Joe College

INTRODUCTION: Thanks as always for reading and for your patience. This is the last chapter set in college, but there are still a few installments before I bring this project to a close. You can keep track of me on Twitter (@jpm770) or at jpm770.blogspot.com. I'm not as good about responding to e-mails as I used to be, but they're closely read and very appreciated.

Joe College, Part 33

We'll all float on, anyway. The upbeat ennui of Modest Mouse played everywhere.

Matt Canetti had adopted that practice of sending goodbye emails to people who meant something. He wasn't more sentimental than I was, but I didn't have that kind of openness in me. Not even with my new interest in empathy.

I tried to compose a farewell to my friend Stephanie, who I had cursed with babysitting me during the immediate blood-letting of my coming out. The words didn't flow correctly, so I deleted my draft.

Instead, I took her to one of the grown-up restaurants on Main Street. The waiter thought that we were on a special date. During dessert, he brought two spoons for my scoop of gelato. Stephanie had a gawky laugh. She blushed. I asked if she'd have fun without me. Probably not. She said that she'd see me in New York one day and maybe she'd have fun then.

We walked home slowly, like we were still on a date. We went into the bookstore I'd visited with Trevor on that day we tripped acid and I realized that we were sentient water.

She asked if I'd met anyone in the time since my notorious column. What a female question. I told her no. She asked if I wanted to. I told her no.

"Oh well," she said.

"Romantic relationships can be fine," I said, "but they're all a kind of friendship gone mad."

"Cool perspective," she said.

"It's not my line," I said, touching her bony shoulders from behind, continuing our chaste romance. "I see the way you look at Micah Gomez in the newsroom. I don't know him but people say he's the nicest guy."

Good-byes felt permanent. We couldn't predict that people would stay around forever. Even people who shouldn't.

Facebook was an embryo. We had it beginning in fall 2004, back when it rolled out to consecutive campuses and wasn't available to the rest of the public. The site was a platform for making fun of each other and posting party photos. Facebook was a drunk, dumb kid who made you laugh at parties, back before he grew up to be a mass shooter and a stalker.

Graduating classes of 2005 were the last cohort to assume the finality of farewells. Leaving people felt like a binary, dramatic boundary. I'd drifted from my high-school friends, even as the rest of them seemed to hang together. I expected that to happen with others I didn't want to lose. I didn't know who I'd see again, or who would be a sag in my heart when their name came up in the middle of a story.

Last week, I saw a status update from one of the Florida Boys about the texture in his infant's diaper. Get wasted in some kid's dorm room freshman year and his questionable discretion trails you for life. One day, that Florida Boy will get divorced, and I'll see selfies with new girlfriends who have enormous fake boobs.

It felt unsettled until the night after graduation. Even then, it didn't amount to closure. Maybe real, satisfying closure only happens in movies like Eraserhead and Hereditary.

Rosemary Kavanaugh was the best-known, best-loved prof on campus. I'd taken one of her classes in each of my four years. Other faculty were famous to the outer world, but each semester she drew a few hundred undergrads to an auditorium where she lectured us on Renaissance classics.

On the first day of class, she'd write her home phone number on the dry-erase board, and say that we could call her any time to discuss our readings or life in general, but no later than midnight, because that would wake her husband George.

She recited Italian poetry from memory. She wept when she described Desdemona death's and Dante's loss of Beatrice. She spoke in a booming voice, then saved a half-shouted whisper for emphasis and epiphany. Her glasses were large and out of fashion, her hair kept in a tidy bun, and she favored cardigan sweaters and long skirts. She had degrees from Cambridge, the University of Bologna and Chicago, and had taught at our university since 1985. She'd published only one book: a 150-page treatment on Dante's use of light and astronomy. Its Amazon sales rank is low, but there were always copies displayed in campus bookstores, and it wasn't because anyone assigned it for a class. Buying Rosemary Kavanaugh's sole book was a rite of passage for a certain type of dork, of which I was one.

I wasn't taking her in my final semester but I wanted to see her once more before I left. She held regular office hours on Thursdays. I worried that she wouldn't know who I was, and that would wound me, or that it was poor etiquette to crash her office hours when I wasn't in her current class.

Instead, she smiled and rose when she saw me in her doorway.

"Oh, my," she said in quasi-boom. She grabbed my hand and pointed me to a chair. "Don't tell me that you're visiting because you're about to leave us?"

"Sorry to say," I said. She at least remembered my face.

"Heartbreaking! And there isn't a thing we can do to keep you?"

"Professor, I would love for you to keep me," I said. "I'd do anything. Mop the floors, shelve your books."

"We'd probably let you write a few things instead," she said, "but I suppose you've reached that time. It's a shame. We're going to miss you."

"Not as much as I'll miss you," I said. "I don't know if you remember. I've been in your classes four times. It was an honor. You've -"

"Yes, yes, of course. Every year! You and your great friend, you always sat together while we read the Comedy. Where is he now?"

"My Virgil! Matt Canetti is his name. He's in D.C. Works in the Senate."

"Wonderful Matt, your Virgil, that's right! And I know you, of course. Of course I know you, Joe." She spoke in conversation the way that she did in the lecture hall, her tones bouncing, emphasis placed on syllables that you wouldn't expect. "I've read your updates about once a week, I think."

"Oh, wow," I said. "I didn't think about professors reading my columns." She cocked her head in a goofy smile. "I probably would've written in a different voice if I'd thought about that."

"But you've got your own voice. Isn't it marvelous?"

"Is it?"

"And I learned from your own words that you found part of it here. But we all arrived here with our own voices, our own experiences. Isn't that right? And we're lucky enough to come to this place, and experience each other, and learn from each other, find new ideas and texts to love. People to love. Isn't that right? So you come here with this unique voice," making her voice deeper, "and jump into the mix of life, and that voice gets stronger and louder." She clapped her hands once. "Command that voice. Don't pretend to have a stuffier voice because of some old professor."

This is what her lectures were like: theatric, digressive, prone to exaggerate the positive.

"Remember from Chaucer, Joe, what we talked about with the pilgrimage?"

"Of course," I said, unsure.

"The pilgrim left on his journey, going far from home, often for the first time. For some, it was the only time they left their family, their little plot of earth. And the pilgrimages changed them. They returned with new ideas, deeper knowledge about themselves and others. Dante had his pilgrimage too, of course, but Chaucer's motley pilgrims seem more to the point. It's not so different than coming here. Isn't that right?"

"Right."

"You came here and told your own tale, like one of Chaucer's pilgrims. I'm lucky enough to hear about all the different journeys. Yours and others. I'm just someone in the audience. And it seems like your tale is a happy one, and that's wonderful to think about."

"The best," I said. "You made me think so hard. I feel like you taught us everything."

"Oh, my." She held her hands to her heart, theatrically.

"I needed to tell you that before I leave. I know it sounds dramatic. I didn't know what I was getting before I came here. A lot of my friends went to good schools, too. It's not the same for them, not at Berkeley or Harvard. I thought that my time would be like theirs. I'd go away to school, make some friends, pick a major, and it's all fine. But even the tough times felt good. Best people, best classes, best profs, best sports. I couldn't wait to get to your lectures. They were a highlight of my day. It seemed like I should tell you that before I'm gone. People probably say things like this to you all the time, but I needed to say it, too. If Matt was my Virgil, I guess you were at least my Marco Lombardo. Maybe my Cacciaguida?"

"Glorious!" She clapped once, loudly. "And when your journey goes forward, you'll always have us with you. When you struggle, when you feel lost -- when find yourself in that dark forest, off from the straight path, as we all do at some time -- you'll remember what you experienced here, and maybe it will help you find your way back. Isn't that right? And you could even think of an old professor, and how much joy it gave her to spend those hours thinking about some of her favorite texts in your company."

I suspect that a significant part of our conversation was a script. Her comparison to the Chaucer pilgrimage had to be a crowd-pleasing standard.

She could preach all day with canned observations about her canonical writers. I'd swim in every word.

How often do I think of Professor Kavanaugh? Once a week or more. Sometimes it's because the books she assigned are on my shelves, so I see them and think of her. More importantly, she gave us tools to make sense of the world's terrors. I didn't realize it at the time. Once you've been properly taught certain books, you have a blueprint for contextualizing crises in current events and coping with the weird-ass vanities, insecurities and tragedies of the people in your life. The books she taught us would become my scriptures.

If that makes me sound like an elitist, ivory tower prig, tough shit. Some people's parents forced them to get business degrees and it ruined their lives. I learned the secrets to life because I went to the school that gave Rosemary Kavanaugh tenure.

I felt lighter after that conversation. I dropped by the office hours of other profs to talk and thank them. I'd taken two semester of Arabic with an adjunct who came to the U.S. from Syria in the 80s. He sometimes talked about how his worst vices were coffee and chocolate, so I bought him expensive packages of each and visited his office hours. His eyes misted when I thanked him for his teaching and his stories.

He'd spoken warmly about the people in Syria and the country's beautiful Roman ruins. He made me want to travel there, but I didn't, and then the war came. Palmyra and Aleppo would become bones and ashes. When I read about it in the Times, I imagine his grief.

"Rob and Evan can't stay with me," I said in a call with my mom. "That's a ridiculous ask."

"It was only an idea," she said. "Evan stayed with you before, and you know how much it meant to him."

"Everybody else is going to have family around, and I want to be with my friends. Rob would wreck everything."

"You're so dramatic," said my mom.

"I wonder who I get that from. Definitely not from you," I said. "You can all share the hotel. It'll be great bonding."

"Forget that I even brought it up," she said.

"Are you going to talk to Rob about his behavior?"

"What did he do?"

"Just generally. I don't want him to be an ass around my friends."

"Unless you point to something specific, I'm not getting involved. I'm not a mediator for you and Rob."

"If I say something preemptively, he'll act out to prove a point."

She held her silence for a few seconds.

"Okay," she said.

"Thanks. Charity begins at home."

"You and Rob aren't my charity. You're my labor and my burden."

"Harsh. Wow. Mother of the year."

"You drive each other crazy because you're the same."

"He's going to be so mad when I tell him that you think he's gay," I said. "I can't believe that you said that. Very rude."

My dad had been spending weekdays in California on a reinsurance arbitration. Sounded awful. Mom was used to his work demands, but with Rob and me out of the house, she was bored. Evan was their easiest kid. It sounded like he had a girlfriend. Apparently her Ph.D workload wasn't occupying her, because a couple of days earlier, she called worrying about how I'd get my belongings from school to New York and when I'd find an apartment. It wasn't helpful.

Really, I wasn't worried about Rob. He wouldn't want to be perceived as uncool and therefore would behave appropriately. This was my excuse to shit-talk him to our mom.

The person whose graduation presence preoccupied me: Barbara Riis.

I hadn't seen Chris's family since football Saturdays. Chris wouldn't have shared unkind thoughts about me. But Barbara was savvier than her youngest child. She would have been hip to what graduation entailed as to my unique rapport with her son.

She would want to say hello to my parents. She'd speak warmly to me.

I reminded myself of how subtle and sharp she'd been, back in our conversation on that porch in Kanabec County, Michigan. She cornered me like a poet. The moment felt increasingly distant. I once believed that I'd be okay. I still think of her with reverence.

I doubted that I'd see her again.

"Yo, bro!" Ahmet Demir said when he saw me at Goal Line, deep in dollar-pitcher night. He laughed and hugged me in the middle of the crowded bar. He pulled my chest to his. A real hug, not a bro hug.

I'd been drinking since 5 p.m. Senior theses were handed into departmental offices that afternoon. I'd met my seminar for celebration beers. A few of us kept the night rolling, and then I met Sam and Chris at Goal Line.

"Happy thesis day!" I said to Ahmet, keeping my hand at his shoulder, partly for balance.

"Happy fucking thesis day!"

"How long was yours?" I said.

"Just fifty. Most of that was footnotes."

"Ha, I beat you bro," I said. "Eighty-seven."

"You're a bit of a writer so I expect you to be more wordful.".

"Dude, do you know any history majors? Some write, like, 150, 200 pages. They're like real books."

