Baker slammed the shot glass back down on the newell post when he was finished; I did too.

Baker was next: he took the bottle, filled up the shot glasses again. “And second, one for my big, Theo Bix, who couldn’t be here.”

We each picked up the glasses, toasted once more.

“For Theo.”

Josh Weinman was next. “For me, Josh Weinman.”

“For Josh.”

“For me, Chris Baker.”

“For Baker.”

Will reached for the bottle next, filled them up much slower and more carefully than the brothers. “Okay, for me: Will Connors.”

“For Will.”

I was dreading the moment where I would have to toast myself, and I wasn’t entirely sure why, because the amount of thought that went into it was so minimal. As I was just about to start moving, Baker elbowed me in the ribs. “Move it, Becker,” he said, fondly

I took the bottle, filled up each shot glass to the brim, just as everyone else had.

“And for me,” I told them. “For Adam Becker.”

They all raised their shot glasses: in unison, “For Becker.”

 

“Okay, no, Louis is a nice guy,” Erik was judiciously saying the next day, Saturday, when me, Tripp, Jordan, and him were in the cafeteria for hungover breakfast at 3pm. “I just don’t understand why I got him. I don’t even know the guy."

He was fixating on this, but in the clear light of sobriety, he was hiding his disappointment much better than he had last night. When we got back to our rooms after big-little night, both of us shitfaced from what turned out to be a surprisingly lengthy night, he had burst into tears over the whole situation. “You don’t understand,” he was saying, his voice breaking. “You got the one you wanted.”

It was an especially embarrassing show for anyone, even drunk as we both were, but I could only imagine Erik was mortified by himself; he could be sensitive and sentimental, but he did not like to lose control, and I had never seen him cry before. I wasn’t very good with handling emotional people in general, so I just sat there and listened. That was all I could do. I told him it would be okay, that Louis was a good guy, but mostly, I just listened, and that seemed to be all that Erik needed before he passed out in Tripp’s bed under the weight of his emotions and his family’s vodka-and-tabasco shots.

He did not mention this, and regardless, he seemed calmer today. Drunk tears didn’t tend to have the biggest impact on the mood of the next day.

And I thought about how maybe the same thoughts were going through Erik’s head that had been going through my head before I turned around and saw Baker: that I would wind up somehow unwanted. And I didn’t think Erik was unwanted by anyone--there had to be some reason why he got Louis, some thought process when Harry Capuano and Brett Morton were dividing people up two-by-two, but I understood what he was feeling. Left out, especially considering I was with Baker and Tripp was with Morton, when that was how our night should’ve worked out.

“I wasn’t expecting Morton,” Tripp told him, picking up a sausage link and popping it in his mouth whole. It was a lie, but I nodded vigorously in agreement.

“It’s a surprise for everyone,” I told him. “Come on.”

Erik offered a disapproving glare, not buying any of this.

It did seem weird: Rowen had such a proverbial boner for Erik. Anyone in that group of sophomores would have been a possibility for all of us--we knew him better than most of the other pledges did--but Rowen and Erik seemed like the most likely pairing.

Jordan cleared her throat loudly, indicating it was time to change the conversation. She was soundly ignored.

“Yeah, well,” Tripp said, conciliatory. “Morton was a surprise. We all knew Becker was going to get Baker. That would’ve been the weirdest thing if he didn’t.”

And yes, Baker was the likeliest option for me--I realized that now--but I couldn’t tell if they were being nice, or if the thought of getting left behind was strictly in my head. “How’d we know I was going to get Baker?”

‘“Oh please,” Erik replied. “He’s practically had his hand down your pants all year.” In falsetto, he added, ‘Come on, Becker, you have to pledge. Please, do it for me, Becker.’”

“Uncanny Baker impression,” I deadpanned. “Come on, he was like that with all of us.”

“Yeah, but he likes you,” Tripp replied. “We were nice to have, obviously, but you’re his favorite.”

I grinned. “Evidently.”

“So what exactly does a big do?” Jordan asked. “Because it sounds like they just buy you a t-shirt and you have to hang out with them at self-perpetuating family events?”

The three of us exchanged disdainful looks, but I wasn’t actually sure what a big or little actually meant in the long run. We had no events on the horizon in terms of Iota Chi specifically with our bigs. Baker told me we should do a weekly big-little lunch like he did with Theo Bix before he went abroad, but we generally had lunch together multiple times a week anyway.

So I didn’t know. And it seemed that Tripp or Erik didn’t really know, because we were all silent and Jordan’s smile twisted into self-righteousness.

“Regardless,” Erik said, irritatedly, locking eyes with Jordan, “it does matter. Because every year, I’ll have to welcome a new pledge into the family and I’ll have to hang out with someone I barely know.”

“And,” Tripp added, “you know, they’re the person you go to for advice and counsel.”

Jordan scoffed at the notion. “But you can do that with anyone. Wouldn’t you rather ask your friends for advice, rather than a stranger randomly assigned to babysit you at the frat?”

“Fraternity,” we all corrected in unison, and Jordan rolled her eyes at that too.

