Bright College Years: (or, If That's Not Life)

By Andrew Pessin

Coming of age doesn't only happen to the young.

When a former close friend and rival is murdered, world-weary but still aspiring optimist Jeffrey goes back to the beginning, to those fraught college years at Yale University during the 1980s and to her, to make sense of what happened—only to discover that what needs most making sense of is himself.

By turns smart, funny, and heart-wrenching, Bright College Years tracks Jeff and an ensemble cast as they navigate the shortest, gladdest, most complex years of life—and then the rest of it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Books
• Release date: Feb 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215356234

Andrew Pessin

Andrew Pessin is Chair of Philosophy at Conneticut College. He is the author of The God Question: What Famous Thinkers from Plato to Dawkins have said about the Divine. He has also appeared on the David Letterman show several times as "The Genius".

Book preview

Cover for the title (Bright College Years)

bright college years, with pleasure rife,

the shortest, gladdest years of life;

how swiftly are ye gliding by!

oh, why doth time so quickly fly?

the seasons come, the seasons go,

the earth is green or white with snow,

but time and change shall naught avail

to break the friendships formed at Yale.

—Yale alma mater, first stanza

Title Page for ()

Published by Open Books

Copyright © 2024 by Andrew Pessin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Interior design by Siva Ram Maganti

Cover image by eflon flickr.com/photos/eflon/

licensed under CC BY 2.0 DEED

Time

Words and Music by Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons

Copyright © 1980 by Woolfsongs Ltd. and Universal Music - Careers

All Rights Administered by Universal Music - Careers

International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved

Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

For G., my D., from your J.

praise for bright college years

"Bright College Years is a wistful trip in a time machine, back to those college years so filled with fun, friendship, and heartache. Travel there with Pessin to a Yale of the early 80s, when a handful of friends thought ever-so-briefly they owned the world."

—Scott Johnston, Yale ’82,

author of Amazon bestseller, Campusland

"Although times change, key truths about the college experience remain the same. Bright College Years is witty and lighthearted in just the right measures, yet undaunted by the inevitable bleaker moments one faces during those metamorphic years—reminding us that those bleak moments are often the most transformational. Philosophical probing meets the nostalgia of memory, and you will relish the journey back to your own formative days as you immerse yourself in it."

—Lauren Williamson,

Connecticut College ’23

This delightful novel brought me right back to campus, to those simultaneously halcyon and turbulent days, with that delicious mixture of nostalgia, promise, and regret, when changing the world was as urgently pressing as whether your football team beat their football team. Fortunately ours usually beat theirs.

—Richard Landes, Harvard alum,

author of Could the Whole World Be Wrong?

This funny, moving, deeply philosophical novel captures the spirit of Yale, moving seamlessly between past and present and illuminating both. 1980s Yale comes alive as these endearing characters navigate their studies, friendships, relationships and, ultimately, their future—and our own.

—Courtney Sender, Yale ’10,

author of In Other Lifetimes All I’ve Lost Comes Back to Me

"Bravo! Bright College Years is a clever, humorous, touching, and thought-provoking story that perfectly captures the essence of college life. It beautifully portrays that period of time and how it shapes one’s future. It’s both nostalgic and timeless."

—Steven Skybell, Yale ’84,

Tevye in the Yiddish Fiddler, www.stevenskybell.com

"Andrew Pessin’s uproarious and touching novel centers around a group of semi-kindred spirits attending Yale University in the early 1980s that calls itself the ‘Meatheads’ and lives by the motto emblazoned on the door of one of its members: FASTER LOUDER HIGHER MORE. The Meatheads are a rowdy, reckless, and big-hearted group of boozers, stoners, and prospectors for love who also excel in the classroom, head up school organizations, attend Allen Ginsberg readings and Gloria Steinem lectures, debate the merits of Erich Segal’s prose, argue over world events, and the possibility of nuclear holocaust, as well as the privilege of going to Yale when their increasingly hefty tuitions might be used for a greater cause. Pessin’s story, however, is more than a Rules of Attraction redux. Pessin has imbued his novel with an air of poignancy, an ineluctability, a word the characters use throughout. Reading Bright College Years, one has the sense that the timeless and comforting rhythms of life at Yale as an undergrad, the shortest, gladdest years of life, the unlikely friendships forged, the sins committed and forgiven, are set to end, and when they do, the Meatheads are blindsided by the beautiful and heart-wrenching realization that the trajectory of their lives will never be the same."

