Joe College

Joe College, Part 25

In April 2004, in the final days of junior year, I returned home to a blow-up between Katie and Trevor. Trevor had borrowed her laptop adapter, and then lost it in the library.

She shouted at him about disrespect and inconsideration and that Macbook adapters are expensive, and because he'd already broken his own and was too lazy to buy a new one, she had no confidence that he'd remedy his carelessness.

Upstairs, Michelle cut Sam's hair in our bathroom. They listened to the theme song from The O.C. He was shirtless. Hair clippings were all over our sink.

"Sam said I should cut his hair," she said. "I've always wanted to cut a guy's hair."

"It looks pretty good, right?" Sam said.

"It looks amazing," I said. "Where's Chris?"

"Running? Or maybe playing PS2 in your room. I haven't seen him in awhile."

He wasn't in my room.

Tonight, as I write this, I would trade months off my life to spend a night at 1254 Hamilton with those people, but at the time, I was sick of the the pretend-that-it's-secret Katie/Trevor friends-with-benefits mess; sick of Sam's spectacles; sick of feeling watched by Michelle and Katie, and the gossip that buzzed low in the background. I wasn't sick of Chris, but life inside his head had exhausted me.

The impatience started when I got the news about my summer internship. I was such a New York guy. I needed to get back to the City. It was where I belonged, where I would stay forever. My housemates weren't from there; they didn't know.

Petty fighting about Macbook adapters, Michelle cutting Sam's hair in order to act weird together: so childish.

I didn't leave campus until after the graduation parties.

Russell hugged me and smooched my forehead. He said that "discovering" me was the best thing that he did in college -- he said stuff like this to everybody that night. He bear-hugged me and rubbed a cigarette-cured beard against my cheek. We said goodbye three or four times. Sometimes you say good-bye repeatedly, just to make sure that the last one wasn't for real.

Across the street, I went to a bar where the graduating news staffers had gathered. That group was like a funeral where everyone had done coke, even though no one present would ever do coke. Elizabeth Kao alternated between laughter and sobbing. They told stories about fights and embarrassments, hook-ups with each other and with outsiders, all-nighters together to finish papers for class after they were done editing at the newspaper, drunken shame and glory. Nobody wanted to go home. Russell appeared with his full entourage. Hugs and cycles of goodbyes repeated into absurdity, like we were mocking the idea of goodbyes.

My last stop was to Doug and to Jamie Calmet. They had a couple dozen people over: siblings and girlfriends and relatives of girlfriends. It was one a.m.; parents, some of them slightly buzzed, were leaving to walk to their hotels.

There was none of the intensity of sentiment that I'd experienced at the bars. These guys were like athletes who finished a long season in first place and were thinking ahead to the playoffs.

Katie, Chris and Michelle were already there. The three of them stayed on campus that summer. Michelle studied for the LSAT and GRE. Chris and Katie hadn't looked for internships and neither of them wanted to go home, so they'd spend the summer waiting tables and tending bar. Sam left the day before for an internship in a Canadian delegation at the Hague (yeah, I know); Trevor was back in Houston with his family.

At Doug and Jamie's, Katie was passive-aggressively annoyed that Jamie didn't seem interested in her and Chris was doing that blitz where Jamie made him jumpy, and I thought to myself something like, "Jesus fuck, enough of this shit."

But they were such good dudes that as soon as I had a couple of beers and settled in, I had a great time. They had a shine of calm confidence. Doug was going to a sportswriting internship at the Washington Post and Jamie was moving to New York for a job at one of the banks. Hunter was doing Teach for America and Dylan was heading to law school at U. Chicago.

I stayed when the party started winding down. I'm always the last one who goes to bed; I never want to leave the bars or parties. Their party was decelerating from chill to boring, but you know how much I hate goodbyes.

I helped collect the empties and put away their food.

Eventually, Chris and I prepared to leave and Doug was like, "No, man, stay and hang."

"We're staying up until sunrise," Hunter said.

"Yeah, graduation has to be an all-nighter."

"Probably going to Charterhouse for breakfast after."

"Nahhh, Pieces and I shouldn't bust up your roommate time," I said.

"Ah, fuck that."

"You'll keep things lively."

"We're pretty much sick of each other anyway.

So we split some Red Bulls, did tequila shots and opened more beers.

They had an actual back lawn. Walking barefoot in the dewy grass felt like luxury. You could hear crickets. More Westchester than college.

Chris and Jamie Calmet played ping-pong under the the glare of the porchlight. Doug and I put down our empty cans of PBR and pissed in the bushes on the side of the house. We returned to our seats and opened new cans. I lit a cigarette. He motioned in for a drag.

"There's something I've always wondered about you," he said.

"What's that?" I said.

"It's not a big deal. You know I don't care. Like, I know we're not super-close, but we share the same basic worldview. I mean, the only reason we're not extremely close friends is that we've always been busy with our own shit."

"I mean, we're pretty good friends," I said. "I think of you as a real friend. I mean, I'm here hanging out with you at 2:30 on your graduation night."

"True enough," Doug said. "I think of you as a real friend, too. Which is just my way of saying, like, I've always wondered something about you, and whatever the answer is, you know that I fucking respect the fuck out of you, right?"

I stared forward at the stupid ping-pong game between Chris and Jamie.

Chris was very skilled at ping pong. You could tell that they'd both played a lot of basement games as teenagers, but Jamie was no match for Chris.

"I mean, it's kind of a personal thing, and I don't want to say something that might offend you," Doug said.

"Okay," I said, "then don't."

He laughed nervously.

"I'm just saying, you can't say that if you ask a question, you don't want to offend somebody, and then ask the question, and then take it back retroactively if it offends the person," I said. My voice was steady, good-natured, like we were having an academic discussion about the role of intent and inquisition. "And I'm not going to, like, be pissed at you or kick your ass or anything. But I might be offended, and you say that you respect me either way. So why take the risk? I'm not talking about anything specific between us. Just as a general proposition. You could ask, and the most you get is the satisfaction of some curiosity that you admit doesn't matter. And the worst is that you end our last time at school on some weird, awkward note, and that'll be our last memory of hanging out here." I took a long drag from my cigarette. "Is that really worth it?"

He laughed. I glanced at his long, pointed profile lit in silhouette. He leaned back and stretched.

"It doesn't matter anyway," he said. "It doesn't matter at all. It was presumptuous to try to put you on the spot."

"You didn't put me on the spot," I said. "I get it. I can be a weird dude sometimes."

"You're not weird at all," he said.

"Is that sarcasm?"

"No," he said. "Was it? You genuinely think you're that weird? Russell is weird."

"Yeah."

"Your little buddy Stephanie is pretty weird."

"Yeah, true."

"Even Riis and Katie are a little weird. Don't think of yourself as weird," he said. "You have your struggles, but we all do, and if we didn't, it'd be boring. Just, like, be who you are and don't worry about it. You'll sort it out."

"Thanks man," I said. "I really value your opinion, but there's not any stuff to sort out."

"I know," he said. "It's cool, bud. I said what I wanted to say. I look forward to being your friend for a long time." He didn't want to leave that note open. "So we should go play doubles against Riis and Calmet."

"Dude, they're so much better than us at ping pong."

"It'll be fun even if they beat us. They might be better at ping pong, but we're better at trash talk."

That first fucking month back in New York.

I'd been friends with Rick since elementary school. The biggest thing that weighed in favor of going to Penn was that Rick would be there, too. We played on the same teams, took the same classes, spent summers together, pre-partied before prom and then threw up in the gravel shoulders between the after-parties.

Our apartment was a tiny two-bedroom sublet on East Sixth Street and First Avenue. He'd found it through his older brother. I'll spare the boring details, but both of us persuaded our parents that they should underwrite our summer living in the city, because of course, if we were going to go there after college, we'd have to know what it was like to actually live in the city and not commute from their houses in Westchester. It wasn't a difficult negotiation.

And I was so fucking psyched to get back. Sanjay was a mile away in the East 20s, in a sublet with two of his Harvard friends.

They all wore black wool pants, unless it was $200 jeans. They wore shirts that buttoned down. They went to bad, overcrowded bars, where DJs played remixes of Top 40 songs. They ordered G&Ts that cost $14; my bottles of beer cost $10. They hit on skinny girls who wore tiny dresses, and half the nights ended up fucking one of them. They talked about their summer internships in finance (spots that they got through their fathers) with the pretense that they had actual responsibility and knew what they were saying.

I would look for any excuse to step outside for a cigarette. I deflected the come-ons of girls with hot bodies, whose faces hadn't caught up. I rolled my eyes when entire bars whooped enthusiasm at a shittily danceable pop song.

"I think I'm more of a T-shirt bar kind of guy," I said to Rick, who seemed mystified and concerned by my lack of enthusiasm.

"I'm a T-shirt bar kind of guy, too," Rick said, "but I'm going to where the people are at."

"What people?" I said.

"Nothing interesting's going to happen at a T-shirt bar in Alphabet City," he said.

A couple of weeks later, Rick and I were going home in a cab at about 3 a.m.

"Dude, you need to loosen up, because you're kind of being a bitch," he said.

"Wait, at noon, we were just going to hang out on Second and watch the playoffs. By the time I got home, you decided we'd go to some club called, like, Argon."

"Argon? What the fuck is Argon? Like, the element? It wasn't called Argon."

"Whatever it was, it sucked, and I just wanted to have a chill night hanging, and I got dragged into this bullshit again, so fuck this being a bitch shit." The cab sped down Broadway. The image of one of Rick's frat brothers, some douchebag named Brandon, flashed to mind. "I wake up every day thanking Allah that I didn't go to Penn."

"Penn doesn't miss you. Trust me."

It wasn't a major blow-up -- the kind of sharp exchange that you have with friends. Neither of us felt anger in his heart. A couple of minutes later we brushed our teeth and talked about the South Park rerun on TV.

But I mostly stopped going out with them. On nights when I did -- when my boredom drove me to follow, when I resolved to have a better attitude and try to fall in with the crowd -- I was an obvious handicap. One night, "The Thong Song" came on at about 2:30 a.m., driving the crowd wild with a song that was big around our junior year in high school. Boobs and asses bounced to a white-girl rhythm. Rick performed a white-guy sex-dance against a girl who looked like Rutgers. I went outside to have a cigarette, then walked two miles home. I texted them a half-hour later.

I stalked gay bars that I never had the balls to enter.

There was the place on 6th & A, and the one on 13th & A, and the place on 4th & 2nd, and its seedy, dark uncles to the south.

I didn't walk in, but I passed them on my way. I went out of my way to pass them, walking by with a cigarette in my mouth, glancing up at their doors and then darting my gaze elsewhere. One night at two in the morning, I drunkenly walked laps between A & B, wondering what it would be like to step inside.

The crowd didn't seem right. Their shirts looked too tight. They clustered outside, smoking cigarettes. Their chatter sounded quick, energetic. The music was garish. I discerned spinning lights.

I couldn't penetrate it. Still, I wanted to go inside.

I recalled Andy's compulsion when he was in Italy, how he dreaded and anticipated stepping into a gay bar. I internalized his fantasy of what he'd find, yearning for my own Nebraskans.

So I lurked some nights, for lost minutes between 2 a.m. and last call, walking alone past those East Village doors, compelled but repelled and afraid.

I never ventured in.

I was not Andy Trafford.

I thought that I'd be Chuck Klosterman, or at least one of those Pitchfork guys. I'd write lean, clever album reviews, hit up shows at Mercury and Bowery, befriend Meg White, Ted Leo, members of The Mountain Goats, maybe Wilco.

But I interned at a publication gasping for oxygen, tentative about the internet, coasting on its name and cultural reputation. It was apparent to the younger staffers that the magazine was decaying. They made low five-figures but were tensely happy working at something that they loved.

They resented the college interns, who were able to afford the jobs only because our parents floated us for the summer.

I combed through press releases and e-mails, listening to CDs and mp3s from record companies you haven't even heard of, looking for something decent enough to warrant a review or attention. You'd think that a place like that would be desperate for content -- any content -- to keep traffic and readers, but aging, senior editors were so hung up on their perceived duty as cultural gatekeepers that they were not going to burn credibility on a middling-but-promising indie band out of Jacksonville or Denver.

And my fellow interns -- it was all panicky scenes and pretension, without the credibility or experience to back their self-regard. They went to stuff just so that they could talk about it, not because they felt genuine passion. There was this one dude, Marco, who went to Columbia, who I'm still friends with, who shared my eye-rolling fatigue with our summer colleagues. The rest of the interns were useless.

They were nothing like the people I knew in college, who were so full of curiosity and energy and intellectual ambition, who knew when they were full of shit, and even then, it came from an earnest place. Instead, they were anxious social climbers, awkward kiss-ups, hipper-than-thou liberal-arts kids who thought all politics was bullshit and seemed amused that I cared about football. They didn't chase what was actually interesting -- they wanted to be part of a scene.

They were not part of my scene, but who's to say? For one of them, I'm probably their pretentious asshole from that summer.

I spent a lot of nights alone in my tiny bedroom of my tiny apartment, masturbating in front of the air conditioner.

I masturbated to Andy Trafford, the first time that I truly saw him, remembering what it was like that summer after graduation, and to Matt, remembering how tight and pulsing he felt. I masturbated to Chris, of course, but also to a guy I saw naked in the gym showers back in April and the hot guy in the suit who stood perilously close to me on a crowded 4 train that night. I masturbated to that guy Ben, who'd been my only random hook-up at that point, the memory of that one, funny night newly powerful and relevant. I masturbated to the idea of fucking Wally, even though I didn't know what it was like to actually fuck a guy. Sometimes I masturbated to them all at once, not in the sense that I was picturing the world's most awkward orgy, but that their images and smells and memories piled onto each other.

I looked forward to nights where Rick would be out at some horrible bar so that I could close the door to my room, crank up the AC, and beat off in peace.

Jesus, how I longed to be back on that fucking campus, hanging out at 1254 Hamilton, drinking on that porch and running the streets with Chris and Trevor late at night. When I thought about Chris, Michelle and Katie at the house, I felt the most intense longing. I'd never experienced homesickness before. It was similar to the way other people describe getting dumped. All of your assumptions deflate. Everything feels impermanent and illusory.

I understood why Matt Canetti called twice a week during the school year.

You wanted a postcard of what you'd left behind.

I didn't call as much because I didn't want them to know how pathetic I felt. Katie drunk texted me often. Chris and I e-mailed. We drunk-dialed each other and had truncated conversations with no depth, but that was still fine, because they were felt natural and reassuring.

This is how it felt to be uncertain. Some people live their whole lives that way, I thought.

Aware that Jamie Calmet had just moved to the City, and remembering that we'd had conversations about getting together that summer, I hadn't expected us to follow through. I assumed we were being polite. He was a guy that I said hi to at parties, with the occasional brief conversation about football or current events. He was more of an acquaintance than a friend, and if it hadn't been for his good looks and Chris's peculiar interests, he might have been a lost figure in my memories of college.

About a week before July 4, 2004, he showed up in my inbox: "Hey man!

Hope that the city's treating you well and that you're enjoying the summer. Feel like getting together for beers sometime this week?"

I had no interest in pretending to be cooler or busier than I was, so I immediately replied, "Yes! How about tonight?"

We ended up at a sports bar in the West Village. I waited out front, having a cigarette and glancing down the sidewalk. When we saw each other, I must have been smiling like an idiot, but I felt that happiness in my heart, and seeing him brought me joy that I didn't deserve. My greeting was friendlier and more enthusiastic than he could have expected, possibly leading him to wonder why he'd suggested meeting up with a moron who once lived a couple of houses away.

But we hung out from 8 p.m. until 1 in the morning. He said that he'd just come off of his first really intense work experience, where he was in the office until 3 a.m. for a couple of weeks, working on a bond offering. He talked about loving the city but needing to get out and see more of it; what colleges turned out people who he liked; the scourge of clubs with bottle service; the unrelenting hotness of New York women and their short skirts; the loathsomeness of Yankees fans; his desire to run the New York Marathon one day; how cocaine is sketchy and trashy; why The Sopranos is the greatest show in TV history; why he fails to appreciate Bruce Springsteen; how he orders Indian food four times a week; and the shadows of 9/11 that crept up on you at unexpected moments.

I wondered what he had that my friends from growing up apparently didn't -- what quirks and experiences led him to this range of casual interests and skepticisms that so closely matched my own. I had these easy conversations all day at college but were harder to come by in the city. At about midnight, we shot pool and flirted with a couple of girls who leaned against a wall. It was the most normal I'd felt in weeks.

From that point forward, Jamie and I hung out at least once a week.

Quickly it wasn't Jamie, but all of these other people, too: friends of friends and their friends, and so on, with one common biographical trait.

"There's just something different about that place," was the sentiment expressed at two in the morning on a rooftop in Brooklyn or the back of a bar on Avenue B.

The only people that I really hung out with in New York had graduated from my college. Leaning into a party near Varick, in a narrow high-ceilinged apartment, with a Strokes song playing, looking around and recognizing a half-dozen of the guests from lectures and discussion sections. Sharing such specific knowledge would make me seem deranged, so I played dumb.

At a Saturday afternoon barbecue in July, somewhere on the Red Hook border, I heard a drunk woman's voice shout, "Oh my God, it's Joe!"

The voice was Hot Erin's, Matt Canetti's roommate from senior year, one of the dozen or so people that he serially labeled his "best friend." She sprung out of her chair and almost tackled me with a hug, which I reciprocated, squeezing her tight, my hands pressing against the dress straps of her lightly sweaty shoulders.

"Oh my God!" she exclaimed a couple of more times, squeeing, a reaction that seemed disproportionate to our limited friendship, but one that I felt too.

She grabbed my sticky hand and pulled me toward her friends.

"This is unbelievable!" she said to them. "This is Joe! He was my roommate's-"

She stopped herself in time. I knew the word that was on the tip of her tongue. It felt like a near-miss car accident, one of those things that comes so close to disaster that your brain can't catch up. She was about to introduce me as Matt's former boyfriend, but saved us just before impact.

"-friend," she said, in a complete recovery. She gave me this look that signaled something like, Don't worry, I've got this. "We used to hang out all the time."

When I introduced Erin to Jamie Calmet, she gave me a look like she approved and was impressed. I squinted slightly and cocked my head: No, we weren't together together. She shifted an eyebrow to communicate understanding.

She moved to New York in May after a year in Los Angeles. She'd worked at a casting agency. "L.A. is way too isolating," she said. "You spend all of this time in your car. They truly care about cars. Going out is a mess because you drive everywhere, so you can't drink properly. I don't know how people can tolerate it." She was working in New York as a location scout. "In New York, you can just do whatever. People don't give a fuck.

In L.A., it was one big scene where everybody was all about `the industry,'" she said, using airquotes, "and there were swarms of dumbfucks who think they're going to be actors. I met several people who take yoga much too seriously. So in that sense, the stereotype is accurate. But here, you don't have to conform to any of that shit. If you want to rock out, you rock out. If you want to work 80 hours a week and make a lot of money, that's what you do. Right?"

I nodded.

"God, Matt is going to be so fucking jealous when he hears we ran into each other."