“Anyway,” she said, elongating each vowel. “When’s Justine visiting again? It’ll be nice to have a little estrogen around here.”

“You hate girls,” I reminded.

“I’m not so fond of guys at the moment either,” she replied, “as it turns out.”

I had attempted to kick the can as far as I could, re: Justine’s visit, in hopes that I would stonewall the whole endeavor, but my mother had caught up to me, threatening to book a ticket for a random weekend, so I panicked. Justine was coming April 20th, the weekend after Spring Break, which we were spending in Destin at a big house Veronica Tandy had rented. It was appropriately late in the season that I hoped she might already send in a deposit to a different school.

 

Ben Revis depledged two weeks later. We received the announcement via a one line email from Harry Capuano. It was a shock, like a death in the family. Not to be overly dramatic. He was the first pledge to leave, and there was nothing in the way of explanation.

“What happened with Revis?” I greeted Patrick, when I saw him sitting alone in the University Center during lunchtime. They were roommates, after all, and I’d imagine that if Tripp was planning on depledging, there would’ve been a lot of conversation on the topic.

“By all means, sit,” Patrick said, putting down his book. I couldn’t tell if he was sarcastic or serious, but I set my tray down and pulled out the chair anyway.

“So what happened?”

Patrick did not seem especially concerned with the fact that his roommate had just left Iota Chi.

“I don’t know,” he replied. He took a sip of soda, then set it back down on the table. “I really don’t--he just said it wasn’t for him.”

Water from the lobby's still-broken waterfalls was beginning to pool at our feet. I saw a janitor put out a Wet Floor sign, and then he disappeared without addressing the core of the problem.

“Did you try to convince him to stay?”

“I mean, yeah,” he said. “Harry told me to try to talk him out of it, so of course I did. But he doesn’t want to stay. He said he’s been thinking about it for a while, and he’s happy about it.”

“Did you know?”

“No,” he said. “He didn’t say anything to me about it, and I don’t think he said anything to Will either. We were both as surprised as anyone when we got that email.”

Ben was one of Patrick’s best friends, so I couldn’t understand the kind of nonchalance that Patrick had chosen to wear. If Tripp or Erik had one day stopped pledging--and they hadn’t told me, if they let me find out in an email from Harry Capuano--I’d be pissed. Bitter, angry, betrayed. Patrick seemed none of these; he was just sitting in the University Center, casually eating a yogurt and reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

“Weird, man,” I said. “We can’t have that much time left. Initiation’s probably, what, a couple weeks from now?”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” Patrick replied, taking another spoonful of yogurt. “I think it’s crazy. We’re almost done”

“Maybe he’ll come back,” I said. Patrick shrugged.

“I’m just counting down to spring break,” he said.

Spring break was the following week; everyone was going to Destin, it seemed like. Veronica had rented a big house in Destin for a bunch of us, and Patrick was staying with a few other Iota Chi pledges and brothers at a house down the street.

“When are you guys heading out?” he asked. “I still need to find a car.”

Baker offered me a seat in Kevin Malley’s car. I did not know whether or not Kevin had been made aware of this.

“Saturday morning,” I said. “I think. Baker offered me a seat in Kevin’s car, but I don’t know.” I paused. “Baker’s handling all of that.”

“Oh?” he said, with a smirk. I did not know what the smirk meant, but it was not warranted. “I feel like Kevin’s been MIA lately.”

He was still smirking, and I still did not appreciate that.

“Work,” I told him. “At the restaurant, not the other thing.”

“Okay,” Patrick replied. “You know, you can tell me if there’s anything going on. Because I know the worst of your secrets already anyway, so this one is really just small potatoes in the grand scheme of what I know, and what I haven’t told anyone.”

I bristled at that. “I know the worst of yours too.”

He looked largely unconcerned about that, though his face was almost intentionally expressionless. “That’s true,” he said. “You do.”

There was a chilly silence, at least on my end; Patrick just kept spooning yogurt into his face. And, because the whole Kevin thing was just eating me up--because maybe I just wanted to tell someone how I felt, and someone that I could ask what the hell I should do:

“All right,” I said, finally, lowering my voice to barely above a whisper in the cacophonous dining room. “So I was with Kevin the night of the St. Louis thing.”

“I figured as much,” Patrick beamed, the smirk returning to his face. “Proceed.”

“Not here,” I told him, looking around. It was the peak lunch hour; the odds of an Iota Chi spotting us, dropping their tray on the table, were high.

“Just switch the pronouns,” he said. “There you go. Tell me about her.”

I didn’t feel especially comfortable with that, but I was maybe that desperate for a sounding board:

“It’s only been a few times,” I told him, making sure no one was around; no one was. “But we had a fight and now I’m getting frozen out. And I don’t know. I like, you know, her. I don’t want this distance.”

I was not able to articulate anything more profound than “like.” I did like him. I did like him a lot, but I knew the problems. Date him? Date him covertly? Maybe? Just move forward--I didn’t know. There were so many potential landmines standing in a way of any sort of healthy relationship, but the more that I thought about Kevin, the more I didn’t care if my leg got blown off. It wouldn’t mean anything public; it would be our own secret, and there was nothing more secret about that secret than the other secrets we were already holding between the two of us.