"Do you know any classics majors?" he said. "They do shit like original Sophocles translations."

"I know this archaeology major," I said. "For his senior thesis, he went to the ancient city of Tanis and dig up the Well of the Souls."

"I know a vegan astrology major and he wrote a senior thesis about how taurus isn't ethical unless it's seitan."

"Oh, that's cool. Sam Frost is a phrenology major. He went around tape-measuring everybody's heads."

"Sounds kinky," Ahmet said.

We stood hip to hip at the bar. He ordered two more pitchers. I got water and a new sleeve of plastic cups. I brought Ahmet to a long table in the back, where Sam was holding court.

I announced that I'd eaten only chicken fingers, hours ago, and declared the greatness of my senior thesis.

"This idea that people go out on these journeys, like Chaucer's pilgrims," I said, mainly to Ahmet but loud enough for Chris to hear, "and they learn about themselves and the world, and it's a heroic quest. But what if it's not? What if it cripples them? You can't go back to the Garden after you've eaten from the tree of knowledge. And now, you're trapped with your lost innocence and fallen world. It's the opposite of the hero's quest."

"But that's not what your experience was like," Ahmet said.

"No, dude, it's a textual analysis, not a memoir," I said. "Knowing breaks their hearts. And even for the rest of us, people have to struggle. You have to know that you're in the struggle. It's only dangerous when people can't see past the revelation. That's everyone's downfall in Faulkner and Shakespeare. Hamlet and Quentin. But, like, Dante understood that he was in the struggle, bro, and that he had to fight his way through it with theology, politics, history, art, astronomy, everything."

"Why is it," Sam said, "that even when you're fucking wasted at the bar, you carry on like you're running the most annoying freshman seminar?"

"I think it's interesting," Ahmet said.

"Of course you do," Sam said. "You're intellectuals. Not me. I love football on TV, shots of Gena Lee, hanging out with my friends, and twins. The perils of knowledge, blah blah blah. Football on TV. Hanging with my friends. I don't know who Gena Lee is."

"Baywatch," Chris said.

"Baywatch! Exactly!" Sam said. "I can't be bothered. We're in a golden age of internet porn. Baywatch, what a waste of jerking off. I'm surprised you didn't write your thesis on Baywatch."

"I'm not an oceanography major," I said. "I've never seen Baywatch."

"What sucks to me," Ahmet said, "is that we'll never take a random class again. I'd take a class called Baywatch and Feminism. I didn't take Cassady's class on Reconstruction. I should've taken German. I don't know shit about Dante."

"You can do that shit in grad school if you want," I said. "Those are all arguably relevant to your field. Like, you'll learn German, bro. Handing in my thesis sucked. I don't get to work on it anymore. No more weird, interesting seminar friends, either."

"Get a room, you two," Sam said. "Go beat off on the liberal arts."

Ahmet laughed comfortably, but the remark embarrassed me. I felt singled out. My jaw and lower lip told Sam that he overstepped. Sam's eyebrows and cheekbones told me to lighten up. A slight sigh and angle of his hand told me that, reluctantly, he was kind of sorry.

Whatever -- I'd been burned anyway.

I left the table to take a piss, then stood outside the men's room and pretended to text on my flip-phone. I assessed myself and lit a cigarette to have more moments alone.

"Hey," said Chris, standing in front of me.

"Hey!" I said.

"Are you going home soon?" he said. "I don't feel like staying out late, and you're wasted."

"Definitely wasted," I said, "but lucid, energetic wasted, not fall-down-and-puke wasted. Plus, it's thesis day. Everybody's wasted."

"I should've done a thesis," he said. "I didn't even think about it. Sounded like a ton of work."

"You didn't need to do a thesis," I said. He acted like everything was normal with us, so I played along. "It's not something to regret."

He nodded and glanced back toward our table. "That guy Ahmet is kind of annoying, right?"

"You think so? He's always been around."

"Just a little pretentious," he said.

"I might stay longer," I said, thinking of Ahmet. "Just because it's such a big day."

"Okay," Chris said. "I need to leave. I'm not feeling right."

"You seem all right."

"Not because of you or anything."

"I didn't think that," I lied.

"I think," he said, pausing to choose his words, "I hadn't thought enough about graduation and leaving. Even two weeks ago. It seemed like it was so far away. I kept putting off my thoughts. Now we're basically done."

"I did the same, dude."

"The thing is," he said, "I know college isn't even real life."

"It's realer than being in a cubicle, writing a stupid report or pasting stupid numbers into a stupid column on a stupid spreadsheet. I've never understood why you say this isn't real. What's supposed to be real?"

"Responsibility, family, bills."

"Your classes were your responsibility, we're your family and you always paid rent on time," I said.

That wrung a laugh out of him! "I suppose," he said.

"I don't understand why we organize around families and jobs anyway. We should be able to honor different types of relationships and priorities. It's the 21st Century. Like, if you and I kept living with Trevor and Katie and some other people, and we centered our lives on pursuing our interests and friendships instead of careers or children, that should be a mainstream option. Instead, it's one stupid thing after another, and nobody wants any of it."

He was intent, like he was processing bad news.

"I'm right, right?" I said.

"I don't know, but there isn't anything I can do with it anyway," he said. "It's like I'm on a plane, and everything seems fine, then I look up and realize the pilot is going to miss the runway."

"Your plane's not crashing, dude."

"Metaphorically," he said.

"Yeah, I know metaphorically. You're not actually saying you're in a plane. But the plane's fine. You can take another flight."

"No." He was impatient. "You don't get it. You're doing that unbelievably annoying thing." He cut himself off. "You're wasted. It's fine."

"What did I do?"

"You want to get technical and condescend to me about a metaphor? This is exactly why I lose it with you. I'm trying to figure out what to say, but you pick on my word choice and tell me how I should feel. Plane's fine,'" he said, mocking my cadence. "Get another ticket. Take a plane to Asia, Pieces! Thailand has great beaches. Good planes.' I don't even know what taking another flight means in this context. Sometimes people want to be listened to and not corrected."

"I didn't mean to do that. I'm thinking out loud, too, dude. I'm making it up as I go."

"We're always talking past each other," he said. "Obviously I've had a blast. I'm trying to figure out why it seemed different for my brothers and sisters, and all I can tell is that I'm not as ambitious or driven. They all graduated with a plan. Had it all mapped out. Maybe I'm not as smart, honestly. You know how bad my grades were when I was doing pre-med. Like, God, what was I even thinking? I never wanted to be a doctor."

"Your English grades were decent."

"Like again, my point isn't to denigrate my academic performance." He was getting more frustrated. "I'm only trying to figure out what's happening. Why I'm freaking out like this."

"You think I'm not freaking out?"

"You're not out of options like some of us," he said.

"What options, dude?"

"You have connections and resources that normal people don't. You can spend the rest of your twenties, like, finding yourself. You can live on a beach and write a book while you learn to surf. You could probably get into Harvard Law School if you applied, go into finance."

"I'd never do that. That's got nothing to do with me." He was looking to argue. "If I disappeared to a beach, I'd work as a bartender and live in a shack, not take money from my parents. Besides, you're a doctor's kid and your family owns a vacation estate on a lake."

"The difference is that I'm not set for life because of my dad. You can try whatever you want and have a safety net. If you tend bar and live in a shack, you'd be that chick in Common People."

He knew I loved that song. I'd introduced him to it. His reference was a power move that I'd expect from Sam or Katie. You can't be offended when someone practices the craft so well.

"Why are we arguing about my dad?" I said.

"I'm just -- you'll never be like common people."

"You're not common people, either. Who do we know that's common people? I love you and love all of you guys, even if I don't understand exactly what's stressing you out."

"That's what I'm trying to talk about."

"So don't go off about money and my dad. It's irrelevant. Let's talk like normal people."

"That's what I'm trying to do, dude. I'm trying to talk like normal."

"Talk."

"I don't even know."

I lit a new cigarette. I'm having a smoke and he's taking a drag.

In the corny movie, we might have reconciled, and you get your trite little ending. In the French movie, we might have shared a wry reckoning, acknowledged an imprint.

Instead, he said nothing.

We leaned against the wall near the corridor to the bathrooms. We stared at the bar. The cigarette made my heart beat too hard. I had a wave of beer sweats. I was no longer interested in getting off with Ahmet. It felt like I was supposed to utter something provocative or sarcastic so that Chris could react and we could squabble more. I treated it like a game of chicken, where I'd lose if I spoke. The Killers song played. Two girls at the bar talked about us from afar, getting ready to introduce themselves, until I made eye contact in a way that conveyed unfair wrath. The Killers song ended and Franz Ferdinand played, and then The Libertines.

"I need to go home," Chris finally said.

"Let's go," I said.

"No, you want to stay, so you should stay."

"I'm too wasted now. I want slices."

"You should stay and brag about your thesis to Ahmet." He pricked the name.

"He, like, just pretended to be interested, and I was being pompous about it."

"It didn't seem like he was pretending."

"You were right. I'm too wasted. I don't want to stay and puke."

"You're sweating," he said.

"I know."

"Okay."

Sam protested when we retrieved our jackets. He said that time was running out and every night at Goal Line was one of our last nights at Goal Line. I felt embarrassed so didn't look directly at Ahmet.

We got in line for slices and ate in silence before we walked home. He'd told me enough. Even when drunk, it was enough for me to process, and for me to understand that he knew I'd processed it, and that he was embarrassed for implying too much.

When we got to the front steps of 1254 Hamilton, I patted one of his shoulder blades. He flinched at the modest touch.

The Collegian, page A-15, col. 1, Apr. 19, 2005

Joe College

head.: "A love letter from me to `U'"

For the fourth consecutive year, the University has passed me over as commencement speaker. This column is the one shot that I've got.

We went to the greatest university in the world. It's not arrogant to say that when it's true. We sent a probe to Venus, perfected the heart transplant and have won every national championship in existence. If we were our own nation, only fifteen countries would have won more medals in the 2004 Olympics.

Lincoln spoke here when we were one of the loudest voices for abolition. Our faculty gave women tenure before the Constitution gave them the vote. FDR called us the Athens of America.

Our graduates include presidents, Supreme Court justices, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize -- and one of the 20th Century's most notorious serial killers. Even our serial killer was the best one!

Going forward, we're going to meet people less fortunate than ourselves. They went to schools like Penn, Duke and Harvard. You'll regard them as peasants or soulless, corporate tools -- maybe a combination of both.

We should try to treat them with compassion.

True, no one would call us modest. But have you ever met someone from Duke? Keep in mind, that place is named after a tobacco salesman, its self-identity is built on hateable white basketball players and 100% of its undergrads are from New Jersey and Maryland. (Google it.) Duke is to date-rape what MIT is to virgins, but if you point that out to one of its sophomores, he'll try to impale you with a sand wedge.

But we're more than our track record. Plenty of schools have distinguished alumni and have made great contributions to society. (Not Duke, but others.)

We have everything, we're good at everything and we make room for everybody. In one day, you can attend a class on Urdu poetry at noon, venture-capital finance at three, go to a queer Marxist reading group at four, eat dinner in a vegan cafeteria at five, watch the basketball team beat Duke at seven, hit-up a clothing-optional yoga-and-weed party at nine, see the main set of a Nelly show at ten, play beer pong in a frat at midnight, and sit down for sushi at two before you drop by the library at three a.m. to pick up that one book on reserve that you need for your research paper on 1920s public works programs in Chicago -- at which point, you run into a half-dozen of your best friends, all of whom are studying all night on a Friday.

That's not the kind of stuff that goes into the PSA they air during the Orange Bowl, but we got exposed to more people, life, ideas and scenes in four years than anybody else this side of a bachelor's degree. The rest of them should be so lucky.

Coming to this school is the best decision I've ever made, but walking through the doors of the Chronicle office and asking if I could write album reviews is in the top five. My love and appreciation to past and present colleagues who are too numerous to list, but special warmth to Mark Edwards, Stephanie Eisenberg, Doug Kaplan, Melissa Shadid and especially Russell DeMarco, who played a bigger part in launching my journey than he realizes. I look forward to reading your bylines for the next forty years. Go forth and bust a few heads.