—James Campbell, Yale ’84,

author of The Final Frontiersman and Braving It

Andrew Pessin has written the rarest of novels: a witty page-turner that’s also philosophically astute. Brimming with well-drawn characters and a spot-on evocation of New Haven and college life in the early 1980s, the book will make you laugh and think. Enjoyable and serious, this novel is a delight.

—Eric Adler, University of Maryland

"‘How bright will seem through memory’s haze, those happy golden bygone days’: Nailed it! Bright College Years is smart, funny, sweet, bittersweet, heartwarming, heartbreaking, and most of all meaningful—everything college typically is, in short, as well as the life in the ‘real world’ that then follows. A perfect mix of sentimentality, profundity, and college hijinks, with great insight as to how we all go from who we were to who we are."

—Scott Smilen, Yale ’84

"Bright College Years is about many things, really, but most of all about friendship, which is really at the heart of the college experience. You’ll feel yourself hanging out with this gang as they form the relationships that carry on, that in many ways determine our trajectories through life; you’ll feel a part of their bonding experiences, the fun and the challenges and the heartbreak that make us who we are, the individuals we become through our connections with other people. ‘If that’s not life,’ as the subtitle has it, indeed."

—Jeffrey Oppenheim, Princeton Alum

A vision of what higher education could be, once was, perhaps could be again, a mix between the classroom and real relationships, with raw honesty, in the pursuit of ‘full frontal truth’—and a lot of fun at the same time. You’ll enjoy this book.

—William Jacobson, Cornell University

Hilarious, moving, richly-written, thought-provoking and replete with wisdom seeping through the narrative, it felt almost like Pessin had had my own college experience, as what he described was fantastically familiar. The novel captures what it’s like to look back on one’s college years from a more mature perspective, to remove the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and remember it as it was—and somehow reconcile who we’ve become with who we once were. A must read.

—Adam Kligfeld, Columbia ’95

CONTENTS

preamble

part 1: freshman year

part 2: sophomore year

part 3: junior year

part 4: senior year (fall)

part 5: senior year (spring)

preamble

After Jude’s murder, after the federal agents had finished clearing out The Advance, after the shock of the violence had begun to dissipate, your mind wandered back to the early days, to the beginning, trying to make sense of it all. Sorting through the decades, the morass of memories, going back to the source, to the Maggie affair and the rest, going over everything. He was fascinated by Anne Sexton but what was that worm poem about? He was maybe a little intense but, what, crazy? We live life forward but can only understand it backwards, they say, yet you also don’t want to project something onto the past that wasn’t really there. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, after all, except when it isn’t. Something Swill might have said, puffing on one. Not a bad guy, but what a repulsive habit.

And so you endeavor to find a clue, to follow the trail, like taking a stroll through a wood and coming across a solitary butterfly, watching it flit randomly to and fro and realizing that the back and forth is actually going somewhere. So you follow and it flits and it leads you deeper into the wood. You are in unfamiliar territory now but you feel you are supposed to be here, so you carry on. One more turn, one more bend, and then perhaps you come into the clearing …

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The dart came from behind him, whizzed right by his left ear.

Startled, he turned, looked. The place was dark, crowded, loud. No possibility of identifying its source, even as another dart now whizzed by his right ear.

What the f— he muttered, ducking, pushing off Black as he moved down the row. Black gave him the finger as he pushed through the crowded row, stumbling. His heart pounding he made it to the aisle, turned around again, looked.

