and like most first attempts, it was somewhat painful. Even if I hadn’t understood my world fully, I had at least not felt awed by it. Now I was being asked to consider points of view that not only had never occurred to me, but which stood in stark contrast to what I’d been taught was true.
Andy, apparently determined that if he wasn’t going to study, no one was, insisted on continuing the discussion.
“Have you met any girls here you want to hang with?” he asked.
Jack shook his head. “I’ve got too much to think about,” he said. “I don’t have time.”
It was a believable excuse, and one I used myself when Andy asked me the same question. But Andy was not to be put off so easily. “We should get some girls together and really party,” he suggested. “You know, get down with some good hash. Maybe mushrooms. You guys ever do mushrooms?”
When we answered in the negative, he promised us that we would all have to do mushrooms, and soon. “You won’t believe the stuff you see,” he assured us. “Have you read Castaneda? The Teachings of Don Juan?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s fucking powerful, man. It’s all about expanding your consciousness. That’s what we should be reading, not this bullshit.” He closed his philosophy textbook and tossed it onto the floor. “Life isn’t in there,” he said, pointing at the book, then pointing to his head. “It’s in here. You just have to let it out.”
All of a sudden he leapt off the bed and jumped on top of me. Ripping the book from my hands, he pushed it aside and rapped on my forehead with his knuckles.
“Let it out!” he said. “Come on.”
I had no idea what he wanted me to do. He was straddling me, looking down into my face and grinning. He looked like some kind of wildman, all shaggy hair and craziness. He tapped my forehead again, then leaned down and kissed it. Then he was on his feet again and changing the record, which had stopped.
It took me a minute before I realized that I had a hard-on. When I did, I was both surprised and frightened. Had Andy brought out that reaction in me? I wondered. Or was it coincidental? I hadn’t been conscious of becoming aroused, but the evidence was against me. I looked at him, taking a record from its sleeve and examining it, and the image of him and Linda, naked and rutting, flashed across my vision. Andy’s ass was moving up and down as he pumped away at Linda. I quickly willed the thought away.
On the floor, Jack was oblivious. He was attempting to roll a joint, and was failing. The pot was falling on the carpet like green snow. Andy, seeing it, sat beside Jack and started to show him how to do it properly while Led Zeppelin emerged from the stereo. I rolled onto my stomach and pressed myself into the quilt on Chaz’s bed, picking up my book and trying to focus on the words in front of my face.
In that one minute, the comfort I’d felt in Andy’s presence evaporated. Helplessly, my body had responded to his, and I felt that I had somehow betrayed Jack. Worse, I realized that I was excited. But why? I had found attraction in men besides Jack, but never had I considered what it would be like to be with them in any real way. Now, closing my eyes, I saw Andy once again, only this time he was pumping himself into me, and not Linda. Meanwhile, he sat beside the boy who had been my lover for more than four years, not two feet away from me, both of them oblivious to my infidelity.
I felt sick. My stomach began to rise, and I suddenly needed to be anywhere but in Andy’s room. Getting up, I excused myself and left, running toward the bathrooms that were situated in the middle of the hall. I made it into a stall just in time, dropping to my knees and retching. My insides emptied themselves again and again as I relieved myself of the pain knotting my guts. The stale smell of vomit filled my nose, and I threw up some more. Miserable, I flushed the toilet, slumped onto the floor, and began to cry.
It didn’t dawn on me—at least not then—that what I was feeling was the pain of outgrowing my old self, of taking those first steps away from the middle rows and toward the front of the classroom. I was cracking from the inside out, sloughing off old ways of thinking and being. The old me was dying, and the new one was trying to birth. That process, though, would take a long time. At that moment, the cool tile of the bathroom beneath my cheek, I only knew that my heart ached.
CHAPTER 12
As September became October, the cool weather of fall arrived, causing the trees to erupt in a riot of red, gold, and orange. Walking to class, my feet kicking at the fallen leaves, I felt that I, too, was experiencing a change of seasons. Ever since the night in Andy’s room when he’d playfully tackled me, I had felt uneasy around him. I shied from his touch, fearing it would arouse me again. I avoided being alone with him, and started spending more time in my own room. Jack noticed my reluctance to make nightly visits with him to Andy’s room, and asked me why I was reluctant to go.
“I just have a ton of work to do,” I told him, gesturing to the mountain of textbooks piled on my desk.
It was true that I had a lot of work, far more than I’d ever had in high school. Jack, too, had a heavy load. The difference was that he ignored his. Used to having me write his papers for him, he was unaccustomed to setting deadlines for himself. Assignments meant little to him because he had never before been controlled by their demands. But now, because we were in mostly different classes and because I had more than my own amount of work to complete, he was largely on his own. Still, he didn’t worry. My questions about term papers and upcoming test were met with, “I’ll worry about it later.” But later never seemed to come, and as we entered our sixth week at Penn, the effects of Jack’s nightly parties with Andy became apparent.
The first indication of trouble was a D on an English test. Having read virtually none of the assigned work, Jack was lucky to do even that well. He fared even more poorly on our first American history exam, receiving an F to my A-. When we compared our results, he fell into a black mood.
“Why didn’t you make me study?” he said, as if his failure were my fault.
“I asked you to,” I reminded him. “You wanted to go hang out with Andy, remember?”
“Whatever,” Jack said, crumpling his test paper up and tossing it into the trash. “History’s all lies anyway.”
“You sound like Chaz,” I said, mocking him gently in an attempt to cheer him up.
“Chaz says everything we were taught as kids was made up by the government to make us think they know what they’re doing,” said Jack. “You should hear some of the stuff he’s told me. It would blow your mind.”
“Maybe Chaz should take your next history test for you,” I commented.
“Why do you hate him and Andy so much?” Jack asked, surprising me with the question.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You hardly go up there anymore. Don’t think they haven’t noticed. They think you don’t like them.”
“I like them!” I said. “I just can’t hang around up there all the time like you do.”
“Right,” Jack said. “I forgot. You’re the smart one. I’m the idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” I said. “That’s not what I said. I was making a joke.”
“It’s what you meant,” Jack shot back. He picked up his jacket—the letterman one he’d gotten in high school—and walked to the door. “I’m going out for a while. I’ll see you later.”
He left. Shocked, I looked at the closed door for probably five or six minutes, expecting at any moment that it would open and Jack would come back in. I didn’t understand why he’d sounded so angry. A failed test had never been a big deal to him before, so I couldn’t imagine that was it. But if not that, then what? Everything had been fine until he’d brought up Andy and Chaz.
Was that it? I wondered, my chest tightening. Had he seen or sensed something that night in Andy’s room? Did he know what I’d been thinking? He’d never