To my other friends: Freshman roommate assignments are like arranged marriages, and rooming with Sam Frost is the closest I'll ever get to Platonic love at first sight. I was fortunate to meet Matt Canetti shortly after I landed on campus and remain grateful for his friendship. Every day, I'm in awe of Michelle Pham's intelligence, energy and patience. I know Trinabh Banerjee by his fake Texas name: Trevor. He's the single coolest human I've ever known, and a rock of sanity and encouragement when I need it. Katie McGonigle is the twin sister I never had, and we are deeply, uncomfortably in love. Chris Riis is near the heart of my best memories and experiences over the last four years, from all-night parties to marathon GTA sessions to family tailgates to bantering about music and movies on the front porch, and so much more. I already miss him terribly.

"I'm hard all the time because of you," Ahmet had said when I walked in. "I jacked off seven times yesterday."

He said this with casual bewilderment, not as thirsty foreplay. I laughed at his casual delivery.

"Are you hard now?" I said, like I was asking if he'd seen the new episode of The O.C.

"I got a boner when you texted that you were on your way over."

"Dang, bro. You can whip it out when you're ready."

"In a minute," he said. "Do you want a beer or anything?"

"Nah. I don't feel like alcohol," I said. "I'd just hang on the couch, or do whatever you're up for."

"Right," he said.

I placed a hand on his moptop hair and he melted into me. He kissed me competently, mouthwash-mouthed and freshly shaved. I stretched my spine and flexed my shoulderblades.

"Sorry I bolted from the bar a couple days ago," I said, our noses and foreheads pressing. "I wanted to get off with you but I was too wasted."

"It's okay," he said. "We're hanging out now."

It was apparent that he'd cleaned his room for me. We stepped out of our clothes in seconds. He understood how much I liked his hair. It draped over my face. I slowly pulled my dick while he took inventory of my body again. Access to another guy's body made him dizzy. He kept returning to the strands of hair around my nipples and my navel, the muscles in my calves, the tendons in my thighs, the slit of my dick. It flattered me that I turned him on so much.

"Let me suck your dick," I said. His gray eyes looked up. His heart was beating fast. He crept on top of me.

"No one's ever sucked my dick before," he said.

"It's cool," I said, propping my shoulders against the wall.

"I'm gonna cum so fast," he said. "Just hearing you say that makes me want to cum so hard."

"Do it. Let's cum and then we can blow each other. I'll teach you."

His kisses lacked finesse but the sincerity outweighed that omissions. I hadn't experienced such earnest, unselfconscious lust from my other guys. I would play with him for a couple of hours that day, and it was play in the best youthful sense, like we were building and rearranging structures from angles, warmth and edges. I was already less physically self-conscious with Ahmet than I'd been with Chris and Matt. He didn't fuel my hang-ups like they did.

His gasp and the tightness of his motion signalled that he was about to cum. I hurriedly gripped his dick against mine so that he'd coat me. I held onto his ass with my other hand. The dude's orgasm was a spasm of ecstasy and relief. I came a few seconds behind, his hair sweeping against my cheek.

It's tempting to think of how different things might have been with Ahmet if we'd latched onto each other at an earlier point. If he'd been my college guy instead of Chris. It's not a productive hypothetical.

Ahmet felt free and fun because we had a two- or three-week window. We'd be on opposite coasts by summer's end. It wasn't enough time to get frustrated by personality tics or annoying traits. We never saw each other's bad days. And I was at a point where I could enjoy him without being scared.

I've had many one-month flings that started with similar enthusiasm. Even before day twenty, you learn that they don't read books, or they don't read the right books, that they only get their news from TV, that their politics is simplistic but confident, that they've never washed their duvet cover, that they have a small coke habit, that their most constant friend is intolerable, that there's something slightly off but not overtly offensive in the scent of their breath, that they care too much about their Instagram, that they like lousy pop songs, that they wear too-tight shirts to show off their pecs, that they're too into Crossfit or that they're one of those people who thinks fancy food is intellectually stimulating. At day thirty, you can't wait to get away, even though nothing objectively offensive happened.

Ahmet's mix of confidence and sincerity would have worn on me. I wouldn't acknowledge that to him, would worry too much about his feelings and intentions, and preemptively extract myself before it got weird. I consider myself a master of diplomatic timing and amicable split-ups.

Ahmet stays golden because he escaped scrutiny. We spent just enough time to like each other, too little to know each other's flaws. Our time was a neatly composed poem.

The final class of my final semester was called Flaubert and His Aftermath. When it ended, I went for a run by myself and thought about our sentimental education.

Guys sat with beers on the front porches of the frats. I speculated about the life we would have had if I'd pledged with Sam and Chris in freshman year. It might have been just as awesome and radically different.

The run retraced my life from Hamilton Street to our freshman dorm, to Cannetti's old fraternity house, then his apartment building, and the Chronicle's offices a couple blocks away. I looped out to the football stadium. They still left it unlocked during the day. Members of the public sometimes ate lunch in the stands or ran the steps for cardio. I descended the stairs to the fifty yard line, thinking about times I packed into the crowd with a hangover at noon, and the rainy, cold November game freshman year when the stadium was a third empty and I huddled with Sam and Chris for warmth. That run was the only time that I would be in the stadium alone.

I sprinted the steps to make myself breathless. I slow jogged through the law school and back to the Quad, then past the Northfield dorms and uphill to McKinley Park, where Chris had administered my reeducation.

I didn't think that I'd recognize the spot where I took my fall in the mud, but of course I did. It was already a sort-of good memory. I did the whole long circuit of McKinley Park, down to the wide-open fields and back uphill.

I wanted it all back, from the day I first landed with my parents and found a note from Sam in our spartan dorm room.

For a moment I wished that I'd gone to a school for dipshits. I wouldn't have known better. Its soullessness would have felt normal. I'd be one of those people who now complains about getting hit up for donations, instead of getting excited by the mailer because it gives me a reason to think about the place. I could have moved forward with my life and talked about college with an ambivalent shrug.

Trevor and Katie sat on the front porch drinking fancy beer in bottles. They looked calm and adult. I ignored them because I was scared of what I might say. Thoughts boiled while I showered and dressed.

"You know that I fucking love you, right?" I said to Trevor.

"What?" He laughed nervously.

"I'm saying it now because I don't want it to be a thing that I say when I'm wasted so that we can laugh it off. I fucking love you. Not in a gay way. I love you so much and I miss the fuck out of you even though you're not even gone."

"You don't need to tell me that, brother. I already know. You know I love you too."

"I don't know why you get to be such an awesome friend and as smart as you are while also getting laid all the time. Great at drugs and great at sports. You're probably the only person I've ever been jealous of."

"Joe, dude, don't feel like you need to say this."

"I want to say it. Any time I think about you, I feel happier and calmer because it's going to get sorted and feel good in the end. I'm completely lucid. I haven't had a drink. I'm not on anything. I mean what I'm saying."

"I know."

"I'm being as direct as I can. After I came out, hanging with you saved me from an even bigger freakout, even if it was only because we tripped acid and walked around."

"Come on." He stood up and hugged me tight. "Come on, bud. I love you, too. You're my brother."

"You're realer for me than my actual brothers."

"You don't see how wild you're meant to be."

"I know I don't."

"Accept your wildness and don't give two fucks."

I told him that on the day we all moved into 1254, he'd hugged me and called me brother. It made me uncomfortable because we'd barely known each other at the time. I was stupid then. I told him that someday I'd take people at face value. This made Katie snort a laugh on the couch. It was more affectionate than derisive. I put my arms down to end our embrace. He didn't let me go.

"Are you solid, bud?" Trevor said.

"Maybe, but I'm never going to get over any of it. I'm going to think about it forever."

"Me too."

"It wasn't supposed to be this good."

"You're speaking truths, bro."

"Come here, Joe," Katie said from the couch, holding out her arm..

I rested my head on her shoulder. She wrapped her elbow around my neck. "I love you too, Katie."

"I love you Joe."

"I'm not talking crazy to you because you'll be in New York with me and Sam."

"I respect the bromance."

Trevor sat close to her left. She hugged him in too. We were having a platonic threesome. I wanted to kiss her shoulder.

"I'm so happy you're coming to the City," I said to her.

"Me too. We're going to have so much fun."

"Trevor, you have to come with us."

"You know I can't do any more winters," he said. "You can come to Cali whenever you want."

"Still, please move to New York with us."

"Dude. That weather, that work lifestyle. I'd be miserable."

"Don't talk like a pussy," I said.

"Real Joe is back," he said.

"When I was on my run, I got super-nostalgic for freshman year. Like, painfully nostalgic in my bones. I wish you guys had been around for when I first met Sam and Chris. As soon as I got here -- instant friends. I'd never known anyone like them but I wanted to be around them all the time."

"The three of you came off as exclusive," Katie said. "The way you talked and held yourselves, I thought you were too above the rest of us. Chris seemed overwhelming -- like, his looks, and how he didn't say much. I thought he was arrogant. And you and Sam were so cocky. And then, the first time I talked to you, it was obvious that you're all massive dorks."

"Honestly," Trevor said, "I almost didn't live here because I thought the same, but I knew that Katie and Michelle were cool, and the dudes I was considering getting a house with instead were animals."

"Thank you for learning to love me," I said. Katie rested her cheek on the top of my head. "What's a platonic version of sex?" I said.

"What, like a circle jerk?"

"No, freak, like a non-sexual thing that people do to bond."

"Spit in each other's mouths?" Trevor said. "That was a thing in my elementary school."

"No," I said.

"Matching tattoos," Katie said.

"That's the kind of thing I'm getting at," I said. "Matching tattoos. Let's get matching tattoos. We'll do the logo, like all the swimmers who went to the Olympics."

"The logo, but with 1254 under it, instead of the Olympic rings," Trevor said.

"Oh shit," I said. "That's perfect."

"I'm in," Trevor said.

"Hard pass," Katie said.

"Sammy will for sure do it," Trevor said. "Pieces, no. Michelle, never."

"Michelle will do it," I said.

"Bet you fifty dollars."

"She has the most intense school spirit," I said. "Eighty percent of her wardrobe has the logo."

"That doesn't mean she'll get a tattoo."

Of course she did. We didn't have to convince her. She went with me, Sam and Trevor to a tattoo parlor off Main Street the next afternoon. We had our platonic orgy: matching tattoos on our left shoulderblades, about the size of a fifty-cent piece, with our school logo in block text and 1254 in script arched underneath.

I ended up in Europe for most of the summer with Trevor and Michelle. Our last three weeks were mostly on beaches in Italy and Greece. We constantly got asked if we were there with a sports team.

I must have studied hard for finals, but I don't remember any of that, except a warm night at a coffee house with Michelle and Sam and his friend Anders, where we went with books and pure intentions, but kept fucking around and distracting each other. Around one a.m., we gave up and went to Charterhouse for beer and pizza.

Michelle and I won awards for our theses. The History Department posted a professional photo of her on its website, describing her research on the relationship between German immigrants, the 1848 revolution and the rise of abolitionism in the Midwest, explaining that she'd be entering Stanford's Ph.D program in the fall, followed by a brief Q & A about why she thought it was important to study history.

I only got a certificate from the English Department with my name on it: highest honors and Best Senior Thesis in Early Modern Literature.

The days between exams and commencement were a string of parties and dinners. In bars and apartment parties, Sam, Trevor and I took off our shirts to show our new tattoos. One bouncer told us that we'd have to leave unless we remained fully clothed.

At a house party on Wainwright Street, people kept kissing each other on the lips and administering slaps. Sam grabbed my cheeks and pressed his closed lips to mine, then slapped me before I could speak a response. I slapped him back and kissed him. The practice was viral for that night, like everyone was high on something other than beer and needed to touch each other. Same sex, opposite sex: people traded closed-mouth kisses and mild slaps to the face.

Four years before, at orientation, they walked us barefoot through the fountain in front of the administration building. They told us that we were supposed to walk through one way when we arrived and the opposite way when we left.