“Well, do you actually like this person?” He replied, crunching the empty carton of yogurt in his fist, then dropping the mangled remains on his tray. “Like, do you actually want to date because you want to date? Or are you just pissed because you found out the sex was drying up, and now you feel like you missed your chance at being together?”

I did not entirely like the insinuation, and I didn’t understand why it couldn’t be a little of both: maybe I did want to be with Kevin, and maybe it was because he had completely cut me off, both as a friend and as a sexual accomplice. I didn’t understand how those two were mutually exclusive; I didn’t even understand how those two could ever be mutually exclusive, without some bleed together.

“Sometimes it’s the push you need,” I replied. “Sometimes you realize what you want because it’s taken away. I mean, I know he--she--slept with some other guy that night we came back from St. Louis. And I just felt so--I don’t know. I was pissed. Upset.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes you delude yourself into thinking a relationship is what you want because it’s taken away,” Patrick told him. “This happened to me with some chick in high school.”

“Are you switching pronouns too?”

He gave me the finger, but did not stop his story. “Katie Byrne. Like, we messed around for a little bit. And I didn’t want anything else, because she was a nice girl but you know, I didn’t want that sort of commitment as a senior when we were both going away. Which was fine, until she started seeing some other guy. And of course, now I’m furious over this thing. Thinking she’s the one that got away. Like, she’s moved on, and now I’ve got nothing. So I went completely insane over it, and asked her out to homecoming. And she said yes, so we start actually dating. And then I realized what a shitty idea it was getting back with her. And how I never should have done it in the first place, because all I actually wanted was to hook up with her. Or, at the very least, prevent her from hooking up with someone else. And I wound up screwing myself over in the process.”

It was a story with not an insignificant number of parallels. I would grant him that. And yes, I was not unaware that a large portion of my sudden affection for Kevin was based on the fact that he had so quickly--so coldly--slid me out of his life and slid some other guy into it, but that wasn’t necessarily what this was all about. It was about Kevin, too. About Kevin mostly. Because, at the end of the day, if Kevin was a girl, it would not have been complicated at all.

I did not exactly know how to articulate that, and I realized it was a floral but flimsy argument--maybe I was deluding myself.

“But at least you got sex out of it,” I offered, instead.

He swatted the air dismissively. “Just oral. Catholic schoolgirl.” He paused. “But that’s what I’m saying. Would you be happy if things just went back to sex?”

Well, yes: if things went back to the way they were? Friendship, with some X-rated exploration on occasion? Yes.

“Then you’re being stupid,” Patrick replied, “because you’re going to open a can of worms. You’re going to throw yourself into a relationship when you only wanted sex. And the potential to screw yourself over big-time is ten times more than it was with me and Katie Byrne. You know that.”

He had a knack for cutting to the core, and of course he was right: if Kevin and I took it a step more, if things progressed, I was setting myself up to be outed. Somehow. And, of course, I might not mind that down the road, if things were serious. But if things weren’t serious--if Kevin spooked, if things fell apart, then where was I?

But, then again, neither of us planned to come out. And in the back of my mind, I still didn’t think dating Kevin Malley would be the worst thing in the world.

Of course, that all depended on the idea that Kevin was amenable to talking about it. Because the decision to end whatever we had--insofar as a decision had been made--had been him. It was not necessarily my choice to reverse course.

“Well, sure,” Patrick said, “but no one who ended things because you weren’t committed is going to refuse to commit now, unless they’re getting some regular dick from someone else.”

I did not know if Kevin had anyone else. It had only been two weeks, and our contact had been so incidental anyway. I didn’t see Kevin suddenly dating another man, which made me feel a little better about my prospects on this whole endeavor.

“Well, we’ll be in Destin for spring break,” I said. “And he can’t avoid me there. You know?”

"All of Iota Chi is going," Patrick replied. "You’re in a house with, what, eight or ten people? There’s not going to be that much alone time for The Talk.”

“I just need a chance,” I told him. “I’ll get it. I’m not done with him yet.”

 

My internal dedication to this specific quest had grown over the following week. I had seen Kevin once in passing, at Bruno’s on Tuesday surrounded by a group of Iota Chi brothers, but I didn’t say anything to him directly. The conversation we needed to have would be our next conversation, and it needed to be threaded with utmost finesse: the setting, the mood, the timing. Sometime over the booze-soaked calendar of the weekend, I would corner him, force him. And, failing to achieve what I wanted, I would try again. We had five days.

Of course, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to achieve: something that involved regular sex. I didn’t really want to think that far ahead, because the very thought of what I might have to agree to in order to get Kevin back largely terrified me. I didn’t know exactly what I would say--I didn’t know what response I was most afraid of, most hoping for. But all I knew is that I did miss Kevin Malley, that I missed him kissing me, and touching me, and fucking me, and I just missed him, with his Purell addiction and his singing in the shower and his lame jokes.

And I knew enough about myself to know that I had to be the perfect amount of drunk in order to make this situation happened. I would have no courage when I was sober, and I would have no coherence when I was drunk, so finding somewhere in the boozy foothills of mid-afternoon was going to be the sweet spot. I realized that was a risky gambit, but it was the best thing I could think of. Booze will out; it was a truth serum, really, wasn’t it?

