Joe College

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Joe College, Part 19

He didn't want to sleep in my bed. Not even that summer, when I had the only room in the house with air conditioning, and there was no other occupant on the second floor to hear him come or go. Some nights, after we got off, I faded to sleep, then woke minutes later when he slid out of my grip and went to his own room.

"I can't sleep if there's another person in bed," he said. "Besides, what's the point? If it's to go to sleep, you go to sleep. It's not like you do anything while you go to sleep. You just sleep."

"Right," I said, naked on the edge of my bed while he dressed. "I can't argue with your reasoning. It's nicer when you wake up in the morning, though."

"Yeah," he said, "it is, but even so, you're just tired all day the next day." He yanked his cargo shorts. "This is all really cool and everything. I just need normal sleep, you know?"

I held the back of his shorts and leaned my face forward against his cock bulge. "I know," I said toward his balls. "I just like the sleeping part."

"Ha," he said, breaking my grip to pick up his T-shirt. "The sleeping part is so not important."

That summer stretched out over slow afternoons and bleary, dawn-taunting nights. My days folded at around four in the morning and kick-started seven hours later. I rarely exchanged words with someone younger than 19 or older than 23. Chris and Trevor were behind most of it -- my co-adventurers and instigators, from April to August, 2003.

Our outside responsibilities were minimal. Chris waited tables a few nights a week at a French restaurant. Trevor had a job with the admissions office. He was an orientation leader -- 70 percent tour guide and 30 percent RA. When Trevor worked orientation he was away for 72 hour blocks. On those nights, he stayed in the dorms with the eighteen year olds who'd start school in the fall, and at day, he ushered clusters to placement tests, guest lectures, tours where he recited points of campus history and tradition.

As to my own obligations, I spent three hours each Tuesday and Thursday in an Arabic language class of ten students. Otherwise, I had my lofty title at the school paper. My summer position was at once stressful, fun and trivial. We published bi-weekly and were mostly staffed by writers and editors between their freshman and sophomore years. I'd had the longest tenure of anyone on the staff, but was clueless when it came to issues like layout and news judgment.

"Don't worry about that. Just make sure no one fucks up," Russell told me. "Don't get us sued. Don't let anyone publish `fuck' unless it's necessary. Don't let the news writers publish anything libelous.

Don't let the columnists publish anything that could be construed as racially offensive or that makes light of date rape -- those things have been known to happen."

"Jesus Christ," I said.

"Give hell to the sportswriters about not pissing off any head coaches, but also don't let them write kiss-ass pieces. Watch them with deadlines. They're the worst with deadlines. Read all the stories to make sure that the grammar is basically acceptable. Make sure everybody runs spellcheck but that they don't automatically defer to it. You won't get it a hundred percent right, but please spare us anything horrible -- like fucking up the variations of there, they're and their. Summer staff people can be good, but they're all young. Even the good ones might not know what they're doing."

"Yeah, Russell," I said, "but I don't know what I'm doing, either."

"Fuck you," he said. "You'll be fine."

There were others in my class year who were better suited for the job, but the ones with real skill were chasing unpaid internships at suburban or small-town publications close to where they grew up. Russell might have induced me with bacon-flavored compliments, but getting me to accept this job had been a matter of self-interest. I was his least-worst option.

At times, the place and the position became a kind of second home to me, too. By default, it's where I went in daylight hours, even if I didn't have a defined task. I'd sit at a desk, answering phones and leafing through the Times, while news reporters nervously assembled their work.

At nights, if Trevor was out of the house doing his orientation shifts at the same time that Chris was working, I'd get bored. Jacob the Subletter was nice guy who bought us alcohol upon request all summer, but he wasn't much of a hang-out dude. One night to myself was awesome -- I'd read in a coffeehouse, browse one of the bookstores, maybe go on a late run -- but more than that, and I became stir crazy.

I'd host a half-dozen people from the newspaper on the front porch, drinking cheap beer and listening to classic rock albums, gossiping about our colleagues, arguing about sports, politics and bands. Chris came home at about midnight. He'd grab a beer and fold in.

Mostly, though, that summer was about me, Chris and Trevor. And as time passes and I think about it, more and more of it becomes about me and Chris.

So, right. My sexual tastes were restrained. I was vaguely intrigued by the prospect of intercourse, but it wasn't what I jerked off to, and the prospect of asshole intrusion was both intimidating and distasteful, in a prudish, Victorian kind of way. I thought of it as trying out for the majors, but I was happy enough in the batting cages.

Getting myself penetrated in any way? No thank you. I'd tested it on myself a couple of times in the shower. When everything was soaped up, I attempted to press my fingertip up there, and quickly concluded that there was no future in that market. I mean, fucking ouch, and gross. It was unfathomable that someone could find that enjoyable. I concluded that to like getting plowed, a person must have an erotic relationship with pain.

Some of this was Matt's influence, because Matt (who had, in fact, had intercourse a couple of times but deemed it awkward and anticlimactic) talked that way a lot. It was also my own temperament. With Matt and Andy, there had been a lot of kissing and touching -- slow-paced, general affection. Middle-aged lesbians might have been edgier. Shit, even now, my ideal porno would be an extended video of two tall guys making out naked in appropriate domestic locations (the couch, the shower, the mattress) followed by a few minutes of 69ing, and external, Bellagio-style ejaculations. I liked giving blowjobs, and, as you might have inferred, I thought jizz had a lot to recommend as a sensory matter. Swallowing a guy's load, though? Yikes.

When Chris Riis said to me, "Cum on my face," I said something like, "Haw?" and rocked my balance backward.

Chris wasn't more sexually sophisticated or assured -- not by a longshot. He was, however, erratic, and careened to extremes. That's how it had been from that first night in my room. He took flight in seconds. He could be sitting next to me and everything would be calm and platonic. If I made a comment or gesture that he took as an affirmative signal, he landed on top of me. He'd grab me by the skull or the shoulders and slam me against the floor, the mattress, a wall. He'd been working out for a year, but my body remained significantly stronger than his. I could have swiped him off. Were it not for my physical leverage, his intensity might have been close to intimidating.

"Calm down," I'd say. My voice was quiet, intended to be reassuring. "We've got tons of time. Nobody else is even home."

His body slacked and his breaths slowed, like I'd just lifted him out of a state. "Yeah," he said.

I maneuvered him off me, with my mouth at his jawbone. "Just, like, draw it out. It doesn't need to be such a wrestling match."

"Good," he said, most likely for the sake of saying anything.

He would have a passive interval. His joints relaxed. Sometimes we were naked already, but if not, I'd pull him out of his clothes. He kissed if I initiated it, but he rarely kissed first. Chris's preferred style was a kind of slow, forceful grinding -- rubbing his cock against my inner thigh and against my balls, or else at my lower stomach, just at the top of my pubic hair. Often he did this while pinning down my elbow or shoulder. I was trying to slow it all down.