At around 4 a.m., about twenty of us departed the house party on Wainright for that fountain. People stripped to their underwear to walk backward in the cold water on a fifty-degree night. A girl named Gemma had a camera and took photos of us, wasted and smiling in our underwear, our cheeks pink from the night's slappings, the whites among us so pale against the flash and darkness.

We were unaffected by the chill. There was no one in sight but we, the fountain people, walking and splashing in underwear.

A lot of people probably got laid that night. I wasn't one.

The final time I hooked up with Ahmet, he had questions that I didn't feel right answering. I left parts of my history unhinted because I didn't want to describe my life. I explained Andy Trafford, and he didn't understand why I was so resistant; when I described the fallout from my coming out, he hinted that he took my mom's side. I said little about Matt and nothing about Chris, which left the impression that Kevin Berger and Wally were the only gay people that I'd gotten to know on campus. Politely, I hinted at my discomfort with the questions, until he finally stopped asking.

I wouldn't tell him that it all seemed like a sham. I was constrained by the cult of self-acceptance, and he was so eager for camaraderie that it would have been unkind to share my raw thoughts. I foresaw that he'd quickly fall in with more conventional gay dudes at Berkeley and that he'd be okay. He already had an ease with himself that escaped me.

Glen and Barbara were the first parents to arrive on graduation weekend. Barbara instructed me to lean down so she could kiss my cheek.

The day before, Sam drove his Jeep to a box store on the outskirts. He bought potted geraniums, potato chips and cleaning supplies. The flowers were arranged on the front porch. The living room had been Febreezed and vacuumed. All bathrooms were bleached down. Debris of marijuana and tobacco had been expunged.

When parents show up for graduation, it's all over.

Some of their parents were strangers to me.

Michelle spoke to hers on the phone almost every day. She had animated conversations in Vietnamese. She had explained that her mom was exasperated about her lack of steady boyfriend but only thought it was acceptable for her to date Vietnamese guys, or, in the case of true love, a white guy. More recently, there had been debates about why a person would keep studying a subject like history when they were admitted to Harvard Law School. Both parents were mystified by her political activism. Her dad had conservative streaks that drove her crazy. He was older; he'd fought against the Viet Cong during the war; he maintained a notion of America based on John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies, very throwback.

She visited home more than the rest of us. Once every couple months. They'd been to campus, but I'd never seen them in our house.

You paint a picture of these people in your head. It's influenced by media stereotypes, even if you don't realize it: Tiger parents, probably. You invent a story.

But then they pull up to the house in a Toyota Camry with her two younger sisters in the back. They're so proud of her that it makes your heart wonder. Like her mom wants to cry from happiness when she sees Michelle. Her dad doesn't stop smiling. No one has ever looked at me like that.

Michelle took her dad's hand and introduced him to us. He had a strong grip and smiled when he made eye contact. He sized us up as men.

"When Michelle first told us she'd be living with guys, she said it was safer because it would be like having guards in the house," he said to me and Chris in accent-free English, half a wink in his eye. "Her mother was worried about you at first."

Chris and I looked at each other and laughed.

"Mr. Pham, if we ever saw a guy give Michelle trouble, we would've thrown him into a wall," I said.

"Mr. Pham, your daughter is the most amazing person I've ever met in my life," Chris said. "My room was next to hers for three years, and I want you to know, she's, like, the greatest person. We'd never let anything happen. You should be so proud of her."

Her dad chuckled and patted Chris's shoulder. Chris blushed in recognition of his own awkwardness.

All of the parents and siblings would be staying in hotels, but the house was the main gathering point of the weekend. They streamed to 1254 as their flights arrived through Friday afternoon. Some wanted to tour the house and inspect the cleanliness of their kid's room. Glen and Barbara left to take a walk through their campus. They returned with a box of fancy donuts and a bottle of champagne. Throughout the afternoon, they people-watched from our front porch.

Chris looked uneasy but I thought that they were perfect. Barbara hugged the moms and spoke specific kindnesses about their kid, but deftly backed off so that she didn't overstep in the moment.

Then there was my family.

Evan texted early notice: "IN CAR FROM AIRPORT"

Mom wore a black leather jacket over our school T-shirt. Her hair was precise. She looked extremely Manhattan. Both of my brothers exited the car with smirks, like someone had just mooned trig class without the teacher catching on. Dad looked calm as ever.

My family strode forward like the cast out of a different movie. In contrast to other parents -- whose body language was cautious, almost nervous -- they walked up like they owned 1254. My mom gave me a theatrical hug and introduced herself to other parents by her first and last name. She emoted enthusiasm.

"Mom is going nuts, yo," Evan said, in a voice that sounded too deep.

I grabbed his elbow and pulled him in for a loose hug.

"She spent the whole ride from the airport telling us that we're not allowed to drink or swear this weekend," Rob said.

"Your voice is so much higher than Evan's now."

"Oh, fuck you," Rob said.

"Number one, rude. Number two, I'm telling Mom you swore."

"Nice, you fucking narc."

"You're just digging your own grave with Mom. Don't play with fire."

"Mister mixed metaphor," Rob said. "Wasn't aware that graves were dug with fire, but that's cool, I'm not an English major."

"Mister mixed metaphor," I said in a squeaky voice. "It's like all your testosterone got transferred to Evan."

"Oh, God," said Evan, deeply.

"Hey, hey," said my dad, placing his hands on my shoulders from behind. "Let's not be so antagonistic. Please." He gave me a hug. "Good to see you, Joe. Great to be back here."

"Thanks, Dad. I'll try to be nicer."

"Evan!" Sam said, bounding toward us. "You look fantastic!" Sam amplified his Englishness when it suited him. His turned-up affectation sounded like bad acting to me, but it could be highly effective on others. He bro-hugged my dad and said, "I feel like you were just helping me and Joe set up in freshman year." He turned the unlikeable middle brother. "I'm Sam Frost. Are you Rob?"

"Yeah! Hey."

"Meaning that you're the smarter, better-looking Joe who's actually interested in women."

"Goddammit, Sam," I said.

"That's literally how I describe myself all the time." Pleased and smug. "How'd you know that?"

"As if it's not completely obvious," Sam said.

"Please, Sam. I'm trying to calm them down," said my dad.

"Joe's mom confirmed that you'll adopt me as soon as I move to the City."

"Our plate's already full," said my dad.

"Plate's full, Sam," I said.

"I'm an only. I've always wanted brothers."

"You don't want Rob as a brother. Evan's cool. Just, like, freelance so you don't have to be around Rob."

"He's all right. Rob, I'm sure you're just fine. Joe's a wanker."

"Wanker?" I said. "Why are you talking this way?"

"I'm not taking in a fourth one of you," said my dad to Sam, walking toward the house. "Remember, no drinking or swearing."

"Oh, also," I said to Rob, "when I was on the phone with Mom she told me that she thinks you're gay, for whatever that's worth."

"You're such a liar," he said.

"Not at all. I'm not saying that I agree with her, but she certainly implied it."

"Why are you always in my face with weird, dumb bullshit?" Rob said. "I haven't even said anything."

"Whatever, bro," I said. "You and Sam can stand around and flatter each other about being gross. Evan and I are going to go hang with Katie and her sister."

I brought Evan to Katie and her sister because he'd crushed on Katie when he visited me. Her sister Megan was a more age-appropriate friend. Away from Rob, I was startled by my small adrenaline spike, how I couldn't last seconds without glancing to see if he was doing something that gave me an excuse to pounce.

"He was actually being chill and funny today," Evan said. "Like, Mom and Dad really, really, really don't want you guys to fight this weekend."

"Okay," I said. "I was being a tool. It's hard to talk to him like a normal person."

"Right, but, like, when he's actually acting normal, you should, like, reward him," Evan said, "not try to make him start acting like a jerk."

"That's incredibly mature," I said. "How are you the most mature one?"

"Dad says I take after him and you and Rob are more like Mom," he said, rolling his eyes.

"What a brutally sick burn against Mom," I said. "So maybe we should back off with Rob."

"There's no we to back off, just you."

"We can try to be cooler with him for now, I agree."

What about this scenario? Evan and Katie's sister Megan both come here for college, which gives Katie and me a reason to visit campus at will from like 2008 to 2012. They've already met through me and Katie. They start to hang out as freshmen, eventually fall in love, and then get married when they're like 27 -- which is too young for marriage in our present century, but it doesn't seem like Evan is likely to have a wild streak. Katie and I would then be guaranteed to be around each other (via shared family) for life, and plus our genetic powers would indirectly combine once Evan and Megan had kids. Their names even suited each other: #EvanlovesMegan sounds like a wedding hashtag. Very cute.

None of this happens, but Katie and I would spend time speculating about it.

When I took my parents and brothers to Cucina di Napoli, it was the closest I'll feel to the sequence in Goodfellas where Henry Hill leads Karen through the Copacabana. We walked in slow motion as Modest Mouse played. A friend or acquaintance was at every other table and we all wanted to show each other off.

All of us were very charming and accomplished. We did such cool things. We had the clearest skin and freshest haircuts. The parents were so impressed with their kids and their gregarious, presentable friends.

"It's a big school. I know hundreds of people. You'd have to be intentionally anti-social not to."

"Extremely charming people today, all around," my dad said at dinner.

"I like them, too," I said.

"But also the parents. You can't predict these things."

"I only really know the Riises. His mom's the best."

"She told me that it's hard for them to see Chris graduate and lose all of you," my mom said. "She said they've thought about moving back here once her husband retires because they like it so much."

"That way I'd have a place to stay when I come back for football games," I said.

"A little presumptuous," my dad said.

"She said that you're all part of her family now, and that her other kids didn't have this kind of connection in college," my mom said to me, as if to rebut my dad. "She said that they credit Joe for helping Chris break out of his shell and start to figure out his interests in life."

Rob wasn't smirking and didn't look prone to a rude comment. He toyed with a cherry tomato in his salad. He was being so compliant.

"That's nice of her," I said. "She maybe said those things because you're my mom."

"Doubtful," my mom said. "I have a good bullshit detector."

"That's true," said Evan, deeply. "She does."

"Learning to accept compliments is a type of art," my dad said to me. He played with his salad exactly like Rob. I didn't tend to fidget like that.

Evan and Rob made parallel eye movements when certain girls walked by our table. I was used to that with my friends but I hadn't noticed it with my brothers. It irked me. It was the kind of observation that would normally make me undermine Rob -- as if yeah right dude, you're a guy who gets to casually glance at girls in public, what a poser.

"Oh, also, some of us got matching tattoos," I said.

My brothers perked up.

"On our left shoulder blades. It's got the logo and our street address."

"A tattoo?" my mom said. "For real, man?"

"It's discreet. Sam, Trevor, Michelle and me."

I faced away and invited her to look down the back of my T-shirt. She tugged at my neckline. "And there it is," she said, more amused than harsh.

"I think that's sweet," my dad said. "A little bit dopey. But also sweet."

"A tattoo, dude?" said Evan.

"A bunch of the swimmers were in the Olympics last year and they did the same thing, but with the Olympic rings under the logo. That was the inspiration."

"Wow," said Rob.

"It's funny that you almost went to Dartmouth," said my mom. "Proof that it pays to keep an open mind."

"This school is a way of life, not a college."

My dad laughed. Rob self-censored the dickish comment that I might have been trying to elicit.

I looked up, and Mark Edwards from the Chronicle was walking toward us, with his parents behind. I stood and hugged him and told the table that Mark would be starting NYU Law in the fall. Mark's parents beamed. My dad went into law-firm mode, taking out a business card and suggesting that Mark give him a call if he ever wanted to talk career stuff.

"Wait, Mark!" I said, jumping up, tugging the back of my shirt. "We got a house tattoo!"

I sat with my parents at the corner of the fancy hotel bar.

"Rick's dad is buying him a two-bedroom in the East 20s for graduation," I said.

"That's one way to describe it," said my dad. "Another is that Ken is making an investment in Manhattan real estate and Rick is his incidental beneficiary."

"I'd never want to be beholden like that," I said. "It's, like, so debauched and over the top."

"I have good news for you, then."

"Rick's parents are insane," I said.