I did wind up in Kevin’s decrepit Tercel, just as Baker had promised; Kevin did not comment on my presence, aside from a polite but perfunctory greeting when I walked up. He was otherwise silent for the remainder of the car ride.

Which was not an especially encouraging sign, but okay, he was still mad at me. Maybe he wanted a conversation too: maybe he was mad because he thought I was mad, or because he was supposed to be mad because he was hurt. Either way, he did not shake my determination.

The house Veronica Tandy rented for all of us was far too nice for us: it was right on the beach, a white clapboard house with green shutters and a sunroom off the back. It was a block down from the other house of Iota Chi guys, and two blocks the other way from a house of Tri-Gammas, which made our house a kind of central coed party space.

I did not quite understand how room selection worked in this particular house, except to realize that it had largely been decided before we even set foot in the house. I was in a room with Tripp--the “pledge room” because it only had a twin bed, with a twin air mattress that looked like a pool raft on the floor next to it, and was located a bit away from everyone else, tucked behind the kitchen and laundry room.

“We played high-card last weekend to see who got to pick first,” Baker explained me, as he mixed us a pair of gin and gingers in the sunroom. “Except for you two. Naturally, we saved the shittiest room for the two pledges.”

“I thought we were family, Baker.”

He looked pleased with himself. “We are family,” he said. “There were lots of freshmen we could’ve invited, but we chose you two.” Mockingly saccharine, he added, “Aww,” and rustled my hair.

I swatted him away, and then took one of the drinks he’d mixed.

He clinked my glass with his own. “So why didn’t Fontenot come?” he asked.

It still felt weird to hear Erik called by his last name, because I didn’t call him that and because Fontenot didn’t really roll off the tongue with any sort of ease.

Erik was sitting out because of money--the whole trip would cost us a few hundred a piece and we knew he didn’t have the money for that, so he went home. Used the ride board to thumb his way back to Lake Laurel, near the Arkansas border, to be with his mom. He said she’d been nagging him to come home, which I didn’t doubt, but Tripp and I discussed later how he only said that after he found out how much it would cost. Money had never been a problem for me and Tripp, since we grew up with it; it was always there in excess, like water and food. We didn’t pass judgment on Erik for not having it; we just casually and separately noted the lengths he would go to keep us from remembering he didn’t have any of it.

“He definitely should’ve come,” I told Baker, trying to be as diplomatic as possible. “I don’t know. It’s, like, an expensive trip I guess. And last minute. I know his mom was nagging him.”

“Yeah, man,” he said, mournfully. “It sucks when you’re on scholarship.”

He said that last bit as if he had any personal experience, which he did not. Sure, Chris Baker was on a partial scholarship, or so he had mentioned at one of our lunches, but it was not because of a lack of means; I didn’t quite understand exactly where on the socio-economic strata the Bakers landed, since Baker never talked about that sort of thing, but it was certainly well into comfortable if he lived near Michaela Birdrock.

“Who are you rooming with?” I asked. “Morton?”

“No, Rowen,” he said. Proudly, he added, “He got first pick. We got a balcony.”

“Must be nice,” I told him. He gave me a sarcastic thumbs up

Kevin came into the kitchen, already shirtless and in board shorts. He appeared to be freeballing underneath them, which sent my mind racing through all of the sinister things I was hoping to do by the end of the weekend, after I cornered him.

Was I staring? Yes. Of course I was staring at him. It’d be so long since I’d seen him with this little clothing and I wanted him. Wanted him to lunge at me, pin me against the wall, and tell me that he wanted me too.

Instead, he was staring at me--definitely, but blankly, so I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. But I had a pretty decent idea of what he was thinking, none of it positive, like I was this little rodent that had managed to scurry onto his spring break trip. “Is everything out of the trunk? Veronica and I are going on a beer run and I want to load up.”

“Yeah,” Baker said. “Should be everything. I just brought in the liquor.”

“Need any help with the beer?” I asked Kevin. “I could go with you. Carry things.”

It seemed flimsy, but only Kevin maybe realized that. He smiled, not a cold smile, which was at least somewhat

“Veronica and I are going to get beer,” he repeated, stressing her name and punctuating each syllable.

“Oh, screw Veronica, I’ll go,” Baker replied. “I don’t want her to get us 240 bottles of cider.” To me, he added, “Hold down the fort, Becker.”

 

Without beer, Morton packed a thermos full of vodka-soda.

“It doesn’t make sense to get beer in New Orleans,” Morton explained, as he cracked it open, and began filling cups. “Because by the time you get here, it’s all warm. And it’s cheaper in Florida.”

“Cheaper than New Orleans?” Tripp asked. “I don’t know if that’s true.”

“My dear little,” Morton patronized, “you have a lot to learn about the Gulf Coast.”

“I’m from Pass Christian,” he replied, and Morton crossed his arms, realizing he was not going to win this one.

“So,” Morton said. “Becker. How’s your slampiece? Why didn’t she come?’

