Classes started on a Thursday, which felt like a typo but the admin staff were too embarrassed to fix it. You wait your whole life to leave home, and then they ease you in on a Thursday, like the calendar was embarrassed for you.
I was good at the part where you go to class. I'd always been good at the parts with rules, it's how I was raised.
You sit, you take notes, you turn it in early, you make the kind of eye contact that says you've done the reading and you can call on me; but they never called on me, because these hundred-people classes were a lecture and the professor just wanted to hear their own voice. The trouble was the rest of the day. The long, unscheduled hours where nobody was watching me, telling me what to do or where to be ... it turned out I had no idea what to do with those. 18 years of being watched, and I'd mistaken the watching for having a personality. Take away the eyes, and there was a guy in a dorm room who didn't know if he liked coffee, because liking coffee had never been up to him. I knew my roommate liked cream, though, so that was something.
The way to my 9am class went past the houses. You know which houses I mean.
Past ΣΤΥΔ, ΑΛΦΑ, ΤΝΚ. Past ΔΚΣ with its sagging porch, quiet in the daylight, a couple of guys eating cereal on the steps like bears who'd come out of the den, watching the uninitiated pass them by. The Flatirons doing their thing behind it. The whole walk smelled like pine and woodsmoke and the cooler air coming down off the mountains, a smell I didn't have a memory for, which meant it didn't belong to anybody yet, which meant it could be mine. Every morning it reminded me a little that this was a different place.
My body kept running the old routines even in the new place.
That was the thing nobody warns you about either. I'd reach for grace over dorm pasta, my chin dipping before I caught it. I'd say "sorry" to a door. That random person who passed by I swore was someone I knew from high school, or that person over there. I'd fold my hands in a quiet classroom out of pure habit and then have to pretend I was cracking my knuckles. I'd tuck the cross back under my collar fast when it slipped out, like I'd been caught, though no one here would have known what they were looking at, or cared. 18 years of choreography ... nobody had told my hands the show had ended, closed up for the night, to reopen ... TBD, or ΤΟΠ?
Because those guys seemed different, the frats. Like they knew there was something else and you could break out of your routine and move on and away from where you had been.
The evenings were the strangest part. At home there had always been somewhere to be by 7 sharp, a thing with a name, a study or a group or a service, the week built like a fence with me inside it. Here, I'd sit at my desk at 8 with no assignment due and no test coming up and nobody expecting me anywhere, and I'd feel the absence of the fence like a missing tooth, my tongue going back to the gap. Jasper would be out, or up on his bunk with headphones. One night I reorganized my half of the closet. Another I read three weeks ahead in a textbook, because the syllabus was the only thing left in my life still telling me where to be.
I almost texted Cole back one of those nights. I had it typed. "Hey, sorry, this week was" and then nothing, because the sentence didn't have an honest end and I wasn't going to start the new life with a lie to the one person who'd been kind to me in it. So I deleted it. And a part of me wondered if he even knew my name. If he'd remembered. Because what had we actually shared other than a brief sin of the flesh. If he remembered me, did that mean it meant something? If he didn't, how would that make me feel, and would it mean that Pastor Dale was right? The one time I tried to bring it up with the youth pastor ...
The cursor blinked.
Outside, a skateboard went by, that long grinding roll and then the pop at the curb, a sound I'd come to think of as Boulder at night. Somebody going somewhere for no particular reason. Just because they could. Their fence was down, and maybe it was never up.
That's the thing: I could too. I just couldn't really figure out how to make my body agree.
I hadn't done anything since the party.
It was a Tuesday now. Over cereal that Jasper ate out of a mug because neither of us had bought bowls yet, he told me we're rushing.
"You wrote your real email on their sheet," he said, pointing the spoon at me. "I watched you do it. You hesitated and then you did it anyway. You want to."
"I was being polite."
"You're never being polite. You're being scared. Look, I'm being straight with you ... so to speak ... which looks the same from the outside, but it isn't." He shoved another spoonful of Frooty-Os in his mouth while I ate my granola. "Come to the rush thing. One time. If you hate it you bail, nobody chases you, nobody calls your mom. Half those guys are the chillest people I've ever met, and the other half are idiots, but they're nice idiots, and not one of them is going to care about the thing you're so sure they're all going to care about, and most of them will be super-happy about it. Look, we're gonna rush dicks and both be happy with it. Trust me."
I didn't ask what "thing" he meant that they wouldn't care about or be happy with. He didn't say. We left it there, the both of us, in the polite blank space where the "thing" lived.
"It's a fraternity," I said instead.
"It's a frat. It's a house where your whole deal is just the weather." He shrugged, scraping the mug. "You walk in, it's already raining, nobody announces it. That's all it ever was for me. Somewhere I didn't have to do the announcement first." He looked at me then, quick, and looked away, which for Jasper was practically a soliloquy. "Figured you might could use a place like that." He pointed his spoon at me again, "I'm trying to help you dude. Trust me."
I had never once in my life walked into a room where the thing about me was already the weather. At home it was the forecast. The emergency. The one that a sharpie crossed out and moved aside. The thing the whole day got organized around without anyone once saying its name out loud.
"Okay," I heard myself say.
Jasper nodded, like he'd known, and went back to his cereal, and that was that. The biggest decisions of my life kept getting made in the time it took other people to chew.
My mom called that night. Because, of course. Like, she knew, that the cross on the wall in my room had flipped upside-down and she knew.
She called on Sundays, as a rule, so a Wednesday meant something. I felt it before I picked up, the old reflex, the fast inventory of everything I might have done that could have traveled the hundred miles down I-25 ahead of me. I answered on the second ring. Not answering was its own kind of evidence. I'd learned that early.
"There he is." Warm. I could hear my dad's TV behind her. "We missed you Sunday. Did you find a church up there yet? A good one? Your aunt says Boulder's got some real ones, if you know where to look, none of that reformed stuff."
"There's a group," I said. "On campus. I went to a thing." It was a sentence built entirely out of true words, every single one of them, arranged to tell the truth that I needed to tell, which right now was still fully real.
"Oh, good." The relief in her voice was real. "What are they called, honey?"
I didn't even pause.
"It's a campus fellowship kind of thing." Smooth. Easy. The lie came out fully formed, a stone that's been in a river a long, long time. "A bunch of guys. We get together Thursday nights, and some of it is in the original Greek."
That part was also true. The rush event was Thursday. I'd just left out the letters, and the porch, and the marker arrow that said "yes, the Dicks," and the part where I'd written my email that she didn't have access to on their sheet before I'd decided to.
"That sounds just wonderful, sweetheart." She believed me all the way down. I was a good kid. Everyone said so. The whole church said so. It was practically my name. "Your dad and I pray for you every night. You know that. By name."
"I know," I said. "Thanks, Mom. Tell Dad hi."
I hung up and sat down on the floor between the beds, my back against my bunk, the phone face-down on the carpet beside me, and I waited for the weight. The cold drop. The thing I'd been promised, from a pulpit and a kitchen table both, would come every single time I lied to her like that.
It didn't come.
That was the part that scared me. Not the lie, but how easy it had been. How smooth. The river had been running a long time, and I was pulling out the results.
And I realized, I'd been telling her some version of that lie my whole life, sitting there on the carpet with the parkinglot light on the wall. Every Sunday I sat in the pew and meant it with my face. Every time I said "I'm fine." Every fake, lying yellow thumb.
The frat wasn't the start of the lying. I'd just never before had the letters to leave out.
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