"He could come up here," I said.

"That's what I keep telling him, but you know what he's like. It's always, `The next two weeks are busy, but maybe after that,' but the next two weeks are always busy."

"He loves to call though," I said. "He calls more than everybody else combined."

"Dude," she said, "he's so fucking bored. Doesn't he sound miserable?"

"Yeah," I said. "I mean, I don't know if I'd necessarily say miserable, but it doesn't sound like he's having a great time."

"I know! Poor guy. He misses college so much," she said. "He's always talking about how he feels like he's wasting his life in this job. I'm like, `So fucking quit! It turns out that you hate the job and you hate D.C. Come to New York! Go to Somalia and build schools or something!

You've got all of this energy and passion, and all you're doing is fielding calls and preparing binders of bullshit.' But you know how he is.

He's going to keep slamming himself against a wall until he wears himself out, and then he'll do the right thing."

He would have been annoyed if he heard that. Her directness startled me.

She noticed.

"Maybe you don't know that side of him," she said. "I probably shouldn't be talking to you about him like this. He cares what you think. But, you know, whatever. If he doesn't like it, he can come up here and intervene, right?"

"Or he can just stay down there and deal with it," I said. "For now, you need to meet my buddy Jamie. He's a good dude."

It was one of those nasty July days, where even high-maintenance people have to say fuck it and not worry if their hair frizzes or the armpit sweat shows through their T-shirts. The barbecue hosts had a hookah; the air on the concrete patio smelled like sweet melons. There was a cooler of sangria, bottles of Brooklyn Lager and cans of PBR. "Float On" by Modest Mouse played about fifty times. It wasn't obvious if the crowd was young professional or hipster, which was a very South Brooklyn dilemma. About five of them, Jamie and I had incrementally collected over the prior month -- people who'd graduated between roughly 97 and 04, none of them married, some of whom knew each other incredibly well and had been hanging out like this for years since graduation.

Jamie was so relaxed and strikingly handsome that when you were with him, it was easy to meet people. He had a VIP pass in any social setting. 30 Rock had a couple of episodes about this phenomenon. Also, when people heard where I was interning, it gave me this undeserved sheen of coolness and relevance, like I was a guy who could get you into parties or something. I was already cynical enough about my job that I avoided discussing it in meaningful detail, but my avoidance was interpreted as nonchalance, which -- again, undeservedly -- served to make me seem cooler still.

There were times that summer when I had flashes of Chris's syndrome and had to remind myself not to crush on Jamie. We had such a good time together and liked each other so much that I wanted to infer extras. One time we sat next to each other on the subway and he tapped my thigh with his fist to emphasize some point of conversation. I felt a tiny volt in my crotchal region and reasoned through the ways that he wasn't flirting. His only nervous habit was scratching between his shoulderblades, and if he wore a T-shirt, it lifted enough to reveal his lower back, with the outline of his spine and lean hipbones, the edge of his boxers, and, most memorably, on a saggy-shorts day, a small peek of his upper asscrack.

He and Erin flirted that afternoon, which made me happy. I ended up in a long discussion with some couple, they were 27 or 28, that started with us complaining about how the establishment conspired to destroy Howard Dean and ended with the girlfriend imploring me to read The Man With the Golden Arm. We were getting drunker and drunker, then ran out of cigarettes, and then wandered Red Hook looking for a bodega to buy a pack of smokes.

The afternoon bled into night. People didn't depart. They hung out all day together, all the time. After sunset, we walked to the top floor and climbed an iron ladder to the roof. We drank and smoked and chastely flirted, taking in the jeweled enormity of Lower Manhattan. In 2004, people still talked about the hole in the downtown skyline, how it was like a missing arm, and wanted to share stories about that morning, even though they'd heard each others' stories dozens of times.

Erin asked me for a cigarette as an excuse to bring me to a solitary corner.

"Sorry that I almost forgot that you're not out."

"That's fine."

"You and Matt were practically, like, cuddling at parties a couple of years ago."

"I mean, that was once, and it wasn't cuddling."

"It was close enough."

"This kind of thing isn't my strong suit."

"I know," she said. "I've heard all about it."

Christ.

"It sucks that you're still going through all of this shit," she said.

"That's not a criticism."

"I'll sort it out."

"Have you seen Kevin this summer?"

"Kevin Berger?" The suggestion struck me as absurd. "We don't know each other well."

"Well, that's a lie," she said. "I've been meaning to meet up with him since I moved here. We haven't worked it out yet."

She took out her flip phone and started texting. I thought that she was writing Kevin. Instead it was Matt. She held up her screen before sending it. "At this second I'm drinking on a rooftop in Brooklyn with your boy Joe." Less than a minute later, he replied: "!!!!!! HOW???" "Met at random BBQ," she replied.

My phone rang. "Are you serious?" he said. "Put her on."

"Hi," I said. "Sure."

I handed my phone to Erin. After a few seconds, she said, "No, we're talking about how much we love you and and how you're the most awesome person ever." She mouthed the phrase Oh my God to me. "Yeah, well you should come up here. Move here." She laughed a genuine laugh, not a drunk laugh meant to humor him. "Yeah, I will. It's all wonderful." Pause.

"Okay, bye."

"What was he saying?" I said.

"God," she said, leaning back and drinking her beer, "I still don't understand how his brain works and I shouldn't say this, but we both know that he's still a little in love with you."

Chris called on a Sunday.

"This is just an idea. You don't have to do it if you don't want to," he said. "No pressure."

"What's that?"

"My mom said that if you want you should come hang out with us at the cabin before school."

"Okay."

"Like, basically, I'd pick you up at the airport, and you could bring all your stuff, and stay for the week, and then when it's done, my parents will drop us off at school."

"That could be good."

"It's like a five-hour drive from the cabin to school."

"Not so bad."

"It wouldn't be super-exciting. It's not going to be like Manhattan. We'd have our own space so don't worry about that. Just waterskiing, the boats, swimming off the pontoon. If we get bored we could go to Lake Michigan or something. It's super-chill."

"Is anyone else coming?"

"I asked Michelle, but she's going back to Detroit before classes."

"That's too bad," I said. I closed my eyes and thoroughly pictured him for the first time in weeks. "Are you sure it wouldn't be awkward?"

"I mean, people come stay there all the time. We have a ton of room, and my mom, like, thinks you walk on water."

"That's so nice. I love your mom."

"But, you know, you don't have to," he said. "I know it might be really weird. I'm only asking in case you wanted to get away from the city and hang out for a few days before classes. And it doesn't have to be, like, for the full week. You could come for a couple days if you want. This is thinking out loud."

"Sounds like it might be cool. I'm going to have to check with the airline and see about changing my flight, but yeah. I'll check out my options and let you know."

"Okay, cool."

"Cool."

"What if Rick and Sanjay aren't the ones who changed?" Andy Trafford said.

"What if you're the one who changed?"

Rick and Sanjay bodysurfed in the waves with our buddy Ethan, up from his summer in D.C.

Andy was back for a month before Berkeley. When his semester abroad ended, he set up in Rome, giving tours of the ruins to English-speaking tourists who must have been disappointed that their guide wasn't a local. Over the summer, I sent terse e-mails describing the latest from our high-school friends, including a real-time update of sex sounds from Rick's room after he brought home a loud girl who I didn't consider attractive.

I snorted. "I haven't changed."

"I wasn't insulting you," he said.

"How have I changed?"

"That's not a question that I can answer."

"Why not?"

"It's ineffable, and anyway, you'll think I'm calling you a pussy or something."

"No I won't."

"You have to think about it for yourself. If I tried to tell you, we'd have a stupid argument because you don't want to concede my point."

"Why do you think I've changed?"

"Because you have."

"No, but-"

"Shut up, Joe. Go to the cooler and grab me another beer, and then think quietly to yourself. Or, you know, maybe I'm wrong and you still smile all the time because your braces are gone, and you're still the guy who made Nancy Jacoby cry in biology class and thought a night was a failure if it didn't end with puking."

"Wait, no, I felt terrible about that Nancy Jacoby thing, even when it was hap-"

"Stop. I wasn't kidding about the beer. Be quiet, just shut the fuck up, and get me a goddamn beer."

That long weekend at Fire Island, it was apparent how strongly the dynamics had shifted. My interactions with Rick and Sanjay were rudely formal and pleasant. We were no longer at ease with each other. It wasn't even passive aggressive -- passive aggressive would been better, because a tension would invite resolution. Our remarks were friendly but trite, like the first times meeting a stranger who had potential to become a friend.

I didn't share a king-sized bed with Andy. I shared a bunk bed with Ethan.

When we were all shitfaced that night Andy bear-hugged me at the waist, lifting me inches into the air, squeezing my spine so tightly that I felt pain. I was six inches taller. He staggered backward for wont of leverage. It seemed like he would lose balance and slam us to the living room floor.

"You're probably gonna be awesome one day, fuckface," he said when he set me down. "Also, you're kinda right about Rick and Sanjay being douchier."

There was that time when I was sixteen and messed around with my friend.

We were alone together in a house on a lake. I mentally convulsed. I didn't know this kind of power existed, but here it was, like I had tapped into this invisible current. It was euphoric and horrible, specific to me and previously undiscovered, but also fully, formally human. I regretted my new knowledge; it could not be unlearned. Core assumptions broke. I scorched my thoughts as ruthlessly as I could, but they wouldn't go away.

I opened a door and became something else.

When I saw Chris near baggage claim, the sight of him swarmed me. I carried a copy of Cloud Atlas and had a bag over my shoulder. I expected nothing more than meeting my friend, until I saw him again, wearing a Tigers T-shirt, Pistons cap on backward, raising an arm to make sure that I didn't overlook him.

I wondered whether I'd ever again see him for the first time. Whether I'd set eyes on him after months apart with the knowledge that I'd be with him for months uninterrupted. We were about to start senior year, and after that we'd be gone. Scattered. The Doors declaring: This is the end.

But Jesus, dude, I missed the fucking guy. I felt guilty for having so badly wanted a break from all of them a few months before, but especially from Chris. With his Detroit sports logos, with a guileless smile. He straightened his posture for me when I approached.

Rick, the scenesters, my sharp cigarette-haze paces past the gay guys outside Eastern Bloc -- that was gone. It was an earlier life. That life didn't matter. I wanted to be with Chris and our friends, sitting on a porch, listening to Modest Mouse or the Allman Brothers, drinking cheap beer, bantering about football or his teams, what movies he'd seen, whether he might like the book I was reading.

That was my home. It was the only thing I wanted.

I dropped my carry-on and my book. He was ready for me to hug him. It was closer than a dude-hug but short of bromantic. I hugged him like a brother come from abroad.

"Ugh, I missed" [love] "you dude," I said.

"I missed" [love] "you too. It wasn't half as fun without you. Not exaggerating."

"No Porch Club?"

"Porch Club only existed because of you and Trevor."

"Did you hang out with anybody but Michelle and Katie?"

"I mean, work people. I just really missed" [love] "you. Sam and Trevor too. Michelle studied all summer. And Katie was like, I don't know."

"Horny for a couple of morons who just wanted her for sex."

"Pretty much, yeah."

"You could have called more often. I would've tried to entertain you."

"I didn't want to bother you. You were going to bars and parties and rock shows every night."

"I wish," I said. "I hung with Jamie Calmet a lot. He's a great dude."

"Yeah, you mentioned."

"He told me to say hey."

"Cool," he said, pausing slightly, making sure that it wasn't a setup. "He seemed like a good guy."

I'd flown from LaGuardia to Detroit to Grand Rapids. My two checked bags were enormous. They careened to the carousel.

"Oh my God," Chris said, hoisting one to his shoulder.

"Less than 50 pounds."

"Is it all books?"

"Mostly clothes."

"How many clothes do you need? You wear the same four outfits over and over."

"Yeah," I said, "it's mostly socks and underwear. Less laundry."

"You have more underwear than anybody I've ever known."

"You think that, but that's only because you've seen the clothes pile in my room. Maybe everybody else has the same volume of underpants and you don't know it because you don't go to their rooms."

"True. Maybe I'm weird for not having fifty pairs of boxers."

"I don't have fifty. I wish I had fifty. More efficient. Saves on laundry."

He softly hit the back of my head. "You're crazy."

"If not doing laundry is crazy, I never want to be sane."

"Lunatic," he said. "Maybe I'm an idiot, but I think I missed" [love] "your craziness."

For the first 30 minutes we could have been anyplace. Strip malls and off-ramps, warehouses, car lots, office parks and suburban sprawl.

Hartford, Stamford, Rochester, Long Island.

The sprawl became farmland and then trees. The highway ran faster as the freeway's surface turned ragged. On a Thursday afternoon, only a dozen vehicles paced between us and the horizon. Chris drove between 85 and 90.

He had the radio on a classic rock station. He offered to let me change it. I told him that this was perfect, how when I was growing up, the classic rock stations was the only radio my family could handle together.

CCR, Doobie Brothers, Elton John, Zeppelin; do you remember when you used to sing -- sha la la la la la la la la la la dee dah.

"That's all I listened to growing up," he said. "A little of the pop stuff too. Whatever was on MTV."

"Yeah, and that's all you listen to now."

"Nah, I bought some stuff that you like over the summer. I got most of Wilco. Michelle got me into Elliott Smith a little."

"That's cool. Elliott Smith is so serious. I had a stage for him a few years ago."

"Yeah, Elliott Smith and then Nick Drake."

"That's serious shit."

"I'm a very serious person now," he said.

"I can see that, Pieces."

"Yeah, I became a very serious person over the summer. I've changed."

"I can only imagine," I said.

"Are you excited to, like, be in the country?" he said.

"I've been in the country before. Upstate New York. You know my family has that house on the lake in Vermont. We went up there for fourth of July."

"Oh yeah, I forgot about that."

"I mean, I'm not completely stupid about the country. I've gone fishing.

I know how to waterski."

"Waterskiing's not country, but we'll waterski a lot."

"Perfect."

"My mom's psyched to see you," he said. "Your coming, it gives her an excuse to get excited."

"Is your dad there?"

"He'll come in tomorrow night after work. And then, like-" he laughed nervously. "I wasn't going to tell you this because I thought you might bail."

"Oh, God."

"After work tomorrow Pete's coming up with his wife and their two kids, and then Susan and her husband and their daughter. Susan's pretty pregnant right now." He said this like I needed a warning.

"Wait, am I crashing a family reunion?"

"Nah. It's like that pretty much every weekend. That's just, like, that's what we do at the cabin."

"Sounds lively," I said. "Are we almost there?"

"Like, another 45 minutes, hour."

I'd driven through upstate New York and rural New England, but the back roads in rural Michigan were a different kind of country, like how I imagined the Deep South. The land was green and the people were poor. The forests looked thicker and lusher than in the Northeast, the land flatter and wetter, swampy and deciduous. The flat two-lane highway ran for miles, barely interrupted by towns or villages. It was criss-crossed with wild-looking dirt roads. We passed trailers and crumbling houses with white, rusting, hulking satellite dishes that were popular around the 80s.

There were a few old houses in late-stage deterioration. Windows were boarded; some wore gaping holes. Roofs buckled downward. Barns collapsed years ago, like chopsticks rising out of toothpicks. Weeds and man-high saplings colonized abandoned lawns. Roadkill lined the shoulder and sometimes splattered the lane -- the corpses of possums and deer, what appeared to be a desiccated fur of a former raccoon. The shells of tiny towns with nondescript names had devolved into intersections and flashing-red stoplights. Those towns all had a gas station, a post office and a small supermarket. Some had a bar; some had a used-car lot; some sold boats; one had a Dairy Queen. We passed bait shops and signs directing drivers toward golf courses. Every few miles, through the trees, we caught the glimmer of a lake, white and shining in the sun, reflecting so much light that I squinted even through my shades. A rusting, rattling pick-up truck passed us, like it was pissed to be trailing an SUV. Chris muttered something about rednecks.

Several times, I wanted to dig up my camera and ask him to pull over so that I could take a picture. He wouldn't have understood why I wanted a shot of a falling house or an empty storefront. It would have seemed rude, voyeuristic.

"You're listening to the North's ONLY classic rock station," enthused the radio spot, "playing the best of the 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond!" It recited a list of towns.

"I know all the words," I said, as Don McLean began to sing about a long, long time ago.

"Yeah, I'm so impressed," Chris said. "This song, and the Star Spangled Banner. They're the only two songs everybody knows the words to."

"You think this song is as universally known as the Star Spangled Banner?"

"Oh, yeah, definitely," he said. "At least with the people I know. It'd be this, maybe Hotel California."

"I don't even know the words to Hotel California. The Eagles were junk," I said, "and I bet that not five percent of Americans under 30 know all the words to American Pie."

"Suit yourself," he said, and and began singing at the part about when he read about his widowed bride, but something touched him deep inside, the day the music died.

"Your singing voice isn't horrible," I said. "I've never heard you sing."

He gave me thumbs up and continued. I silently mouthed the words and bopped my head as I stared into the green tangle.

It had been weeks since air tasted so clean. It had a slight mineral trace, of cool stone and fresh dirt. It bathed my face and legs. I stretched my arms and eyelids. No sound but leaves applauding me in the breeze.

Before I was able to get my luggage from the back, the front door opened and Chris's mom said hello. A golden retriever bounded ahead of her, tail slapping back and forth, mouth and tongue hanging in that doggy smile inherent to certain breeds. His quick excited breaths approached a slight whine. He nosed and nuzzled at Chris's knees, canine hips swinging side to side, circling Chris in excited front-paw hops.

"Is this Handsome?" I said.

"This is Handsome!" Chris said. "Joe, check this out." Chris crouched slightly and held his arms outward. "Handsome! Handsome! Hugs!" he said.

The dog stood on his hind legs and put his paws onto Chris's shoulders.

Chris hugged Handsome. The dog's tail frenzied.

"Good boy. Good boy. You love hugs, yes," Chris said. The dog scarfed at the air. Chris released his embrace. Handsome stood down. "We didn't even teach him that. He barked and whined when people hugged without him, so we started hugging him, too. He loves hugs. Try it, he'll hug you."

I mimicked Chris's posture and called the dog's name. He made eye contact with me and bound forward. He rested his paws on my shoulders, settling his chin at my neck and collarbone. I hugged the dog back. He lapped his tongue at the air. It thumped against his nose.

Barbara Riis said, "Now hug me, too."

I hugged her like my mom.

"We're so glad you could come," she said, regarding me. "All summer, I was telling Chris that he should invite his friends up for a weekend. But you know how shy he can be."

"Ooookay, here she goes," Chris said, opening the back of the SUV. "We need to unload Joe's stuff. He packed like a hundred pounds of crap."

"You're taking the lakehouse, right?" she said. "Are you hungry? Do you need anything to eat?"

"I'm not, like, famished," I said. "Maybe in a couple of hours. Is that okay? Sandwiches are fine."

"Joe needs to stretch his legs, Mom," Chris said. "He's been traveling for seven or eight hours."

"Yeah, I wouldn't mind checking things out first," I said.