To again compare, with Matt Canetti and Andy Trafford, fooling around with them was almost like a conversation, or maybe an old-fashioned ballroom dance, where one of us led the other, and then you'd reverse roles, with the whole thing carried out in an unbroken rhythm. There were courtesies and implied understandings. By contrast, as soon as Chris got the go-ahead, he was crazed, and if I didn't verbally push a change of style, he kept knocking at his own pace.

One time he grabbed the edge of my left pectoral so hard that it left a bruise.

But I also have to make it clear: his style was incredibly hot.

It was like waiting for the fuse to hit the firecracker. I'd have in mind that I wanted to get off with him, and I'd give him a prolonged look, and grab his shoulder or his thigh, and a couple of seconds later -- slam. And seriously, the way he looked at me when we were together was sometimes enough to make me cum. The way Chris Riis could look at me, that is something that I still jerk off too. I'd be on my back and his face would be a few inches away, his blue eyes serious and focused, the slopes of his cheek and chin and nose so immediate, and I would think about what an awesome and remarkable life I enjoyed, when a person who looked as good as this guy could like me so much.

"I want you to cum on my face," he said.

"Haw?" I said, half laughing, and defaulting backward.

He'd just taken my dick out of his mouth to pull a stray hair off of his tongue.

This was just his second or third time trying to give me a blowjob. It was sloppy but enthusiastic. "Watch the teeth," I'd say gently and hold the weight of his head, when I felt their edges shear at the top of my shaft. His blowjob technique didn't feel good the way that it should, but whatever the shortcomings, the idea that he wanted to go down on me more than compensated for any flaws.

"You don't really want me to do that," I said, kind of laughing. I clutched his hair; it was shaggy; he hadn't gotten a haircut in at least a couple of months. "You don't have to say that just because you saw it in a movie or something."

Now he was self-conscious. He nodded and shrugged. I'd taken him out of a zone.

I went down on him, which I had grown to love doing, even when it made my jaw ache. Chris's hard dick was not dramatically bigger than it was when it was soft. When it was soft, it didn't have the folds or wrinkles to it that mine did. His was long and smooth in any state. I've been with dudes who look small soft -- just a couple of inches -- but they more than triple in size when they're hard. When Chris was soft, it was sculpted and defined, which is part of why he looked so fucking awesome when he was naked. The girth and length were just minimally bigger when he had a hard-on.

I slid my tongue around the circumference and into the slit. He moaned and arched his back. If we'd been in auditory privacy, Chris would have been loud. I could tell. He constantly muffled moans and exclamations. He couldn't cum without making a sound, but even when we were home alone, it was like he feared discovery, so he stifled it.

Chris responded to each gesture of my tongue. I would try to deep throat him -- taking it in until it hit the back of my throat -- and he released a slow, delighted moan, the skin of his stomach pacing in and out.

He liked me to watch him cum. There was the exhibitionist streak, and it got to a point where he almost didn't want to cum if it wasn't in full view of me. He'd whisper something like, "Wait, wait," and shift his body so that I could see, "I'm about to...," and trail off.

Sometimes he looked down to himself while he came, but usually he'd look up at me. I don't know if it was that my face got him off the way his got me off, or whether he was watching for approval. Chris almost always came before I did. Ultimately, he was an easier touch.

The campus and the town had depopulated. Those who remained walked at a slow shuffle. There were smatterings of classes, mostly taught by graduate students or adjuncts, and none by the blockbuster faculty. Even for those of us doing coursework, the academics were not our real agenda.

We were quasi-nomads, living in quasi-ease and quasi-luxury. There were seniors who'd just graduated and either didn't want to let go or weren't sure what to let go for. There were many who lacked the resources or ambitions to pursue internships in the cities, but who also didn't want to go home to parents. They spent the summers waiting tables or serving coffee -- or else doing nothing while they lived off more student loans.

This demographic proved to be self-selecting. It was like the highest achievers, the richest rich kids and the ones with direst financial needs all fled elsewhere. Those who stayed for the summer were a little shabbier, a little drunker, a little more stoned -- more likely to wear glasses and skip shaves.

During the school year, the coffee houses and restaurants were packed from 9 a.m. to closing. In the summer, you could wander into the air conditioning with only three or four tables occupied by the aimless.

For a place that could be brutally cold in the winter, there were days so hot that it stung. Prolonged spells of highs in the mid- or upper-90s. Irregular tornado watches. Days so hot that you didn't want to be outside. Once the sun went down, we would sit on the front porch, with beers and the grill, sweating in the humidity and basking in every cool breeze that flirted with the trees.

Then it would break, with highs in the seventies and evening lows in the sixties. We grew so accustomed to hot temperatures that it felt brisk.

At great labor and irritation, I'd bought an air conditioner for my room. This was more than a luxury. Having the attic room, the heat collected like a science fair project on global warming. After the first 90-degree day, it was so intolerable that I tried to sleep on the living room couch, but the living room wasn't cool, either, and the cross-breeze was weak. I dropped the cash, and carried in my arms the air conditioning unit for an eight-block, sweaty, bone-hating walk. I stripped in my room, and once the unit was installed in my window: pure bliss.

But then, because I had the air conditioning, Chris and Trevor were wanting to sleep on my floor a couple of nights a week. Like so many things in my room -- the Grand Theft Auto, the DVD binges, the blowjobs -- a tentative, grateful first incursion by a housemate quickly grew into assumed entitlement. And again, at first, it was kind of fun: like being in junior high and having a sleepover with two of your friends. But they both fell asleep more easily and soundly than I did, and they could both have tremors of snoring. With Trevor in the room, I couldn't rely on my most reliable sleeping aid (masturbation) and no matter how quiet and considerate they tried to be, their movements woke me in the morning.

The daytime heat could be so bad that Chris and I often took to running at night. We ran shirtless, because even at night, the air could be so muggy that your shirt dripped after a mile. The act of shirtless running was comparable to the way writers describe skinnydipping. It was extra-sensory, with the air immediately cooling the sweat on your skin. So many of the rental houses in the student ghettos had gone dark and lifeless, but we were still there, jogging through the heart of campus in our sneakers and nylon shorts, with the moon and the lights, girlfriends of strangers glancing at us as we passed.

One restless, sober night, Trevor incited us to jog in the rain. All three of us did a quick three-mile crisscross of campus, with barely anyone else in sight. Jogging bare-torsoed in the rain at 10 p.m., past these sites and landmarks that were so often jammed with people -- it all belonged to us. It all started to feel different. That we were no longer students who happened to go to this school. That now we had possession of this place, and it was the geography of who I was, just as surely as the streets where I grew up.