"But if you ever need any help, or, I don't know," my mom said. "We wanted to come up with something special for a present. It's not easy to pick for you."

"Let's say you wanted to do a kind of gap year," my dad said. "Take a year off and travel. Write whatever you like. Apply to grad school if that's what you want. We'd support you with that."

"Oh, cool," I said. "That could be awesome, but Sam and Katie are going to be in the City, and Jamie Calmet's already there. Half my best friends are going to be in the City. Being gone for a month is one thing, but longer than that sounds hard. I'm sure I'd meet cool people while I traveled, but it wouldn't be the same."

My dad made a subtle, wow-type expression and clinked the ice in his scotch. His habits would have annoyed me if he'd been someone else. He jiggled ice in his beverages, tapped his knee with pens, batted spherical foods on his plate. Absent-minded tics, just enough to distract.

"In our generation," he said, "or when I was your age, you know, we had friends and a social life, obviously, but the emphasis was so much on finding a spouse, getting married, what you were going to do for work. And your friends were there and valued, but it wasn't quite the same. Your generation, you specifically, have these deep attachments, and they carry you along in a way that I wouldn't have understood without observing it. If someone described it to me, I would have been cynical." He sipped his drink. "But I find it touching. I see the way you respond to each other and how it's so obvious for you. I think I envy that kind of bond."

My mom lightly squeezed the back of my neck. "So if you think of anything that you'd like. I don't know what. Maybe we could have a party at the house with your friends. I know it's not buying you an apartment."

"Mom, I don't need a party, and I only mentioned Rick's apartment because I think it's crazy. I haven't thought about a present. I didn't know college-graduation presents were even a thing. I'm materially great, so thank you for that. Maybe we can get some of Dad's firm tickets to Shakespeare in the Park and go to late dinner after. That would be nice."

"I agree that it would be nice," said my mom. She tugged my ear toward her and kissed the top of my head.

It was only ten, but I'd have to be up around seven the next day to get ready for commencement. I walked the fifteen minutes back home. I thought that the house might be busy, but it was just Chris with Katie and her parents in the living room. A few bottles of beer were on the table and a baseball game was on TV.

I waved hello and then went for a short solo run through campus.

In bed that night, I couldn't turn off. I reminded myself that the next day would be a ceremony based in logistics, followed by tame parties. Nothing should concern me. No one was actually leaving. I could depart campus the next week or when our lease expired in August. Sam and Katie had work obligations starting in July and were planning their moves. The rest of us would float on as we wanted.

Each sound drew my curiosity. The front door closed at 1 a.m. I wanted to see who it was and go hang out, but that was counterproductive. Anonymous laughter carrying from the sidewalk. Footsteps on the second floor. I played a Sam Cooke gospel CD at low volume, hoping he would cradle me to sleep.

My leg spasmed and I jumped wide awake at 5:30. The sun wouldn't rise for an hour. I thought about Chris when I masturbated. Only 5:40.

I put on shorts, washed my hands and went downstairs. No one up, obviously. The dim light felt like a black-and-white movie. I made coffee and smoked a cigarette on the porch steps. I couldn't recall a morning where I woke so early. My heart beat faster than the situation required. It wasn't just coffee and cigarettes.

Stray underclassmen in marching band uniforms shuffled past. They carried large instruments. I dully waved hello from the steps. "Play hard," I said to one of them, my voice scratchy.

I stepped down to the basement and opened the door to Sam's room. He had the softest, most even snore. When we were freshmen, his snore helped me fall asleep, like the hum from a fan.

If I did this with anyone else, it would make me a freak and a creeper. Sam and I were the only people allowed to observe each other's sleep. Maybe Trevor and Katie.

I climbed over his body and curled behind him, big-spoon style. This wasn't a plan. I figured that I'd annoy him into waking up, but it felt more calm and comforting than I expected. The scent of his linens reminded me of our dorm room. People have a signature traces in their soaps, deodorants, scalps, pheromones. Our bodies didn't touch. I draped my right arm above his ribs, expecting to poke him into waking. I chose not to.

I thought about my dad's comment, about people being carried along by friendships in a way that he hadn't experienced.

I stuck my finger up Sam's nostril.

He gasped, flinched in brief terror. The back of his skull knocked my chin.

"Oh, you mad fucker," he croaked in a deep voice. "Why?"

"Love you, bro," I said softly.

"Your finger smells like cigarette," he said into his drool-soaked pillow.

"I couldn't fall back to sleep."

"You could have at least given me a reach-around," he mumbled. "We're finally fucking."

"Ha. You think nose-picking is fucking, you fucking virgin."

I stuck my finger up his nose again. He slapped my hand. "Stop digitally penetrating."

"No."

He rolled onto his back and shielded his face with his arm. "You have no idea how much I fantasize about waking up in your arms. Every morning, basically."

I gently slapped him near the ears. He scrunched his face. "You were the best roommate," I said. "The best."

"Keep seducing me," he said.

"I'm saying it before we drink so that you know I mean it. You've brought so much fun to my life."

"Well, you know that I have fun with you too," he said. "We're still going to see each other all the time."

"It won't be like this though," I said.

"You're the one who thought we shouldn't live together in the City. Now you're filled with heartache."

"Maybe we could live across the street and give each other our keys."

He leaned up to give me a quick, closed-mouth kiss, then slapped my face, like at the party a few nights earlier.

"Okay," he said. "Let's get ourselves pretty before people show up. I can't have them seeing you like this."

We'd loosely organized a friends-only meetup at the house. The goal was to get buzzed on cheap champagne and walk to the ceremony together. There were about twenty of us on the front porch. We drank straight from bottles that we passed. I'd set up speakers. The playlist was off Katie's iPod. It felt like a game day. We tossed a football between the porch and the street.

A pod of enormous men in graduation gowns too small to fit their arms lumbered from the corner.

"Yo!" Trevor shouted toward them. "Jake Mulhaney! Bidogeous Brick! Yo, guys!" he shouted from the sidewalk, yelling the names of the quarterback and the defensive lineman who'd been drafted to the NFL a couple weeks earlier. Trevor waved his arms.

The football players chuckled like benign giants encountering forest sprites.

"What up, guys," one of them said in deep purr.

Trevor asked them for a group photo, and it happened in seconds: Our front porch poured to the sidewalk, standing and crouching in front of the most massive humans on campus, some of us holding champagne bottles. Trevor and Michelle were framed in the front and center, jointly holding the house football, both of them staring into the lens with deadpan seriousness.

We passed them our bottles. Some took a swig. They were headed to the stadium early. Coach wanted special words with them before they walked.

"Come back tonight!" I called as they strode off. "We're having a party! I'm Joe College, from the Chronicle!"

We technically violated open-container laws on our walk to the stadium, but no one was going to ticket graduates. Some of us technically violated vagrancy laws when we technically urinated behind a row of trashcans in the empty driveway of a student rental.

We lined up single-file in a practice field, divided from others by orange tape, and were guided through an orderly procession toward the football stadium. Sam rode me piggyback-style until I tired and shrugged him off. We filed through a tunnel and were led onto the field, while underclassmen in the marching band played Pomp and Circumstance on a tireless loop.

Our speaker was a renowned foreign statesman in his twilight. There had been grumbles that it should have been the famous movie director who received an honorary degree earlier in the ceremony.

He discussed strengthening international cooperation to enforce human rights and conservation in failed states.

"What are the chances that Evan and Megan hook up," I whispered to Katie.

"Evan seems shy."

"Is Megan shy?"

"Joe, I don't know. We don't have that kind of relationship."

"I don't have that kind of relationship with Evan, either. But he's, like, a real dude now."

"It's puberty, Joe. It's nature."

"I don't know what that's supposed to mean."

"Just, shh," she said. "Let's listen to the speech."

Trevor leaned in from the other side of Katie and gave a thumbs up. "They should hook up. We need something new to talk about."

"You're both being disrespectful to halting atrocities."

"We should have had a funny commencement speaker, like Conan or Jon Stewart," Sam whispered.

"Hell no, moron. Then everyone would be outraged that our speaker doesn't have gravitas and complain that we're being treated like a joke."

"I don't care about gravitas," Sam whispered. "Could have been the South Park guys or what's his name -- George Costanza."

"Shut up, shut up," I said. "So stupid. You're being disrespectful to halting atrocities."

But the whole ceremony ended in a snap. The university president gave final remarks that sounded like a sanitized version of my farewell column, which made me feel like both a cliche and a prophet for school spirit. She declared us graduates and told us to come back home whenever we wanted. We rose to sing the fight song before we exited.

The fabric of graduation gowns is thin as tissue paper. The dye rubs off in the oil of your fingers. I think it cost about $75 to rent for the weekend.

"Come here, Joe," Michelle said. "Turn around."

"What?"

"Your tie is bunched up and sticking out under your collar and it's driving me crazy."

She flipped my collar. I felt her fingers through cloth as she organized the back of my neck. The tie's resettlement pressured my carotid. I adjusted. She turned down my collar and smoothed it. She squeezed my shoulders.

Seeing my housemates dressed up, with our families and siblings on site, lent the situation more gravity than I'd expected. Nice shoes can change so much.

The arrangements back at our house were more elaborate than I'd expected. I knew there would be food and coffee, champagne and beer. Katie's parents had taken it on themselves to coordinate a beverage order and the Riises had a catering delivery of breakfast carbs. My mom was miffed that I hadn't asked her to contribute something. I told her that I hadn't paid attention to the plans.

Chris's brother Pete and his sister Susan drove to town that morning for the ceremony. Pete greeted me with an aggressive hug. I introduced the oldest Riis siblings to my parents. Pete and Susan felt closer to our parents' age and status than to ours, but that wasn't true. They were about the same age then as I am now, and I still consider myself 22.

I intuited invisible currents in these families. That Sam had been an only child and Chris had been the youngest felt so obvious in their contexts. Trevor, Katie and Michelle had ease with their younger sisters, nothing like my rapport toward Rob and Evan. You could see who was more preoccupied with pleasing their parents (Michelle, Sam) versus whose parents seemed more concerned with tending to their kid (the rest of us).

I wanted to eavesdrop on all of them. What were they saying about whom? Our poor younger siblings must have been so bored. We had no relief for sober teens. Evan wore poorly fit khakis and a button-down that looked a size too big. It was probably something my mom grabbed from Rob's closet during a final rush to pack.

I stood on our porch when Katie handed me a flute of mimosa. She looped her arm through mine and leaned into me. "You and Chris are sulking by yourselves."

"I'm not sulking."

"Yeah you are."

"I was watching. Like, it's interesting how good Trevor and Sam are at talking to parents. How people's siblings have certain parallel gestures, like Michelle's sisters cock their heads the way that she does and Trevor's sister has the same laugh that he does. It's cool to watch Peter Riis hanging out with my mom and dad. Like, I don't know. It's not a deep point. You see a side of people."

"My mom was like, Why didn't you and Joe ever go out,' and I was like, Mom, Joe's gay. Remember all that drama?'"

"Why would you tell her that?"

"Why would you care? She's not, like, Republican."

"That's literally the last thing I want to think about today. I don't need anybody's parents thinking about me that way. It's extremely embarrassing."

"Dude, I thought it was cute that she even asked."

"So does she know you and Trevor hooked up sometimes?"

"Yeah. Duh."

"I can't believe you said that to her. Now I actually am sulking."

"You're so emo."

"What if I went to my parents and was like, `Oh, Katie has herpes.'"

"Joe, I don't have herpes, and that's not a reasonable comparison."

"Tons of people have herpes. It's not a big deal. I'm almost sure you have herpes, even if you don't know it."

"You're telling me you have herpes?"

"I'm not even sexually active."

"Oh, wow. That's not the gossip."

"I'm not. And I was thinking nice thoughts about people, and now you're ruining it with, like, dicks and herpes."

"You brought up herpes, and no one's talking about dicks."

"Don't say that so loudly," I whispered. "There nice people here right now. I don't want them to think about us this way."

"You're a freak."

"At least I know it. I don't go around talking to parents about, like, whatever."