The hall was packed. Nobody clearly aiming for him, at him.

Yet somebody clearly was.

Maybe it wasn’t meant for him. It was so crowded, it could have been meant for someone else. He was feeling paranoid, that’s it, all this talk of assassination.

Right. He felt his own weapon, in the holster he had bought, as another dart whizzed over his shoulder. He felt it, just maybe, touching his hair as it went by. Maybe he should get a haircut, present a smaller target. Think about that later, he thought, instinctively ducking, turning on his heel, crouching as he headed down the aisle toward the stage with the massive organ. For a moment he thought the organ looked like an enormous tree with all its branches pointed straight upward, its many arms raised, praising the heavens maybe.

He would not meet his end tonight.

He got to the bottom, to the front row. The English Beat had finished their short set, Jeff had had to admit to Black that they were not terrible, and now The Pretenders were on, opening with their hit song, Precious. Chrissie Hynde was just now singing the lyric the gang had argued about over dinner, in which (Jeff was sure) she was going to use her, her, her vagination, and hearing a hot woman in her tight black tights singing about using her vagination was possibly the hottest thing he had ever heard.

But he would have to get aroused about that later.

He first had to preserve his life now.

He slinked along the front row, to the side. Another quick look around and at first all he saw was everybody singing along and dancing.

Then he saw his assassin.

Striding down the aisle toward him, calmly, confidently. Sure of his mission, not a care in the world. Openly bearing his weapon, reloading casually, his burning eyes, his killer’s eyes, locked on Jeff through those little round glasses.

Was that a gentle cruel smile on his murderous face?

His heart in his throat Jeff turned, started running.

He got to the end of the row, saw the door to the side of the stage. So different from a regular concert, no security here, no bouncers, like those beefy guys who’d almost thrown him out of Toad’s Place the other night just because of the little puking incident in the bathroom there. He had made it to the bathroom at least, for crying out loud. Jeff was proud he’d matched Eli to the fifth Alabama Slammer, appreciated that Eli even helped hold his hair back as he vomited in the stall just as Steppenwolf was launching into Born to be Wild upstairs. True, would have been nice if he’d managed to vomit into the toilet rather than next to it, but you can’t have everything. How Eli held all that liquor, skinny as he was, was a marvel. Many generations of whisky drinkers for his forebears, he said. Also marvelous was his ability, with just a few words to the beefy bouncers, to let them stay in the club.

Jeff went through the door, closed it behind him, noting with dismay that he couldn’t lock it. It was dark back here, a narrow corridor with some closed doors off it. Storage rooms maybe, offices, running through, feeling his way through, trying all the door handles, all locked. He could hear the music from the stage but surprisingly muted, good soundproofing here.

No one would hear him scream.

He heard the door at the end of the hall behind him open.

He’d paid ten bucks for this concert. The two tickets. He would not die here tonight.

Not during the opening song at any rate.

He could hear the footsteps approaching him, that steady, confident, homicidal pace, as he started running along the corridor, which seemed to stretch around behind the stage. He was behind the organ now, he could see the massive pipes stretching up to the ceiling. A funny contrast, the President, Bart as they affectionally called him, had spoken to the entire new freshman class in this hall just a few weeks before, the convocation including a brief organ concert where these pipes had belted out some Baroque masterpiece. He’d sat then with Ren who was a fan of interminably long 19th century novels and could tell you everything you really didn’t want to know about Victor Hugo, including about the silent film version of Hunchback of Notre Dame that was shown in this hall too along with a live organ score. Ren who had declined to come tonight because he was already underway writing his own interminably long novel which he said was going to be about everything, hence the length. That sunny convocation afternoon seemed long ago, as it was now dark and late and oh so hot Chrissie Hynde was singing about her vagination on the other side of the organ, and his assassin was approaching.