What Chris modestly called "the cabin" dwarfed my parents' place in Vermont. The main house had five bedrooms and a wraparound porch, set 50 yards back from the lake, built in 1908. When it was sunny, the lake reflected light to the house's interior, hitting the front rooms from every angle. Peonies and rose bushes grew around the perimeter of the house.

Next door, with a separate driveway, was a smaller residence that they called the cottage. Brick and one-story, it served for overflow space on the big weekends. The furniture and carpet were worn. It was decorated with flea-market type paintings. Chris's parents bought it 10 years ago, around the time that his brother Pete got married, reasoning that with five kids and other relatives, they were already short on space in the cabin, and who knew how large the brood would be when grandkids arrived.

Closer to the water's edge, under the shade of a loping elm, was the lakehouse. From the outside it looked like a large shed. We had only a small living area with a fold-out couch and an antenna TV, a beat-up coffee table, a mini-fridge and a cramped bedroom with two twin beds. The damp bathroom had a standing shower.

"My dad and brothers fixed this up a few years ago. Everything but the plumbing. They hired a guy for that. It used to be storage for the boats and stuff."

"Very cool," I said.

"Is staying out here okay?" he said. "We could stay in the cabin, but once everybody's around, and my nieces and nephews, they're going to be loud in the morning and we'd have to be quiet at night. I know it's kind of spartan but at least we have our own space."

"No, man," I said, "it's great."

Handsome followed us to the lakehouse, walking circles around Chris before sitting in the doorway, looking at us expectantly.

I dug my pair of swim trunks out of my luggage. We changed to swim.

"Holy crap," I said, when Chris stripped off his T-shirt. "What have you been up to?"

He looked down at his body, pretending that he didn't know what I was talking about. He pointed to himself like he was saying, Who, me?

Chris had gotten ripped. He'd worked himself into good shape in the three years since we'd met, shedding the slight baby fat, getting more muscle definition -- but it looked like he'd trained for the NFL combine in the months since I'd seen him. His chest and shoulders had swollen. He had the makings of a six-pack.

"No, seriously," I said, taking down my boxers and stepping into my swim trunks. "Were you working out like literally every day?"

He appreciated the attention. I mean, he looked fantastic naked. If it had been a different situation -- if it weren't daylight, if the dog weren't watching us, if we hadn't stepped away from his mother fifteen minutes before -- I might've been all over him.

"Well," he said, pulling up his swim trunks, "there really wasn't much to do this summer. When I wasn't working, I just read, watched movies and went to the gym. So I'd go to the gym, like, two hours a day, and almost nobody was there, so I had it to myself. Sometime I'd go to the gym in the morning, and then when I got home from work at midnight, I'd go out running. Plus, I was, like, drinking less. Katie and I would hang out and get hammered once in awhile but not like during the school year. They say beer has a lot of calories."

"True," I said, looking down at myself.

My body looked white and soft in comparison. I hadn't had a gym membership in the city. I didn't run more than 10 times all summer, and probably averaged 20 beers a week. With the drawstring on my swimming suit pulled in, my stomach was slack. Not fat, but I was soft and pale at the navel, and it looked disgusting.

We swam to the Riises' floating raft, anchored 50 feet offshore. It was a wooden platform that bobbed on pontoons, the kind of raft that people used for waterskiing. Handsome tried to follow us in, but he turned around and paddled back to shore before the end of the dock. He trotted to the dock's end and barked at us, then lay down to rest, regarding us mournfully, his chin cradled on his folded-over paws.

"That dog fucking loves you, man," I said.

"I know!" he said. "I was the one who spent the most time with him, I think. Except for my parents. He goes nuts when I come home. He's a good boy."

"I wanted a dog growing up," I said. "There was just, like, too much chaos in the house. My mom wasn't going to take care of the dog and my dad was too busy. My brothers and I would have fought about it. Kind of sucks."

"Yeah, that sucks," he said. "Dogs are the best." He rose and stood on the raft's edge. "Check this out.

Chris did a perfect dive into the water. I was surprised that a tall man, especially an ungainly one, could dive so gracefully with only a two-foot platform. The raft tipped as the weight shifted. Chris surfaced, eyes closed, hair golden-brown from the lake, slick to his forehead like a helmet, water and sun shining on his newly-muscled shoulders. I stood and cannonballed, landing several feet to his right.

"Do you know how to dive?" he said.

"Not really."

"But you have a pool!"

"Yeah, but I could never get comfortable with going in head first. Feels so unnatural."

"Weird," he said.

"Right," I said.

I climbed the ladder back onto the raft, looking out over the lake, sun on my shoulder, breeze on my chest. It was dotted with clusters of houses, boats latched to docks, a few other rafts bobbing in the distance, but mostly undeveloped forest on the shore. We had it to ourselves that day.

Chris climbed up to the raft, sending it rocking. I was careful to adjust my balance. He stood next to me, dripping, close enough to feel the heat of his body as the water dried on my skin.

"It's nice, right?" he said.

"Holy shit, dude, it's so nice."

"Yeah," he said, "it's great that you were able to come."

"God," I said, looking up at the clouds. I elbowed his elbow. Handsome stood on the dock, wagging his tail, anticipating that we were poised to swim back to land. There was no sound but the lake.

"Just do me a favor and don't take anything my mom says too seriously," he said. "She doesn't have a filter. She's not trying to embarrass me on purpose. It's more like she knows that she'll embarrass me but doesn't care."

"That's okay," I said. "My mom is crazier. We fight all the time."

"Yeah. Everybody thinks their mom is crazy. I'm not complaining. I'm used to it. Just, like, if she says anything that seems off, don't take it seriously. She'll forget about it five minutes later."

They eat dinner early in the Midwest -- like, at 6:00 or 6:30. In New York, no one eats before 8:00 unless there are extreme circumstances.

His mom liked cooking and was used to economies of scale, so a dinner for three had as much food as a dinner for six. Barbecued ribs, baked potatoes, asparagus, corn on the cob, peach cobbler. She was a dramatically better cook than my own mom, who perceived eating as a functional chore. I ended that dinner in a food coma.

She gently peppered me with questions throughout dinner -- very specific stuff about my summer and New York. She asked whether the subways and Central Park were safe, whether it was difficult not owning a car, how much apartments cost. She had an image from the 70s or 80s, of mugging and graffiti and junkies. She larded me with questions about my summer internship, operating, like everyone else, under the delusion that I had been in the midst of something extraordinary, like I was the kid in Almost Famous, hanging with rock stars and going to concerts every night. I told her enough truth to be honest, but not enough to make it sound as messy and bitter as it was; I had nothing to hide, but no one wants to know how those things work in real life; it only makes you sound cynical and spoiled.

Chris sat as a silent observer. He concentrated on her words, waiting to interrupt if she pressed too far, looking at me for a signal to silence her.

As Chris and I cleared the table, with Handsome staring up at us, tail wagging, she said, "Really, we're all so happy that you could make it out here. I know that you're Chris's friend, but you could be in Manhattan or Paris right now, but the fact that you flew out here is just so special."

"Jesus, Mom," Chris said. His word choice pinged me; he didn't normally use Jesus as an exclamation. "You make it sound like he's Colin Powell."

"No, it's cool," I said. "I needed to get out of the City. Time for a break."

"Plus, it's nice that you two get to spend time alone together away from everything at school."

"Mom!" Chris said. "Chill!"

Each time he scolded her, she felt provoked to push her observations that much further.

You'd think that I got off with Chris at the first opportunity. My summer had been sexually desolate. I wanted to touch him as soon as I saw him at baggage claim. But then it didn't happen, and getting off with him became just a small tremor in my thinking. I was exhausted, having woken at 6 for a 9 a.m. flight, and then spending late-afternoon hours in the sun. By 10 o'clock, I was dozing in the cabin living room, watching a rerun of Extreme Home Makeover and an episode of The Apprentice with Chris and his mom. I bordered on wobbly; Chris and his mom essentially ordered me to bed.

Handsome wanted to follow us to the lakehouse. He watched in despair from the back door.

When we got into our quarters, I touched Chris's back. "Seriously," I said, "thanks for having me out here."

"It's cool," he said. "I'm glad you're here."

I gave him a tentative hug. His body stayed tense for the first few seconds, and then loosened as he hugged me back. He smelled like sun and lake.

We brushed our teeth, took out our contacts and kicked off our jeans. Five minutes later, I was asleep in my own, tiny twin bed.

We woke early, around 7:30, and on a couple of mornings, before 7:00. It came naturally. If I woke first, I remained in bed, waiting for him to surface. If he work first, I flitted to consciousness as he moved. I slept soundly but delicately. Sleep leaves you abruptly in new environments. The later sunrise, the songs of birds through window screens, the cool humidity of the air when it crossed the dewpoint and reached low temperatures that I hadn't felt since early May, the smell of a lake that wafted richer and heavier than my childhood lake in Vermont. I came to the day recalling exactly where I was, and permitted it to carry me.

He pulled off a T-shirt and delicately stepped out of his boxers. He knew that I was awake, watching. First thing in the morning, he put on his swim trunks and went into the lake. It was how he woke for the day. I would stay in bed for another five minutes, waiting for my erection to die down, before I put on my own swim trunks and followed him out.

Most mornings in Michigan started gray. The night's moisture collected, with the grass cold and dewy, a light-fog density to the air. I woke expecting rain; by 10 it was sunny and cloudless.

In mornings the lake was warmer than the air. I swam out and joined Chris near the raft. We climbed out and leapt in a few times. We discussed the dewpoint. Jumping in, the water turned cold a few feet below the surface.

Weeds reached for our feet.

We swam back to shore. I showered and shaved. Some days Chris dried off and put on a fresh day's clothes. That would be it for him; the lake was his bath. He lingered, chatting with me while I shaved and towelled off before dressing.

Handsome bounded outside to take care of his morning's business and greet Chris. His mom was already making coffee. She made us breakfast to order: eggs, omelets, blueberry pancakes or French toast. I repeatedly told her that this was unnecessary, that I was fine with cereal, but she insisted on cooking. "Stop feeling guilty," Chris told me in front of her. "She sincerely likes to cook." I didn't want to rag on my own mom by noting her lack of culinary ambition. Requesting food from Chris's mom made me feel like a customer, like I was treating her as the help; I slowly realized that such a mundane task was a common family dynamic in most places. In the City, I'd pay $20 for lesser breakfasts. And even if the coffee tasted bitter and chalky -- overheated soup of Folgers and hard water -- a half-spoon of sugar balanced it.

My cell phone had no service. The Riises had no WiFi, no Internet. I had no gossip and banter with Sam Frost, Andy Trafford, my newspaper friends.

The cabin had a single landline that they used only for coordinating. If the phone rang, it was a disturbance. Aside from snippets of the Today show in the morning, I heard no news. The Republican Convention was coming, but I tuned out. I'd spent weeks raging about Bush and Cheney, slowly falling for Kerry and Edwards, fuming against the war in Iraq, but within 12 hours of being in Michigan, all of that was gone.

I had Chris and his family, my book, swim trunks and running shoes, classic rock on portable radios, a lake in front of me, a hammock behind me, and a sun that blessed my shoulders.

That lake in the woods felt more isolated than an island.

It was glorious.

I knew the reason that he wanted to run, besides that it made sense.

A short four miles. Down the stub of a dirt road that ran from the lakefront properties, out to the bigger dirt road, down to the main paved road at the far end of the lake. The mile-and-a-half of straight, flat gravel on the opposite side of the lake, the right turn, up the slight incline and down the slight incline. Back to the bigger dirt road.

He knew that he could beat me. He was correct.

His strides were easy and long, nearly elegant. Now I was the one who puffed to keep pace. My decline to an eight-minute mile had descended to a struggle for an eight-and-a-half-minute mile, which would have been a comfortable pace at nine minutes. By the second mile I devoured air, occasionally grunting when I exhaled, intent not to let him outpace me by too far. His shoulders were upright, his breaths deep and strong, the slack of the back of his shirt bouncing above his butt.

"You can do it!" he said, smirking as he looked back to me.

"Fuck off, Pieces," I croaked, grumpily. "Jesus, all those cigarettes."

"No smoking!" he said.

"I could still run 10 miles," I croaked.

"Me too!"

"It'll just be," I croaked, "like a week of good runs," I croaked, "before I'm solid."

"Ha."

"No," I croaked, "once you're good at it," I croaked, "you bounce back fast." I spat chalky tongue residue toward the weeds. Some of it strung across my cheek.

His body was self-possessed. The hunched, staggering strides of freshman year seemed impossible. He looked like a natural-born runner, each step as efficient and focused as the last, the back of his thighs tensing and relaxing, feet landing near-perfectly just behind the toe. Even subtle things -- his arms' movements and how they guided his breathing -- were technically correct, the things that you're coached, not the things that come intuitively. I was mildly annoyed by his superiority and his awareness of it, but that was balanced by my pride and surprise.

"Run ahead of me," I croaked on the last mile, "as fast as you can," I croaked, "I know the way back."

"Naw, I don't want you to drop behind and get lost."

"Don't patronize," I croaked, "I'll still see you."

"Nah," he said.

"Do it!" I grunted, intentionally slowing. "I want to see you fast."

So he went. He stride sparked. I couldn't have caught him if I wanted.

He was below an eight-minute mile, probably below 7:45, bobbing down ahead of me. It looked easy. I attempted to bump my pace, and for about a hundred yards, I gained a little, before my heart and lungs screamed to relax and my pace went even slower than before, his white shirt becoming distant in the shade of those trees.

When I returned to the cabin, he was in the lake, swimming in his running shorts, shirt hanging to dry on a railing. Handsome splashed nearby.

"You've given me something to aim for," I said, propping myself at my knees, catching my breath. I spat foul spit in the lawn.

"That's an irony," he said, the lake coming to his waist, water dripping down his chest and arms. He leaned backward and submerged.

I hung my shirt next to his and plunged from the end of the dock. Handsome paddled toward me.

We coated ourselves in sunscreen and dozed in hammocks. We wore shades over our eyes; the leaves fluttered shade overhead. I slept with "Cloud Atlas" over my chest. A lawnmower buzzed softly across the lake.

"It's going to get busy once they're all here," Chris mumbled in his hammock. "Just so you know."

"Yeah, I know."

"It'll be fun though," he said. "Games and stuff. We'll go skiing."

"Cool."

"The kids are cute. I know you're not a kid person. I'll keep them away from you."

"No, it's fine."

"If the kids annoy you, tell me."

"They won't annoy me," I said.

"They're not annoying kids, they're just little kids, but I know you don't like kids."

"Why do you think I don't like kids?"

He paused. "`I effing hate kids.'" His impression of me was credible.

"When did I say that?"

"We were walking through the quad one Saturday and these kids were running around and almost ran into you."

"I was probably in a bad mood."

"It's okay," he said. "You're, like, my guest. If you want me to run interference, tell me. We can hang on our own. Could drive to Lake Michigan and hang out if it gets to be too much."

"I'll be fine. I'm not that delicate."

"You're way more chill away from school," he said.

"Ha."

"Way more."

"So are you. We're probably all more chill away from school. This is my vacation."

He sighed slow and deep, stretching in his hammock, balling his fasts and arching his back. "Sweet," he said, vaguely stoner like.

"Sweeeet," I mimicked.

First came Chris's dad. Luggage, groceries, golf clubs. In all the time that I was around him, he was friendly and good-humored; not rigid or tough; but he was always in control. No question. He often spoke softly and I think it was on purpose, because when you speak softly, people stay quiet and focused in order to listen.

Glen Riis had the firmest handshake I know. He patted my shoulder when he gripped my hand and looked in my eyes. "Great to see you, Joe," he said.

"I hope it's not too boring for you."

"Not at all." I sometimes had the temptation to address him as sir. "It's perfect here."

"Well, we like it," he said.

Chris and I carried groceries inside.

Chris's oldest brother Pete came with his family a half hour later. I'd met Pete at tailgates. When you're 21, 36 seems adult and drained, practically middle-aged, but Pete was an attractive guy with more boyish energy than Chris. Pete was shorter than Chris, probably about 5'10, but he had the tight, muscled build of a former wrestler. His hair was darker blond with barely noticeable flecks of gray. You imagine Pete as a popular guy in high school, and he was.

He married a woman named Amy. In New York, she would have been a different type of woman, with a personal trainer, an expensive haircut, shapely clothes, perhaps already with small tucks of plastic surgery. Maybe she'd read Zadie Smith and talk about Jack White because she'd think those things made her culturally relevant. Amy was still an attractive person, and she graduated from law school ("Currently non-practicing.") but it was a Midwestern thing. She looked like motherhood, without pretense, fear or vanity.

Pete and Amy had a blond nine year old named Tyler and a blond six year old named Jonas. I recognized them from photos pinned to Chris's corkboard, even though I hadn't known their names. They sprung from the car and ran to Handsome, who barked appreciatively and wagged his tail.

"Hug me, Handsome!" Tyler said, holding out his arms. The dog raised his front paws and rested his head on the kid's shoulder, panting drool on his shirt. They were nearly the same height.

"Tyler!" Chris said. "This is my buddy Joe. We go to school together."

"Hey man," I said, waving my hand.

He said hey back, tentatively. When I was a kid, I hated being introduced to adults like that. You never knew their motivations -- whether they were the type to condescend and ask you how you liked school, whether they would subject you to teasing or awful jokes, whether they'd rather avoid you entirely. For a little kid, someone who's 21 doesn't seem more approachable than someone who's 40. They're all vague authorities who didn't understand you.

His little brother had already run off to change into swim trunks.

Pete and Amy both thanked me for coming, and batted more smalltalk about New York. It was crazy, how many thanks I received for my mere presence, and the curiosity that they had about New York's exoticness. During that trip, I was questioned about whether I'd ever been past 30 Rock ("Sure!"), whether I'd been in the crowd outside the Today show ("Ha, nah. It seems like a hassle.") or at SNL ("Unfortunately, no. It's extremely hard to get tickets.") and whether I went to Broadway shows often ("Not much, but The Producers was awesome."). Mets or Yankees fan? ("Yankees, but I'm not obnoxious about it, I promise.") Is Central Park safe? ("Oh, definitely.") Why are New Yorkers rude? ("People aren't actually rude.

They're just focused. There are so many people that if you stopped to talk to everybody, you'd never get anything done.")

I was conscious to be a good one, not to be the guy in a hurry, to say nothing that could be construed as impatient or condescending, even if it was as gentle as the oddity of medium-market local news or a mention of David Remnick.

I was prepared to perform, and for the first couple of hours, I did. My words and posture were careful. I remained engaged and smiling through smalltalk that, in other circumstances might have had me digging my nails to the meat of my thumb. I calculated everything.

But Jesus, dude, they were all so fucking nice. I didn't have to tame an inner asshole because the inner asshole was passed out on opium. You accustom yourself to these twisty, elaborate conversations, all of this sarcastic and cynical bullshit, expecting to get sandbagged, expecting to be critiqued or judged -- positively or negatively -- based on every small thing. Deploy the wrong preposition or admit a gap in understanding, and you see the judgment and amusement in someone's eyes.