She kissed my cheek. I wiped the lip-spot like a child.

"I wanted to talk to your parents, but now I'm embarrassed," I said.

"Come talk, dude! They'd love it."

"Who knows what they'd even say now. Let's go talk to Trevor's parents instead. I've barely been introduced."

"They're cool. Way more fun than Trevor makes them sound."

"People are probably the most critical about own parents."

"I'm going to text my mom first."

"Why?"

"I'm going to tell her to never bring up your situation. Are you cool talking to her then?"

"As long as that's off limits, yeah, I guess."

I kept a distance from Chris's family without being obvious. He was too tense. I'll never know people as well as I knew my housemates. I knew their shifts based on the angle of a shoulder, discerned sincere smiles from ones of endurance.

He was easier with other parents than he was with his own. He was so handsome that teenage sisters turned shy when introduced. I don't think he was even aware of that.

His family didn't baby him the way that we did. When he got too couch-comfortable, the guys in the house brought him to the gym or the bars, invitations he happily accepted. Michelle and Katie doted on him like a little brother. But his family disregarded the pouting, and his bratty posture escalated. I'd observed it several times. They were immune to his small maneuvers. We were not.

He wore a new dress-shirt that he picked up at the mall 48 hours earlier because his only decent button-down had been too tight in the shoulders and too short in the arms, an old shirt that he'd brought from home freshman year, when his younger frame had barely lifted a weight, couldn't run a mile and was an inch shorter. His new shirt showed the creases from being folded on a store shelf.

We made eye contact across the living room and he darted his glance. I respected the non-hostile request.

My mom wanted family photos. I slipped back into my graduation gown and smiled with my brothers. Katie wanted a photo with us. She pulled in her sister.

Sometimes, even people you'd rather be quarreling with look good in a photograph.

Sometimes, even people you'd rather not be quarreling with look ill in a photograph.

Barbara wanted a photo of just me with Chris. He huffed and shuffled.

"Bro, it's good!" I said. "Just a couple photos."

"Why just us though," he mumbled as a declarative sentence. "Like, why no Katie and Michelle."

"We can get one with everybody," his mom said, "but Joe is such a special friend to you."

I wanted to coach him so badly: the more you react to the remark, the more you flag it. The weirder you seem. Laugh and be normal. No one's going to read into her comment unless you blow it up.

I flashed a big, exaggerated smile. "Moms are gonna mom," I said to him, and nudged his shoulder.

"They're all special friends to me," he mumbled. "No one's more special than anyone else."

"Joe's extra-special," his mom said, "at least to me."

"Thanks, Mrs. Riis!" I said, eager to normalize. "You're extra-special to me, too."

Chris was red and miserable. "It's okay, dude," I announced, inventing an explanation for him. "I know you don't like getting your photo taken. It'll be over in five seconds."

"Yep," he said, seething over his mother. He stretched his shoulders like he was waking from a nap, smoothed his hair. He put a hand on my shoulder but made sure that our torsos didn't touch. I took the suggestion and kept my arms at my sides. He looked like the grandpa and I looked like the kid. Our postures were rigid and erect; it was unnatural. His smile was theater, not the smirk that could look cocky and bashful at once.

A rotten photo -- the inverse to my favorite, where we sat next to each other drunk on the porch couch, where he smiled calmly and I looked adversarial toward the lens. The classic photo that still hangs among others over my bedroom dresser.

He disappeared from the group not long after that. I later learned that he and Evan went up to my room and played Grand Theft Auto.

"Did you guys talk at all?" I asked Evan.

"No. We just, like, drove around and wasted people. It was Chris's idea. He was like, I'm bored, let's go play GTA in Joe's room,' and I was like, Same.' What would we talk about?"

"How awesome I am, probably," I said.

"You're a good friend and you teach him new about new ways to look at things, and that's all a parent wants in their kids' friends," she said. "That's what I said to your mom, too."

"He's also a good friend and influence," I said.

"That's nice of you to say."

"I mean it."

She sighed. "What are we going to do with him? You can't keep `em down on the farm after they've seen Paree. I want to ship him to New York City with the rest of you."

"I've told him he should come."

"I'll bet you have." That timing; that gleam. Jesus. She rattled me.

"Yeah." My nervous laugh. "Sam and Katie would love it, too. Like, the band should stay together."

"He's sure not going to be happy back home. There's not a lot that's going to suit him. Not high school football games and the crowd at the sports bar at the strip mall."

"Stuff like that has its appeal."

She ignored my comment. "He'd never want me to share this, but when we used to talk on the phone, back when he first got to school, he wouldn't stop talking about Joe and Sam. All of these plans, how you were going to rush Peter's old fraternity, how much fun he was having with the two of you. And then it got to be that he'd talk about Sam less and less, and more and more about Joe." She paused. "I knew he was going to take graduation harder than his brothers and sisters."

"He'll be okay. It's just a mood."

"Every mood has a reason. He'll miss you, too."

"That's, just." I waved off the sentiment. "It's all cool. Thank you, though."

She pursed her lips and paused. "Everyone is very proud of you, and appreciates you for everything. He won't ever say that, so hear it from me."

"Right. I know, I know. And you and Mr. Riis have been so awesome. We should have gotten a gift to thank you. Graduation snuck up."

"Today's not about me or Glen, but thank you for the thought. Just make sure that they appreciate you out there, the way we do," she said. She instructed me to lean down for a hug.

I woke from a nap in late afternoon. Sam and I walked to the hotel where our parents were staying.

We'd failed the elaborate process for graduation-night restaurant reservations. The marquee restaurants opened their phone lines at 11 a.m. a month earlier and took bookings first-come, first-serve, with an up-front credit-card deposit. I spent fifteen minutes hitting redial between the expensive steak house and the best French restaurant on Main Street. By the time I got through to one, it had only tables at 4 p.m. and 9:30.

My parents would have been happy with a proper restaurant, but none of us are, like, dedicated food people; my parents look forward to Shake Shack as much as Daniel. After Sam and I got closed out in the reservation rush, we conferred and decided on a contrarian plan: Goal Line for dinner, with dollar pitchers, chicken fingers and jalapeno poppers. We could have found a middle ground -- even bar food at Charterhouse would have been okay -- but jointly taking them to our cheapest, drunkest spot felt like a dare.

We weren't the only ones there with parents, but most of the customers were juniors staying on campus for the summer, drinking through the afternoon with NBA games on the projection screen. A table of bros quieted and looked our way as parents walked in.

It was understood that Sam and his parents had a fond, respectful relationship. They'd been in their early forties when he was born, more than a decade older than my parents. They carried themselves with a warm rigidity that I would have associated with the London Tories they'd been before migrating to Canada. They read The Economist, they drove Lexuses, they played tennis, they preferred Four Seasons hotels, they probably thought that The Beatles went downhill after they started using drugs, they probably said "Lady Thatcher."

In their presence, Sam was clean-mouthed, friendly, restrained. He was recognizably himself in the way that Scarface edited for basic cable was technically the same movie. His true personality had been forged by private high schools and bootleg VHS tapes of sweary comedians.

We ordered pitchers and nachos for the table. My parents loved that we'd brought them there. Sometimes they wanted nothing more than to be included in whatever my brothers and I were up to, even if it was the shitty sports bar that I frequented when I had no better option. I've only recently understood that when someone leads you outside of your routine, it can feel like a vacation from yourself.

My mom's eyes darted when Rob poured a cup of beer. Rob smirked, almost daring her to say something. She looked to my dad. There was no use in making it an issue. Mom reluctantly unclenched.

Shortly after we sat, Sam's dad delivered an uncomfortably dad-level toast, mercifully brief, about how proud he was of Sam. Sam endured it with a plastic smile. Beneath the table, his foot applied pressure to the toe of my shoe.

"Of course, when you didn't get into Harvard or Princeton, you thought it was the end of the world," Peter Frost concluded, "but after a couple of months here, you'd never seemed happier, and we couldn't be prouder. Cheers to a great education, great friends, great memories, and a great future in New York."

We clinked opaque plastic beer cups. I texted Sam on my flip-phone: "Cnt believe u cried over Hrvrd and Prncton u bitch"

"u sad cunt" he replied.

"cnt wait 2 throw u thru a window tnight"

"pussy"

"Joe is embarrassed by compliments," my mom began, standing.

"Oh, God," I said.

"But in the spirit of the day -- I mean, of course we're proud of you. Whenever you told us what you were up to, it sounded like everything but the football team. You studied Arabic, you read classics that I could never get through, you wrote god-knows-how-many articles in the school paper, you edited writers, you were always out at parties."

"Let's settle down, Mom," I said.

"When people ask me how Joe's doing at school, I always tell them, `He speaks Arabic, he loves Faulkner and he edits the college newspaper.' Do you know how cool it feels to say that to other parents? It's pretty fucking cool."

"Language, Mom," I said.

"God, no swearing," said Evan, deeply.

"Wow," said my dad.

Rob drank half of his beer in a gulp. No swearing; no drinking.

"Okay, I shouldn't swear, but it's very cool, and more than being proud of you, we're happy for you, for the life that you made for yourself here and for all of the great friendships that you've built. Not least of all with Sam -- who, I want to be very clear, is always welcome to whatever help we might be able to give once he settles into New York. Not that he'll need it, but as parents," she turned to Mr. and Mrs. Frost, "well, you know."

"That's so kind of you," Sam said, more sincere and bashful than I knew to be real.

"So I do want to say congratulations," my mom said, "and also, thank you for being yourself and pursuing the things that you pursue, and letting your dad and I share in pieces of the adventure. So," she said, raising her plastic cup, "cheers to Joe, and to you Sam, and to the school that brought us all here."

"Well, thanks, Mom," I said. I turned to Sam. "Are we supposed to say things?"

"I don't know. Do you want to say anything?"

"I guess thanks, Mom and Dad and Evan, and everybody else, for being here. And for letting me come here and not trying to make me major in something douchey and pointless. And thanks Mr. and Mrs. Frost for agreeing to come to this incredibly trashy bar because Sam and I weren't able to get real dinner reservations. You're great sports."

"And I would also, of course, like to say thanks Mom and Dad, for all that you've given me," Sam said. "I count myself truly lucky to have you as parents. Your support is unparalleled." I wanted to laugh at his word choice. "And thank you to Joe's parents for leaving me in charge of your son for the last four years. I've done my best to guide, mentor and protect him, but of course, all credit goes to you for his good qualities, and I accept the blame for his shortcomings, if any. Evan, always great to see you, and Rob, you're a great guy to talk to and hang out with." He was delighted to troll me. "Hopefully we'll be good friends in the years ahead."

After dinner, Sam invited all parents and brothers to what he described as a few laid-back drinks with Friends of the House. By then, I knew his description would be wrong. Both of our phones had been vibrating with texts asking if we were still having a party and if friends could come.

Our parents smartly declined. They said that they were tired from the long day. Evan was in a purgatory where he wasn't old enough or outgoing enough to attempt a college party with women and beer. He should have given himself a shot.

Rob was willing, though. He was buzzed after openly violating our mom's alcohol ban. Swearing could not be far behind.

"Dad's going to be farting up the hotel room all night because of jalapeno poppers," he said, as he walked to the house with me and Sam.

"Ew!" I said. "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"What the fuck is wrong with you, taking them to a shitty sports bar for your graduation dinner? Why were you letting them eat nachos and jalapeno poppers?"

"They fucking loved it," I said. "They can go to Babbo or Jean Georges whenever. That was authentic."

"Their farting will be authentic."

"Shut the fuck up. Nauseating comments."

"I'm the one in their hotel room. Evan has this cot by a window. We're living like vagrants."

"You're so spoiled. It's a super-nice hotel."

"It is a nice hotel. Mom and Dad should've gotten two rooms. You can't have four of us in one hotel room. You of all people would have a mental episode."

"They probably don't trust you alone with Evan. They probably think you'd abuse him. Sexually."

"Lovely," Rob said. "And you think my fart comments are out of line? You're the gay one."

"Okay, so now you're one of those bigots who thinks gay dudes are molesters."

"You said something extremely sick about me. Don't pretend to be PC and sensitive."