Oh Jeff-Jeff, the murderer was sing-songing. "Where are you? …"

Jeff picked up his step, continued around the semi-circle corridor, trying to unsnap his damn holster as he ran. He’d gotten one that had a strap because he’d seen too many stupid old Western films where the cowboys dramatically unsnapped their weapons and he thought it looked cooler. He was obviously thinking of himself more as an assassinator than an assassinee, hadn’t thought that he might need to withdraw his weapon quickly in self-defense. And whoever designed this strap, it actually required two hands to unlatch it, which he tried to do as he stumbled along the dark corridor toward the lighted opening at the end.

Oh Jeff-Jeff, his murderer cooed immediately behind him. I have something for you …

Was that the click of the weapon cocking?

Jeff jumped through the opening, finally releasing his weapon, gripping it, glad he’d loaded it at least before holstering it. As he came through he tripped on something, some wiring on the floor, and stumbled onto the stage. The music was so loud, the lights were so bright, he felt blinded, the stumble felt almost slow motion, cartoonish, like that scene in Modern Times where Charlie Chaplin teeters and totters on roller skates along the edge of the second-floor overhang, but finally the stumble ended and Jeff hit the ground, the floor of the stage. He found himself on his back, looking up, almost directly up, into the vagination of oh so hot Chrissie Hynde who as the consummate professional kept on singing as members of the stage crew—pretty beefy themselves—crept out to deal with the intrusion. His weapon, where was it, he had dropped it during the stumble. Frantically he reached around, was just feeling it when he managed to pull his eyes off Chrissie Hynde’s private area and looked up, directly, into the murderous eyes of his murderer.

Oh Jeff-Jeff, his murderer cooed, pointing the weapon at him, smiling that cruel smile of the slayer upon the about to be slain.

Jeff saw the finger pull, heard the click, could swear he heard the whiz of the dart as it fired through the air and landed directly on his heart.

You dead, Jude whistled as the beefy crewman tackled him.

part 1

freshman year

====

fall

1.

faster louder higher more

Those first weeks September what a memory, at the time it seemed forever but in retrospect it all went by so fast. As you look back now you almost don’t recognize yourself, can barely pick yourself out of that crowd. You were a poor planner, saw dozens of classes during shopping period not one of which you ended up taking. You made loads of mistakes in your desperate attempt to make friends, woo women (still girls), and distance yourself from whoever you had fossilized into by the end of high school. Your first credit card was for the Yale Co-Op and you somehow spent $200 your first time in the store, mostly on items with the word Yale on it. Were you possibly unaware that you, ultimately you, were going to pay that bill? Everything dumb you did at least once, except trying to pick up Dean Large’s wife—that one you tried twice.

What? Jeffrey said to Debra, his de facto psychologist, many years later. She was way younger than the Dean. I thought she was like a senior.

But twice?

I didn’t believe her the first time.

No, you don’t really recognize yourself when you look back. In fact, literally: you recently pulled out your old Freshman Facebook to show to Debra and, flipping through it, saw all those dated high school yearbook photos and then, for those who had failed to meet the summer deadline, including you, that generic George Orwell photo with the dapper mustache. Fitting, for the Class of 1984, that the substitute photo would be of the man who wrote that book. Fitting, too, as you flipped through the Facebook, that pretty much every member of the gang except for Beamie was represented by Orwell.

You had a nice look at high school Beamie, beaming that smile, that loser.

Orwell was actually everywhere, in every speech including President Bart’s at convocation, on posters tacked all over campus announcing meetings, events, parties, clubs, and of course the showing you attended of the 1956 film adaptation of 1984, and on class swag. There was even a class t-shirt with Orwell’s face on it distributed at freshman orientation on the Old Campus quadrangle, you with your sieve of a memory were somehow the only one of the gang who remembered it and it was sweet vindication when, after everyone doubted you at the 20th and 25th reunions, you finally dug yours out of a box in the garage and showed up with it for the 30th.