It didn't have to be like that. Nobody was out to pin me. I was the vaguely intriguing, vaguely impressive friend of their youngest brother and youngest son. They knew more about me than I did about them. They wanted to like me and let me in, not make me explain myself or mount a defense.

Not worrying about their judgment made me not want to be an asshole. I lost the urge to drop obscure, pedantic knowledge or to impress them with irrelevant polish or fake worldliness. There was no point.

As I let down my guard and stopped worrying, vast segments of my social life -- my real life -- appeared exceptionally fucked up.

Chris's sister Susan hugged him so much. Susan was eight months pregnant.

She hadn't seen him since Christmas, I soon learned. Susan and her husband Chad, they were the only ones who didn't live within an hour of Chris's parents. They were in the Detroit suburbs, which was driveable, but didn't lend itself to casual visits. Susan had a tomboy four-year-old named Holly, who barrelled out of the car and latched onto Chris's leg.

Holly barked at Handsome.

"Are we training for the Olympics or something?" she said to Chris. It wasn't mocking -- slightly bemused, somewhat admiring. "What are we doing here?" She squeezed his tricep. "Is this what happens now from Hot Pockets and Mario Kart marathons? Are you on steroids?"

Chris said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Are you responsible for this?" she said to me.

"I got him running. I don't know what else he's up to."

"It's so great to meet you," she said, hugging me, with that huge pregnant belly protruding. "We've heard so much about you. I thought I'd never meet you except maybe graduation."

"Yeah, I mean, I know Chris really loves you guys," I said, and trailed off, stammering, and going to my default comment, "It's just so nice here."

"Am I embarrassing you?" Susan said to Chris.

"Only a little," he said.

"A little? Then I'm not trying hard enough," she said. "Wait until I tell you what pregnancy has done to my body."

"Jesus, Susan," he said, squishing. "Like I tell you, doctors are really into TMI, it's gross."

There it was again -- the Jesus profanity.

"Please tell me you give him a hard time," she said to me. "You're loosening him up, right?"

"Joe gives me a hard time," Chris said. "Way more than you."

"I don't give you a hard time," I said.

"Give him a hard time," she said to me. "He needs a hard time."

"Great," Chris said. "Encouragement."

She touched my arm. "Don't worry. We can talk about him when he's not around. You can tell me what he's really been up to."

He looked to me like I would help. "Joe?"

"Bro Code," I said. It was a dumb phrase that Rick used over the summer.

"I won't say anything that violates Bro Code."

"Bro Code? Is that legally binding?"

"Yeah. It's federal law."

"Bro Code. You guys are fratboys," she said. "You sound like fratboys.

I've got 48 hours to hunt for details."

"Susan, like, babies me," Chris said later that night. "She's kind of obsessed with me."

"I mean, she was joking around."

"I know. I'm not annoyed. But, like, Susan and my mom are the ones without a filter. If Jeannie were here, she'd keep them in check, but she's camping in the U.P. with her fiance this weekend, so."

"They're fine. They're not as crazy as my mom. If this were my family, my mom and I would have yelled at each other several times, and I probably would've murdered Rob."

"Look," Chris said, "I know how you think, and I know what it's like to get frustrated with family, but I can't believe yours is as messed up as you make them sound."

We played Hearts at night after dinner -- all of the adults but his mom.

With seven of us, we played an adapted, two-deck version with 91 cards, each player dealt thirteen. They lit citronella candles but coated themselves in mosquito spray. They warned me repeatedly about the mosquitoes.

The sun set later in Michigan, at the time zone's far western fringe. We had faint daylight at 9 p.m.

Barbara Riis had the three kids -- Tyler, Jonas, Holly -- at the lakeshore.

She carried a flashlight. She was helping them try to catch frogs and turtles. They splashed ankle-deep in the water, inspecting for reptiles.

"Joe, you seem like a poker player," Pete said.

"I'm horrible at poker."

"That's surprising," Pete said.

"I already get too competitive without bringing money into it."

"You played football in high school, right?" Pete said.

"No. Ran cross country in the fall. Then basketball and baseball."

"You any good?"

"Not that good at basketball. I didn't start. I only played because my friends were on the team. Baseball, I wasn't bad. Starting shortstop. I was good at fielding. I liked fielding better than hitting."

"What did you hit?"

"I was, like, .270 in senior year."

"That's pretty good."

"There was a guy on our team who hit like .380."

"Jesus."

"Shit."

"Yeah, but it's not like in the South, where the high school teams are really good," I said. "He didn't even get recruited."

We were late into a deal. Someone led diamonds. Susan dropped a jack high; I played an off-suit heart; Pete unloaded the queen of spades on her.

"Oh, you bastard," Susan said. "I knew you were saving it for me."

"Not true," Pete said.

"You could have dropped that two hands ago."

"True," he said, "but I didn't feel like playing it then."

"Play nice," Amy said to her husband.

"I always play nice," Pete said. "I didn't play it against you."

"I'm gonna get you back," Susan said.

Barbara Riis came back with the kids. They had a small green frog in a bucket. Tyler tipped the bucket to show us. The frog was sedentary in a half-inch of water.

The game broke so parents could put the kids to bed. Susan, Chad and Holly stayed in the cabin. Pete had to make Jonas take a bath. Tyler wanted the frog to stay in his room. His mother said no. Later that night, the parents would free the frog in the lake and tell Tyler that it escaped overnight. Chris's mom asked if anyone wanted more pie; we said no but took more beers. The Supremes played on the radio. Chris looked at me half-apologetically, like he thought I might be annoyed by the commotion and the game's interruption. My legs still felt tight and strong from our jog. I leaned back in my chair and stretched, keeping his eye contact, smiling to signal him to stop worrying.

"I mean, it's not like I don't want to." He initiated, in fact, when he pulled me at my lower back. He was half hard and as soon as he touched me, I was too. "Just, like, with everybody here, my head's not really into it.

It's too much to think about."

It wasn't yet 11:00. We were in the lakehouse. Lights were on in the main cabin. Pete and Amy were probably cleaning.

"It's not that I think they'll find out," he said. "That's not what I mean. They'd never think of it. They're not going to think of it. They'd never know."

I reached over and flipped the switch to dark. He went all in for my kiss.

I held the new muscles of his shoulders. He leaned into me, smearing his lips across my cheek.

"I can't," he said to my skin. "There's too much. It feels weird."

"That's okay," I said. We were still holding onto each other, standing in that small living room that smelled of traces of bleach and mildew. "I'm exhausted, anyway."

"Me too," he said.

We removed our contacts and brushed our teeth with moderate degrees of boner. Once I thought that he fell asleep, I jerked off to him; the next morning, I woke at 6:45 and found Chris jerking off. I rolled over and watched him with my eyes half open, observing while he finished with a few sharp thrusts.

Bro Code.

The second run was uglier than the first. We went 15 minutes after we woke. I expected it to be bad. The first time after a long break, your body wants to expel energy. You start strong. The second time, it sucks from the first step. Ankle and knees feel like ceramic, thighs feel like cast-iron, heart and lungs over-exert immediately.

Chris didn't tease me. I wouldn't have minded but was glad that he didn't.

He jogged beneath his ability. We probably ran 8:45 miles. He knew that I was hurting.

When we got close to the end, I quickened my pace, conscious of my form. I ran my hardest. My lungs fought for air. I hadn't struggled like that since high school cross country, when we hit the hills, when I could break six minutes a mile. I hadn't felt so physically pathetic in years.

Do you know what a process it is to jam your feet into two fiberglass boards and be jerked from the water at 25 miles an hour?

First, you leap backward to the lake, vest strapped around you, nostrils and eyes snaring the light sting of blue exhaust fumes rattling from the boat's motor. You take a face of water and drift from the boat. Someone slides the skis toward you, one at a time. If his aim is good, the ski slides toward your face. A graceful catch is harder than you expect, because the lifejacket is not designed to permit you the full range of motion. When your shoe size is 13, you struggle to maneuver into the skis' tight bindings -- the rubber edges tear at the hairs of the top of your foot. Tug, wrestle, squeak, and cram. Once you finally attach the skis, you have to paddle backward and maneuver to get hold of the rope and the handle; forget about efficiency with these damn awkward, half-floating planks latched to your feet. You feel like a wounded waterbug.

Then, once you finally have hold of the rope, there's a crude balancing act of positioning your body and skis just so, while slowly, slowly, slowly being dragged by the boat, in such a way that the movement is intensely uncomfortable, straining you at the shoulders and forcing your knees to your chest. Do not attempt this for more than 10 seconds, as it rapidly exhausts you, and in this part of the process, it never feels like you'll get the stability to raise up from the lake. Just point your skis toward the air, angled at roughly 45 degrees, and ignore core stability.

Give your driver a thumb's up. This isn't to indicate that you feel awesome, but that you're ready to go.

The boat's motor grinds. A burst of that acidic gray smoke coughs toward you. You hurtle forward. Your upper body propels ahead with awesome power, while every joint below the waist resists. It feels like you could snap at the hips. Slowly stretch your legs at your knees -- picture a plane extending its landing gear. You rise to the surface, air and spray hitting your eyes, briefly blinding you.

A miracle! Upright and free, skin to the sun, chill force of wind and speed, but it's become effortless -- aside from some slight strain in the forearms and certain back muscles, you could maintain this indefinitely, square and skimming water, at a speed somewhere between 25 and 30 that feels more like 80.

And then, not fifteen seconds later, your center of gravity stones out.

You overcompensate with a forward lean. Your face smashes into the water, liquid that feels like concrete. The lake performs an enema in your nostrils. Your forehead rings; your groin muscles stretch from a half-split as your legs separate in the fall.

The smack jolts you with adrenaline. You feel no pain -- it's mildly euphoric. The boat slowly circles back.

"Everything all right?" Pete asked.

"Holy crap, dude," Chris said. "That was nasty."

"I'm good!" I said.

"You need a breather?"

"Nah," I said, "let's go again."

We repeated the ritual. This time I stayed up. We made two-and-a-half laps before my forearms burned. I gave the boat a thumb down. Pete did a sharp turn in the waterfront. I released the handle and slowly glided downward, my hips dropping into the water, landing softly on my back, skis neatly positioned against the sky.

They were brilliant skiers -- tanned and blonde and poised, from eight-year-old Tyler to Chris's dad in his 60s.

They grew up with it, Chris told me. He and Pete skied since they were Tyler's age. Pete could ski barefoot when he was in college, but only in larger lakes with stronger boats. He stopped after his friend tore his ACL doing it.

When Pete abdicated the controls to ski and removed his shirt, I decided that I'd hook up with a 36 year old, after all. He was more muscled and compact than Chris. He must have lifted a few times a week. I congratulated myself for the foresight to bring shades on the boat, as I stared unnoticed at the muscles of Pete's back. On skis, he cut through the wake, effortlessly maneuvering himself in swift arcs, sending tall rooster-tails of spray a dozen feet in the air.

Chris and I napped again in the hammocks. I slipped to consciousness for seconds. Voices of young parents splashing in the water with their kids.

Barbara Riis speaking quietly from the porch. Comforting disturbances. I looked to Chris's slumbering profile and settled back to sleep.

"It's actually remarkable to see what all of you have done for him," said his sister Susan. Chris still slept. I stood shin-deep in the lake with a Diet Coke in hand. Susan monitored Holly, who splashed in a lifejacket and spun an inflatable octopus.

"It's really nothing," I said. "He's a good dude. Whatever's happened, he did it for himself, not because of us."

"He's our littlest brother," she said. "We were so protective of him.

When he was a little kid, you know, he was the kind of kid who'd cry at recess. He wasn't bullied. He was just a sensitive kid. He had friends in high school. He wasn't an outcast. I think he was even kind of a popular guy, in that way that a certain kind of quirky kid can be popular, but Jesus, Chris was shy. We all worried what would happen to him at college. You can see what the rest of us are like. We're not a shy group."

"Yeah," I said, "that surprised me a lot."

"I imagine," Susan said. "Mom and Dad were hilarious after they first moved him into your house. Mom was like, `I think his housemates were drinking!' She was trying not to seem so pleased about it, that Chris was having this normal college experience. When he left for freshman year, I could have pictured him being overwhelmed and coming back to go someplace closer to home, or maybe that he'd been so repressed growing up that he'd be one of those guys that gets to college and goes wild."

"No, he's such a good guy," I said. "I think he just needed the right circumstances to draw him out. He's still on the shy side, but it's pretty functional."

"I'm not sure if you appreciate it because you haven't known him as long as we have, but for me, it's like, I can see him grow into himself and still be the person that he was. Somehow college has done for him in three years what we weren't able to do in eighteen. It feels good seeing it, so thank you, and all of your friends. I know that sounds gross and sappy."

"Yeah, well, we're around a lot of good people," I said. "I'd never tell them this, but being away from them this summer sucked."

"No, tell them that," Susan said. "That's the kind of thing you tell people. Mom is always talking about how much all of you love each other."

"I wouldn't take it that far."

"It's okay," Susan said. "I'm not going to wring any confessions from you.

I'll save that for Chris." She interrupted her thought to call her daughter back closer to shore, ordering her not to swim to where she couldn't touch bottom.

"He must love getting those questions," I said.

"Let him get annoyed," she said. "He can't be self-conscious forever.

Besides, I'm not talking mean about him. It's all out of love."

"No, I know," I said. "One thing that's funny is, he never, ever swears.

He keeps saying Jesus in front of your mom, and it's a little weird."

"He refuses to swear. Our parents never swear. They used to yell at me and Pete but they've given up. Davey swears like George Carlin. So who knows. Maybe he'll start swearing, and then he'll move on to pot, and maybe, someday, God forbid, get a girlfriend."

The kids begged us to throw them. Chris and I knelt in the water and propped them in our hands. Counted to three and lobbed them as far as we could. They flailed through the air and landed feetfirst, buttfirst, a few feet away. Small kids are light, even the nine year old, like they have the bones of birds. Holly, the four year old, asked to climb my shoulders, then commanded me to go underwater. I flopped forward with her on my shoulders, swimming a kind of butterfly with a tiny child laughing and gasping on my back. She held my hair and pulled at the scalp to keep her balance, but her grip was weak and merely prickled. We were so shallow that my chest scraped the gravel of the lake. I remained underwater and carefully lifted her from my back.

Her cousin Jonas ran toward me in the water. "Can I go next?" he said.

"Sure," I said, standing, collecting my breath. "Let me rest for a minute first."

It's not the kind of thing that I thought would be flattering, but those little kids went bonkers for me.

You have to understand, I was literally never around children. Evan was sixteen and the youngest person I knew. Children were small, clumsy, inarticulate; they couldn't read interesting books and their taste in music seemed horrible. Few things sounded more boring than pretending to indulge their stupid interests. Plus, I could easily break one by accident.

When it was time for dinner, they asked if Chris and I could sit near them.

By that night, the two smallest ones were climbing over me. The nine year old sulked because no one would play Monopoly with him. ("That's more of a rainy-day kind of thing," his mother said, to no avail.) Chris would pick up Holly and hold her over his shoulders, like he was about to execute a squat. He would fling her on one of the empty beds. She landed on her back, bounced on the mattress, laughed wildly. Jonas begged to ride on my shoulders. He called out to the dog from his perch; the exhausted dog looked up at us from his rest on the floor, thumped his tail twice and ignored us.

With Pete, we took them to the waterfront to hunt for reptiles. This was largely ineffective, because Jonas was more interested in trying to scare and wrestle us than he was in capturing frogs.

"I'll get you!" Jonas abruptly said, in a shout meant to startle.

"You're too small to get me," I said.

"I'll get you!" he shouted, and ran toward me in the dark water, clasping me at the knee.

"Oh man, you totally got me," I said.

"Jonas, stop!" yelled his older brother. "You're scaring the frogs."

"I'll get you!" Jonas shouted to no one.

"Jonas, you're not going to get any frogs being this noisy," his father said. "If he's bothering you, Joe, let me know."

"It's no problem," I said. "Our first names our practically the same."

"I'll get you!"

"You're just way too small to get me," I said. "Sorry, but it's true."

He ran at me.

"Oh man, you got me again. It's incredible," I said, lifting him out of the lake and setting him on the dock.

When we returned frogless to the house, Jonas snuck around the corners of the lakehouse, then leapt out in an effort to scare us. He scrambled ahead, standing still behind a tree trunk, waiting to pounce when we got close.

"I'll get you!" he shouted, jumping out from his spot. I feigned terror.

It turned cool at night. Not in absolute terms, just for what I was used to in August. We changed to jeans. I dug through my luggage to find a flannel.

Chris took out the orange hoodie. My orange hoodie.

"I know that hoodie," I said while we changed.

"Yeah, this one? It's nice."

"Where'd you buy it?"

"I forget," he said. "Maybe The Gap? I can't remember."

"Yeah, I bet you can't."

That Saturday was the latest we stayed up all week, probably until about one in the morning. It was only me and Chris with his two siblings -- their spouses had tired after putting kids to bed. We drank beers and ginger ales on the porch and played Spades while Handsome dozed a few feet away. They drank the single greatest beer I've ever tasted. It came in bottles with an orange label. It was some kind of a wheat beer but faintly orange-flavored, not sweet and lemony like a Hefeweizen but also not sharp or hoppy. I've never had it before or since, and can't remember its name.

Pete was 36 and Susan was 31; Pete did emergency medicine in Grand Rapids and Susan delivered babies at a hospital in suburban Detroit. She'd been pregnant with Holly while she was a resident, which must have made her a bad-ass. Pete and Susan were obviously close, moreso than either of them were to Chris. They easily moved in and out of banter about work, inside jokes with one another, trash talk about the card game, and if they addressed me or Chris, the tone became slightly calmer, more formal, even when they gently needled Chris.

"How did he get the nickname Pieces?" Pete asked.

"Our roommates made it up. Like Reese's Pieces."

"Yeah, I assumed that. All of us got called Pieces."

"I was hoping for a better story."

"Joe used to hate it," Chris said.

"Yeah, I thought it sounded like the name for a cat. I wouldn't call him Pieces. Then it stuck."

"Do you have a nickname?"

"Just Joe."

"That's boring."

"Pieces is the only one with a nickname."

"What's the weirdest thing he's ever done?" Susan said.

"Susan, don't," Chris said.

"Don't embarrass him too badly," Susan said.

"Can I tell them about the ice cream truck?" I asked him.

"Sure. That's fine."

"We were in Sam's jeep one time with this girl who lived next door. We'd gone to the grocery store. Chris was the only one of us who knew how to drive stick, but he hit the brakes at a yellow light. He got Sam's jeep rear-ended by an ice cream truck. But he was freaked out to be behind the wheel during an accident, so I posed as the driver when the police came."

"You probably committed a crime," Susan said to me.

"Yeah, I know, I'm still on the run from the law."

"Who was the girl next door?"

"It was just a girl who lived next door. Nothing scandalous."

"That's it?" Susan said. "That's the craziest thing?"

"What kind of crazy things do you think happen?"

"Partying naked," Susan said. "Acts of vandalism."

"Dealing ecstasy. Murder. Human trafficking."

"Yeah, I traffic humans sometimes," Chris said.

"What's the craziest thing you ever did?" I asked Pete.

