Mom texted twice before I’d even unpacked the car.
>> Made it?
Not even four minutes later
>> Praying for you, sweetheart. 🙏
<< 👍🧎🏼♂️➡️
It felt like a lie – a grave sin – though I couldn’t have told you what the true answer was supposed to be instead, my phone told her where I was. And, I’d gotten good at the thumb. That little yellow thumb did a lot of work in my family. It said fine so I didn’t have to decide whether I was.
The drive up had taken just under two hours, and I reflexively apologized to everyone when I saw my speedometer at 69. Or above. It was I-25 most of the way, the Springs shrinking in the mirror, Pikes Peak going flat and then gone over the horizon. The den of sin in Denver, then the foothills coming up gold on my left like they were showing off. I kept the radio off. Told myself I wanted to think. Mostly I watched the gas stations slide by and practiced sounding normal, which is a thing you can practice, it turns out, like scales or psalms.
I knew what I was driving away from ... I knew from what I was driving away, that was more proper.
And that drive away was the part nobody warned you about. You think leaving is going to feel like a door opening. For me, it felt more like the part of a dream where you realize you can move your legs after all, and you don’t trust it, and you keep waiting for the dream to take it back, to rip that tiny bit of freedom you think you have back from you and you’re back to being a non-playable character, going through life because someone else tells you how.
I carried my pared-down life up four flights in three trips. A duffel, two boxes, a milk crate of books my dad had gone through first, the way he went through everything first, with a new Bible on top for good measure. The dorm smelled like floor wax and strangers, the B.O. aired out from last semester and the body spray not yet settled in. On the third trip my arms were shaking, and I stood in the stairwell holding the crate and feeling, for no reason I could name, like crying. I didn’t. There was a kid with a skateboard watching me from the landing, and anyway I’d had a lot of practice not crying.
Jasper had moved in first.
I knew his name off the housing email and nothing else, and what I learned in the first ten seconds was that he wasn’t using a shirt today, that he’d taken the left bunk and the better desk, and that neither of those were up for discussion. He was stretched out up there with one knee bent and his phone over his face when I knocked. On my own door. Like a guest. Even though the door was open.
“It’s open,” he said, not moving. “It’s your room too, man.”
He had the easy voice of someone who’d never once worried about being overheard. Half-unpacked already: a climbing rope coiled on his desk, a sun sticker on his laptop, a record player he clearly cared about more than anything my family owned except the family Bible with all the names going back and back and back. There was a smell in the room I’d come to know as his own body spray. He sat up to shake my hand, and I took it.
And I noticed the body it was connected to.
The way you notice a loud noise. That’s all it was. A thing my eyes did. And I was good at telling myself that that’s why I wanted things that I was told would damn me.
I held the box of extra-long sheets my mom had folded into perfect thirds the night before, smoothing each crease twice with the flat of her hand, and for the first hour it mostly held.
“Renner, right?” He read it off my duffel tag. “You go by anything?”
“Josiah. Or Si.”
“Si.” He tried it like a flavor. “Boulder kid?”
“Colorado Springs.”
Something crossed his face and then chose not to land. “Cool,” he said, which I’d come to learn was Jasper-speak for I have opinions and I’m not going to bother you with them. He was from right here. A townie. His mom taught in the geology department, his dad ran a bike shop on Pearl, and he said both of those things the way other people said the weather, facts that cost him nothing. He asked what I was studying and I said undeclared and he said good, declare late, it’s a scam, and went back to unpacking like he’d handed me something and didn’t need it back.
I hung my shirts, still flat and pressed. I lined my shoes up by the door. I kept the cross under my collar, and I don’t know why, but leaving it out felt like a flag I wasn’t ready to plant. So it stayed under the cotton, against my chest, where it had always been. Reminding me that I wasn’t what God wanted.
We ate in the dining hall that first night, Jasper and me and two guys from our floor he’d already collected the way he collected everything, easily, without seeming to try. I’d never eaten dinner with people who weren’t family. I didn’t know the rules. There weren’t any, it turned out. You sat, you ate bad pasta, somebody told a story about their high school that made the table laugh, and nobody bowed their head, and nobody noticed that I almost did, my chin dipping before I caught it and turned the motion into reaching for my water.
That would keep happening, that first week and after. My body knew a hundred little routines from a life I was trying to leave, and it ran them without asking me, and I’d catch myself halfway in. Reaching for grace over dorm pasta. Saying sorry to a door, or to other cars you passed, or a speedometer that displayed “69” like it had a choice and was mocking you. Jasper caught it once, the water thing. He didn’t say anything. He just slid the parmesan down to me like that’s what I’d been reaching for all along and kept talking, and I could have kissed him for it, except that thought arrived with such force that I had to look at my tray until it passed.
That afternoon, before all that, he’d made me go to the thing on the quad. “Everyone goes, it’s like the first freshman experience besides meeting me, dude.”
There was a tent the size of a small church, and under it a couple hundred folding tables, and at every table some club wanting your email. A cappella. Quidditch, which I hadn’t known was real while I read it under the covers because it had condoned witchcraft. A beekeeping club. And three campus ministries, spaced across the tent like they’d agreed on territory, each with a banner and a smiling sophomore, and I steered us wide around all three without quite admitting that’s what I was doing even though I knew my mom would ask which I’d joined. But, I knew those smiles. I’d worn that smile. I could have run that table in my sleep, and that was exactly the problem, the way you cross the street to avoid a house you used to live in.