He touched me when we were both still sweating, as soon as we hit the landing of the second floor. Trevor was away at his orientation responsibilities, and there'd been no sign of Jacob the Subletter when we entered the house. Without the usual signal from me, he grabbed the back of my sweaty hair. He was already half-hard in his running shorts.

When I put my mouth to his neck, I got a quarter-teaspoon of sweat. Our chests and our hair were still dripping, and the heart rates still elevated. Our mouths were dry from the run -- a scent like boiled library.

He practically shoved me into his room and slammed the door. Before he could kick off his shoes, I yanked down his running shorts. The wave of odor hit me. If you'd told me that I'd be so aroused by it, I would have been indignant. Maybe because the sweat hadn't even dried yet, our smell didn't seem dirty or disgusting. It seemed instead like a sign of vigor.

I had myself shoeless and naked in seconds. Neither of us bothered to strip our socks. He pulled me to him at the hips. We pressed from thigh to shoulder, our skin congealing. I squeezed his upper back with my arms looped beneath his armpits, our dry tongues scraping when I put mine into his mouth.

"I don't know," he said, sounding embarrassed. "I'm sorry. But when we were running, I kept staring at the muscles in your back and your shoulders, and the way your, like, upper legs looked."

For most of our run, he ran about six feet behind me. When I'd asked if he was okay with the pace, he just said yeah.

"Don't be sorry," I said, my nose sliding against his slippery, sticky cheek. The air in his room was in the 80s and motionless. We weren't going to cool down.

"But it seems, like, rude," he said.

"What? That you think I'm hot?"

"Uh," he paused, caught on the phrasing. "That I think you're hot." He sounded skeptical.

"You think I'm hot," I said. I dug my fingers into his sweaty scalp. "And I think that you're very, very attractive."

"Ha."

Saying this was getting my dick even more fired up. "Like, amazing," I said. "You do know that I think that, right? You're so fucking hot." I mouthed the sweat at his chin and neck, and clenched his dick against my thigh. "Sometimes I just look at your face or you brush up against me, and I go crazy."

He pushed me back to his bed. My damp back clung to the sheets. He'd figured out by then that I get very turned on with a mouth at my ear or my neck. He pressed his at my ear canal. His exhaling into my ear brought a tickle in my spine. I laughed and arched my back. He cupped my balls in his hand, sliding his dick up against my sweating hip. Sometimes he could get so caught up in the moment that it seemed like he forgot I was there, almost like it was an achievement to be won and not a two-person experience. I held the back of his head so that he wouldn't move away from my neck or ear until I was ready.

The things with our bodies in the states they were in: lust doesn't cover it. It was complete blurring. Our hearts and our lungs hadn't eased up from the run, and neither had our sweat glands. We were like half-boiled salamanders. Our bodies' were uncivilized, maximally naked. There wasn't allowance for self-consciousness or modesty. The newness of the sweat felt human and untainted. It made my eyes sting and my lips burn. I wanted to drink off the surface of his body. I licked the sweat from his nipples and the pool of his navel.

When I took his dick into my mouth, the wave of scent and humidity hit my face -- the thick sweat smell, but with a spermy undertone, and a faintest drift of something sharp and acidic, like citrus or pine. I wouldn't describe it as good, in the traditional sense, except that it was narcotic in the fact that it was Chris Riis and my hormones were in that moment. His pubic hair was wet, and his balls were drawn tight to his body. I licked the length of his shaft, the blond hairs threading my tongue and lower lip, and inhaled deep through my nose. He breathed high and tight when I took the end of his dick into my mouth. I took it as deep into my throat as I could get it. It pressed passed my uvula and against my tonsils; I briefly thought of Linda Lovelace (RIP) and still didn't quite have it all the way in. Before I coughed or gagged, I slid my mouth back, digging into the slit of his cock with my tongue, breathing deep through my nose, moving my hands up and down his chest.

It had me so hot that I need to change positions to jerk my own dick. I took his out of my mouth, jerking it slowly with my spit as his lube, and reached down to my own cock, which was so tight that it hurt.

"You know-," I started to say.

Chris made the telltale whimper that preceded his orgasms. I didn't recognize it in time. Before I could move or it dawned on me, a line of his cum nailed me in the upper-left forehead, going just above the eyebrow and into my hair.

It was a sex equivalent of abruptly getting hit by a water balloon, or like an old comedy sketch where a scoundrel nails an unsuspecting businessman in the face with a pie.

"Ack!" I half squealed, and darted out of the way, while he jizzed on his stomach, onto the sheets, into the air. I wiped it off my brow and forehead, laughing at the same time. "You did that on purpose!"

"Whoah! Shit!" he whisper-shouted. I hadn't heard him curse in a long time. He was still cumming.

I'd heard somewhere -- in tenth-grade oral folklore, or perhaps the movie "Go" -- that semen badly stings if it gets in your eyes. That was my primary concern. I tried to wipe it away with my hand and the hair on the back of my arm. I used his sheet to mop my face and arm.

"Dude," he said, "I'm so sorry."

"You did that on purpose!"

"Oh, man," he said, sitting up. "Like, I just wasn't thinking. My head was in another place."

"Wow," I said. Semen broiled on his chest and stomach. Fresh lines of sweat streamed over his neck and forehead. I watched a drop slide above a slightly defined pec before it stopped.

"It was just not what I meant to do at all," Chris said.

I know he didn't intend it. He was hilariously remorseful.

"Shut up," I said, grabbing him by the shoulders and kissing him. "You're crazy."

I pushed him back on the bed, pinning him with my knees, kissing him while my dick slid against the sweat and cum of his stomach. Indeed, his semen lent a fresh cologne to the room. I straddled him on my knees. I licked the palm of my hand and stroked myself, staring down at his face. He watched my dick. At first he stroked the back of my upper thighs, just below my butt, but then he clenched my ass muscle in squeeze-and-release pumps.

When I tried to aim my cum at his face, of course it was intentional, and I didn't do it because I wanted to fulfill some kind of pornish scenario he must have glimpsed and internalized. It was tit for tat, like when you were a kid and someone blindsided you with a squirtgun, so you then stalked for revenge.

When you're straddled over a person and start shooting jizz, you don't have squirtgun-level accuracy. Most of it hit his pillows and headboard. On the fourth or fifth shots, I angled my dick downward, and managed to get his hair and forehead and part of a cheek. Whatever porn had led him to believe, my misfires must have been significantly less erotic than he'd imagined. He wiped the stray drops off his face, seeming mostly exhausted and bewildered.

"Okay," I said, climbing off him and looking down at the mess we'd created. "I admit that I did that on purpose."

"Yeah," he said. "I could tell."

"Right," I said. "Now we have to find a way to air out this room."

We wandered around the stores near campus, just to kill time before he went to work. I was planning to go home and nap, then invite people to drink at nine or ten.

