Pledging, it turned out, was mostly chores and studying, which after a lifetime of both I was weirdly good at.
We cleaned the house on Sundays. We kept study hours in the library two nights a week, Nik signing off like a man who’d been personally promised that GPA. Nobody hit us. Nobody made us drink anything. I didn’t have to clean the floor with my tongue.
Nobody made us do the things the movies had promised me. The worst of it was the recycling, which at the Dicks was a genuine commitment: four bins and a lecture if you mixed them. Because it’s Boulder.
There were 8 of us pledging. I learned them slowly because I wasn’t sure how long I’d last, and learning their names seemed premature. There was a quiet engineering kid named Sam who I think was as scared as I was but about different things. Two guys who were obviously going to be a problem for Nik and knew it and enjoyed it. Jasper, who treated pledging like a game he’d already beaten and was now playing for the fun of it. That’s who I’d learned so far. We hauled couches, alphabetized the absurd house library, and got quizzed on the names of guys who’d graduated before we were born. Somewhere in there, when some day flipped to the next and I had no idea which it was, the 8 of us turned into a thing. A unit.
I’d never been in a unit, other than my family, or church, and at least with the church that was more of a unit to which I formally belonged rather than any sense of actually belonging, if that makes sense.
At my old school you were a soul being individually saved, which is a lonelier arrangement than it sounds. Here you were one of the guys hauling the couch, and if you dropped your end somebody caught it, and nobody made it mean anything about the state of your character or the strength of your resolve. But your Big suggested you might hit some dumbbells while studying.
There was also no alcohol. The movies, the rumors, the warnings hadn’t prepared me for that. They’d told me it was everywhere. If it was, us pledges never saw it. Or, at least I didn’t. I’d asked Tav once. “We run a tight ship,” he’d said. It was a campus frat, they didn’t want to get in trouble, and so all the alcohol was locked up. If the guys had any in their rooms, I didn’t see it.
I settled into a rhythm I’d never in a million years have predicted: I hooked up. Sometimes. Not a lot. Every couple-three weeks, when it felt right and the guy was nice and I’d run the thing through in my head enough times to believe I was allowed to be in it. I didn’t understand it myself. It was like, in being here, away from home, away from the Springs, it let me be something I hadn’t been before, let me see or do things I hadn’t done before.
Jasper did it every few days, the way other people went to the gym. I watched him with the same awe I’d had as a kid watching a guy on my street do a backflip off a garage roof and land it clean. It was that pure animal not-thinking I’d never once in my life had access to. And when I’d told my mom I wanted a skateboard so I could try tricks like that, she took me straight to the youth councilor at the church. Something like that wasn’t meant for me.
The thing nobody from home would have believed was how careful everyone was about the s-word. Not careful like ashamed. Careful like adults. There was a bowl of condoms in three rooms of that house: Front entry, living room, and kitchen for some reason. Guys talked about getting tested the way they talked about an oil change, a thing responsible people did on a schedule and didn’t make a face about. A guy on my hall was on PrEP and mentioned it like a vitamin supplement.
At home, sex had been a cliff with Hell at the bottom and no rail for an eternity in either direction. Here, it was a thing you did with another person or persons, on purpose, with a rail, and the rail wasn’t shame. The rail was everybody just caring whether everybody was okay. It reorganized something in me to watch it, slowly, like furniture being moved in the next room over, where I could hear it but not see it yet, but the permission was palpable.
Tav was around all the time now, which was the rule’s particular cruelty. It didn’t keep him away. It kept him just a careful foot or two away. He signed my study hours the weeks Nik couldn’t. He sat across from me at the library table with a textbook of his own, kinesiology; he wanted to be a physical therapist, which I found unbearably tender for reasons I refused to examine. He’d walk me through the cell-membrane stuff in a low voice so we wouldn’t get shushed, close but not close, and then catch himself leaning in and lean back out. We both got good at the distance.
It was a rule. Rules kept us safe, they were meant for that. It told me what I could and couldn’t do, and that’s what I wanted, even if what it told me I couldn’t have was also what I wanted.
“You’re getting better,” he told me once, talking about the bio. He said small encouraging things like they were verdicts. “Told you you had it in you.” I carried that around for a day, you had it, turning it over the way I used to turn over a verse, working the shine off it, when there was something else I wanted to have in me.
To be honest, by then I had had it in me. A good one. A sophomore named Theo, an art kid (of course), funny, who laughed at something I said and then kept laughing about it later for no reason I ever got. Afterward, we split a bag of pretzels against his headboard and he showed me his sketchbook and I walked home grinning at nothing like an idiot. I’m not even going to describe the sex because it was just sex. I couldn’t believe that I was even thinking things like that: “It’s just sex.”