Jude—in what turned out to be the second to last time you would see him—was not impressed. I still deny it, he said in that authoritative tone of his that could have you doubting your own lying eyes.

It was hardly surprising, then, that there were plenty of Orwells that first Halloween night mingling among the ghosts, witches, and monsters all crawling along dark moonless Grove Street as they approached the ancient cemetery entrance. People took costumes seriously here, with makeup and engineering. There was a two-headed creature whose heads were so indistinguishable in their lifelike movements that it was hard to tell which was the true head. A vampire whose fangs squirted what might have been actual blood; a werewolf more lupine than homo sapiens; and a witch somehow perched above a moving platform as if flying her broom. All right the motor could be a little quieter but the kid was only a sophomore.

I’ve heard that the witch’s broom was actually used for masturbating, Beamie noted.

So nicknamed because of his beaming (if loserly) smile, the lovable loser, as he liked to think of himself, was second-guessing having come along. He didn’t like taking time from studying but at least had made it clear he would depart after the cemetery run, despite their pointing out that his chances of getting laid were much higher at any one of tonight’s parties than it was studying applied math in the library stacks.

There’s any number of things wrong with that statement, Swill answered, thinking of Beamie more as loser and less as lovable. He was costumed, as he explained, as Churchill, Freud, and both Marx’s (Karl and Groucho) simultaneously, meaning that he was just puffing on a fat cigar.

Like what?

Like first of all, there are no actual witches. So there are no witches’ brooms. Second, if you’re talking about the women accused of being witches—

How the fuck? Tayvon interrupted, whose chances of not getting laid tonight were comparable to Beamie’s chances of getting laid. This was especially impressive given that he was dressed as President Carter less than a week before the man’s humiliating electoral defeat. He was referring to the humanoid figure walking on its hands toward them, its legs swaying wildly in the air, with glowing red eyes in its upside-down head just above the ground, and emitting low growling noises.

That is impressive, Croc said in his gentle giant tone. Giant indeed: by width, bulk, and weight the largest player on the football team, his teammates liked to rate the size of people’s asses on a scale of one-to-Croc. (That’s a good one, Ren had said on first hearing this, recording it in his notebook for use in his novel.) Gentle, too, since aside from voraciously crushing opposing quarterbacks Croc wouldn’t hurt a fly. In fact while most of his teammates were prone to aggression after drinking, three or four beers in Croc would more likely find him reciting some poetry and maybe weeping.

Almost as good as that guy, man, Eli said, wearing a butler uniform, having borrowed it from his. He was pointing across the street where someone was somehow dressed up as South African Apartheid.

You can’t really compare them, Swill said, in his usual contrary mood tonight.

Why not? Eli asked.

Visual versus conceptual. Like apples and oranges.

Maybe, but quality transcends category. And apples and oranges are both fruit.

Yeah, but—

Enough jabber, Tayvon interrupted again, arriving at the cemetery entrance. Anyone know where the hell Walter Camp is in there?

The stone temple gate rose before them with THE DEAD SHALL BE RAISED chiseled above their heads, a slightly odd thing for a cemetery manager to inscribe, when you think about it, because that would put him out of a job.

"I said, enough jabber, Tayvon repeated more urgently when the debate about the inscription began. Let’s head in. See if we can find Ig."

Ignacio had said he would meet them there, once he heard there would be tequila.

The tomb of Walter Camp had been settled on after a healthy argument at Commons dinner. Once it was realized that Abraham Pierson—namesake of their own residential college, Pierson—was not buried at Grove, there were surprisingly strong feelings on behalf of both Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight that could not be reconciled. Zar, good for maybe 7-10 words per meal, used them to advocate for Josiah Willard Gibbs but received no support and in protest declined to come. The girls—women—expressed no interest whatever in getting drunk in the graveyard, except for Maggie who was game for anything. Croc’s timing was good. By the time he suggested football pioneer Walter Camp everyone was sick of the whole debate and happy to resolve it.