It took me a second to realize he was referring to Jackie Hughes, who seemed like such a figure from the distant past, even though it had only been a couple weeks ago.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “She’s kind of a weird girl.” I wasn’t exactly sure why “weird” had been the adjective I selected to describe Jackie Hughes--who was anything but weird; she was actually comfortingly normal. But I went with it.

“Jackie is not weird,” said Veronica, from her towel. “You could do a lot worse than her, Becker.”

“She’s not the one I have my eye on,” I replied, and I was suddenly filled with the terror that would only invite further questioning. I wasn’t sure how I’d hold up under questioning. But instead Brett Morton was quickly distracted by a shinier object: Kevin and Baker heading down the beach, each armed with a 24-pack of Natural Light.

“I’ve never been so happy to see Baker and Malley,” Morton shouted. “Is it really you? Is it a mirage? Am I imagining this?” He downed his vodka, and dropped the solo cup into the sand.

Kevin set his case of beer down on the other side of Veronica. He was luminous. I had never seen him shirtless in the saturated light of the sun; he was pale, even paler than I had imagined him to be, but he was perfect. His strong chest and his nice arms and his flat stomach, and all I could think about was how I wanted him.

I felt rumblings south of the border, so I flipped over onto my stomach to be safe. And continued to watch him. Watch as he spread his towel, and chuckled at something Veronica said. Watched as he sat cross-legged on the towel, and spread chalky white handfuls of sunscreen on his toned body. He was everything.

“Beer, Becker?” Baker asked, yanking me back to the reality of the situation we were in--the uncomfortable reality where I couldn’t exactly get off of my stomach for a few more seconds.

Instead, I closed my eyes and smiled, and pretended to be the most relaxed person in the universe. “Just set it down,” I told him, meditatively.

Baker chucked a can into the sand next to me, and I thought of things that were unappealing: the paper I had to write when we got back to campus, the last time Tripp and I played Battlescar 3, my mother’s Lexus--anything. And then it died down, and I propped myself up on my shoulders, reached forward, plucked up the beer, and shook the sand off.

Baker had put his towel next to mine, was also spreading sunscreen on his body, but it was somehow far less sexy than what Kevin was doing on the other side of the group.

“We should do this every day,” I told him.

“Drink and lie around?” Baker said. “We’re not too far off at Tulane, you know.”

He was staring wistfully at Veronica, who was in a giggling tug-of-war with Kevin over the sunscreen. I could see why an outsider would think there was some kind of flirtatious spark behind them, a relationship kept just behind the curtain, a sordid sexual secret. And I knew that look on Baker’s face: it was the look I was desperately trying not to let appear on my face when I was looking at Kevin.

I wondered if Baker knew that Veronica and Kevin did not have anything between them--that they could physiologically never have anything between them--but I figured he probably didn’t. I knew I couldn’t tell him, and I wasn’t sure that would improve his odds with Veronica either, but I just thought about how much easier it would be if he knew.

“I’m just saying,” I told him. “I could get used to it.”

“Five days here,” he grinned, “and you’ll never want to to drink again.”

 

“It’s great,” Baker was saying. “I have nothing to do next week. We get back, I dick around for five days, then we have formal, and only then do I have to start to think about finals.”

It suddenly dawned on me that, if that was in fact true, there was a major conflict looming on the calendar ahead of me. That I had not anticipated.

“Formal’s in two weeks,” I told him, even though, as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized that was not, in fact, true.

“Nope,” he said. “Weekend after we get back.”

Tripp knew exactly what the problem was, because he started dying of laughter.

“What,” Baker said, the smile falling from his face, suddenly suspicious that we were laughing at him.

“Becker’s sister’s coming next weekend,” Tripp said. With a malicious grin, he added, “So I guess we know who Becker’s taking to formal.”

I wanted to kill myself. Literally, die. No longer live.

At this point in the conversation, the embarrassment must’ve been wafting across the beach like a rancid smell; Kevin Malley suddenly perked up and, with a smile and more excitement on his face than I’d seen in weeks, came to revel in my misfortune.

“What’s this?” he said, his voice thick with schadenfreudal glee, squatting down next to Becker’s towel. “Becker’s taking his sister to formal?”

“No,” I said, sharply, and I resented that he was taking so much pleasure in this particular embarrassment. “I legit will not go, before I do that.” Except there wasn’t much I could do. I didn’t

“Justine’s hot,” Tripp said. “I’d take her, except I know you won’t let me bang her.”

Tripp was several beers in, but even so, he looked uncomfortable saying that. There was something about being in this exceptionally fratty environment that was pulling him in a direction we both knew was a bit outside of his wheelhouse. Inside Erik’s, certainly, but Erik wasn’t here.

“You’ll figure it out,” Chris Baker said, optimistically. “Please, there’s always someone who needs a date last-minute.”

“It’ll probably be Baker, let’s be real,” Kevin said, slapping an annoyed-looking Baker on the back, as he picked himself up and left the conversation.

Yes, it would probably be Baker, in the end, if he wasn’t taking one of the DMV girls. I took solace in the fact that I could probably entrust Justine with someone who a) had absolutely no game, and would feel far too guilty to do anything with Justine, even if he managed to cross that particular hurdle.