So I knew it could be that. I had proof. I had pretzels and I didn’t have to go through a pretzel-like flow chart in my mind to rationalize it.
I want to be fair about it. I was, for a few weeks there, something close to happy.
Then, my mom sent the photo.
It wasn’t even a bad photo. That was the whole problem. The youth group, 20 of them on the church steps, light jackets and big dumb grins, and my old spot on the end of the second row standing empty, where I’d stood every Sunday for six years.
The message under it was hers in that way that only my mom could be: “We saved your seat!! Everyone asked where our Josiah went. Pastor Dale prayed for you by name on Sunday. We love you so so much, never forget whose you are. 🙏”
“Whose” you are. Not who. Whose. Because I was property, God’s property, God had given me a soul and I’d sullied it with sins of the flesh.
And the floor came up to meet me, the way it hadn’t on a single one of the nights I’d done the things they’d have damned me for. I’d spent the whole Fall braced for the punishment to come out of the sin, and it turned out the punishment came out of the love. From a saved seat. From 20 people who would pray for me by name every Sunday of their lives and never once, not in a thousand of them, be able to actually know me, because the knowing would end it.
Some animal part of me understood they’d rather keep the empty seat than have the real me sitting in it. That was the math. I’d done that proof with its lemmas and QEDs a long time ago. The photo just made me show my work.
I sat on the dorm floor with the phone in my lap and couldn’t get a breath all the way down.
What had I been doing? What had I done?
I should have called somebody. I didn’t have a somebody for this. Not one who’d do anything besides pray over me or tell me it was a Tuesday, and neither of those was the thing, though I couldn’t have said what the thing was. Jasper would’ve tried. I didn’t want to watch the easiest person I knew try and fail at me. So I did the other thing.
There was a guy I’d talked to twice. A junior, Marcus. He was easy, uncomplicated, and he’d made it clear the door was open whenever. I texted him. He was sober and so was I, we said so the plain way I’d learned to say it, both of us clear-eyed in his small clean room, and he was nice to me, really nice, but none of it touched the place that needed touching. It was physical. It felt good – great, even. But I went somewhere else in my head about halfway in. I did the thing and made the sounds, and the whole time the youth group sat on those church steps behind my eyes with my empty spot on the end.
After, Marcus asked if I was okay. And I went through the motion and told him yes, in the exact voice I used on my mother. I pulled my shirt back on sitting on the edge of his bed, looked at his calculus book on the desk, and felt about a thousand years old. He walked me down to the door, because people had to escort guests and we were in different dorms.
When we got to the door, he looked at me.
“Si.”
“Yah?”
“Look, I told you my door’s open. It is. But it’s not just open for hooking up. If you want to talk – need to talk – I’m here.”
I nodded.
I walked out the door, and the leaves were changing and it was getting cold, but I didn’t feel the cold.
Here’s the lesson I’d gotten wrong. I figured it out somewhere on that walk.
I’d spent the whole Fall learning the sky didn’t fall, that the sex didn’t cost what I was promised it cost, and I’d gotten cocky, like I’d found the cheat code to a game everybody else was grinding out on hard. And it was true, as far as it went. The sky didn’t fall. But a cheat code is still cheating, and that’s a sin. There was that cost I hadn’t priced in, which is that you can do the forbidden thing all you want and still walk home empty, not because God’s up there keeping the books, but because you used a person to not feel something, and that doesn’t work. It never works. You end up the same amount of alone, plus now there’s one more good person in a doorway wondering what they did wrong, when the answer is nothing. The answer is you. You carried the empty in with you and left it in their clean room like a sock.
I stopped texting people back for a while after that. Marcus. The other guys. I skipped a house thing and told Jasper I had a paper. Tav sent me a “you good?” on the Thursday, just those two words, and I looked at it for a long time and then put the phone face-down on the carpet and didn’t answer, which I’d never done, not to him, and the not-answering sat in my chest all night like something I’d swallowed the wrong way. Even Jasper got the short version of me for a couple weeks, the “I’m fine, just tired, pledging’s a lot,” and he let me have it, mostly, watching me sideways the way you watch a pot you’re sure is going to boil over the second you turn your back.
What I didn’t realize was that somebody else was watching too. Somebody who knew the exact look I had on, because he’d worn it himself, two hours south of here, a couple years before me.
I told myself I was just busy. I was getting so good at telling myself things and almost believing them. It might’ve been the only skill I’d honestly improved since the Springs, and I’d improved it a lot.
And the man who’d noticed me was about to give me a come-to-Jesus talk. I just didn’t know it yet.
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