Ross never knew the details. He was far from much of what was going on that first year, and it was only over time that he pieced things together. Flipper had talked about being himself, about loving another boy, but he hadn’t said anything very specific, and Ross wasn’t the kind of person who would ask. He wasn’t exactly sure when things had started with Andy Lagger or how far they went. He had the feeling that the football dorm kept it all nervously quiet. Everyone on campus said that the best place to be gay was the softball and girl’s soccer team, and there were, to be sure, more than a few lesbians living over their in Justin Hall. Things were not the same for boys. There was a higher ick factor, and Ross suspected that the ick factor was proportionate to the lust factor and the curiosity factor. If a few homely girls with short hair wanted to dress in plaid and hold hands, and this was certainly how lesbians were interpreted at Saint Alban’s, so be it, but that athletic, handsome boys, the future of America, should be doing unspeakable things behind closed doors in their bunk beds was, no matter how open the world pretended to be, unsettling.
And then, apparently, something had happened. The story told in hushed variations by Tara Bodlin and Meghan Turner was that Flipper had come into his room to see Andy fucking his girlfriend, and he had lost it, throwing things, screaming, yelling at the top of his lungs that he and Andy were having sex. Ross had heard, but missed—he managed to miss a lot—that Flipper had made a scene in the cafeteria and there was even a story about him masturbating publicly at a party. Whatever the truth, his star had been tarnished. Football season was well over, but he didn’t go to rugby that semester either. He was under a disgrace which meant very little to Ross, upstairs reading his books, or to Jimmy, who was already a known drunken reprobate, and who was steadily making his way through the girls on campus.
“I think,” Jimmy said, wisely, “they could keep a a secret for a bit. But when Flip kept putting his sexuality out there and acting nutty, they all had to distance themselves and shut him out. Girls aren’t as nice as they pretend to be, and other guys really aren’t either. They were beginning to ask if the whole football team was gay. That’s why Flip’s here. None of his friends deal with him, and the guy he had a thing for doesn’t want shit to do with him anymore.”
By then Ross had developed his own life, was working in the coffee shop and even had the idea that if there was such a thing as being popular, he was it. That was strange because in high school he certainly hadn’t been, but lately, in junior college and now again, he seemed to be a personality people gathered around. He was spending more time with Macy, who was Jimmy’s cousin, so more time with him too, and though he was friends with Flipper, he was the kind of friend who knew how to stay out of the affairs of others. When he saw the guy coming back with Flipper to his rooms sometimes, he didn’t know this was Andy Lagger. He’d heard names and bits of stories and had no faces to piece them too. It wasn’t till later, when Flipper told him the full story, that he understood that Andy had come, first to check on him, and then to talk, eventually to apologize and, then Ross imagined from the things Flipper did not say, for more.
The morning Andy Lagger found the body of Noah Aukerman, the weekend before final exams, there had been a party in Merlini, the soccer dorm, and he and Flipper and Ross had been there. Ross got the idea that while he loved a party at Merlini, he wouldn’t have loved living there, but it was full of good guys and, he understood, guys who wouldn’t mind what Flipper and Andy were.
“It’s a more open place, here,” Mike Wheeler said to Ross.
They had been drinking on the back porch, looking out on the main quad, and they talked for a good half hour before Mike said he had to go. As he took Ross’s hand a long time and not so much squeezed it and departed, as pulled away from it in a lingering way, Ross looked at the athletic young man in fitted jeans with his bronze hair, and it wasn’t until ten minutes later that his senses were back with him and he understood what he’d been saying. Ross wanted to find him, to go after him, but he didn’t know what he would have done. He felt stupid for being so slow to the game, and completely turned on by the idea of Mike Wheeler.
Back in the dorm, amidst the music and the black lights, he sought out his friends. Pouring a beer he saw two soccer players in the corner, frankly making out in the middle of the room like it was nothing at all.
“Yup,” Jimmy Nespres said, leaning against a wall with a girl Ross had seen in the coffee shop, “Welcome to Merlini. By eleven on a Saturday night, half the guys are drunk and making out with each other.”
“Oh?”
“Some of it starts out like a dare, but mostly folks just start feeling stuff. Guys getting huggy, laughy, emotional, and then—” Jimmy shrugged and pointed to where the two boys were still making out and people were just walking by, getting more punch.
“And nobody cares?” Ross said. “Here?”
“Merlini’s a lot more laid back than like, say Noll and Seifert Halls. What happens here stays here almost as much as it does in our dorm. And then, also, the liquor and the drugs.”
At the look on Ross’s face, the girl with Jimmy, who knew Ross even if he didn’t quite know her, laughed and took his hand playfully.
“Ross,” she said, “half these people are tripping balls!”
“You know this guy… Mike Wheeler?”
“Mike Wheeler?” Flipper said. “Yeah. He’s does track and shit. Cool guy, Kinda hot, What about him?”
“Is it stupid of me to think he was hitting on me?”
Jimmy shook his head, the wings of his bronze hair shaking.
“I don’t think so. A lot of track runners swing that way.”
“Oh.”
“Why? Did it make you nervous?”
“No,” Ross said. “It made me feel stupid, cause we talked for about a half hour and I didn’t pick up on it till he was gone, and now I sort of want to find him, only I don’t know where he is.”
“I’ll find him,” the girl with Jimmy said, shrugging, and Ross thought that he liked her and needed to know what the fuck her name was.
“Let’s go,” she said.
As they followed after her, Ross said, “She’s kind of remarkable.”
“Yeah, Connie’s pretty straight.”
“Connie,” Ross remembered, following her up to the second floor. “I’ll have to make her a nice coffee or something next time she comes into the coffee shop.”
“Are they still doing that Dungeons and Dragons shit?” Jimmy wondered as they came to the quieter second floor.
“Uh, I’m afraid so.”
“Fuck that,” Jimmy said, touching the cigarette tucked behind his ear.
“Hey, Wheeler! Wheeler!” Connie knocked on a door.
“By the way, what happened to Flipper? I was looking for him. He and that Andy—”
“I know, right,” Jimmy said. “Seeing them together I kind of want to get with a dude again.”
Jimmy said it so casually Ross was about to ask, “What’s it like?” but either Jimmy wouldn’t be able to answer, or the answer would take forever and now the door came open.
“Connie!” Mike Donofrio from Modern Aftican Studies opened the door, “what the fuck?”
“We’re looking for Wheeler?”
“He’s gone. I haven’t seen him since—”
“Who’s looking for Wheeler?” they heard a voice coming up the stairs.
Mike Wheeler in his backward turned ball cap that looked like it had never seen a ball game was coming down the hall now, and he looked startled.
“Connie! Jimmy. You again,” he said to Ross.
“Ross was telling us he met you, and then you disappeared and he wondered what had happened to you,” Connie said. “So, here you are.”
She had said nothing to embarrass him, but Ross was embarrassed nonetheless and Mike smiled at him from the side of his mouth and said, “Well, here, I am.”
Mike asked Mike Donofrio—Mike and Mike, that was a good way to remember each other—“were you asleep?”
“I was asleep,” Donofrio said, “cause I was planning to head to the bar, which I am now, and I don’t know when I’ll be back.”
Mike Wheeler shrugged and said, lightly, to Ross, “Well, then would you like to come in? I just got beer.”
“Uh—“
“Yes, he would,” Jimmy said, clapping Ross on the back, and heading off with Connie, who nodded and tapped Ross softly on the cheek.