We went into a bookstore that I visited about once a week. I bought him a copy of Gatsby, just because. He hadn't read it. One of his loose summer goals had been to read more. After Dead Poets Society, he bought an anthology of the Romantic poets, and, like a lot of us with poetry books, left it largely untouched.

We sat on a sidewalk table with iced coffees and the books I bought.

"The thing with Nick Carraway," I said, pointing at my abrupt gift, "is that he's a liar. He starts with a monologue about how he's the only person he knows who's capable of withholding judgment, but then he spends the entire book judging everybody. You can't believe anything he says."

"Why do you say it's the greatest of all time?"

"It's full of great sequences and twists. Lots of sex and booze and parties, but then you get to the end, and it's about people's dreams and self-delusion, and these kinds of facades that people put up to conform. Everybody's kind of a jerk, but except for Tom Buchanan, they're all sympathetic. But he's such a great writer that it's all done in a way that's funny, exciting, weird. Not preachy. It's as fun as a great book can be."

He picked it up and went back to reading. I thumbed at a short story collection but I wasn't in the mood. Wearing my sunglasses, I stared down at the mostly-empty sidewalk, silently counting my pulse. I watched a hottish guy amble down the sidewalk until he passed us and continued on his way.

"Hey," Chris said. "I have a question. It sounds kind of weird, but I don't mean it in a weird way."

"You know I love weird shit," I said.

"How do you think we got to be friends?" Chris said.

"You're just a nice, funny guy. Sam and I liked you right away."

"But we're, like, so different."

"Right, but that's good, right? I can't imagine if the only people I knew were like Sam or like me."

"Like, that I have this life, and that I'm friends with you and with all these other people. Like, `Why are they friends with a person like me?' It's not that I think I suck. You've got all of these crazy ideas, and energy, and ambition, and you do all of this stuff, and what do I do?"

"You should probably stop," I said. "You're going to bum me out if you keep going."

"Why?"

"Because," I said, thinking about my hatred of giving or receiving compliments, "you're just awesome, and everybody loves you. If I asked them, they'd all say that you're one of their best friends."

"I know. I'm not explaining it right. I'm not talking in a negative way," he said. "It's just, like. When I was growing up, I obviously had friends and whatever, but it wasn't like this. For me, it was more about my family a lot of the time. Like, what makes people like each other? How do people start to like each other, and why? And it's not, like, because they're there, because you meet people all the time, and they might be okay, but they're not people that you want to actually know and have be a part of your life. It's not because you have similar tastes or interests, because half the time, that's not true, either."

"I think part of it's that you want to be around people you trust, right? And some of that's just based on how they talk and present themselves. There are people I meet, and I might think, `What a pompous, self-promoting asshole,' but other people might get a totally different read, and see something like integrity or values. So maybe a part of it is people that you feel like will be good and loyal, and that they'll reciprocate, and that probably works a little differently for everybody." I was making this up as I went along, but I realized that I believed it. "And beyond that, just speaking for myself, a lot of the people who I really like, and that certainly includes you, have some kind of quality that I wish I had for myself. I mean that there's something about them that I can admire and want to emulate, but that I know I'm lacking."

"Like what?"

"Specific examples?" I said.

He shrugged.

"Ugh." I didn't want to go on the record effusing about nice things. "I mean, like Sam can walk into a party, and he can be so outgoing and familiar, that even though he doesn't know a person, he can talk to them in five minutes, and they like him, but it never seems phony. I mean, isn't it ridiculous that Sam can be so profane and obnoxious, but that he's friends with all of these great people? He basically handpicked everybody that lives in the house. I barely knew any of them before we all moved in. It seems like Sam predicted how everybody would get along and fit. He's got some kind of genius for that.

"And Michelle is so genuinely interested in people, and uses so much thought and care in how she talks to them and maintains her friendships. It's like she looks at people and decides what she can do to make things better. Or that Katie sees bullshit from miles away and can call it out to your face totally fearlessly, and that Trevor, almost all the time, seems so happy and enthusiastic about everything, but also in a way that never seems phony. Those are all things that I don't have -- like, at all -- and I wish that I did, but I don't, and being around people who do have those things, it makes me better, and I see how they do those things, and I try to use it in my life."

"Interesting," Chris said. "Very interesting. Maybe I've done the same thing without realizing."

"Right," I said, "or that you'd even think to ask a question like this, or to appreciate some of the things that you appreciate, which I totally take for granted."

"But you have some of those things," he said. "You're good at meeting people. You're interested in other people like Michelle is."

"Maybe," I said. "It's funny because sometimes, you start to realize that the way other people see you isn't how you see yourself at all. In good ways and in bad ways. Which is maybe why you're questioning why other people like you, when to me, it's obvious why we all like you."

Satisfactory resolution. He returned to his book.

As the nights repeated and built -- two or three times a week, all similar in structure and participants, different in energy and outcome -- our respective friends coalesced, even if they had no outside connection. My nerdy, eccentric newspaper friends bonded with Trevor's extroverted, cleancut orientation friends. We played card games, tossed a football down the traffic-free street, ordered delivery at 2 a.m., pulled out a portable CD player and, if drunk and necessary, danced on the sidewalk.

Its uncreative name was Porch Club. All told, there were about two dozen members, a half-dozen whom were adamant about hanging out. As in, other plans were dropped and rearranged in order to get to the porch at 1254 Hamilton. They called themselves the Porch VIP Club.

At Porch Club, you could only drink Rolling Rock or Night Train from the bottle. Nobody ever enforced this rule because nobody ever had to.

Porch Club's members were expected to shout the choruses of annoying, slightly nostalgic pop songs, specifically MMMBop and Mambo No. 5.

Porch Club honored Jacob the Subletter. He bought us most of the beer. He was our benefactor.

We were discouraged from throwing things at one another, but if strangers approached down the sidewalk, it was acceptable to toss dimes and pennies in their direction, so long as you weren't trying to harm the target or hit his or her face. It was like our version of horseshoes. Targets could be annoyed, amused, or oblivious, but none of them tried to fight us.

Friendly pedestrians were sometimes invited to join. Chances of an invitation improved as the night got later.

This rules list is non-exhaustive. Like a summer camp of 20-year-olds, there were traditions and assigned tasks. I wish that I'd kept a list of them. I've already forgotten too many.

I saw one Porch Club boob and one Porch Club wiener, both of which were accidental public reveals, neither of which was satisfying.

At times I found myself flirting harmlessly with one of Trevor's girls. They liked me and Chris. Sometimes Trevor dropped encouraging hints. Trevor's sex life had been robust that summer. Chris didn't know what to make of those promptings, but I'm a sucker for attention.