"I slurred you because you're you, not because you're gay," I said. "Which, incidentally, you are. And you molest Evan."

"You're so fucked up."

"I wish I had a brother," Sam said. "I'm jealous that you get to talk to each other like this."

"You talk like this all the time," I said.

"Oh, that's right," Sam said. "Except that you're required. I have to forge my own identity."

"I'm cool giving Joe away," Rob said. "Are you're sure you're not, like, already a couple?"

"I fuckin' wish," Sam said.

"Rob, seriously, knock it off with the homophobia," I said.

"To be clear, the reason I hate you has nothing to do with your being gay," Rob said.

"Similarly, my contempt for you has nothing to do with your being so obviously, severely gay," I said.

"Perfect agreement!" Sam said. "I love seeing the two of you make up. It's my new private fantasy, when I'm alone."

Heavy pause.

"I will fucking murder you," I said.

That night, a forty-person conga line circled the living room to a remix of Harry Belafonte. It included Peter Riis, Trevor's dad, and my unlikable middle brother. Our couch collapsed because people treated it like a trampoline. We arranged an emergency keg delivery because what we thought would be a chill gathering of close friends went viral and became, I suspect, the definitive graduation-night party for the Class of 2005.

It wasn't out of control in the way that you see in movies. Parties like that only happen at Cal State schools and in the SEC. White Americans don't know how to behave themselves in hot weather. We went to the kind of school where people were conscientious about washing their hands.

At least a couple hundred people must have passed through our house that night, though. A lot of the graduating seniors brought siblings. We had the outgoing editors of the school newspaper, the former student government president, Trevor's former drug dealer, varsity wrestlers, members of the girls' soccer team, a Marshall Scholar, left-wing activists, center-left activists, and that one hot econ major who'd been on Survivor before she quit the show mid-season based on excessive bugbites and craving pizza. The back of our house smelled like pot and the basement concrete was sticky with spilled beer.

Katie had briefly hooked up with a guy named James who thought of himself as a DJ. He set up his laptop in a corner and controlled the music after she texted him. In 2010 I would run into him at a bar in Greenpoint, where he told me that he'd become bi; I went home with him that night.

I thought that I'd be sadder, but for the first couple of hours, I was so occupied with talking to people that I lost track of the occasion. Everyone would be relocating to New York, D.C., Chicago, San Francisco -- or else they were going to law school at Harvard, Virginia or Michigan. I was being hugged, gripped, introduced. The promises to hang out in the City or keep in touch from afar felt sincere; many years later, they are mostly kept.

Around 10 p.m., the crowd parted near the front door. I thought that it was the police. The name Bidogeous Brick passed through the room. Our new friend from that morning passed through the doorframe with a small entourage. He was greeted with legit cheering and applause, like he'd won us a game that morning. Selfies weren't much of a thing before smartphones, but some people had small digital cameras. Mr. Brick strode through the living room, casually accepting high-fives on his way to the kegs, pausing like a pro to smile and pose when asked, flashes going off in our dark living room. His body was so dense and large that it had its own gravity, like our floors and walls couldn't contain him.

Even Chris seemed pretty happy. He'd been dancing and smiling, more outgoing and smooth than his custom. He wasn't even drinking that much. His older brother was in clover, being back on campus at a legit college party, where he wasn't even the oldest person there.

Then, sometime before midnight, it shifted for me. I felt too real. It became desperate.

I'd been trying to ignore Katie's deportment with Rob, but they nagged at my attention.

First they danced in a group, then they gathered with a different clique on the porch. Later they talked only to each other.

They separated for awhile. It was overdue.

They reconnected and looked earnest in chat, leaning against the hallway wall while others edged past. Katie's shoulder was too relaxed. They made eye contact like real people. They understood each other in some way.

The hypothetical scenario made me so furious that it was easy to recognize that I was the one with the problem. Nothing had even happened.

I walked down the block to smoke a cigarette alone. It occurred to me that I possibly had unresolved affections toward Katie that weren't wholly platonic. They weren't, like, horny feelings, but it wasn't pure friendship. Sometimes my heart squeezed when I thought about her face. I liked when she touched me. When she held my head to her bare arm, when she'd held me and Trevor on the porch that day. She was a light sunburn that tingled when a seam brushed against it, pleasingly sensitive, not enough to feel pain.

Katie had hooked up with all kinds of guys. Some of them had been really hot. I wanted to hook up with those straight bros. There'd been tremors of envy that she could net them when they were far off limits to me, but I'd also been jealous of their intensity with her. They had an access to each other that I wanted.

The idea that she'd consider Rob, of all possible dudes, was a mockery of my limitations.

Struggling to make ourselves heard over an Iggy Pop track, I pulled her into her bedroom and closed the door: "Katie, if you hook up with Rob, I don't even know."

"What are you going to do, get mad at me?"

"Is that an actual question?"

"Just because you're repressed."

"Quit."

"When you tell me not to do something, it makes me want to do it, just to prove a point. So you know."

"You'll mess up our friendship. It's not right."

"You'll be mad for, like, a day, and then you'll think it's funny."

"You don't understand. Clinically, I think he's a psychopath."

"He said that when you were kids, after one of his birthdays, you put his new Ninja Turtles in the toaster oven and the smoke alarm went off. He didn't know what you'd done until he smelled the smoke and your mom yelled at you. Those were his new toys, you dickhead. Plus, you've never even taken an intro psych class, so you shouldn't make a diagnosis about whether someone's a psychopath. It's irresponsible."

"The point is, you shouldn't even be talking to him, out of loyalty to me," I said. "Besides, Penn is the douchiest school. It's probably worse than Duke."

"He's a normal person, like anybody else. And I don't share your petty hatred of random schools. I've never understood why I'm supposed to look down on Penn people just because it annoyed you on your visit."

"Okay, hook up with anyone from Penn. Just not my brother. You were my friend first. Plus, we're all going to be in the City. Like, how awkward will it be if you cross paths after hooking up with him?"

"I respect your first point. The second point is childish. Grow up, Joe. You're not the manager of other people's choices."

"Are you even being serious right now?"

"Are you?"

"I'm being exactly as serious or unserious as you want me to be in order to dissuade you from affection toward my brother."

She made an exaggerated puking sound.

"I know what's really going on," I said, practically spitting. "You want to hook up with me but our situations make that implausible at best, and because I'm not available, you want to get with my brother instead. You think he's my stunt-double, except for hooking up. But he and I are nothing alike."

"You're an egomaniac."

"I'm not going to fight with you at graduation, but you know it's true."

"Not remotely."

"The fun part for me is going to be when he realizes that you gave him herpes, or worse."

We were equally startled by my nastiness. I gasped at myself and tensed, waiting to accept retaliation. I thought she was going to slap me. I deserved it.

"Never forget," she said, caress of affection in her threat, "that I know all of your weaknesses. You don't know mine. And you're much frailer than I am."

She jabbed a finger into my pectoral.

"Yo, is Katie going to hook up with your brother?" Trevor said.

"Maybe," I said. "He's the fucking worst. I apologize, dude."

"Why are you apologizing? It's weird for everybody."

"Yes."

"What if Pieces made out with my sister? Weird as fuck."

"Brothers are super-different. But I still hope she gives him herpes."

"She's making out with you by proxy, bro," Trevor said.

"That's what I said to her. She pretended that I was being vain."

"She's trolling both of us," Trevor said, "but joke's on her cuz I don't care."

"If this is how she wants to go out," I said. "We should have just done a chill thing at the house and not had five hundred people come over."

"This was supposed to just be a chill thing at the house," Trevor said.

"True."

"And it's fun." Trevor jostled my shoulder. "You're having fun. You know you are. Just put Katie and your brother out of mind. Probably nothing's going to happen, and even if it does, choose to ignore it. We can control our feelings more than we think. Tonight's a really good time. Everybody's having a good time. Look at my dad. Middle-aged Indian dude dancing with pretty girls like nobody's watching."

"I'm cool," I said. "You're right."

"Love you, bro," Trevor said.

"Love you too," I said. "Pleasedontleave."

I danced with Michelle and Chris. Michelle barely drank because she had to get up early for breakfast with her parents. She didn't need the alcohol. Few people had done more to earn a moment of valedictory. That night, she was pure happiness. Cut loose, unrestrained. She beamed while we danced, shouted lyrics from the Backstreet Boys and Biggie, the music from our first high-school dances.

When she pulled our faces toward her, I braced, expecting her to kiss us. I would have let her, if that's what she thought she wanted, but she needed to speak in our ears to be heard over the music.

"Just so you know, you guys were the best," she said. "I'll miss everybody, but I'll miss you the most. It's probably an Upstairs Crew thing."

"You're going to be so good," I said. "I'm jealous and I'm sad you won't be around, but I'm so happy for what you've got ahead of you. Stanford will be amazing. You're as great of a person that I'll ever know. I'm sure of that."

"Same," Chris said. "Everything that Joe just said."

"Oh, you guys." She gave each of us a hug. "I've spent more time around you than any man but my dad. It'll probably be that way until I get married."

"Stop talking," I said. "You're going to get me emotional. I don't want to lose it tonight."

"I'll stop, I'll stop," she said.

"We've still got a few weeks together, right? No need feel things just yet."

"No, I know," she said, leaning into my arm. "It just feels right to have words tonight, specifically."

"Plenty of adventures ahead," I said. "We should do a weekend trip somewhere before summer's out. Maybe Chris can take us up to his family lake."

He followed me outside. The living room was muggy and we'd gotten sweaty from dancing. We walked around the corner to smoke because he didn't want his doctor brother to spot us with a cigarette. The din of our party remained audible.

Chris wasn't a smoker. I think he just enjoyed the ritual. He'd bum one and barely inhale.

"Michelle is the best," he said. "Just the greatest."

"The best there ever was and the best there ever will be," I said, sincere in my hyperbole. "I bet she writes something really cool."

"We're having a good party, right?"

"Amazing party. People are so happy. Lindsay from Survivor and Bidogeous Brick. This is, like, a celebrity party."

"So funny," he said.

With cigarettes in our mouths, I reached out and slapped his palm. "I'm glad we're cool now, too. That's as important as anything."

"I'm glad we're cool, too," he said. "There's something that's been driving me crazy though. I don't want us to leave on a bad note but I need to ask."

"Of course, man."

"Why'd you make up that thing about my mom?"

"What do you mean?"

"About how she thinks certain things," he said. "Why'd you lie to me about my mom? Why bring her into our differences?"

It took me a moment to understand what he was talking about. I was baffled, trying to think of a stray comment that he could have misconstrued. Of course I'd never speak badly of his mom. I wouldn't speak unkindly of anyone's mom. Certainly not his.

The words came back from the quarrel on our run: She knew about you before you met me. She told me when I was at the lake.

He wanted me to lie. He was begging me for a favor, not starting a confrontation.

"Oh. That thing." I spoke dryly, like an accountant reading from the page. The tone told him that my answer was false. "I was mad at you. I wanted a reaction. So I made it up."

"Okay," he said. "It's okay. That's what I thought."

No it wasn't.

"Your mom never said anything," I told him, so flat that it was nearly sarcastic. "It was wrong of me to say that. Terrible. Don't think about it again."

"Okay." Relief lightened the corners of his mouth. "I knew that." Like he finally got to stand after a long flight. "I'm sorry for how everything went down. I said extreme things. I went too far."

Lying about his mother's knowledge was an acceptable bribe if it helped us depart on good terms. He was only slapping himself in the face.

"You get to see things in a different light. I was going to stand by you regardless. You could have said worse things and I still wasn't going to sell you out."

"I know," he said. "That's one of the things I shouldn't have said. Some of that stuff about using people for attention. That wasn't true. We'd taken it way, way too far. Like, I didn't know how to talk to you anymore."

"I'm glad we're over it now."

"And it felt more intimidating because I didn't want to disappoint you," he said. "Sometimes you take me seriously when nobody else does. Not my family, not even our friends. Our friends make fun of me. My family treats me like a kid. You would take me seriously. Which I appreciated because you can be so," he gestured, searching for a diplomatic term, "precise."