I imagined what it would be like to go with Kevin Malley. I wouldn’t. Obviously. But I imagined, walking into a room with him like that. But that was where the fantasy abruptly ended because there wasn’t much I could really imagine. It would be awkward and tortured, for both of us.

So I squelched that particular fantasy, and just decided that I would go with Jordan or Michaela, and Baker would go with Justine, and everything would probably fall into line pretty decently.

“It won’t be me,” Baker assured me. I didn’t believe that.

“Do you have a date to formal, Baker?” Tripp asked.

“No,” Baker replied, huffily. “But there’s plenty of time.”

 

By 9pm, we had all braised in the sun for hours; I was hot and my eyelids were heavy from the whole day of drinking outside. It felt later than it was somehow. We were at the other Iota Chi house, a block down, sitting around the firepit on their back patio with the rest of Iota Chi and Tri-Gamma.

“This firepit is sick,” said Rowen, putting his feet up on the stone perimeter. “Veronica, why didn’t you get us a house with a firepit?”

“Yeah, Veronica,” Kevin agreed, accepting the bowl that was being passed around from Baker. “We have to slum it in that crack den you got us.”

She flipped both of them off, and then carelessly went back to her animated conversation about geology lab with Dana Schwartz and Tommy Pereira.

Annie Rue, who had materialized from somewhere—she wasn’t staying at the Tri-Gamma house with the other girls—was sitting on Patrick’s lap, both of them enveloped in a conversation with Maddie Schindler, the other member of the DMV. Patrick and Annie were being objectively cuddly and disgusting, as per the norm, but not nearly as much as they had been in other situations, where they were sucking face without seemingly realize the external context. At least they were socializing.

And we were at that portion of the night where everyone seemed to balkanize into separate conversations; I was alone, staring across the fire at Kevin Malley, who was also alone.

“How are you doing, Becker?” he said, stiffly, maybe because he felt there was no other way out of this particular social nicety, but it was the first conversation he initiated with me in two weeks.

“I’m,” I said, “you know. Same as I always am.”

“That’s good,” he said. He held out the pipe; I nodded, and he stood up and walked it over to me.

“Light me,” I told him. “I can’t do it.”

Kevin’s lips played around a smile, if only for a split second, but then he decided instead to roll his eyes and scoff. “I can’t believe you still can’t light the damn thing. It’s not hard.”

“It’s an art,” I said, “not a skill.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied, and he lit the lighter as I inhaled. It was ashy, and there wasn’t much left. When I took the pipe out of my mouth, Kevin took it back, poked the ashy marijuana with the corner of the lighter.

“It’s cashed,” he said. “Does anyone have anymore?”

“I’m sorry,” Baker said, head snapping out of his conversation. “I think you have us confused with yourself.”

“Mine’s at the house,” he said, standing up, brushing off his thighs with his hands. “Do we want more? I’ll go grab it.”

There were vague groans in affirmation from pockets of the group.

“Do you need help?” I asked him. Kevin didn’t respond to that request; he had moved away, flipped his flashlight on, was already starting to walk down the beach without me.

 

The next morning was hostile, the world made up of angry brushstrokes. Tripp was snoring, facedown, on the mattress. He only snored when he was facedown, and he was only facedown when he was drunk and that was how he landed. He never moved when he slept; in Sharp, he made his bed only when he did laundry, because it stayed tucked and crisp no matter how many nights he slept in it.

I stepped out of bed, walked around the few inches of exposed floor between the bed and the air mattress, one foot in front of the other like I was on a tightrope. It was the kind of hangover that only seemed to exist inside my head—my temples were pounded, but I didn’t feel dizzy, I didn’t feel nauseous.

Baker had told me those were the best kinds of hangovers; the ones where you could pop a handful of ibuprofen and ride out the rest of the sentence with minimal disruption. So that was a good thing, except I hadn’t actually brought any Advil.

Outside our room was the kitchen, and I could smell bacon. Maddie Schindler, Matt Rowen, and Kevin Malley were standing around the stove. Kevin was the one doing the cooking. I hadn’t known he could cook, but for some reason it didn’t surprise me all that much.

“Morning Becker,” Rowen greeted. “Up early.”

“Not as early as you guys,” I told them. “What are you, still up from last night?”

“It’s nine-thirty,” Maddie replied. “I’m a morning person.”

“The early bird gets the worm,” Kevin echoed, sunnily but not especially warmly, as he flipped an omelet from the frying pan into an awaiting dish.

All of them were far too chipper for this hour of the morning, considering the sheer volume of alcohol consumed the day and night before.

“I need Advil,” I said, my voice more hoarse that I had been expecting, as Kevin reached around me to hand the omelet to Rowen, “before I can function.”

Maddie rummaged in her straw beach bag. “I’ve got some.” She pulled out a softball-sized bottle, Kirkland Signature, and tossed it to me. My reflexes were deadened to the point that I didn’t even attempt a catch; it clattered to the ground, and sprung open, unleashing a small army of pink pills across the cold tile.