One night this girl Meredith and I danced on the sidewalk, and when I broke for a fresh beer and a sit, she sidled next to me, and said in my ear, "Should we go inside? It's chilly." This briefly perplexed me, because who wanted to go inside when there was so much fun to be had with everybody? And then I thought, Oh, and I shrugged and cheerfully said, "Yeah, but it's too hot inside," leaving it at that. She wasn't hurt or offended. Her expression was, if anything, surprised, but in a way that seemed, like, pleased, as if I'd contradicted a negative assumption.

"You're an interesting guy, Joe," she said.

"Ha! That's Chris's word," I said. "He calls everything interesting."

"Interesting," she said.

"Isn't it?" I said.

Chris's hair grew increasingly shaggy, until sometime in early July. He had a light tan from our runs, and from afternoon matches of golf and tennis with Trevor. With the long, golden-blond hair and the tanned-marshmallow complexion, he looked like a surfer or a skater. The effect was extremely attractive, especially knowing how radiclally the look betrayed the personality.

His manager hinted that it was starting to look edgy for the restaurant. When I was at the newspaper one Wednesday, he and Trevor went to a barbershop and left with fauxhawks.

"You look like gay elves," I said.

"I was going to wait until you got home," Trevor said, "but I knew you'd never go in on it."

"Right," I said. "I like looking too manly to be in `N Sync."

"I liked `N Sync," Chris said.

"No you didn't."

"Yeah. Their songs were real good." Joking, obviously. "Oh giiirrrl," he sang, in falsetto, "you make me wanna grooooove." He did an impromptu dance that cannily mimicked the boy-band videos, arms swinging in unison to his hips. "And when you make me grooooove, it makes me love you tooooo."

"That's not a real song," I said.

"Is so," he said. "It's called Make Me Wanna Groove."

"You hate the coolness," Trevor said. "You're bitter because you look like a junior accountant."

In truth, I was a little jealous that they went off and did this without me, yes, even though, no, there's no way I would've joined Team Fauxhawk, and I acknowledge that, yes, they both looked good with their hair like that, and, yes, if I'd passed them on the street, especially in New York, I probably would have concluded that they were gay, but in an attractive way.

"We got asparagus," Trevor said. "And chicken. Do you want to grill in a couple of hours?"

"And watermelon," Chris said.

"Cool. Have you called Porch Club into session?"

"Nah," Trevor said. "Let's keep it chill tonight."

And so we did. Our porch was usually a social hub, but that night it was just us. When Jacob the Subletter came back, he took a seat drank with us for awhile. Trevor came up with his pipe and some weed. He'd been smoking a lot that summer, but I hadn't had any since that first night with Chris.

"I talked to Katie on the phone today," Chris said. "She said to say hi."

"How is she?" I said.

"Bored," Chris said. "I miss her."

"I miss her too," I said.

"Why doesn't she come for a weekend?" Trevor said. "Chicago's not that far."

"I told her that, and she was like, `Yes! I totally will!' But it was, like, in a way where I could tell that she wouldn't."

"Weird."

"Yeah," Trevor said, "Katie's weird sometimes."

"Look," I said to Trevor, slightly stoned, slightly drunk, "we all know what's going on with you and Katie. Like, everybody in the house knows. It's totally obvious."

"Naturally," Trevor said. "You're all awesome detectives. You need to be a genius to figure that out. Every day, I feel like I'm living in `Murder, She Wrote,' because you guys solve mysteries left and right."

"Bullshit. It's Scooby-Doo,' not Murder, She Wrote.'"

"Oh, perfect!" Trevor said. "Pieces is Fred, Katie is Daphne, Michelle is Thelma, you're Shaggy and Sam is Scooby."

"Ha!" Chris said. "That's fantastic! We definitely should do that for Halloween, right?"

"Please," I said. "How am I like Shaggy?"

"By default. I guess you could be Scooby and Sam could be Shaggy, but Sam seems more like a Scooby."

"But I'm more of a Fred," I said.

"No way," Trevor said. "Pieces looks like Fred. You look nothing like Fred."

"Not with the fauxhawk. With the fauxhawk, he looks like Carson Daley's buttboy. Or what's his -- Ryan Seacrest, from the Idol."

"Stop dishonoring my hair," Chris said, making a show of patting it for consistency of style.

I reached over and messed it up. He pretended to struggle, a false display of trying to bat my arm. He stopped fighting, and for several seconds, I manipulated his hair to an imprecise part. Chris gently slapped me in the stomach.

"It's too bad that you guys aren't actually gay," Trevor said, "because you're, like, in love with each other so much."

Trevor wasn't mocking us. It was very nearly sincere, even if he said it while laughing. I expected Chris to freak, but he sat blankly, as if the comment hadn't been made.

See, I understood how to play a comment like that. Did people think it was weird that I didn't have a girlfriend? That I didn't date, or jump into the banter that most guys, regardless of conquests or temperament, love? Hell yes.

Did any of them ever suspect that I was gay? Hell no. I'm convinced of this. I could win the point at trial. A large part of that was that I didn't fit the stereotype, but a necessary condition was that I knew how to divert the conversation.

"The problem with that," I said to Trevor, "is that I've only ever loved one man in that way, and that's you."

"Oh, God," he said. "Don't announce that in front of Pieces!"

"Time to come clean."

"My parents will be heartbroken," he said. "Not because we're in love, but because you're not Indian."

"Gandhi porked Murphy Brown in that movie."

"Bite your tongue," Trevor said. "Gandhi and Murphy Brown didn't pork. You're thinking of Ben Kingsley. Even if he did, that wouldn't sway my parents."

"Ah, fuck it," I said. "I'll dress in brownface and put on a sari, if that's what it takes."

And that was it. Back to the finer points of Scooby-Doo casting, Chris's purported favorite boy bands, and my re-telling of the classic origins story where Sam and I first met Chris, and he puked and went crazy.

I glanced in Chris's direction through the night, seeing if he was visibly rattled by Trevor's remark. I feared a stray, defensive comment, or a remark to overcompensate, but no. He was cooler than I expected. It was like he hadn't heard it.

We had the first variation of this conversation a couple of weeks later.

He knocked on my door before opening it. His body language was tense.

So was his face.

"Do you have a minute?" he said.

"Is everything okay?"

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Totally okay. I just wanted to check in about something."

"Okay."

"I just want to make sure you understand," Chris said, halting and deep, "that I'm not gay." The last word, he said quickly and softly, as to avoid saying Beetlejuice three times.

"Okay," I said.

"I mean that I'm not." His voice went down to a whisper. He thrust his hands. He kept his eyes focused several feet in front of me. "That is, I'm not attracted to other males. Not interested in guys. Not sexually. And that needs to be clear."

"Okay," I said. It seemed like he was trying to be metaphysical, but that was not in his nature. My instinct was to be sarcastic or skeptical, but, again, he seemed serious, even if I wasn't clear on what he was trying to tell me, or why. "So, do you mean that you think you're, like, bisexual?"