"Yeah, I take you seriously. I've learned things from you, too. I know you're a good person. Some of the side comments, making fun of each other -- that doesn't mean anything. We all do it to each other."

"Yeah, I know that," he said. "It got hard always being a target."

"Even so, people have nothing but good thoughts. You know how much everybody likes you."

"No," he said.

"What?"

"I'm negligible to them."

"I really don't think so," I said.

Jesus Christ.

"From my perspective, you're extremely liked," I said. "You just heard Michelle. I saw how people introduced you to their parents. That wasn't an act."

"Okay, okay," he said, "I shouldn't have said that. Forget I said that. Don't repeat that."

"I won't," I said.

"I didn't really mean it. But sometimes it felt that way."

Either he was more depressed than I had the aptitude to handle, or, more likely, he got carried off in something specific to the moment. Departure feels easier if you let yourself get bitter. Most people don't actually dislike their exes; they have to convince themselves in order to move on.

Let him go.

I gestured, as if to tell him to suit himself. I observed a well-dressed trio of women walk toward our party. Too polished to be our kind of people.

Knowing him had left me better off. It was the first time I separated from the posturing and status drama that came from growing up with sons of bankers, sons of lawyers. Chris allowed me to mentally opt out of that world. In my brain he would remain classic rock on a lakeside with a good dog named Handsome.

When people move through their 20s and 30s they enjoy saying shit like, "Things aren't better or worse now. They're just different." I don't contradict them, but I think they're delusional. You can tell from the tone of voice.

He was better off from his time with me, too. Even if he denied it. Even if it didn't always feel that way. Think about an alternative world where he fell in with different people, or didn't fall in with anyone. We'd given him a life.

"I suspected that the day was messing with you," Michelle said.

"Dude, go hang out with your friends. I'm cool. Just mildly exhausted."

"Me too, buddy."

"I'd feel better if you were going to Columbia. Or at least Princeton."

"I'll be working so hard that I won't be able to hang out anywhere. I'll be as available from Stanford as I would be in New Jersey."

"I'm so mad that we can't just stay. We don't even have the option. I already know that I don't want the same things as other people. I'll never give a shit about a career or settling down. I want enough cash to get by, good friends, the freedom to think about the things that I want."

"You can live that way, and then, if your priorities change, you can live another way."

"It's never going to be like this again, though."

I went on a mission to find Rob and Katie. If I found them talking to each other, I would force him from the party. I'd walk him back to the hotel if necessary. Call our parents in a rage if that's what it took. Let people think I was overreacting or being an asshole; I didn't care. I blamed myself for letting him come in the first place.

He was downstairs, on a beer pong team with Sam. Katie was on the front porch with her arm around Trevor, talking to the well-dressed women I'd spied walking to the house.

I contemplated an excuse for exiling Rob, anyway.

He would end up passed out in Sam's bed. They slept next to each other like a couple of losers.

"Yo!" A tall boy approached and touched my shoulder. It was Ahmet.

"Hey dude," I said. "I was wondering whether you might make it out."

"I need to tell you," he said, energized, shouting over the music, "that I came out to my parents and sisters at dinner tonight, and I feel like I have you to thank."

"Are you joking?"

Jesus Christ. He had no idea what he was doing to himself. He'd barely experienced anything.

"Nope!" he said. "They took it great. They said they'll be proud of me as long as I'm happy and true to myself."

"Really?" I didn't think those conversations were real. "Wow."

I wanted to tell him to run and hide, that he had it all wrong. It was too definitive. Did he realize what he'd done, how hard it would be to walk back?

"Yeah, Joe! Isn't it awesome?" he said. "I owe a lot of it to you. You showed me that I could be gay and still be my own person, and that it would be okay in the end."

"I taught you that?"

"Thank you. Sincerely. I know that we've always been around, but it's only a couple weeks that we've had to really know each other, and you'll have a place in my heart for that."

Not everyone thinks like you; don't impute your feelings and experiences onto them. He looked so happy. I couldn't recall another person attributing that kind of happiness to me.

"Give the credit to yourself," I said, hoping to wrap up before something uncomfortable was said. "And your parents. They sound like great people. I didn't do anything."

"Are you serious?" he said. "After you came out -- I don't want to be too dramatic, but it was like you walked a path for me. Like, if Joe can be gay, I'll be okay, too. Then I got to know you better, and it seemed real, not a vague idea."

"Oh shit." I briefly lost my words. "Dude."

I wanted to dismiss it, to tell him that he didn't know me well enough to speak that kindness, that being gay sucked, that I harmed every guy who ever liked me, and that if I had a do-over, I'd happily be in the closet, pursuing secret handjobs.

Telling him that wouldn't be nice; it might not even be true. We didn't know each other well, but it seemed like he'd changed already, that he'd had no outlet for this energy before, and there was a new light inside of him.

Sam once said, as a slightly mean joke, that Ahmet seemed gayer than I did. But Ahmet had been by himself. He'd never had a Matt or an Andy. I had been his Matt by default.

Wait.

"I can't even tell you, dude. I have the greatest friend, Matt Canetti, maybe you met him sometime, he graduated two years ago, and that's exactly how he made me feel. Like it was all okay. I never thought someone would talk about me that way."

"Well, you did it!" he said, unaware of my bewilderment and frailty.

Ahmet had earned his own happiness and thoughts. Saying more about myself would be wrong.

"Dude, I'm touched that you shared this with me," I said. "Congratulations. For real."

"Don't be foolish, bro! I owe you one."

"You should feel more thankful to yourself. I'm going to go to the keg and get us celebration beers."

Sam's friend Anders was talking about how he and a couple of his fraternity brothers were making plans to go to Oktoberfest in Munich that fall. I asked why they weren't traveling over the summer instead.

I heard my own question. The best ideas can't be planned.

I did the math in my head but was too drunk to get the numbers straight. Sam and Katie would be in New York by June, but the rest of us were free.

I found Trevor, Michelle and Chris. Trevor thought something was wrong. "Nothing's wrong, you just need to hear this immediately," I said. I pulled them into Katie's room and closed the door. It was the nearest place that we could speak in private.

"Hear this out. We're all going to Europe. I'm going to go buy our flights right now. Get me your passport numbers."

"I don't have a passport," Chris said.

"Okay, we'll get started with you on Monday. They expedite passports for a fee. I'll do your flight separately."

"I'm not going to Europe," Chris said.

"No, you need to hear this out," Isaid.

I told them how my parents had wanted to get me a graduation present, except that none of us had any ideas. I didn't want to do a long trip by myself. My present would be traveling with them for a couple of months.

"They'll pay, they'll cover it," I said. "I know they'll be cool with it. I'm positive. You were dogging me at the bar that night about my dad's money, coming up with dumb things that I'd do with it," I said to Chris. "This isn't dumb. It'll be awesome and it'll be all of us."

"Assuming this could happen, maybe we should wait until tomorrow, when we're all sober and you can check in with your parents first," Michelle said.

"No, dude, no. We'll wake up and find a bunch of excuses for why this wouldn't work. I know we will. When it very definitely works. None of us has to be anywhere. Not until you're at Stanford in August. The only reason we wouldn't is that we're thinking small and timid, like this should be more complicated than it is. Alcohol was made for decisions like this. It's a definite plan, and we're going."

"No," Chris said. "I can't."

"Why not?"

"It just doesn't seem right."

"Not right how?"

"I don't want to be indebted to people like that. I don't want to owe you anything, or your parents."

"You owe nothing. The most literal nothing. If you tried to repay me, I wouldn't take it."

"That doesn't seem right, either," Chris said.

"Then what seems right?" I said. "Sitting around? Letting shit pass you by?"

"Okay, well." He sounded exhausted. "Again."

"None of us have jobs. Staying here for the summer could be awesome, but I'm worried that after graduation it might make me mostly sad. So let's all go and do a thing. Like, go to Paris and look at beautiful things, get high in Amsterdam and walk along canals, party all night in Berlin and Prague, read Thomas Mann in the Alps, go to beaches in Croatia and Greece."

"It could be sick, actually," Trevor said, thoughts turning.

"And you'll get annoyed with me," I said to Chris, "and sometimes we'll all get annoyed with each other, and that's fine. We'll hit pause and do our own shit for a day or two and it'll cool down like it always does."

Chris looked sour.

"I promise, like," I pleaded, "if the money's a hang-up, let's talk to your parents. Or even Pete, bro. If you really don't feel right using my dad's money -- which you shouldn't give a second thought -- we'll find a way to make it work."

"Yo, Chris," Trevor said, "this is a lot of the blue, but if I'm hearing Joe, it's not that crazy. Extremely generous, but, like, it doesn't have to be extravagant and debauched. We're going to find ways to keep paying each other back for things in the future, anyway."

"Like, how? Like, we're going to buy each other trips and stuff?" Chris said. "How would that even work?"

Trevor looked at him, deadpan. "One day I will buy you a Rolex and a Bentley, just because you're my bro."

Chris snorted.

"Get over the hurdle of the money," I said. "Pretend there's no such thing as money. Just think about how good of a time we could have. We'll go to some of the best places in the world. It's unlimited freedom. We need to do when we have the time and momentum. Carpe diem, motherfuckers -- that's from Dead Poets Society, Pieces, maybe you've seen it." I clapped my hands and jumped up and down. "Dead Poets Society, Pieces, you daft fucker: `Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.' Remember that line?"

"O Captain, my Captain," Trevor said.

"This is crazy," Michelle said.

"Thank you," Chris said.

"I mean crazy in a good way," she said. "I'm going to wait until my parents leave to tell them. Assuming that we actually do this."

"We're doing this," I said. "Get your passports. I'm going upstairs to book flights."

"It sounds like you guys will have a great time," Chris said. "I can't make it."

Trevor shook his head. First he put his hand on Chris's shoulder, but it evolved into a hug. In a neutral, friendly voice, he said something that I wouldn't have been able to pull off: "Self-denial for its own sake isn't some kind of moral victory, my dude. It just makes you fucking stupid."

We were on Hydra with the two Davids. I barely knew them in college. They were extracurricular acquaintances of Michelle's. Brothers in a frat that was considered uncool. When one of them wrote Michelle after seeing her Facebook update from Paris, we grudgingly decided to rendezvous with them in Munich. We'd traveled together since.

They were with us in Rome when Michelle almost crashed her rented Vespa. We stopped in Florence and Siena, and cursed ourselves for missing the Palio by a week. Naples is Europe's most underrated city. We visited the ruins in Agrigento before spending days on a rocky Sicilian beach, living in a hostel on an olive farm a mile's walk from the beach. Then we took a ferry and island-hopped through Greece.

There was a bad incident with some drunk, pink Brits at a club in Mykonos. They were about ten years older than us. It started with a racist epithet. I exploded. Trevor followed. Missed punches and jostling. People fell. Security ran over. We got thrown out. So did the three Brits. No one was harmed. I spent the rest of the night on edge, looking behind my back, expecting a Brummie thug at our shoulders.

Americans think that our countrymen are bad foreign tourists, but in Europe we behave well. Brits are the real menace. The Continent should be grateful for Brexit.

We speculated that they felt comfortable vocalizing their racism to me because I was the only white person in our crew. A few days later, in Hydra, the conflict still unsettled us, but it also felt funny. The edge was off. The threat felt distant.

Mykonos was stupid. We were stupid for going there. Some boneheads at a hostel in Berlin had persuaded us. We laughed over the scrape that afternoon on Hydra, but afterward, in separate conversations, Trevor and Michelle said kind things that I didn't expect.

Because it doesn't have light pollution, Hydra is supposed to be one of the best places in the world for watching stars. The skies are clear in the dark. Most visitors are Greeks who ferry from Athens. In Greece, confident children play outside past midnight. Adults eat late. Their cigarettes glow. They drink dark wine in front of cafes.

We walked with the two Davids to the empty beach after dusk, flip-flops protecting our soles from sharp pebbles. Smooth moonlight spread over still water. It lit our matching tattoos. The water felt warmer and lighter than our bodies. We floated on, under a gauzy bend of Aegean stars.