Maggie was indeed game for anything.

It doesn’t matter what we do, she would say, as long as we do it together.

Maggie was also responsible for what had already become the gang’s slogan—Everybody in, nobody out—as well as therefore the ensuing debates about whether that should apply even to losers like Beamie.

Especially to Beamie, Maggie insisted, "because he’s our loser."

Just a few weeks into their first year and she was already charmingly possessive about the people who had been randomly assigned to the nearby suites in Lawrance Hall, the freshman dorm for Pierson College. No surprise then that people were drawn to her like butterflies to nectar, earthworms to soil, or leprechauns to rainbows according to the preferred metaphors of Jeff, Jude, and Black respectively. Along the way she had collected countless friends from her prestigious boarding school in Maine, from back home in Woods Hole, from her many soccer teammates from teams stretching back to elementary school. She was also the most beautiful creature who ever had walked the earth, at least according to Jeff, who in endless soliloquys to Black in their shared bedroom supported the claim with detailed analyses of her long black hair, her shining dark eyes with perfect eyelashes, and certain remarks about her tall, lithe, soccer-fit body that are better left in the dorm.

Black did his best to drown these out by covering his ears and humming the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love, only occasionally chiming in to remind Jeff, You don’t have a chance, El Jefe. That Magdalena is a treasure. You’re not worthy to carry her trash to the bin, man.

What’s the job below carrying trash? I’ll do that.

Oh, man, you gotta have some dignity. You got a better chance with her if you have some self-respect.

Yeah? Like how?

Black contemplated a moment. I take it back, man. That shit has sailed.

You mean the Lisa episode. Jeff’s transparent attempt to get to Maggie via studying together with her roommate Lisa—they were both in a Russian history freshman seminar, Lisa because she would go on to become a journalist covering matters Soviet and Russian and Jeff because he was late in selecting his courses and this was the only thing still open—had ended in humiliation when Lisa arched her nasty left eyebrow in dismissive scorn and said, This is a transparent attempt to get to Maggie via me.

Forgot about that! Black snorted. Good times. No, man, I meant the loverboy serenade.

Jeff cringed. He was a modestly accomplished guitarist and pianist who in addition to playing Grateful Dead and Neil Young songs had begun writing his own. The first week of the semester, in a deeply choreographed maneuver, he’d casually strolled over to Maggie’s room playing his guitar, waving his long hair, all prepared with his Oh I was just walking by and thought I’d say hi speech, only for her door to be opened by the captain of the men’s lacrosse team who just laughed in his face, as Black did when Jeff reported the story immediately afterward.

Black was still laughing. "Man, that one is gold. But don’t give up, man. You have the name El Jefe to live up to."

Thanks for the vote of confidence, man, Jeff said, looking for his lighter to fire up a doob. That means a lot to me.

Oh, I got no confidence, man. You’re not even worthy to bring the trash to the guy who takes it to the bin. But it’s so damn entertaining to watch you try.

If only Jeff had known at the time that Maggie wasn’t in her room when he knocked, and that the lacrosse team captain was actually there hitting on Lisa, who decided in that moment that his laughter at Jeff’s sweet gesture was really boorish, and whose telling of the incident to Maggie afterward put Jeff on Maggie’s radar in a new way. Fun-loving Maggie’s radar, who may have been game for the graveyard, but unfortunately none of the other girls in her suite—women—were as adventurous as she.

There was Lisa, already writing a weekly opinion column for the Yale Daily News in which she cast aspersions on her generation’s lifestyle choices, who referred to herself as Maggie’s conscience as she cast aspersions on Maggie’s lifestyle choices, and who just couldn’t see the appeal of getting drunk in the graveyard with those little boys. There was Jasmine who was obsessed with her cello and with Black, Black who for reasons unknown (for she was a great beauty) resisted her advances, and who was performing in the orchestra’s Halloween Concert—Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre—which precluded getting smashed beforehand. And there was quiet Isabela, who always had her Nikon taking photos but who rarely spoke, who hung out with them but always seemed uncomfortable. She would meet them all at the Pierson Inferno later but the graveyard idea was just too icky for her taste.