"Well, this is really stupid, but when I was in the frat, there was this night when a buddy and I went into this guy's room at like three in the morning and set off a string of firecrackers and a couple of Roman candles.

And it was a huge mess. The room got destroyed. This was in September and it was still kind of warm out, so the window was open, and this guy Eddie, when the fireworks started going off, completely lost his mind. He woke up in his tighty whities and jumped out the second-floor window. He said that at first, he thought the house was on fire, and then he thought that somebody was shooting, so he just instinctively jumped out of bed and out the window."

"Jesus."

"Jesus, Pete," Susan said.

"Now it seems evil," Pete said. "I mean, number one, a guy jumps from the second floor window, it's easy to imagine him snapping a femur, even getting some kind of spinal injury. And if he'd gotten hurt, that would have been most awful for him, but I'm sure that we would've been reported, maybe arrested, maybe kicked out of school. The whole thing was completely ridiculous. Smoke alarms went off. We woke up the whole frat. Everybody was pissed. My buddy and I had to repaint the room and replace some of Eddie's stuff. I've never felt like such an asshole.

"But, you know, everybody was fine. It was the second floor. We had this guy in a couple weeks ago, he was probably 22 or 23, who had a motorcycle accident on a dirt road, brought in by medivac, permanent neck injury -- just horrible. So this wasn't like that."

"You've probably got a lot of crazy stories," I said.

"You have no idea, man. I have nothing but crazy stories."

"Don't feed his ego," Susan said to me.

Pete reached into his mouth and removed a front tooth.

"Disgusting," Susan said.

"How did that happen?"

"High school hockey," Pete said.

"It's not even a good story," Susan said.

"Yeah, the lost tooth story isn't good. Fell on my face in practice.

That's all."

"Mom still lost her shit," Susan said.

"You weren't even old enough to walk," Pete said to Chris. "Mom had to bring you with her to the hospital. You cried the whole time."

"I can do math," Chris said. "When you're 90, I'll only be 75, so I'll get the last laugh."

"How old will you be when I'm 60?"

"Like, 28?"

"Math prodigy."

"Remember when you and Davey tried to slingshot Chris off the pontoon boat?" Susan said.

"Oh, yeah, God, with the bungee cord. What were you, eight?"

"No, I think I was younger," Chris said. "I think I was like six."

"Okay, so that would line up. I had a stage where I was into throwing guys."

"You can try to throw me tomorrow," I said.

"I'm not sure if my back could handle it," Pete said.

"I mean, it looks like you're in pretty good shape, but I was thinking more of a slingshot contraption."

"The slingshot," Pete said longingly. "We never could get the tension or leverage right."

"Dad was so pissed when you fired that can of beer into the lake."

"Yeah. A beer can was easy. A human is difficult."

"I'm glad that I'm only having girls," Susan said.

"You're stopping with the second one? Is that official now?"

"Who knows. I don't want to have that conversation now, Pete. That's not a late-night cabin kind of discussion."

"You have any siblings, Joe?"

"Two brothers. Younger."

"You must have some stories, too."

"I mean, yeah, I have crazy stories, but they're more like crazy in the clinically insane sense, not in the funny sense."

My tone must have been more severe than I intended. They paused and regarded me, like they'd just asked me about a dead parent without realizing it.

"No, no, it's fine, it's not that bad. My youngest brother is a sweet guy.

The other one and I fight some, but whatever." I waved a hand like this explained something: "He's going to Penn."

"Oh. Well, at least that's impressive."

"Joe clashes a lot with one brother," Chris said, offering to close a curtain for this brief threat of a Bad Joe cameo. "But it's not that bad."

"Oh, yeah, it's not that bad."

"You've got to fight with your brothers," Pete said. He kicked Chris under the table. "Fight with your brothers and stick up for your sisters."

"Oh, yes," Susan said. "My hero. I'm so blessed."

"What if we never got to be friends?" I said as we walked through the dark to the lakehouse. "Wouldn't that have sucked?"

"Yeah, that truly would've sucked," he said.

I will never see anyone more attractive than Chris Riis wearing my orange hoodie, leaning back in the porchlight among the citronella candles and the empties with the orange labels and the cards spread among us, pinkish-tan in the face, hair blond bright and clear from the sun. We periodically made eye contact when Pete and Susan bantered into digressions, holding it for a few seconds, lips in matching smirks. It was a struggle to look away from his face. I had been conscious not to look at him for too long because I didn't want his siblings to get the wrong idea.

We woke again at seven. Less than six hours' sleep. I tried to make myself drift off again but my normal rhythms had been altered. It was sunny that morning and wind blew across the lake. A child's voice called the dog. I stretched and looked to Chris while I squinted and smiled.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," I said.

On the third morning we did not run. The third day was for recovery.

The wind blew small choppy waves across the lake. A white sailboat graced over the water. We wrapped towels around our shoulders when we came back to shore, warming ourselves against the breeze. He waited his turn at the shower with a towel around his waist. Our skin brushed when I stepped out to dress. We caught each other's faces, naked and alive.

We skied a couple of hours after breakfast. I didn't tell them that my right shoulder was tight and sore from yesterday. I rose cleanly from the water on my first attempt, bouncing outside the wake, knees absorbing the waves' sharp jumps, swinging in wide parabolas when Glen turned at the ends of the lake, keeping the weight off my tender left arm. Handsome barked at us from shore.

When I woke from my afternoon nap, Chris was trying to play badminton with Tyler. Tyler hit the birdie into the net or whipped it to the ground. He was frustrated. Chris handled it gently. He made poor hits on purpose in order to keep his nephew's self-criticisms in perspective.

I watched them for several minutes with my eyes half-closed, admiring Chris's temperament with the kid. I stretched and yawned at the clouds and called Handsome over for a petting.

Holly scrambled across the lawn. Without saying anything, she arrived to my hammock and tried to climb up.

"What do you think you're doing?" I said. "You almost made me fall over."

She didn't say anything as she clawed at the netting. I adjusted my weight to give her a better angle. She flipped up and rolled over next to me, so that we were lying next to each other on our backs, with her bobbly blond head propped at my armpit.

"Whoah, this is very personal," I said.

"Yeah," she said, "it's personal."

She smelled like something sweet and sticky, like jam or berries.

Something that grows on stems and gets mixed with sugar.

"Why are you here?" Holly said.

"Why? Because I'm friends with Chris."

"Why?"

"Well, we go to school together. We live in the same house at school."

"Are you in Uncle Chris's family?"

"No. He's my friend. If I was in his family, I'd be your uncle or cousin or something like that."

"You live with your friends?" She was incredulous.

"Yeah, in college you live with your friends."

"You live with your friends?" she said. "That's crazy."

"Kind of. You're just there with your friends. They're who you spend time with."

"That's crazeeeee."

"Kind of, but it's a lot of fun."

"Why?"

"I mean, what if you got to live with your friends all the time? And you could do whatever you wanted? And you didn't have your mom and dad around to tell you what to do. So you'd basically, like, you get to, like, play all the time with your friends, and that's just what you did. All the time. That's fun, right?"

"Yeah."

"So that's basically what we do."

"Is Uncle Chris your friend?"

"Yeah, I mentioned that already. I thought that's what we were talking about. Yeah, he's my friend."

"Why?"

"Because he's a really nice dude. He's nicer than most people. And he's a lot of fun to be around. We have a lot of fun. We stay up late and go to football games and play video games and watch movies."

"Nemo?"

"Of course."

"Nice." She said it kind of like Borat.

"And, you know, he's just a really good guy. I'd want an uncle like Chris."

"Why?"

"I don't know. He's my friend. I just really like" [love] "him a lot."

"Why?"

"You're, just, like, talking in circles. Do people tell you that?"

"No."

"You are," I said. "And it's crazy." I said it like she did.

"I'm not crazy. You're" she struck me in the stomach with her four-year-old fist "crazy."

"You think I'm crazy?"

"Yeah."

"No," I said. "Sorry to break the news, but you're crazy. Probably the craziest person I've met."

"No," she said. She turned her face to me and climbed up to put her hands on my shoulders, facing me. "Crazy!" she shout-whispered.

"Sorry, but no. You're crazy. Quite possibly insane."

She scrunched her face. "What's insane?"

"Like, the craziest of the crazy. When you're super crazy, you're insane."

She blew up her cheeks and stared me in the face. "You're insaaaaaane."

"No, you are."

"I'm crazy and you're insane," she said.

Chris abruptly loomed over us. He hoisted her from my chest by her armpits and placed her upright on the ground.

"Holly?" he said. "What are you doing?"

"She's being insane," I said.

She jumped at Chris, like she was trying to climb him.

"Are you bothering Joe?" he asked her.

"No."

"We're talking about who's crazier," I said.

"Close contest," Chris said. "I'm not sure who I'd pick for craziest."

I rolled out of the hammock, picking her up and propping her behind my neck, the way that Chris had the night before. She squirmed and laughed.

"She doesn't weigh that much," I said. "Honestly, not even enough to do real squats." I did a couple of squats with the four year old on my shoulders, then set her on the ground.

Chris and I had a couple of seconds of incredulous eye contact. "I mean, I can't even," he said. "I wish Sam or Katie were here to see this." Holly again tried to take him down at the knee. He kicked her off. "I don't even know who you are anymore."

"He's insane!" Holly said in staccato.

When they began to leave, it was instinctive as the departure migratory birds -- the sun reached a certain angle and it was time to move.

Instantly, they transitioned from sitting together on the porch to gathering children's belongings and putting bags into SUVs.

Barbara Riis walked behind Chris's chair and placed her hands on his shoulders.

"I know how disappointing this will be for you both, but unless you have a problem with it, I'm going back with your dad for a couple of days. I told Aunt Mary that I'd take her to a doctor's appointment tomorrow and I need to get to the hairdresser's. And it's no fair for your dad to feel lonesome the whole week."

"Okay," Chris said, sounding vaguely skeptical.

"Is that okay with you?"

"Yeah, it's totally fine. But are you, like, leaving the Escalade? Or are we stuck here?"

"No, I'm leaving the Escalade. Dad will drive me back after work on Wednesday. Do you need money?"

"No, it's fine," I said.

"Joe has money," Chris said.

"I mean, we wouldn't need to buy that much, if anything," I said.

"You guys should be fine with groceries," his mom said. "There's still a lot of hamburger and shaved meat-"

"Oh, we'll be fine," I said, "although, you know, I'll definitely miss your cooking."

"Do you know how to cook? Because you know he can't cook," she said.

"I'm pretty okay with a grill. I can handle scrambled eggs."

"You're almost out of beer," she said, "but you can drive to town for that."

"Mom!" Chris said. "We don't drink that much."

"It's fine. Relax."

"I mean, you make it sound like we're alcoholics or something."

"Of course I do not," she said. "Joe?"

"We can get more beer. It'll all be fine. I'll be very well behaved."

"You're not the one I'm worried about."

"Mom!" He grunted and slapped his knee in frustration.

"Dude," I said to him, "we'll be fine."

"I know we'll be fine. That's the whole point. The point is, she doesn't think I'll be fine, like I haven't been living on my own for three years or whatever."

"Mister dramatic," she said, squeezing his shoulders. "Do you want me to stay? Is that what you're saying?"

"No!" he said. "I'm just saying that I know how to take care of myself."

"You've made your point," she said, lifting her hands from his shoulders.

"Is Handsome staying?" Chris asked.

"We were going to take him. Do you want him to stay?"

"I don't know."

"Won't it bother you to have him in the lakehouse at night? Or do you want to go up to the cabin? There are fresh sheets in the second-floor closet if you want to go to the cabin."

"God, Mom, I don't know!"

"I think it's better if we take Handsome. Even though I know you love him."

Chris sulked for the minutes after that exchange. Holly came over to announce that they were leaving. She pulled at my hand.

"What, are you trying to take me with you?" I said.

She shook her head.

"Too bad, because I was going to go with you and stay at your house for awhile. That's no good?"

"You can stay in the guest room," she said.

"Nah, that's cool. Now that I think about it, I'll probably stay and hang out with your Uncle Chris. Is that okay?"

Susan hugged Chris when she said good-bye. "Ugh, I love you so much," she said. "I'm proud of you. Hope the next time I see you, you don't look like The Rock."

"His name is Dwayne Johnson now, and I'll look like me," Chris said.

Susan hugged me, too. "I'm sure I'll see you again," she said.

"I hope! Graduation, at least."

"Oh, more than that. Come back any time. Thanks for being so good to Holly."

"Dude, Holly and I are pals."

Holly had turned shy talking to me around her parents. She smiled and hid behind her dad's legs.

"She has a little crush on you," Susan half-whispered. "You taught her the word insane."

"We're both a little insane," I said, pointing at her.

Chris picked Holly up to say good-bye. He handed her off to me. "Bye," I said, putting my hand on her forehead. "It was fun hanging out."

"You're crazy," she said.

"No, you are."

"No, you are."

"I don't think so," I said, putting her down.

When Pete and his family left, he gave me a tight Midwestern handshake. We agreed that we'd see each other before some of the football games in the fall. I told him that he should came hang out at the house sometime after the games. "Yeah, man, of course I'd love to, but I'd have to negotiate that, and I'm married to an ex-lawyer, so you know how that goes."

"Yeah, but my dad's a lawyer, so I know their tricks. Put Amy on the phone with me and we'll hash it out."

"Pete will be your responsibility then," Amy said, "and I don't think you want that."

"I mean, he's not that bad," I said.

"Shows what you know," she said.

We waved good-bye as they drove off, Handsome sitting watchfully at Chris's feet.

His mom gave us a quick inventory of the kitchen before she left. Chris sighed and rolled his eyes the whole time. "You're acting like this is the start of The Shining, like we're going to be trapped here all winter," he said.

"Dude!" I finally said. "It's fine. It's helpful."

"Joe, it's okay," his mom said. "He's just tired."

"You guys shouldn't talk about me like I'm not here."

"Chris!" His dad exclaimed, quickly and sharply. He'd been clearing the dishwasher. I'd forgotten that he was there. I hadn't heard that tone since high school. It was startling. "Enough of it!" He stared calmly at his son.

Chris turned red, lips pursed. He wanted to argue; he glanced at me and then to his father, signaling a reminder that I was present and a request not to embarrass him in front of me; his dad registered, expression softening slightly. "She's only trying to help," his dad said, low with impatience but not aggressive.

"I know," Chris said softly. "She doesn't have to worry. That's all I'm saying."

"Okaaaay," she said, like she was cheerfully resigned, "I know you'll be fine. You've heard enough out of me."

"Thanks so much for everything," I said. "We'll miss you."

"That's sweet of you to say," she said.

As soon as everyone was gone -- as soon as Chris and I had so much real estate to ourselves -- we were exhausted, like we'd stepped out of a long flight and could finally stretch.

Which we did, literally, taking two reclining loungers out to the dock with beers, the radio, and mosquito spray. It was maybe a half-hour to sunset.

"Dude, thanks so much for putting up with them," he said. "I know it's not what you signed up for."

"Are you kidding? They're awesome."

"I appreciate you saying that, but I'm sure it was a lot."

"No, man, they're fucking great. I kind of get it now."

"Get what?"

"Like, I always thought it was a little weird how involved you were with your family. Not weird as in crazy, just different than I'm used to. None of my friends are as close to their families as you are to yours. I know you think that I'm exaggerating when I talk about this stuff, but I can't picture all of us hanging out together the way you do. And dude, Pete and Susan are just so fucking fun, and the kids were hilarious, and your parents are so great. If that was my family, I'd want to be around it. I kind of get now why you want to live closer to home after graduation."

"I figured you must have been dying to get away from them."

"Fuck no. Why would you think that?"

"Just, like, knowing you and the way that you can be."

"Ha, like how?"

"Kind of intense."

"But I like to have a good time."

"Definitely, but even your good times are intense."

"I don't want to be intense," I said. "I just want to chill. Listen to CCR, sit in the sun."

"You're so funny."

"No, I'm serious," I said. "You don't understand the kind of shit I was putting up with this summer."

"Yeah, living in Manhattan off your parents' money while you hung out with Jamie Calmet a couple times a week. Sounds awful."

"No, no. That was illusory. I mean my friends, my fucking friends, guys I was tight with since like fourth or fifth grade, man, and everything else there, just everything. The job sucked. The job was horrible. You can't tell that to people because they'll think you're being a douchebag, that you're ungrateful, but everybody I was around this summer, it was awful, man. The only people I liked went to [COLLEGE REDACTED] and all we did was pretend like we were still there. I kept thinking about how much I wanted to be hanging out at 1254 with you and Katie and Sam. Like, all of you. I missed that shit so much, man."

"Yeah. We missed you, too. Katie and I would sit around and talk about what if you were there."

He was in my wingspan, body extended next to me in daylight, only ourselves. No one in sight. Voices of small children chirped distant and unseeable down the shore. I could touch him; we could be unbounded. I extended a hand to the top of his head. That was all. He shifted his hips slightly, like that alone had been sufficient to arouse him and require adjustment. He looked over at me, neither annoyed nor encouraging, just calm, like this might be normal.

"Let's go swimming again before it's dark," he said.

"Or we could swim in the dark."

"True. It makes my mom nervous when we do that, but she's gone."

"We're both good swimmers."

We were partially bonered when we changed to our trunks, which we did efficiently and without contact. We swam to the raft and sat next to each other on the edge, watching the sunset. A couple of small boats dimmed at the far end of the lake, where guys cast reels over carpets of lilypads.

I've never cared for sunsets or that kind of lame bullshit, except on that night, sitting next to him as the sky to our right blushed the range of warm colors and a first star blinked far to the left. I periodically slipped off the edge of the raft, feeling the colder water deep at my feet, the weeds at my toes, my hair suspended. When one of us climbed back on, the balance tipped dramatically. But mostly we sat together, not speaking as the sun drew down. A campfire smell drifted down the lake. New stars winked. The air turned cool as soon as the sun faded. It wasn't like the City, with the hot, all-night breath of streets and facades. Our feet felt warmer in the water than our shoulders did in the air.

We swam toward shore. The lake's floor was sandy and weedless for the first 15 or 20 feet. We remained in the water, chests below the surface.

I gently kicked his shin. He brushed a splash at my face. I jabbed his shoulderblade. When he reached an arm around my neck, I thought it would be to French me or pull me to him, but instead he dunked it. I let him keep me under and touched my teeth to his ribs, like I was about to bite.

This gave us both semis. It was properly gay and innocent and pastoral.

We dried ourselves on the dock and entered the lakehouse. By then we both had boners. We'd been together for 72 hours and had barely touched. With our twoselves finally alone, that seemed preposterous.

"So," he said, and hesitated. "Yeah."

And you might think that we had this romantic, beautiful spot of lovemaking, with our watercolor sunset and the stars and the quiet mercy of a lake in the woods.

But Chris bluntly tugged my boner from the outside of my swimtrunks, and pulled them down with a casual forcefulness that made the stupid thing take a sharp downward angle and hurt. I kicked out of my soggy swimtrunks. I wanted to ouch aloud or express exasperation, but he would've winced.