“Nice catch,” Rowen mocked, spitting omelet into the air.

I bent down, took three off the floor, and swallowed them without water. And then I sullenly began sweeping them up with my forearm.

Kevin bent down next to me. “Here,” he said, picking up a handful, and putting it back into the jar.

“You’re in an awfully good mood this morning,” I told him, an observation more than an invitation—though, as his smile melted away, I knew he had seen it more as the latter. I was too groggy and hungover for effective intonation.

“We’re at the beach,” he replied, his voice suddenly cooling to match his face. “Don’t read too much into it.” And then he stood back up and went back to his omelets.

 

“So we get back Sunday night,” Morton was explaining to Tripp, running his finger through the sand as if checking something off of an invisible calendar that he had not bothered to draw. “And then we have a regular week, right? You’ll have pledge meeting on Tuesday, and a brotherhood event on Thursday. Saturday’s formal.” They both instinctively looked at me, to smirk. “And then Sunday starts T-week.”

T-week was what they were calling “transformation week,” which seemed like an intentionally-scrubbed synonym for hell week, which is what we were expecting.

“And T-week last until…” he said, his voice trailing off and his finger puncturing ellipses into the sand. “Well, until you’re ready.”

“So, a week,” Tripp said. “That would put initiation two weeks from Saturday.”

Morton’s general jolliness was not immune from conversations about pledgeship; he scowled. “No. It’s not Saturday. It’s when you’re ready.”

Morton was an astute actor, in this art installation that constituted our pledge leadership team, but it was pretty clear to everyone involved that initiation would be two weeks from Saturday, maybe two weeks from Sunday, depending on how the schedule lined up. We were nearly done with the semester; that weekend was our final weekend before study days, and none of us could imagine that Tulane would let any fraternity wade that close to finals without initiating their pledges.

So, Saturday. Two more weeks of this.

Morton seemed to realize he was failing to convince. “It’s only going to get harder from here,” he warned. “You saw what happened to Ben. This is when people start to drop, believe me.”

Kevin scoffed loudly from four towels away; Morton ignored him.

“I’m just saying,” he replied, “we have a lot of stuff planned. There’s a lot still to learn. You’re really only about midway through, if you want to look at it in terms of a time commitment. Because it gets tough. Very tough.”

The doomsday bit seemed to quiet Tripp, who was maintaining his composure pretty well but gnawing on his cuticles, the way he did when he was anxious. I was less convinced, but I knew better than to tempt fate; I imagined the first pledges to be dropped were the ones who failed to drink the Kool-Aid, and I certainly wasn’t going to let that happen to me after all of the time and effort I’d already invested.

“You’ll be fine,” Baker told me, as if I was the one who was concerned. “That’s what bigs are for.”

I loved Baker. I really did. He took his role mentor, as big brother, very seriously, and I appreciated that. He seemed to understand that he was supposed to be the layer of insulation between the fire and brimstone from Brett Morton and Harry Capuano, and the actual reality. Things weren’t quite like Baker described, but I appreciated having someone like that to translate.

Tripp had no such crutch from Morton, who relished his role; Louis and Erik had spoken maybe once since big-little night, at what Erik had described as an uncomfortably stiff Bruff lunch.

But regardless, I took solace in the fact that we were about two weeks out from it all being over. “Pledging is the most fun you’ll never want to have again,” Baker had told me, almost wistfully, at lunch last week. And maybe it was true, and maybe it was not true, but my mind remained firmly fixed on what would happen after.

“Someone toss me a beer,” called Kevin Malley.

 

The evening had fallen into a ritual; we traveled through the sand to the other Iota Chi at around sunset, where we could already smell burgers grilling. The firepit had been lit again, and I saw Annie Rue and Maddie Kessler roasted marshmallows.

“You know what,” Kevin said, just as he plopped down a case of beer in the ice bucket next to the grill. “I forgot my flashlight.”

“It’s sunny,” Morton noted. “Still.”

“Well, yeah,” Kevin said. “i don’t need it now. I need it for later.”

I sensed an opportunity and I was not going to let it be denied like it had been yesterday when Kevin went back to get another batch of weed.

“I left mine too,” I told him quickly, which was technically a true statement, even though I hadn’t actually intended to bring it with me to the other Iota Chi house. “I’ll be right back.”

Kevin pretended he hadn’t heard me, but he clearly had, because he was power-walking down the beach as fast as he could. I had never seen anyone walk so quickly. In my quasi-day drunken state, I was struggling to keep up with him.

“Would you slow the fuck down?” I called over to him.

Kevin stopped, spun around. “I’m sorry, why are you coming?”

“Fuck you,” I said. “You were so nice this morning.”

“No,” he said, “I helped you pick up Maddie’s Advil because you catch things like a faggot.”

That last word stung, and far more than I thought it would; Kevin seemed to notice that too. His jaw slackened a bit, then pursed into a defiant but apologetic grimace.

“Look,” he said, calmly, attempting another approach. “I know what you’re trying to do. I’ve seen how you keep trying to corner me, and I want you to know that I’m very consciously not trying to let you do that.”