Then we passed the letters. So many letters, and I knew them all from high school physics and because my dad made me learn them so I could read some of the older biblical texts. ΤΟΠ, ΑΛΦΑ, ΤΝΚ, ΣΤΥΔ, ΒΤΜ, ΣΛΥΤ, ΔΚΣ, and others.
Delta Kappa Sigma. ΔΚΣ. A banner, a folding table, a bowl of those little wrapped candies. And next to it, a bowl of little wrapped condoms. Two guys behind it, neither of them performing the way the white-teeth ministry tables had been. One caught me reading the letters and grinned.
“You know what everyone calls us,” he said. Not a question.
I didn’t.
“The Dicks.” He said it like he was handing me a present. “Delta Kappa Sigma, DKS, Dicks. We’ve made our peace with it. You’d be amazed how fast you make your peace with it. And we work hard, we play hard.” And he winked. And the other guy at the table looked at him and rolled his eyes, and the look was something I’d seen before. From married people. And I noticed it: One of them had a rainbow bracelet. The other had a rainbow flag pin on their shirt.
The second guy was quick after the eye roll: “But our frat has the second-highest average GPA of the frats on campus, and so we’re doing something right, and it’s a good justification for the annoying ‘rents.”
Jasper laughed, the real kind, and he took a candy and three condoms. I felt my face go hot and didn’t take anything. The guy didn’t push. He slid the sign-up sheet a half-inch toward me, friendly, like it was already mine, and I wrote my new school email on it before I’d decided to.
The dorm room was different at night.
Smaller. The parking lot light came through the window and lay across the floor in a strip between our beds. I could hear the dorm doing its dorm things, a door somewhere, water moving in the walls, somebody’s bass two floors down coming up through the bed frame like a second pulse. I lay on my back in a room with no parents a door away for the first night of my life, and I could not sleep, and I told myself it was the strange bed.
And then I heard Jasper.
It took me a second to understand it. The shift in my periphery, the change in his breathing, a rhythm to it. He wasn’t being loud. He wasn’t hiding it either. He was just doing it, the way you’d do it if you honestly did not think it was a big deal, and the not-hiding was the part that took the air out of me. At home there had been a whole architecture around this. Locked doors, running water, a list of things to think about after so the wanting wouldn’t have anywhere to go. Here was a guy a few feet away doing it like he was stretching a sore shoulder.
I lay very still. My heart was going. I’d spent years being still and quiet while I wanted things, an expert at silence. So, I was good at it, and I lay there being an expert and listening to my roommate not care whether I knew.
“You can, you know,” Jasper said. Low. Easy. Not even a little embarrassed. “I’m not gonna make it weird. I’d have to be asleep to make it weird, and I’m not.”
I didn’t answer. The little yellow thumb wasn’t going to help me here.
But I did. Under the blanket, careful, telling myself the dark made it not count, telling myself he was probably most of the way asleep even though we both knew he wasn’t, even though he’d just spoken to me in full sentences. Because maybe this is what roommates did in college. And at this point in my day, that made sense, or I told myself it did. My breath went strange and I worked to keep it quiet out of a habit I couldn’t shut off. I’d done this my whole life, but always braced, always listening for a step in the hall, always with a verse running underneath it like a ticker. This was a person in the room. A person who knew. And the world did not end. The bass kept coming up through the frame. Nobody knocked. No one drove two hours.
When it was over I lay there with my heart slowing and the corners of my eyes wet, which embarrassed me more than the rest of it put together, and I waited for the thing I’d always been told would come. The weight. The cold drop of having done it with your parents a wall away, or you just wasted five minutes of hot water. The certainty, settling over you like a wet coat, that you’d traded something you couldn’t get back.
It came, a little. But quieter than I expected, and from much farther off, like weather in another county.
“See,” Jasper said into the dark, like we’d finished a chore together. “Not a big deal.” A pause, the smile in his voice. “It’s a Tuesday, man. Go to sleep.”
“It’s Monday.” Aw, sugar. I just admitted I was awake. I should’ve passed everything off as him dreaming in the morning. Not now.
“Dude. Lighten up.” I heard him shift, and my head turned, and I saw him licking his fingers. Did he ... ? “Look, I don’t know what shit you had to deal with growing up, but this proves you’re cool dude. You have potential, and ... I’ll leave that alone. But stick with me, I’ll help you. It’s Boulder, not the Springs, we got a whole different attitude here.” He licked his fingers again, the loud smack punctuating the casualness, and he laid back down.
I lay awake a long time after his breathing went even. Not because of the guilt, which I knew the shape of and could have drawn blindfolded. Because of the other thing. The part where I’d wanted something out loud, in a room, with the lights off and a witness, and the ceiling had stayed a ceiling.
I didn’t have a word for that yet. I’d been given a lot of words growing up, careful ones, words for exactly this. Struggle. Flesh. Give it over to Jesus. That other word, the one for what it feels like when the punishment doesn’t come and you have to sit in the silence it leaves behind ... that one they’d left out. On purpose, I was starting to think, because that made the guilt worse.
I felt the weight of the necklace against my chest.
And I looked over again at Jasper, and the necklace for the first time didn’t feel quite so heavy.
If you enjoyed this story, consider supporting the author on Patreon.
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