By the time we were on top of his bed, the trace lakewater of our thighs dewing the sheets, he could have grabbed me whatever way. I held my hands at the moonwashed band of skin below his pinkish-pine tanline. The mouth of his dick was wide and wet. I pressed into his remade chest. He had a trace of body musk, not in a gross way, but the product of a day active in the sun, darting in and out of the lake. The scent of himself. His dick radiated over me.

There was this stage we had, where we kind of simulated sex with each other. Chris and I would never have intercourse. That might matter to you, like it's some kind of disappointment or anticlimax, but I don't look back on it that way and was only lightly perplexed about this at the time.

There was a practicality inasmuch as neither of us would put out.

Intercourse was also abstraction; it was adult, official, unsettling, seemingly messy and painful and dangerous. So we didn't do it, merely mimed it, which seemed to us like an adequate substitute.

I straddled myself over him while he leaned against the wall, my dick pressed against his ribcage, his dick against my ass. It buzzed against my line of hairs. He pulled my face down and kissed me.

"You don't know," I said, palm at his stomach, fingers extending in a V against the base of his cock, "you don't understand."

He welded his mouth into mine and pulled it away. "Yeah, I obviously understand."

"No." Because I have to insist I know things others don't. Our foreheads knocked. I wondered what it would be like if he actually fucked me and concluded that it would be unpleasant. He came on my lower back and the exterior of my asshole. I shot against his chest, with two ejaculations reaching his neck and lower chin.

We washed off together in the small standing shower, making out and tugging at each other the whole time. Water spilled from our bodies against the bathroom floor, which quickly built to a cold shallow pond. Oh well.

We extended the couch's fold-out bed, even with its thin mattress and the metal bar down the middle, because it was easier than inching ourselves on those tiny twin beds. I suggested moving into the cabin for the night, but Chris shook his head and sternly said no -- too many family associations, I guess, while he perhaps considered the lakehouse his.

We didn't stop kissing, touching, licking, sucking, smelling and breathing each other for at least two hours. I think that I tasted his earwax and liked it. One of the times I came, his nipple was in my dick.

"I never want to be away from you for three months again," I gasped between tongues, my cock pulled tight like a bow.

"I know," he said. "Me too. Jesus, Joe. Fuck."

Ping.

We slept in the same bed -- something he'd only permitted two or three times at school. He said that he couldn't sleep well unless he was alone, but I think that he also feared discovery, a concern that I considered legit.

But it was also true that we slept fitfully. The bed was uncomfortable and the sheets were scratchy. At one point I woke because he kissed me while I slept.

We'll never be apart for three months again, I thought.

And then I wondered: Isn't this the kind of place where Jason shows up in an old Friday the 13th movie?

On day five, we ran more than seven miles. If it still didn't feel as good as it should have, at least it was better, and the distance made Chris moderate his pace. It still was easier for him than me, but I was not a hindrance. Maybe his natural pace was 8:20 and mine was 8:50, so we met at 8:30, which still had me grunting and gasping for the last couple of miles, but I felt capable for the first time since spring.

We touched each other lightly, patting each others sweat-drenched backs, jostling at the shoulder. If he'd asked, I would've followed him into the woods and sucked his sweat-brined cock with my knees in poison ivy and mosquitos surveilling my ears.

"I'm, like, losing it," I said, realizing that we were on track to spend the afternoon naked in the lakehouse. A cockquake triggered aftershocks all over my body; every vein was a faultine; when he kissed my elbow, my elbow jizzed over his lips; my eyelids were uncircumcised; I could sneeze cum. "You know that you're the hottest guy ever. Like, literally, the most attractive person ever."

He appeared bemused and happy from the compliment. His eyes dragged me under, his now-raw lips smirked, the fat exhausted purple head of his cock shuddered the earth.

"I don't know about that," he said. "Maybe second hottest?"

Oh my fucking God.

Essentially we'd forgotten to eat -- not since breakfast, an hour before our run. When I stood to piss I was lightheaded, and I kind of wanted to ride it out and see what happened, see what I would hallucinate if I fasted for a couple of days while Chris and I stayed in bed and exchanged suddenly abundant compliments and fluids. Maybe Los Angeles would be leveled; California would break into the sea; I'd sustain myself on nothing but his spunk and sweat.

But he was more practical, so at four we showered and dressed and went up to the cabin. We gorged on Doritos and Oreos before I lit a grill and made us each a couple of burgers and hot dogs. With some leftover potato salad and berry cobbler, we sat at the table on their porch, listening to the radio, staring exhausted and disoriented at the lake, which didn't have a trace of a person near it, not a boat or distant lawnmower or tinny, carrying voice. Our stomachs gurgled and groaned, flush with sustenance.

It was so isolated that Chris leaned sideways and gave me a single, chaste kiss on the neck, which was more than enough to give me a boner, my dick so beat that it bruised on arrival.

"Do you want to go to Lake Michigan tomorrow?" he asked.

"Yeah, sure. What's there?"

"Beaches. It's basically like the ocean."

"Yeah, that's cool. I want to see what else is around. You want to run first?"

"Can you handle it?"

"Ha," I said. "Jackass."

"You ran well today. I was proud of you."

"Ugh, don't make me pound you."

We went to bed early. Not even ten. We were so spent that we only got each other off for like an hour before sleep. I changed to basketball shorts and T-shirt -- I don't sleep well unclothed. I slipped in and out while he pulled at me. We came awake at 6:30, to gray sunrise and the sounds of geese. We were both naked and hard. Each blamed the other for our undress and condition; neither quite recalled but each was correct.

On day six we ran five miles. I felt good! My lungs and heart had full control. It was never my leg muscles that felt the effort. Just my cardiovascular system, atoning and recovering for weeks of Marlboros and IPAs. My heart no longer felt tight, like a strained muscle, and oxygen did not land thick and heavy in my lungs. He could still outpace me -- he took pleasure in besting me for the last two miles -- but it was no longer an embarrassment.

"Live in the glory while you have it, pretty boy," I said. "I'll be crushing you by October."

"No way," he said. "You'll be smoking and drinking like crazy a week from now. I'll be running like 25 miles a week. You're in decline."

Time would prove him correct.

Lake Michigan is Ocean Lite. Waves don't invert forward in a feets-high vertical avalanche. They're one or two feet, choppy, aggressive, breaking down just within reach of the beach.

But the sand is beautiful. Open-legged, pillowing, golden dunes that I'd never seen on the south shore of Long Island. The waves are not engaging and challenging as the Atlantic's, but the terrain is steeper and superior, and all the better because so few people are there, especially on a partly cloudy Tuesday.

We paid a $10 fee to a state park. It had a name out of Game of Thrones -- Storm Haven, Storm's End. Dragonstone State Park. We changed in a bath house that smelled like piss.

A lot of my friends in the City have a prejudice against lakes, that lakes are dirty compared to the ocean. If I mention that I once swam in Lake Michigan, they ask if the water is dirty. That water was so clean, so much clearer and purer than I've seen in the Atlantic. Rib deep, my feet were white and visible below. I opened my eyes underwater and saw a dozen feet away; Chris's knees and pale thighs were within reach, blue swimtrunks flapping. I swam to him and slid my hand up his inner thigh, to the hair near his in-drawn balls. He squirmed and I toppled him easily.

you always say that I don't tell you about myself, so here it is.

my dad is a great guy who works too much at a job that he hates, and because he hates it so much, it makes me scared to plan for myself. like, i'm scared to commit myself too deeply to anything, because i'm scared that i'll get trapped the way that he is and that i'll never find my way out.

one time when i was like seven or eight i went into the city with him on a saturday or sunday. i forget why but he needed to stop at his office for like five minutes. but then he ended up on this long call and this meeting that went on for hours. so they set me up in this conference room, alone, with cookies and some paper and some markers, which i thought was awesome, truly. it was like fucking bliss to be in this huge law firm conference room, all alone, as a little kid, pretending that you were a fancy lawyer, and drawing some shit. for some reason i took off all of my clothes and ran laps around the room for a few minutes, which is nuts, but i thought it was hilarious. and then that got old, so i got dressed and kept drawing.

my dad was apologetic beyond belief afterward. he took me to toys r us and let me pick out a couple of new nintendo games. the next weekend he took me to the city, and we went to the natural history museum and then sat on the floor for a knicks game. so that's my dad.

my mom is smart and cares a lot but she can be direct as hell and it drives me crazy.

my middle brother rob is a monster.

and you know evan. he's the sweetest kid. for awhile i was scared that he might be gay, not because he seemed interested in guys but because he was so shy and reserved, and i thought that might be a way to cover for himself. as soon as i saw him around katie, i was like, yes! this kid is definitely straight! and thank god because i didn't want him to endure that.

i didn't realize i was gay until i was sixteen. i was up at the lake with my best friends from high school and this guy andy and i messed around.

andy is the best dude. i love him.

and after we messed around i couldn't handle it. i cut him out completely.

i embarrassed him in front of our friends because i didn't want to associate with him. i fucking bullied him at school. not physically. just psychologically. it was deeply fucked up.

there were nights when i'd stay up until four or five in the morning, panicking. pacing my room, punching my mattress, swearing, crying. so i'd got to school without any sleep, just angry and exhausted. i'd lose my temper over nothing, but not in an argumentative way, in, like, a blow-up, fuck-you way, just very hair-trigger, crazy stuff. i was pissed at andy and pissed at myself and pissed overall, like nature or god had played a horrible, horrible trick on me, that put me in this position of having to deal with this in my life. that me, me of all people, had to put up with this shit, because it wasn't me, it had nothing to do with my life and my friends and what i wanted.

but then i started to comprehend what i'd done to andy. just this hurt on his face. and there was no reason for him to be that sad. it was all because of me, and i wasn't mad at him specifically, just raging at my situation, and i'd made him into a symbol for that.

i made up with him. i apologized, and he's such a good guy, he took the blame for himself -- said what happened between us was a one-time thing for him, that he was so sorry and would never be able to forgive himself for it. that made it feel worse. even though we kind of made up, he was wary for a long time. it took months to straighten things out. i mean, i'm still not sure if we've straightened things out entirely, and that was five years ago.

i have this fantasy that one day i'll do some sweeping, dramatic gesture to compensate -- save him from a fire, donate a kidney, that kind of thing.

and after i made up with him, i thought that it was just to be nice to my friend and make him feel better about himself, but now i know that wasn't exactly the case. i needed him around, too. so the summer after graduation, we really started hanging out again. i mean, doing stuff.

when i got to school and i talked about having a girlfriend at berkeley, that was andy, even though i didn't think of him as my boyfriend. he was just, like, my good friend and we happened to get off together sometimes.

thinking of any guy as my 'boyfriend' still seems messed up.

i don't like the terminology. i hate all of the terminology. it's embarrassing. it's a cliche. it doesn't apply. they're just experiences.

they're people who you care about. it's all unique. people talk in shorthand and i can't stand it. these terms all become cliches. they demean the specific and turn it into generalities, things that don't belong to you but to language and some fake framework. so fuck that.

but here's the other thing. you might've figured this out, but probably not.

so remember how we went to that rush party and met matt canetti, and how afterward matt tried to recruit us to his dumb frat. matt and i kept e-mailing and then we started hanging out. you know all of that.

but matt and i, like, more than hung out. i stayed over at his place a couple times a week for most of freshman year. i only got away with it because sam and i both stayed out all night, a lot, like, as a practice.

if sam asked, i'd be vague, make it sound like i passed out at a party or hooked up with a girl, even though i never explicitly said that i'd hooked up with a girl. i never specified a gender because it didn't seem moral to lie, but if he referred to a girl, i didn't correct him.

but matt and i became very, very close. we still e-mail and talk all the time. he doesn't know about you or your situation, i swear. i know you wouldn't like that so i've never told him.

by sophomore year, around the time stuff started happening with you, the, like, physical side of things with matt had already died down. i love that dude so much. i had so much fun with him. he's so good to me. but we hit a limit with where things were going, and it transitioned into this close, kind of intense, kind of competitive friendship.

but he's like, i don't know. this sounds dramatic. i feel like he's the most influential person i've had in my life, because he made me figure out that i could be who i wanted without being hostage to this other shit, that whatever i did or whoever i hung with, i didn't have to be this guy who fell into a framework, who conformed to a set trajectory or a type, that i still had all of these choices and options and didn't need to be so imprisoned by it.

at least, like, analytically i know that. i don't feel that way most of the time. i still get pissed or stressed or depressed about it, and start to think crazy thoughts and can't fall asleep at night. but i e-mail or call matt and he'll talk me down.

and then that stuff with you started and it's all been cool, and i feel pretty lucky about that and feel lucky to know you. but that's kind of a different thing and we don't really need to talk about that, because it'd probably just weird us both out and is all kind of conceptual and abstract, anyway.

We walked another couple of miles down the beach. There were no people.

We climbed dunes and they left us momentarily breathless. We were quiet after my cluttered thoughts. I'd said too much; I didn't want to push him; and I felt tense and exhausted after reviewing myself.

Obviously I knew my own story, and you do too, so maybe including it again was redundant and something that I should edit out, but explaining it to Chris, I felt different than before. These people and incidents were no longer experiences. They were foundations.

I wanted Chris to touch me or something.

Instead we swam naked in the huge lake, which seemed both far riskier and less intimate, the most un-Chris act that he ever committed. But there was literally no human in sight; we hadn't seen a person for 20 minutes. A barge floated a few miles from the beach. He dropped his towel and his empty water bottle, threw down his swim trunks and said, "Dare you," before sprinting pale-assed into the waves. "Pretend it's a law firm conference room!"

And I didn't want to do it! I was more conservative than he was! Possible sex offenders! I looked around nervously for several seconds before I threw down my red swimming suit and tentatively entered the water, lemming-like.

"So," he said, after swimming underwater, popping up next to me. "Not Pete. My other brother Davey. I don't know why I just thought of it now.

It's just a coincidence. But Davey's only eight years older. And there was this time when he came up to the cabin with like four or five of his frat brothers. It was summer after seventh grade, so I was twelve and they were twenty. They went camping on Lake Michigan for a couple of days and brought me with them, and we all randomly went skinnydipping in the dunes this time, and it was just kind of a practical spontaneous thing, like we were hiking the shore on a hot day and they were all, Why the hell not.

That wasn't near here. It was like two hours north of here. And there was this guy in their group named Ryan. He was a varsity swimmer, swam in nationals, which seemed extremely impressive, so I was kind of in awe of that, it made him seem like a minor celebrity even though I'd never met him or heard of him before. He looked like a movie superhero. I mean, I really, truly haven't thought about it since then, how shocking and, like, blinded I was to see him in front of me with his clothes off. Maybe that sounds pervy, there wasn't anything pervy, he was just this naked guy and I guess I wasn't used to that. It was very weird and interesting and intense-seeming, I guess. I just thought of that now." He trailed off.

"Oh God, Joe, never mind. That made me sound like a complete psycho. I don't even know what my point was. There was nothing inappropriate.

Nothing pervy. It was just this scene that came to mind, because that was the only other time I've done this."

"It's cool man," I said. "I think I get what you're saying."

"Yeah, I'm not sure what I'm saying," he said. "But what else is new."

On the way back we stopped at a Dairy Queen in a tiny town with another odd name, something like Deepwood Motte or Dreadfort. We ordered Reese's Pieces blizzards and stood in the parking lot.

An enormously fat kid was the only person in line behind us. I'm not saying that to make fun of the kid, because it wasn't a funny scene. The kid couldn't have been more than thirteen and he was just so tremendously fucking enormous, like a crisis sort of thing, like an abusive situation, like that kid's mother must have been a troubled person herself to permit such a physiological tragedy. Because I was wearing shades, I could stare without being rude. It wasn't a derisive stare. I felt dumbfounded by this radical, possibly doomed example of the human condition.

On the other end of the parking lot leaned a pair of skeletal dudes, middle-aged, sunburned to melanomic crimson-browns, with gray-red goatees and stained T-shirts. One actually smoked a cigarette and ate a sundae simultaneously. The other impatiently, profanely chastised a daughter who might have been eight or nine, and, as far as I could tell, did nothing improper. They noticed the fat kid. One laughed and joked to the other, like they were 30 years younger, like they were in the grade above this kid. I couldn't hear their comments and neither could the kid, but based on their gestures in his direction and their scratched-up laughter, the derision was obvious.

"I want to go beat the shit out of those two guys," I said, "and then, like, take that poor kid with us and feed him kale."

"Classic Michigan rednecks," Chris said.

"No, I mean it. Those guys are real assholes."

"Okay, take it easy. They've probaby got a gun in the truck."

"What're they going to do, shoot me at Dairy Queen because I stuck up for a fat kid?"

"Let's not have a memorable moment over this."

"No, I'm obviously not going to confront them. There's just a lot of extremely fucked up stuff going on at this Dairy Queen."

Chris ate a spoon of his blizzard and said, "I think of you as such a cynical guy, but at the end of the day, you have a lot of faith in the perfectability of people. Maybe that's why you're such committed liberal?"

"Yeah, maybe," I said, glaring toward the two dudes across the parking lot.

We finished our blizzards and prepared to leave. The two comedians had moved on from their target. Chris entered on the driver's side. I opened the door to get inside and couldn't help myself.

"Hey!" I shouted in a deep, gravelly voice, pointing at them. "Just so you two assholes know, you are in no! position! to talk shit about some kid, so go fuck yourselves!"

I slammed the door shut, and Chris must've felt like we'd just held up the place, because he rapidly turned onto the road and slammed on the gas. One of the two dudes gave me the finger and the other creased his face, apparently shouting for us to fuck off.

"Joe, you idiot," Chris said. "You shouldn't do that."

"Why not?"

"You think you taught them a lesson? If you got through to one of them, which I doubt, they're just going to be angry. Go home and beat their wife, beat their dog, maybe their kid. Be pissed that some fancy boys in an Escalade started shit with them at a Dairy Queen. You didn't do anyone any good."

He drove the rest of the way back like he expected two raging hicks on our tail.

We changed into jeans. He wore the orange hoodie. There was still time to sunset. We tossed a Nerf football and attempted with mixed success to design elaborate routes for our passes.

"What time is your mom coming back tomorrow?"

"My dad's driving her up after work. So, like, probably eight or nine."

"Cool," I said. "Much love to your mom, but I kind of wish we had another day or two just to ourselves."

"I know," he said.

"It's easier when it's just us."

"I agree," he said. "I thought about calling and suggesting that she stay with my dad for another day, but I couldn't think of a good reason besides leave us alone."

"Yeah, we can't really ask her to stay away."

"Plus she probably wants to get the cabin ready for the weekend. She's very organized like that."

"It's fine."

After it got dark we went inside and flipped through TV channels. We didn't talk. It was dull.

"I'm gonna go lie in the hammock," I said.

"Cool."

"Come lie in my hammock with me."

"Same hammock?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe."

"Okay," I said. "I'm going to go out to a hammock. You decide."

I mean, it was dark and no one was on the lake. The nearest house was a couple of hundred yards away, separated by trees and weeds and swampgrass.

No one could see.

A few minutes later he came out with bottles of beer and the radio and a fleece navy blanket. He threw the blanket over me and put the other stuff on the ground.