"Whoah. No." His nose and forehead wrinkled. It looked a bit theatrical, like he'd practiced the expression the same way he practiced his words. "I"m not any one of those things. I'm not anything."

"Okay, wait," I said. "You mean as a label, right?"

"Yes, exactly," he said. "Definitely not as a label. That, but also not as a fact. The part about, like, being attracted."

I pretended that I understood, and I nodded, as if we had it all figured out. Perhaps he was nervous that I'd tip someone off -- hence, he wasn't "gay." Or he wasn't your stereotypical homo, and needed to declare that -- hence, he wasn't "gay."

"Okay, just so we're clear," I said, "the point is that you're not gay."

"Yeah," he said. "Exactly."

"Got it," I said. "We're clear."

"I want to like," he paused, and made a long "argh," type sound, as his dick was near the cusp of my asshole, "like," he paused again, "ugh."

"Not with me," I said.

"I know," he said. "It'd be, like, too much."

"Right," I said, "and I'm sure it'd hurt."

"But, like, ugh," he said.

"That you want to, like, fuck me."

"Naw. That's a very gross way to think of it. Like, very vulgar."

"How should I put it?"

"It's, like, a kind of a confidential study. Or experience. I'd phrase it as an experience."

"An experience of what?"

At least he could laugh at himself. There were many words that he didn't want to use. "An experience of being extreme?"

I hugged his head. "You're crazy."

"I know," he said. He straddled my hips so that his dick was in view.

He looked down as he stroked it, then he looked at me watching it, and we had one of those flashes of eye contact that, at the right moment, could get me off without even trying.

"The guy who wanted me to cum on his face," I said, "is now too shy to even use a euphemism for sexual congress."

He laughed at his red self. "Sometimes we get too carried away."

"No," I said. "I like that you want to do that to me. I think it's awesome. I just don't think that I'm going to be able to do that. Only because I think it would hurt. If I didn't think it would hurt, I'd try."

"But you've done it before," he said.

"No."

"Come on," he said, good natured. "I don't believe you."

"Seriously."

"Come on."

"For real. The stuff I do with you is the stuff that I've always done. Except for that part where you, like, partially blew your wad on my face. That was new. I still don't think it was an accident."

"Come oooooonnn," he said. Even if he couldn't bring himself to say, directly, that he wanted to fuck me, this was the most he'd talked about sex. "We all get carried away."

"I dig it when you get carried away," I said. "Sometimes a little, like, rowdy about it, but even then. You know I like it. You know how much I like you."

He was still astride my hips, stroking his dick. I rubbed my thumb against the underside of its head and the slit of it.

"I bet you say that to all the," again, he paused before he hit the universal word. "People."

"Yes," I said. He had no idea that I'd used that as my own euphemism.

"I do say it to all the `people.'"

"You're probably a playa," he said.

"Yeah. I'm so smooth."

"You're so smooth when you want to be."

"Yeah, right."

"You are. When you want to be."

"I'm not a playa."

"Like, how many?"

Andy, Matt, Ben -- I didn't count trying to dickslap Wally or making out with him, because it was innocent and I didn't remember, anyway. "Three," I said.

"Guys or girls?"

"Guys."

"Only guys?"

"Oh, no. I was just counting guys. Before guys -- what exactly are we counting?"

"I don't know," he said.

"If making out with a girl counts, like, seven or eight, but if it's junk-touching, only one girl."

"And three guys?" he said.

"Not including you. You'd be the fourth guy."

"Huh. Interesting."

"What about you?" I said.

"Probably a couple thousand," he said. "I lost count in ninth grade."

"Wow!" I said. "That's very accomplished. This was all when you were living in Michigan?"

"Nah," he said. "From all over the world. Tibet, Guatemala, France."

"Even more impressive. What country was the best?"

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "Probably Cambodia. Its capital is Phnom Penh."

During the entire discussion, he played with his dick -- stroking it, hitting it against his thigh, rubbing the underside of it against his stomach. He alternated glances between my face and his dick.

"You're a great geographer."

"A geographer of ... passion," he said, laughing at his words before the sentence ended.

"Like, an aspiring cartographer of fucking."

"Ugh. Nasty." He shoved my shoulder.

"Right. Okay. Just a collector of experiences."

This whole session wasn't even supposed to be happening. It was barely afternoon. He didn't work that night, and Porch Club ran late the night before. I'd been showered and dressed at around 11:30, and sat in our muggy kitchen, eating cold cereal and fiddling with a Times crossword.

"You doing anything today?" he'd asked.

"Nothing planned," I said.

"Cool," he said.

"Maybe go to a movie in the afternoon?"

"Yeah," he said. "AC."

"Exactly. You can come up to my room if you want. I'm going to crank up the AC and read or something."

"Play Vice City?" he said.

"Sure," I said.

It happened quickly. He came up the stairs to my room, closed the door, and took off his clothes. I was still watching Price Is Right.

"Well," I said.

He wasn't hard. He sat next to me on the futon.

"It's hot out," he said.

"Oh, shut up," I said, grabbing his head, kissing him, and going down on his stiffened cock about 45 seconds later.

When he went for one of his usual forceful moves, I was like, "Just chill. Let's go slow this time." I stood and methodically removed my shirt and shorts, leaving the boxers on. "Nobody's around. We've got all day if that's what we want. Let's just be calm and chill about it."

He let me take the lead that time. When he showed hints of turning slammy and forceful, I overpowered him. No pinning my shoulders to the mattress that day.

"I'm serious that I've never had experiences in being extreme," I said.

"I still don't believe you."

"Just haven't gotten into it."

"Neither have I," he said.

I kissed at his neck, even though it didn't get the reaction out of him that it did out of me.

After we got off, I drifted to sleep. It was early for a nap, but we had been up late drinking the night before. The AC blew cold on us and, paradoxical to the temperature outdoors, his warm body felt good under the comforter. I dozed on and off for about 90 minutes, my face variously pressed against his shoulder, chest and armpit.

I'd wake for several seconds, thinking that he was asleep, but when I moved to see, it was apparent that he was awake, lying there. There was no music or radio. It was just him, lying on his back, not entirely hard, while I slept against him. Tempted to say something or ask what he was thinking, I caught myself -- Remember what he said to you a couple of weeks ago, Ca___,' I thought, mentally calling myself by my last name. Just have fun with this and don't trick yourself into thinking that it's more than it is.'

I repositioned my face against his afternoon skin, satisfied that he hadn't moved yet, and drifted back to sleep.

It was the middle of August and the tentacles tightened. People were going home for a week or two with their families, before Labor Day passed and the school year revived. Every refugee misses the old country sometimes.

There was never a declared final session of Porch Club, both because the whole operation was informal and unorganized, and the idea of hosting an end-of-summer night struck me as too sad to mention.