Under differing circumstances, I might’ve laughed at how Kevin was able to see what I was doing—was I that transparent?—but under the current ones, I was more angry with him for not letting me explain myself, not letting me even get a word in when I needed a word in so desperately.

“Why won’t you just let me talk to you, about all of this?”

“Shut the fuck up,” he hissed, motioning his head over to the bonfire, which was paying zero attention to what we were talking about anyway. He took off again down the beach, and I scurried alongside him; I was not going to let him get away.

“I just want to talk,” I said. “Come on. You owe me that.”

Kevin snorted in contempt at that. He kept walking, but his pace had noticeably slowed back to human speed. “Owe you? I don’t owe you that. We fucked around. Now we don’t.”

“Oh fuck you,” I told him. “I’m sorry. What do you want me to say? I’m sorry. I didn’t want to go to St. Louis--I wanted to be with you. Is that what you want to hear?”

“I don’t want to hear anything,” he replied. “From you. You can’t give me anything that I can’t get from anyone else.”

“That’s not true.”

“No, that’s not true,” he said. “You could’ve given me something. And you didn’t, and you won’t.”

“Because I got detained one night?” I said. “I had to drive to St. Louis. That was not my idea.”

“It’s not about St. Louis,” he said. “Stop making this about St. Louis. It’s about the fact that you want me when it’s convenient for you, and you’re just really not at all concerned about what I want or what I need.”

“You don’t even tell me what you want or need,” I told him. “One minute, we’re having fun—and I actually feel like—” I stopped. Because I didn’t know exactly what he made me feel like, what I felt like. And he seemed to notice that, but he said nothing; he had ceded the floor to me.

So I continued. “I liked where things were. I didn’t know why they needed to be different.”

“They needed to be different,” he said, slowly, his mouth suddenly dripping with venom, “because I saw where it was going. It was going somewhere you weren’t willing to go. So I stopped it before it fucked us both over.” He paused, then, as if to convince himself as much as to convince me, “That’s why it can’t happen.”

And maybe he was right, but maybe he wasn’t right, and I was about to do something a bit more akin to groveling when I realized he had pushed all of the blame for where things were going—or where things weren’t going, or where things would be unable to go—onto my shoulders.

The last time I checked, Kevin Malley was also in the closet. Kevin Malley was also hiding things from everyone sitting around that bonfire, just as much as I was.

Where I wasn’t willing to go, he wasn’t willing to go either.

“You don’t even know what you need,” I told him, each word coming out exactly as callously and punctuated as I had hoped they would. “I’m not ready for what comes next? What makes you think you are? If you want a boyfriend so badly, then why does everyone at that bonfire think you’re fucking Veronica Tandy? ‘Lie of omission’ my ass.” Part of me decided I had made the point I was trying to make, but then Kevin opened his mouth to rebut, so I pushed onwards. “You want it both ways: you act like it’s all my fault because I won’t go out on a limb, but you’re a fucking basket case, because you know you won’t either. So stop trying to blame me and play the victim card, because it’s not attractive. If you want to be with me, man up and do it. Stop acting like a fucking torn vagina all the time.”

Despite my intention to hurt him, I had not planned that to be eviscerating. I had not planned that to be anything: my point just started moving along, as if it had a mind of its own, and of course it stumbled onto something incredibly potent, and incredibly accurate.

Kevin’s face had suddenly flushed a dark red, and there was passion and anger, and I couldn’t tell which one was in higher doses--if he was going to grab me and kiss me, or punch me in the face.

He did neither; he stood for a second, as the color drained back out of his face.

“Fine,” he said. “So maybe I don’t want you either, then.”

He had missed the point entirely. Or, more likely, he was refusing to give in to my point. That certainly sounded like a Kevin gambit, but I didn’t want to fight. The purpose of this conversation was not to bring us further from the negotiation table, but for us to leave it altogether, together.

We had reached the beach in front of our house, but neither of us made the effort to walk towards it. I knew we were going to finish this conversation, except I didn’t exactly know the destination we were on course for.

“I never said I didn’t want you,” I told him; my voice cracked, and I knew I was going to start getting emotional any second. And I was damned sure not going to be the first one to get emotional. So I swallowed, took a second to regain myself. “I do want you. I want you so fucking bad. And I don’t know—I don’t know if I’m ready for anything. And I don’t know if we can make any of this work, but I just…” My voice trailed off, because I knew I would fall to pieces if I finished that sentence. Semantically, I didn’t know what I was going to say, but we both knew what I was going to say, and it was romantic as hell.

The unspoken words floated between us like an enchantment, and Kevin and I were staring now, staring at each other. He had no expression, except for contemplation; no expression, except he was thinking about it, thinking about where I was, where he was, where we would be. And, I figured, thinking about how calamitous it could go if it ended later, when we were more invested, rather than if it ended now.

And then there were shrill voices coming from the terrace: Dana, Maddie, and Veronica, streaming out of the back door.

“I thought you guys left,” Veronica called over to us, as she picked up the pace.

“Forgot my flashlight,” Kevin said, finally, through a lump in his throat.

“I’ve got it,” Maddie said, patting her straw bag. “Let’s move before the beer’s gone.”