"We're going to fall out of the hammock," he said.

"No we won't. We both know how to balance and we're quite stable."

"Am I supposed to lie next to you or lie on top of you?"

"Whatever you think makes sense."

He positioned himself next to me. His feet were cold and wet from the dewy grass. He pulled the blanket over us. It was cold, maybe in the 50s. I slid my bicep behind his neck. He tugged the blanket to his shoulders so that only his head stuck out. He leaned to his side and snuggled against me, wrapping a leg over my thighs and hips. I inched toward him so that the hammock would maintain stabilty. His body was all limb, reach and muscle -- tight, warm, huge.

"I don't want to go to New York anymore," I mumbled.

"Yeah you do. It's all you ever talk about."

"Just thinking about it makes me sick now."

"So you had a bad summer. It happens."

"I just want to hang out with you."

"No you don't."

"Maybe I should go to Chicago instead. I don't really know Chicago, but people love it, they say Chicago and San Fran are the only other real cities in America."

"Yeah, Chicago's nice."

"I think I like the Midwest better now," I said.

"You do?"

"It's so much easier than New York. Chicago's not far from your family."

"Nah, it's pretty close. Just a couple of hours."

"We should go to Chicago after graduation," I said. "Not, like, necessarily as a unit. Nothing that high pressure. We could just go there to hang together. It'd be easier to make plans."

"Maybe," he said. "I'm still not thinking that far ahead."

"I'm not really thinking that far ahead," I said. "I'm never graduating.

I'm going to stay forever."

"You could always go to grad school. Get a Ph.D or something."

"I know. I think about it sometimes."

"You should. You love school more than anyone I know. Or, I don't know, maybe not Michelle. You and Michelle just love it."

"Yeah, I could go to U. Chicago or Michigan or something."

"Or Harvard or Princeton."

"One of those kinds of places. Really," I said, my heartbeat outmuscling my brainwaves, "I just want to hang with you."

"Yeah, we have a lot of fun."

I squeezed his shoulder. He reached his hands into my jeans and put a hand on my hardon. I undid my fly. Chris didn't jerk me off -- just cupped over it with his palm. I leaned sideways and kissed him at an awkward angle, pulling his tongue with my lips. He moaned in contentment and leaned against my neck.

"Hammock's more comfortable than I thought," he said.

"You're more comfortable than I thought."

"You're as comfortable as I expected," he said.

"You're hotter than I expected."

"You are approximately as hot as I expected."

"I meet expectations," I said.

"Yeah, you're okay."

We stayed in the hammock like that. It seemed to go on for hours.

I can only piece together a handful of events from when I was 24, but there are weeks and months from a decade ago that live so vividly. Every semester in college lasted two years. I recall details from those parties -- who was there, what we talked about, what songs played, the temperature at night, who was elated or sad and why -- but a bar night from three weeks back is cloudy.

My summer in New York seems like it lasted a couple of weeks, but my week with Chris in Michigan went on for months. There's that bullshit saying about how time flies when you're having fun, but it doesn't actually feel that way. Time flies when it's empty; when you're full and happy it runs forever. The good nights with your friends feel like epics; the nights at home in front of the TV do not exist.

During that trip to Kanabec County, Michigan I had walked into a new life.

Like some character in a movie that steps through the door and is a new person in a different world. I couldn't remember who I was three weeks before, when I endured Rick and walked alone past gay bars, counting the days until I could escape.

There was sun and water, people who loved each other, strangers who were warmer to me than my lifelong friends. Everything seemed so simple. The clock never moved.

The lakehouse, near midnight.

"Cum on my face," he said, taking my dick out of his mouth, holding my ass with both hands, kind of kneading it, one thumb sliding again the hairs of my asshole. "I want you to cum on me."

My cock came on his forehead, in his hair, down his cheeks and lips and nose. I've never gotten into the cum-on-face vibe, which seemed primarily an invention of the porno industry, specifically to humiliate women.

Swallowing a dude's load may be nastier and less healthy, but I can get turned on by the compulsion behind that, to have something of the other guy inside you.

He slid it from his face with his fingers. Some had gone through his lips.

It dripped onto the sheets. Chris was red and stunned, but he seemed content. A hint of my splooge was in his kiss.

"I'm gonna cum now," he said, "It's really close."

"Where do you want to cum on me?"

"Don't know but it's fast so decide."

Our tectonic eye contact. I went down on him just in time to take it into my throat.

We stuck to each other in bleach-scented, shoulder-colored sleep.

On day seven neither of us felt into the run. We did it for habit and structure. A short four miles. No conversation worth noting.

After breakfast he went into a clean-up mode. He loaded the dishwasher and swept the floor. I volunteered to help but he refused, insisting that I was a guest and therefore should chill and enjoy myself.

He discarded old food and bagged garbage; he mowed the lawn; he cleared the towels and bedding from the lakehouse and put them in the laundry. I read "Cloud Atlas" and paced the porch, sipping beer, mildly buzzed by myself, feeling bored and tired.

He paused in mid-afternoon but remained anxious, running through mental checklists of tasks to complete before his mom returned. It was superficial activity. We'd left no mess.

But I guess that's what he had to do to reform himself.

His posture, the looks, the tone and substance of our conversations, it all tightened as he practiced monitoring himself.

I hadn't expected us to canoodle in front of his mother, to continue carrying on, not even to touch each other in the privacy of that lakehouse once the property was no longer ours. We'd go back to performing out of necessity, I knew; I just didn't think we'd go back to performing so pristinely. I didn't want to regard him the same way that I did four days earlier.

Handsome's yowls of greeting: a hybrid bark, whine and imitation of human shouts, shaking his tail with his full abdomen, circling Chris's legs, jabbing the backs of our knees with his snout. We took turns hugging him and he bounded toward the lake, circling back to bark us into following.

"How's Aunt Mary?" Chris asked.

"Her bloodwork's just fine," his mom said. "We went to a dinner at the church on Tuesday. Dick and Regina say hello."

"That's nice of them," Chris said.

"Your haircut looks great," I said.

"Oh, thank you for noticing!" she said.

We unloaded a couple hundred dollars of groceries and helped shelve them away. Chris's dad didn't stay more than 20 minutes. It was dark; he'd return home by eleven and work for the next couple of days.

She'd brought us a box of cold, franchised pizza, which we microwaved. It might've been the longest I'd gone without food from a restaurant.

"You sure went through a lot of sheets and towels," she said, carrying down a full laundry basket.

"Yeah, I guess," Chris said.

"Were you using the fold-out?"

"Yeah, I guess," he said, rolling his eyes.

"Yeah," I said, "the twin bed was a little tight for me. I sprawl a lot when I sleep."

"The fold-out couch is just awful," she said. "You honestly should feel free to stay in here. The beds are so much more comfortable."

"No, Mom!" he said. "We're fine!"

Easy, easy, I thought.

"I'm only offering. You do whatever's comfortable."

Jesus, he was so perturbed that she was back. Whatever awkwardness it might've caused to suggest that she return a day or two later, it probably would've been less squirmy than Chris bristling at her cheerfulness.

She ignored his sighs, snaps and non-responsiveness, focusing her comments on me, as I responded with extra enthusiasm, hoping that she wouldn't feel bruised or unappreciated.

Chris and I went back to sleeping in those tight, separate beds.

My dreams were anxious and geometric.

On day nine, he ran angry. In races, I run angry. Humiliate the hills; let no one pass you. The harder it hurts, the greater your frustration, the more you're doing it right.

"Argh!" he shouted, as we slowed slightly and ran on the shoulder as a truck approached us, and "Argh!" he muttered when the driver waved hello.

He waved in response, out of obligation.

"Easy, killer," I said.

He glanced back in irritation. "I could smoke you right now," he said.

"Then do it!" I said.

He shook his head and gave a look, but elected not to speed away.

"Hey," I said to him while I changed in the lakehouse, "I don't know what's going on, if you're annoyed with your mom or what, but just so you know, I'm having a really good time and I'm glad that you invited me. I like your mom. So don't, like, put a cloud over things if it seems like she's crowding us, because I don't feel that way, and I don't want this trip to go out on a kind of ambiguous note because you're feeling tired of your mom."

"It's just -- no."

"No, man, it's cool."

"Yeah," he said.

"It's not, like, a big thing. I'm just saying."

"I know, yeah, I didn't think I was being that obvious."

"It's not that obvious," I said, lying. "Just a little tension I was starting to pick up."

"We're okay," he said.

"No, I thought so."

"I'll take it a little easier with her."

"What are you reading?" I asked her.

Not the standard Mom Lit. She tipped the cover and revealed Stephen King's "It."

"Whoah!" I said. "Nice!"

"Glen thinks I'm crazy for reading these, but he's hard to put down."

"Definitely. He's so much fun."

"And I have you to thank for another kid who can give me good book recommendations. You brought out his inner English major."

"Yeah, I worried that I'd get the blame for him not thinking about med school anymore." My statement sounded more defensive than I intended.

"Of course not. I knew he wasn't cut out to be a doctor. By my fifth kid, I could see things coming before he did. Pete and Susie and Jeannie were always into that stuff. Chris never cared for blood. When Davey got his appendix out, Chris was terrorized. He slept in our bed because he was so upset that his big brother was in the hospital from surgery. My other kids loved Glen's work stories but those stories, they upset Chris so much. He was squeamish. I thought he'd get into teaching. Maybe something artistic. He used to like art and writing but I think that embarrassed him. He wanted to be friends with the tougher guys, not the artistic kids."

"Plenty of tough artists," I said.

"Hemingway, Mailer, Jackson Pollack, Picasso," she said. "That's not him.

Not that we have those types in Grand Rapids."

"Yeah, not a lot of those types in New York, either."

"So he's still getting it sorted out," she said. "He's still figuring himself out. And that's okay. He doesn't need to be in a hurry. I know how much you help him, how comfortable he is being himself with you."

"Yeah, I mean, he's turned out to be a good friend to me, too."

"Of course I realize that," she said. "I thought it would be good for the two of you to have some privacy, just to do whatever you wanted."

"Ha." I said. I felt a squeeze in my voicebox, like I would choke on my words. "Well, you know."

"Oh, I do know. You were apart all summer. You're both grown adults.

You needed some quality time together without an old lady around."

"Ha." Hydrogen-headed falters. "It's nice having you here with us, obviously."

"He needed to be with you," she said, ignoring my comment. "He was excited and moody for days before you came. That's not how he usually acts."

"He's. Huh."

"It's all fine, of course. Better than fine! I'm happy that he found you, who can put up with some of his edges and just appreciate him for who he really is and not lose patience. You mean so much to him, even though he probably doesn't tell you that. But I know. I would've known even if I never met you or saw what the two of you are like around each other. How happy you make him. That's a rare person to find, maybe harder for him than for others."

"Yeah," I said. I kept a hand on the porch railing, hoping to keep myself stable. I'd left him napping in a reclining lounger in the shade next to the dock. I didn't want to look back. He wouldn't want me to say anything confirmatory. Technically, she hadn't even articulated anything that I could deny, even if the denial were to be a lie. "It's fun hanging out," was what I concocted.

"I'm glad for that," she said. "Whatever you might think, it makes me happy, as a mom, to see him this happy with you."

She gave a smart look, a steady regard, a static half wink, a corner of her lip upturned, an inflection in the angle of her jaw. You can cut the shit, her face said. I know what's happening, so you can relax.

"Is there iced coffee left?" I said.

My voice wasn't mine.

"In the fridge. Help yourself, Joe. Stop worrying. Make yourself at home."

I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to tell him. I wanted to tell someone -- SHE KNOWS

SheknowsSheknowSheknowsSheknowsSheknowsSheknowSheknowsSheknowsSheknowsSheknowSheknowsSheknowsSheknowsSheknowSheknowsSheknowsSheknowsSheknowSheknowsSheknowsSheknowsSheknowSheknowsSheknowsSheknowsSheknowSheknowsSheknowsShe-

GAHHHHH SHE KNOWS

Jeeesus

Holding the edge of the counter, sugaring my iced coffee, staring out a window that faced trees and shrubbery and gravel driveway, carefully replaying the words, persuading myself that I hadn't inferred too much, that I wasn't overthinking, that it wasn't a mistranslation from Midwestern Motherian to Manhattan Closetese.

Her final stare could just as well have been boldface, double-underline.

That look, man. She wasn't a joke.

I couldn't hide in the kitchen. Keep it casual, keep it loose, be your smooth and unaffected self--

Screen door snaps shut.

"You find everything okay?" she asked.

"Yep!"

"You all right?"

"Oh, yeah, definitely."

"I hope that wasn't too serious."

"Oh, that? No."

"I just thought you'd appreciate hearing it."

"Oh, sure, yeah. Thanks Mrs. Riis."

"Like I keep saying, call me Barb."

"Okay. I will." I looked out at the lake. "I'm going to see if he's awake."

"That sounds good," she said.

He still slept in the shade, peaceful and pretty.

I went into the lakehouse and collapsed on that lumpy couch.

She must've seen it years ago. She practically said so. He was as heteronormative as any Manning, but his mom was a savvy lady. I imagined the clues -- a handsome kid who struggled with girls, who hadn't shown interest in them, who tripped himself in his friendship with guys, who was most comfortable alone. He spent a lot of time at home, chilling with the dog, ESPN, USA Network. He could talk sports so that was his way to relate -- that, his looks and his quietly funny, understated manner were enough to land him on the outer fringe of the cool kids. He'd probably gravitated toward the good-looking guys in his class but was scared of how they made him feel. The girls he took to proms were just friends. He didn't date them. He hadn't played sports because of the intensity in that bonding -- that physical and emotional proximity, it might've made him crack. Her two other sons: athletes, rowdy, popular, confident. This third son was the best looking one, with the sweetest, gentlest disposition, but emotionally mute, and she'd understood what that meant before he did.

How much had she said to him? Probably many things. Variations on the words just spoken to me. Nothing more explicit. She wouldn't have asked or asserted directly, wouldn't have deployed the g-word. Stuff like, "Whoever you are, you know we love you," or "I just want you to be with a person who makes you happy," these kind of broad generalizations -- the right things to say! -- that allowed enough inference that he wouldn't feel cornered.

He understood the suggestions. Chris hated that she knew! His warnings to me not to take her seriously. His offense at her trivial remarks. He wasn't a moody kid bristling at standard maternal reach.

Didn't matter that she'd been supportive and compassionate toward him -- the fact that she recognized it angered him. It heightened his disgust in himself. She wanted him to embrace the one thing he least wanted.

Her support and tacit acknowledgments ratified it as real. Instead of feeling comforted, he would revolt.

But I wasn't his mother. I would have to assemble my own arsenal.

"Would you two mind running into town for a gallon of ice cream?" she said.

"I tried to call your dad but I think he's already on his way."

"Yeah, sure," Chris said. "Let me wake up a minute first."

He yawned on cue and bit into a pear.

You're listening to the North's ONLY place for classic rock. It's 83 in Moat Catlin, 78 in Karhold, 81 in Winterfell. 75 degrees on Bear Island.

Clear and cooler overnight, mostly sunny tomorrow with highs in the upper seventies and low eighties, partly cloudy with a chance of rain on Sunday.

High-pressure system passing through on Monday, with temps dropping into the sixties -- in case you forgot that winter is coming.

[Or so I remember the announcer.]

Coming up in the next hour -- Bob Seger, John Mellencamp and Grand Funk Railroad, plus three in a row by The Beatles. Now here's Fleetwood Mac!

"Yessss," Chris said. Secondhand News played as we pulled out of the driveway.

"Baow baow baow baow, baow baow baow baow, baow baow baow baow, baowbaowww baowbaowww," he sang with the song.

"These people were crazy," I said. "All they did was fight with each other and bust up each other's marriages."

"Oh, I know!" he said. "But then they all kept playing together anyway.

Because they were so committed to the band. That was the wild part."

"Yeah." I stared out the window.

"You okay?" he said.

"Yeah. Why?"

"You look and sound stoned," he said.

"Ha, no."

"See, the way you just said that, that was exactly how you look and sound when I've seen you stoned."

"No, of course not."

"Are you for real?" he said.

"Wait, no, are you being serious?"

"I mean, I wasn't being serious but now I'm not sure."

"No, no. Just tired I guess. You were asleep for like 90 minutes. I barely dozed off."

"Dude, you sound totally weird right now," he said. "I'm not even joking.

Not weird in a crazy way, just in a not-yourself way."

"Okay." I faked a yawn, tried to exaggerate my tiredness, even though I was anything but tired; I was jittery as a coked-up ferret. I don't know what he was talking about being stoned, because my right leg bounced about 200 beats a minute and I could barely slow my words to a conversational pace. He glanced sideways as he made a left turn.

"Ha, if we were anywhere else, I would swear that you're so high," he said.

What they called "town" was a flashing yellow stoplight with a gas station, a brick church built in the '70s, a post office and a kind of general store. There were literally five houses, all on the same side of the street, two with visible above-ground pools.

No one was in the store. Except for a wall of fishing lures and a glassed-in case selling live earthworms in containers of black soil, it sold bodega fare. The old lady behind the counter must have been in her eighties.

"My mom said a gallon, right?"

"Yeah."

"Like, they have gallons of chocolate and vanilla, but that's not exciting."

"She probably wants vanilla."

"Why do you think that?"

"Wasn't she baking pies?"

"So?"

"People like vanilla ice cream with pies."

"Dude, you sound so ridiculously stoned."

"Maybe we should go running again when we get back?" I said. "I do feel a little funky. Maybe something short, like two or three miles."

"Maybe?"

"Anyway, let's just get vanilla. It's safest."

"Okay, but then I'm gonna get some chocolate syrup and whipped cream or something."

He was attractive when he shopped for dessert, so I stared at his ass.

We put our items on the counter. I added a bag of Reese's Pieces. "And a pack of Camel Lights," I said.

"Sure, my darling," said the old lady. "Can I see your ID, love?"

I dug out my wallet.

"Dude, Joe, my dad hates smoking, it's his most hated thing."

"I won't smoke at your place. I really need a cigarette. I'll smoke it in the parking lot before we go back."

She returned my ID.

"No, you don't understand. He'll smell it on your clothes."

"I'll change."

"He'll smell it on your skin."

"So I'll go swimming," I said. "He's not some nosferatu."

The old lady chuckled while she made change.

"I thought you wanted to run?"

"You didn't sound into it. I'm fine. I'll just have a cigarette."

I lit up as soon as I stepped outside. A clutch of chickens clucked the hallelujah chorus in my lungs. Chris was cross. No matter. My toetips tingled, my fingers fluttered. Oh, Jesus, is this what heroin addicts feel like when they get a fix? I hadn't missed them for the entire week, until the hour before I had one, and now I felt myself drawn down, warm and calm, fully lucid, as my alveoli filled with sweet cancerous powdered roses.

SHE KNOWS

I exhaled smoke and smiled at him.

"Oooookayyy," he said. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," I said. "It's just nice to be here."

"You're being super-weird. I can't even tell you. Like, extremely weird."

"I'm just tired. And happy. I like it here. Like hanging out with you.

So I'm all chill and happy right now."