We had a night that effectively served that function. There were more people than could comfortably fit on the porch at once, so it spilled to the sidewalk and our thin patch of muddy grass.

There was this sense of saying good-bye and missing each other, even though classes would start in less than a month, and we'd be back in no time. We were saying good-bye because we'd soon have full classloads, extra-curricular responsibilities, relationships that sometimes bore semblances of dating, the casts of regular-season friends.

All of these people bonded in the way that can happen when you're abroad alone and naturally fall in with other English speakers. We were all friends after that, but not the kind of friends where you naturally expected to see each other twice a week for eight-hour sessions, developed absurd inside jokes and expected to wake the next day and live it all again.

I made a good friend that summer. Her name is Stephanie. If this were a different story, this chapter would have had several thousand words about her -- but narrative limits, writerly discipline, et cetera. Stephanie ran the news staff that summer, and she was in love with the idea of being a reporter.

This wasn't one of those situations where you immediately like a person. She nagged me at work. She worked longer hours than I did, not because they were necessary, but because she was a perfectionist who, she could admit, bordered on paranoia. She'd spend an hour carefully reading and editing a story about something dull and mundane (say, the appointment of an assistant dean) and it wasn't unusual for her to send one of her five-person staff out to harvest more quotes. At times, she loomed over my shoulder while I read final proofs of her pages.

"Do you mind?" I said in our second week together.

"I'm just making sure it's all okay."

"Stop hovering over me like the angel of death," I said.

She backed away and took a seat at a computer terminal, fuming but appearing fragile. I sensed what she was thinking: that I was a dumbass who'd only written music reviews, and had gotten the summer post because I happened to be a year older than her.

After about a month, I understood that she made my life earlier. She could be a smug know-it-all, but that was my kind of person. I'd like to think that she realized I wasn't a cocky tool from Westchester; my knowledge of the university's arcana wasn't equal to hers, but any time we talked current events, I spun out facts that threw her (she was a center-left, John Kerry type, while I was a Howard Dean) and what I didn't know about the school, I picked up fast.

And then, the way that these things can evolve, the initial tensions broke. She was like someone from a different time, with idealist streaks that ran deep, but intellectual purpose and a lack of shame about who she was -- a five-foot-two, incredibly skinny, weak-jawed, glasses-wearing girl from Long Island, who didn't give a mouse's shit about reality TV or whether her ass looked bad in those jeans. She was how you see women in certain movies from the seventies, who stand up for their intellect and don't give a fuck about their hair or their handbag.

God, she was smart, and forceful, and sincere. Even though she was technically my subordinate, and had a year's less experience, I learned far more from her than she did from me. She basically schooled me in newspapering. It was just my job to get out of her way, and to occasionally provide a reality check when her enthusiasms outracedher.

She entered Porch Club in June, but she wasn't hardcore. Her limbs lost position after three beers and she couldn't stand marijuana or tobacco smoke. She rarely stayed past midnight. But God, how she blushed if Trevor hugged her good night.

On that last night, she hung around. She kept refilling her bottle of water. I wanted to tease her for finally staying late, but that would have made her self-conscious.

Sometime after 2 a.m. we cycled through the usual CDs. Chris came down from my room with a new stack. He was becoming as particular about the party music as I was. He put on a CD of Sam Cooke, which, of course he did -- he liked music from the 60s and knew I loved Sam Cooke.

You know the song Twistin' the Night Away. It plays early in Animal House, at the first Delta party. And I fucking love that movie, and I have this Sam Cooke song in my blood, and it was late in the evening of what we knew to be an unofficial close of summer, so when the song came on our cheap portable CD player, it hit me like an espresso spiked with nicotine.

"Come here!" I yelped at Stephanie. "We're dancing now!" I grabbed her chickenbone wrist and dragged her to the sidewalk.

Of course she wasn't a great dancer, but she didn't care about that. Who would? We were living our spontaneous outburst anchored in a dance that was well unfashionable by the time our parents had been our age. When the song ended, I darted to the porch to play it again.

Stephanie smiled so much, practically laughing her every breath. It was crazy, how happy she seemed. I wondered if she had a crush on me, or if it was some kind of hybrid crush on the broad idea of it all. I imagined that she hadn't hung out with guys like us in high school, which I'm not saying because I think that I'm so fucking special, but I was tall and athletic and devastating handsome (ahem) and (at rare moments) mildly personable, and I imagined that when she was in high school, maybe she didn't spend late nights dancing at parties. She and I probably wouldn't have been in the same cliques and wouldn't have talked to each other in our classes, not because of dislike or social distinction, but because I would have been aloof and she would have been shy.

She was at college now, and we were true friends. I liked her! And I liked that I could grab her by the hand and convince her to come to the sidewalk in front of the house, dancing this silly dance to a beloved song, and that, by all appearances, my doing this seemed to bring her joy. And that, in turn, brought me joy, because even if it sprung from a delusion of my grandeur, it thrilled me to think that I was responsible for making her laugh like that. This might have been imagined; it might have been egotistical; but I don't care, because I was with this friend who I liked, and I was overjoyed to be dancing with her, too, and if there was a chance that my friendship made her happy, all the better, and if my narcissism contributed to this idea, then Balls love it. I wanted to please this person and support this person, and watch her, and at some point in the future, brag that I knew her when.

Usually at 4 a.m., group energy tipped toward yawns, stretches and good-byes. That night, only a couple of us had left, but no one else was preparing to.

"I hated going back to school so much. Every year in August, it felt like I was getting sent to prison."

"Seriously? Because I loved it."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah! I was psyched to see my friends. You see them in summer but it's not the same."

"As opposed to now."

"Except for the ones who are gone."

"I just feel sorry for them. They should have stayed."

"But no. They have ambitions,'" using airquotes, "and families.'"

"And `real jobs.'"

"Fuck real jobs."

"I know, right?"

"I wish every day for the rest of my life could be like this."

"How much drinking, grilling, smoking up, sleeping in, hooking up can a person handle?"

"To infinity and beyond."

"In moderation."

"Or no moderation."

"No moderation."

"Some moderation."

"Yeah. You need some moderation."

"In proportion."

"No. None."

Stretching: "Ahhhhhh."

"When I was a little kid, though, I wanted to go back to school just for recess."

"Fucking merry-go-round. Merry-go-round was da bomb."

"For us it was swings. Everybody sprinted to the swings and to hang out and talk shit."

"You talked shit in elementary school?"

"It was, like, elementary school shit-talking, but yeah."

"Uh ... kickball? Dodgeball?"

"They banned dodgeball for us."

"Those fucking pussies!"

"Kids tried to nail each other in the head and got too upset."

"Those fucking communist pussies!"

"There should have been an underground dodgeball scene, like in Fight Club, but for dodgeball."

"The first rule of Dodgeball Club is, nail the other kid in the head."

"The second rule of Dodgeball Club is, nail the other kid's nuts."

"Or, like, vulva."

"Ewwww."

"Why is it always acceptable to be sexist about nads? Guys can get nailed in the balls, but you never hear about it the other way around.

I'm just trying to promote equality."

"Because it's just -- ugh. Never mind. So not worth explaining."

"We could go to the playground," Chris said.

"There's a playground?"

"Yeah. It's, like, a half mile that way. Joey and I run by it sometimes."

"It's on the other side of Lincoln," I said. "It's where the real people live."

"Ha. I love that you call them real people."

"I don't mean in, like, a classist way. Just that they're not, like, students."

"Do they have swings?"

"Merry-go-round?"

"Fuck yeah they do."

"Monkey bars?"

"Not sure."

"Yeah, not sure."

This obviously was going to happen. People arranged to take a piss or down some water before they left. Chris and I were the only ones who knew where we were going. There were twelve of us. I'm sure of that number because at one point on the walk, I did a headcount. Whether we were all tired and regretting the pilgrimage, or out of respect for the late hour, we didn't do a lot of talking.

About halfway there, Chris tapped me on the chest and said, "Race you."

"My stomach's full of beer."

"Mine too!"

"I'll run harder than you will," I said. "You know that I'll beat you, and if I run harder, it's going to make me feel gross."

"You're such a coward," he said.

"This is all a scheme to make me puke."

"Maybe," he said, smiling. "But if you run so hard that you puke, I'll probably puke too."

"No."

"Come on," he said. "If you say no, I'm going to run off without you, and you'll lose anyway."

"Tool," I said.

I announced to Porch Club that Chris and I were racing to the playground, and that they should keep walking past Lincoln. We were about a quarter mile away.

"Okay, wait," Trevor said. "Get in starting positions."

"Starting positions?"

"Never mind. Just stand there. Okay. Mark. Get set! . . . Go."

Chris and I bolted down the sidewalk. I took a lead. He tugged the back of my T-shirt.

"Fucker," I said.

He cackled.

Beer bounced in my stomach. I would toy with him. I let him get a ten-foot lead. At that hour, there was no traffic on Lincoln. We slowed at the intersection. When we got to the other side, I sped up.

I ran in the street. My breaths came sharp and heavy. I heard Chris panting, a dozen feet to my right, and the pound of his sneakers hitting the sidewalk.

"I'm going to beat you!" I said, speeding up.

His feet tapped faster. He was trying for a big burst for the last tenth of a mile. I had the energy to push my speed, but it hurt. These weren't my running shoes. I felt the sting in my ankles and my arches. My lungs burned. I glanced sideways. He wasn't giving up.

The playground was in sight.

"To the swings!" I shouted.

He was really booking it. I expected the rhythm of his steps to slack, but he was pushing. He started to gain on me.

I cut up from the street, onto the grass of the playground. I must have had him by only ten feet. My soles wanted to slip on the dewy grass. I slapped a pole of the swingset, with Chris so close behind that he almost plowed me to the ground.

We rested our hands on our knees, breathing heavy, smiling. I belched beer residue.

"Good race," I said.

"Almost had you," he said, panting.

"Yeah," I said, "but only because I ran in the street." Panting. "When I had to cut back off the street, you gained, like, a mile on me."

"That was your choice," he said. "Nobody made you run in the street."

"True," I said, "but I was scared that I'd trip on a break in the concrete. Or run into a tree."

"Klutz," he said.

"Plus, I'm drunk," I said. "Way too drunk to run around like this."

"Me too!" he said. "First one to puke loses."

I shoved him in the shoulder. He shoved me back. I yanked his forearm. There was a slight dampness on it. "Shut up," I said, quickly putting my nose and mouth at his shoulder, then pushing him away.

I totally would have kissed him if we weren't in a children's playground and our friends weren't three minutes away.

"I won the race!" I announced, when they appeared around the corner.

"Barely," Chris said.

"Right. But I still won."

"Good race, Pieces," Trevor said, slapping him on the shoulder and settling on a swing.

I sat in the grass. The rest of them went to the swings and merry-go-round. Though I felt no risk of vomiting, I didn't want to take chances, and my heart was still jumping from my triumph over Chris.

Trevor and Stephanie took to the swings. Trevor was aggressively high, in multiple respects. In elementary school, kids thought they could swing so high that they'd do a 360. Never happened, of course, but once you get close to 180, the chain slacks when you hit peak height and start to swing back down. Trevor was like one of those kids trying for a 360. His legs looked powerful.

"I'm going to jump!" he announced.

"No!" I said from the grass.

"I'm going to do it!"

"No, man. You're too buzzed for jumping."

"Watch me!"

Before his swing reached the top of its arc, he pushed off. His legs kicked in the air, and he landed on all fours, in a feline elegance.

"Yes!" he said. "Told you."

"You're very good."

"Thanks, man."

He pimp-rolled toward the merry go round.

I took his empty swing. Stephanie was next to me, pushing with all of her force and momentum. The chains creaked when she pulled them.

"What a fun night," she said.

"It's beautiful," I said.

"Thanks for inviting me."

"Of course. Working with you was a blast."

"Whatever. I know I get kind of stressed-"

"Just shut up and take a compliment."

"Okay," she said. "I'm going to try to jump like Trevor."

"Be careful," I said.

She loosed her grip and dropped. She landed on her feet, unwieldy but unscathed.

Meredith was lying, wasted, in the grass. She said that she was going to lie down and watch the sun rise. She said that she'd never seen a sunrise.

The grass felt better and heavier than I expected. The cold dew soaked through the back of my T-shirt. The ground drained my body heat. I stared straight up, my eyes unfocused on any particular star.

Intentionally, I blurred my vision, like I was trying to see in 3D or studying one of those secret images in the computer-generated posters they used to sell at mall kiosks.

Chris laid down with us.

"What are we looking at?" he said.

"Nothing," I said softly.

"I used to know the constellations when I was a kid," he said. "My brothers were in Boy Scouts. They taught me all the constellations. I don't remember them anymore."

"You weren't in Boy Scouts?" I said.

"You seem like a Boy Scout type," Meredith said.

"Nooooo," he said. "Those things weren't for me. Like, I don't know.

I didn't used to like groups and I hated those uniforms."

I counted my breaths and my heartrate.

The squeaks of the swings and merry-go-round continued like metallic crickets.

(every day of that summer felt so sweet

There was a round of quiet laughter behind us, but I pretended that I was paralyzed, that I couldn't speak, looking up into the dark, I couldn't move a muscle even if I tried.

(i thought it would go on forever

When I later looked toward Chris, he was motionless on his back, breathing deep, eyes closed, sleeping with his face to the stars.