"You are so on drugs."

"I want to be locked in a room with you for like two weeks." I exhaled smoke. "Just us."

"That sounds like jail. How would we get food?"

"We'd order it," I said.

"So, like, a hotel room, not a cell."

"No, it doesn't matter, I don't care. It could be a cell. That's fine.

We'd figure out food. That'd be fine. I just want to hang out with you all day and not leave."

Ugh, he liked that, even though he pretended not to, wrinkling his nose like a child, shaking his head like a child, but he didn't suppress his smile or the tremble of laughter or the reddening of his face.

"You must be tripping so bad right now," he said. "Do me a favor and try to act normal around my mom and dad, and if you can't swing that, try and be quiet."

Of course I couldn't sleep that night. That conversation with Barbara Riis played through my head so vividly that after dinner, I found a pen in my luggage and did my best to record it in the blank endpages of "Cloud Atlas."

I tried to read myself to sleep but couldn't focus on the words or the storylines. Lit in the orangish light of a lamp that must have been bought in the 70s, I stretched and turned in my twin bed, re-reading pages three or four times.

Chris slept in his bed, four feet to my right. I stared at his sleeping face like a creeper.

That conversation I'd had with Doug Kaplan on his graduation night, that had been a spontaneous, lightly awkward exchange. We both knew what the other was saying, and by the end there was no doubt that I'd resolved his curiosity. I was mystified with myself for weeks afterward. It would have been so easy for me to evade him, to make him think that he was crazy for wondering such a thing. But because we'd been speaking in that kind of code, abstracted into a discourse on the very nature of etiquette, it unfolded fluidly, so much more so than if he'd been like, "Dude, I've always wondered: Are you gay?" That question, I would have crushed straight up and down.

And if Barb Riis had said, "I'm glad that you're my son's first boyfriend," I would have gone to the bomb shelter. Code Red! Shocked denial and clarification, crisis summit with Chris, a tense mother-son rift, the inability to look at him comfortably in her (anyone's?) company.

Her artfulness, it was perfectly tailored. Like she knew exactly the words to reassure me, but also, shockingly, to inflate me with a kind of pride and wonder. No longer was I a pernicious influence corrupting her son.

She seemed to credit me with possibly saving him.

Without grasping it, I'd become accustomed to regarding myself as a languid, apathetic villain, my chemistry and biology first turning on me and then bruising those who'd attempted to care. The premise of her comments inverted the story: Could I be his redeemer instead of his demon?

He rustled in bed. Faced the wall, then faced back, kicking lightly at the sheets, eyes cracked open and dim. The lamp disturbed him.

"Sorry," I whispered.

"S'okay," he whispered back, deeply drowsed. He hugged a pillow against his chest. I hoped that he pretended the pillow was me. He exhaled long through his nostrils -- opened his eyes and looked at me, then closed them again.

"Hey," I whispered.

"What's up," he said in a mild speaking voice.

"Dude, I fucking love you. I don't even mean that in a boner way."

"Ha. Boner way." I'd made it sound like a joke. He squeezed his pillow.

"Thanks. I love you too." He spoke in the same voice that Trevor used when telling everybody that he loved them.

"I love you in a Dead Poets Society way," I said. "Like, carpe diem."

"I'll carpe your diem."

"Yeah, that's what I mean."

"Joey, just go to sleep," he groanwhined. "You're so wound up today. I'm trying to sleep."

I let him be, and folded my hands over the book on my chest. Glanced at the ancient clock-radio on the bedstand, which must have cost like $90 in or around 1978, when its plastic flip-number minutes and faux-wood plastic were state of the art. 1:23. That equaled 4 a.m. in lake time. I picked up the novel and tried to read more.

I could tell from his posture and breathing that he was still awake.

"Hey," I said.

"What?" he said, slightly exasperated. He put his elbow over his eyes and half-laughed. The light and my words kept him awake.

"Are you sleeping?"

"Shut up."

"Do you have a boner?"

"You're so immature," he said.

"Probably."

"Probably what?" he said.

"I'm probably immature," I said. "You probably have a boner."

He exhaled in defeat, the way that you sigh when you make a make a bad roll in Risk. He threw his sheet from his body. Yeah. The thing with boxer shorts, when you hook up with a guy, everything is so loose and dry and mechanical underneath them, it's all cloth and turgidity and levers. His dick practically did pull-ups beneath blue-cotton boxers.

That night, I read no more.

I stood shirtless in basketball shorts just after dawn, throwing a chewed-over, worn-down tennis ball no more than ten feet from the shore.

Handsome curved and bounded into the lake, paddling past the end of the dock, retrieving his toothworn ball and returning, circling, play-growling, daring at me to clutch it from his teeth.

"Hey, buddy hey." I patted my knees. "Hey Handsome!"

He stood in front of me, daring me to make a move, darting backward with my eye movements.

With some dogs, the more you engage them in fetch, the more they withhold.

You call the dog over -- "Handsome! Handsome!" -- and he growls with his tail wagging, backs on his hind legs, jerks his mouth to the side when you reach to grab the ball.

Turn your face away, stretch, pretend that you're not interested, and the dog comes forward, drops the spit-slimed ball at your bare feet, and wags his tail, puzzled that you lost interest.

At breakfast, his mother placed her hands on my shoulders as she walked past. I stretched and smiled like a cat getting its ears scratched.

"How did you sleep?" she asked me.

"Kind of restless. I shouldn't have had two cups of coffee after dinner last night."

"I worried about that," she said. "You look tired. Still handsome, but tired."

Chris glared at her.

A cohort of old relatives came the night before. Old couples who were introduced to me with names like Ann Marie and Fred, Loretta and Jim, Kathy and Bill -- cousins of Glen or Barbara, I don't remember, they were all old and they don't factor into my story so there's no reason to dwell, except that they were all funny and energetic, the men drank Old Crow mixed with water, one of the old ladies smoked Lucky Strikes, and I remember thinking that if I were Glen and Barbara, there would be much worse things than to be in my sixties and spend long summer weekends on a lake with loud-chatting, gently soused cousins, none of whom retained my interest past coffee.

In late morning, Pete came back with his family. They weren't supposed to be back that weekend but his work scheduled had been reshuffled, with an eighteen-hour all-nighter in the ER on Wednesday, so he found himself with the weekend off.

"The boys need to get out before school starts," he said. "We wanted them to see Chris again before he leaves. And, you know, you too."

In early afternoon, Chris and I went running, just to get a break from everybody. Even though I was exhausted, I felt light and nimble for the first time. This would be our last run before we left; the next morning, we'd load our stuff into the Escalade and be delivered back to school.

"Let's keep going," I said, when we reached the turn-back at the far corner of the lake.

And so we kept running, down dirt roads that were new to me, barely inhabited stretches, mailboxes a quarter-mile apart from each other, residences so far off the road that we couldn't see them through the trees.

It was sunny and in the upper-seventies, but the air was dry and we mostly were shaded by the woods. We were going farther than expected -- miles deeper into the country -- sweat gluing our shirts to our chests until will removed them. Over the miles, a light layer of gravel dust stuck to my chest. I felt the grit when I ran a thumb over my skin. We climbed a long, steep hill. I thought that we'd have a view from the top, but the view was largely nothing -- obscured by the trees and the narrowness of the road.

"Go back?" he gasped at the top.

"Yeah," I said.

"Your shoulders are getting burned," he said.

"I know. I'll live."

Ten miles, eleven miles. My longest run in months, maybe in more than a year. Even my legs felt it. My legs usually can go forever.

On this long, flat stretch on the turnaround, he slowed next to me and put his hand to the back of my head, his stride wobbling.

"Hey," he said.

I thought he might have injured himself when he pulled us to a stop, but he pushed into me, pressing our pink, sweat-fouled chests together, and kissed me, both of us breathing too hard to kiss with full reality, our mouths dry and scraped, sweat dripping into our lips.

"Oh, fuck," I said, immediately at half-mast in the middle of a gravel road.

There was no one around. Hadn't seen a vehicle for miles. The only signals of life were black-and-orange "NO TRESPASSING" signs that sell for $2 at hardware stores.

We stood in the road, looking at each other with iron eyes, waiting for signals of mutual assent. He'd given both of us hard-ons in our sweat-drenched shorts.

"Let's go," I said, tugging him by both hands.

We walked into the woods, weeds scratching at our shins, bugs sticking to our wet chests, until we got deep enough that we couldn't see the thin sunlit strip of beige dirt road, our cocks practically busting out of our shorts.

I leaned my weight against a tree and he pressed himself against me, our feet side-by-side, running shorts around our knees. Our dicks felt like wet rubber. He grinded against me while we kissed. We both came within a couple of minutes, just seconds from each other, cum indiscriminately striking each other's stomachs, running down and matting in the hair of our inner thighs, high-pitched ringing in my ears, vision botchy as my circulatory system struggled to catch up.

"Oh, wow, dude, wow," I said.

"I know," he said.

"I fucking love you dude," I said.

"I know you do. I thought you'd like that."

"Well, thanks," I said, looking down at our bodies. "Shit."

We tried to wipe ourselves with fallen leaves. Their lack of absorbent qualities meant that we were minimally successful. When we resumed running, the sweat washed our cum off my body, beginning the work of washing it away.

Our legs had already switched into recovery mode. The four miles back felt that much harder. My body was a magnificent weight.

"Running seems boring," Tyler said.

"It can be."

"I don't understand what you do."

"It's like when you read a book or watch a movie, your thinking goes to some other place. You're absorbed in it."

He raised a shoulder. He wasn't being hostile.

"You should try it sometime," I said. "I did a mile race when I was eight.

I think that was the first time I really ran."

Our legs were too fragile. We reclined in the speedboat with our feet propped while the others skied.

Afterward, Pete and Amy played volleyball with their two sons and Chris.

Old ladies chirped and played cards on the porch while their husbands golfed.

I went into the lakehouse, locked myself in the bathroom, ran the shower and sobbed.

It wasn't quite sadness. It's the way that a little kid cries halfway through a day at Six Flags or Disney. I was feeling too much. My emotions were an uncontained forest fire; the hills smoked.

I wanted to be a Riis. Completely. I would have stayed another month. I wanted a cool older brother who lost his tooth playing high-school hockey, an older sister who loved me and needled me, a mom who read Stephen King and cooked and was secretly, diplomatically grateful for my nice boyfriend.

I wanted cheery funny little children as my nieces and nephews; I could not envision my brothers fathering children, and if they did, I wouldn't hoist them on my shoulders and pitch them into the water. I hadn't wanted these things before, because I couldn't envision them, and if you'd tried to explain it to me, I would have considered it weak and lame.

But then as I got sad about leaving the Riises, I thought about returning to school the next day, and I started to think about all of my friends and housemates, which made me both excited and crushed with despair, because from that point forward, it would be finite. There would be no more first times -- only last times. Matt Canetti's graduation hollowed me out; this would be three or four times worse. I would lose everything and everybody, and we all knew it. That was unbearable, but I also loved it all so fucking much that it made me crazy -- like, what a lucky asshole I was that I'd wandered into those people and had that life, where all day, every day, I was surrounded by people who I was crazy about, studying shit that I loved, good at almost everything I did and liking it all. Sam's flight arrived tomorrow, Katie and Michelle would already be at the house; party invites awaited in my unchecked inbox; I'd get to read awesome books that would change my life; I would write witty and smart columns that inspired love letters from freshman girls. It was cruel to me, that I had it so good, because when you have it that good, you know it can't last forever.

And Chris, dude -- even then, even at its peak, I didn't truly believe that I'd go to Chicago or Michigan with him. Embarrassing fantasy talk. But if you'd given me that option on that day, I would have taken it.

Intellectually, the end of college meant the end of everything, but in my heart, I could not begin to picture living hundreds of miles away from him.

If he wanted, I would have gone someplace horrible-sounding, like Lansing or Detroit, or some weird little town in the middle of nowhere, where we'd live near possible meth-heads who laugh at obese adolescents at the Dairy Queen. That could be fine! We could work simple jobs, go running down back roads, hang out on the lakes, read challenging books, no cable TV or indie-rock venues or any of that shit, and I'd happily live in oblivion.

I cried for several minutes, during which I shelved and alphabetized my mess of miserable joy.

Because I was hiding and running the shower to block the sound of my stupid crying, I had to take a stupid shower, because it would seem crazy if I were gone for ten minutes with the stupid shower running, then came out dry, with my stupid face messed up from all of my stupid crying.

But after my shower I didn't go out to them. I took a pillow, reclined on the old, scratchy couch, and fell asleep. I woke to loud laughter from the cabin porch and a jet ski's distant buzz. My heart creaked.

"Are you coming back for Thanksgiving?" Jonas asked.

"Ha, no, no," I said. "I live in New York."

"Oh."

"Yeah, no," I said. "I'll have Thanksgiving with my own mom and dad and my brothers."

"Oh." He paused, trying to grasp this. "Are you coming here next summer?"

"I don't know," I said, thinking that it was unlikely.

This uncertainty appeared to trouble him. I hadn't expected little kids to get attached this easily. A little swimming and an unsuccessful frog hunt, and they think you're a fixture.

"I mean, I see your dad sometimes. I see him before football games. Do you ever go with him to the games?"

"No," he said. "I'm not old enough to understand football."

"Ah, yeah, it can seem boring at first."

"And tickets are expensive," he said.

He spoke so seriously.

"That's true," I said. "But maybe you could come sometime, and you could stay at our house during the game, and that way we'd get to see each other and hang out."

What the fuck was I saying? I was going to skip a football game to babysit Chris's six-year-old nephew? Jesus Joe, get a fucking grip you huge nerd.

He just seemed so serious and concerned about the prospect of not hanging out -- I mean, that was pretty sweet, and I didn't know how to reassure him because I doubted that I'd ever see this little kid again, and what did it matter, anyway, because two weeks later he'd probably forget who I was.

Mercifully he didn't react to this enthusiastically. Pete must have liked getting away from his kids for the games. I gave Jonas a light swap on the back of his head and said, "Anyway, cheer up, I'm sure we'll hang out again soon."

At night they made a campfire and Pete lit bottlerockets over the lake.

Between the prior night's sleeplessness and the day's epic run, I was barely able to stay awake. I waved off a beer because it would put me straight to sleep, and declined a chair because I didn't want to sit upright. I reclined a few feet from the fire in the dewy grass, cold moisture soaking my back, observing the bottlerockets' detonations over the smooth lake, cloud cover moving the stars and half moon in and out of focus. I briefly slept in the wet grass, even though it was early, and little kids and old people were all still awake and lively. Then my grogginess and lack of sociability embarrassed me. I crawled closer to the fire, next to Barbara Riis and her two grandsons, and went through the motions of roasting a marshmallow.

I didn't take a single photo. I only thought of it on our final morning.

My camera was buried deep in my luggage, and it's probably just as well that it stayed there. In due time, a cache of several hundred photos -- the lakehouse, the water, the cabin's porch, Glen and Barbara, Pete and Susan, me and Chris, those little kids -- would only have bruised me. Some things, it's better that they just live in your memory.

There have been times when I've gone onto Facebook and combed through Chris's photos in order to find shots of those places and people. Now that I'm 30, they're ghosts in my mind.

Writing tonight, in August 2013, my curiosity won out.

Pete is 45. He still looks good. Susan had two more kids, but I already knew that. Holly is thirteen. Jonas is fifteen. His older brother Tyler is, at this very moment, starting freshman year at our college, living in the dorm across the street from the dorm where I lived with Sam and met Chris. He ran track and cross-country in high school; his profile's privacy settings are low.

Before breakfast on that last day, I tried to take mental pictures. Our ramshackle quarters. Our swim trunks drying on the railing outside our door. The angle of the raft and its distance from the end of the dock.

Handsome's love of hugging. The musty, bleachy smell of the lakehouse, the cold-rock smell of the lake, the pancakes cooked in volume and the bitter coffee. This fantasy life had been mine for eleven days; it still feels like it's mine.

On day eleven, we did not run. We'd run enough by then.

We were the first to leave. Pete and Amy would stay and close the house at the end of the day. The elderly cousins doted on the children and talked about golf.

"Lots of driving ahead," Glen said to everyone.

So I stuffed my clothes into my bags, held onto my copy of "Cloud Atlas," and said goodbyes to Pete and his wife and their sons, my voice an unfamiliar timber. I gave Handsome a final hug.

Twenty minutes from the cabin, my phone had a seizure.

Eleven days of text messages came at once, buzzes hitting two seconds apart. I was briefly exasperated. It was such a cruel intrusion -- I'd barely had time to think about the outside world and already it was bearing down on me.

When I flipped open the screen, it looked something like this:

Matt / Matt / Matt / Matt / Matt / Katie / Mom / Matt / Matt / Katie / Katie / Michelle / Katie / Sam / Sam / Sam / Jamie / Andy / Rick / Hot Erin / Jamie / Hot Erin / Jamie / Mom / Mom / Sam / Sam / Sam / Sam / Dad / Trevor / Matt / Matt / Matt / Matt / Matt / Matt / Matt / Matt / Andy / Sam / Sam / Sam / Sam / Stephanie / Katie / Trevor / Katie / Trevor / Sam / Sam / Sam

Except that it went on for 200 messages.

I sat in the back seat with Chris. I tilted my phone's screen to him.

"Mr. Popularity," he said.

"Dude, we're going to have so much fun," I said.

In August 2004, right before the start of senior year, I returned home for the last time.

It was late afternoon on a Sunday, and the streets were lined with U-Hauls and minivans. Strange girls were already occupying Doug and Jamie's old house.

Katie and Michelle knew we were coming. I texted them when we exited the freeway. They sat on the front porch when Glen Riis pulled into our short driveway.

"Oh, man!" I shouted, jumping out of the car. "I missed you guys so much."

I bounded up the stairs and gave Katie a long, tight hug. Michelle held out her arms and we hugged, too. I raised her a half-inch from the ground and gave her a peck on the cheek because she seemed less likely to misinterpret that than Katie, and I wanted to do something to show my love.

Chris walked a few seconds behind me. He gave them perfunctory hugs.

They'd only been apart for a couple of weeks.

"Yeah, as you guys can see, Joe kind of lost his mind this summer," he said.

"I don't even know what to do," I said. "Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls."

"Let's do whatever you want," Michelle said.

"I want to go party in the freshmen dorms."

"How high are you right now?" Katie said.

"High on life!" I said. "Where's Sammy? He'd understand."

"He called like 10 minutes ago. He's in line at customs. He sounded pissed."

"Ugh, what a dork," I said.

Glen and Barbara came up to the porch. The girls hugged them. Glen handed Chris one of his bags. Barbara asked the girls if there was anything we needed -- whether a trip to the grocery store was in order, if the house needed new towels, and so on.

Chris looked at me and rolled his eyes. I followed him inside. I missed our scruffy pool table; I missed my bedroom. I followed him up the stairs.

"Dude, I can't believe you're not more psyched to be here," I said.

"I was just here two weeks ago, crazy," he said. "Besides, it all looks the same to me."

He dropped his bag in his room. With the door open, I pressed a finger at his chest and smooched him on the lips.