Maggie was game, but did she really want to be the only girl among those little boys?

Happily, her totally cool English literature professor came up with an alternative that afternoon, when he invited the entire class to his house for an early evening Halloween party. A young, newly minted Ph.D., tall, almost gaunt, with long hippie hair, Dr. Taslitz Fester, or Doc, as he insisted his little freshbirds call him, had a Ken Kesey vibe as he led them through subversive readings of the great texts of Western literature—not that they, as little freshbirds, could appreciate those readings as such.

I’m actually a professor of theory, not literature, and certainly not ‘English,’ he had told them on the first day, speaking quickly. God, no!

But what exactly is ‘theory,’ Doc? asked that annoying girl who would go on to talk incessantly in class and never really say anything.

Only everything, Doc answered, illuminating nothing.

The subversive readings were part of his mission of subverting Western civilization itself, he explained over the first weeks of classes; an urgent task, as its internal contradictions were rotting it from the inside out. Indeed, signs of its demise were evident right at Yale, where efforts to end the major in Western Civilization were nearly ready to bear fruit. He peered at them through his yellow-tinted glasses, you know he was handsome, in a subversive way. He could see they had understood not a word, how could they, they were so young, so naïve.

At any rate, my little freshbirds, he continued with a smile, here is something more digestible for you. As you are aware, there is talk of raising the state’s legal age for alcohol consumption to nineteen next year. The dying establishment is fighting back by coming for your freedoms and so, in a small act of resistance, I invite you all to my house tonight. Bring comrades as you wish. Costumes—clothes, for that matter—optional. My plan, he pushed his glasses back up his nose, is to show you how it’s done.

Give it a rest, El Jefe, I’m telling you man, Black said in their room, putting the finishing touches on his Little Richard hairdo. You got no chance.

I don’t know, Jeff said, admiring his own multicolored clown wig in the mirror, I think I have a chance.

You don’t think she thinks you’re stalking her?

Jeff had been attending Maggie’s home soccer games, cheering her on—well not just her, he didn’t want it to be too obvious so he cheered all the girls on, but especially her.

It’s not impossible, he answered, as Maggie had said with some alarm, What are you doing here? a couple of times, but had apparently been satisfied with his I’ve always loved women’s soccer response. But it’s part of the plan. I’m getting her used to seeing me around.

What he didn’t mention was that the plan seemed to be making progress. Maggie had stuck around after the last game to talk to him and they had talked for a while, long enough for that gorgeous sweat to stop glistening on her skin, long enough where they got beyond the phase where Jeff just made a lot of jokes, really talked actually. She had issues, it turned out, some family issues, some extended family issues, and that only made her that much more desirable.

I adore you, Jeff said to her in his mind as she spoke, watching her untie her ponytail and letting her long black hair drop.

It was a little like being interviewed, Maggie told Lisa, whose eyebrow was deeply skeptical. Maggie was now brushing that long black hair with the antique brush her grandmother had bequeathed her. But then I started to realize how good the questions were. Like, insightful. And the more he listened to my answers, the more I wanted to tell him. I felt like he was unraveling me.

Oooh, the Unraveller, Lisa echoed.

Make fun if you want.

Oh I will.

But Black knew not of Jeff’s unravelling, and persisted. I just don’t see it, man. It’s a mismatch.

How so?

She’s a treasure, that one.

What, I’m not? Jeff said, gesturing at himself.

Don’t you see yourself, man? You’re a clown.

What? It’s a cool wig.

I don’t mean the wig, man.

Fuck you, man. She actually invited me to the party.

She invited everyone. Everyone in, nobody out.

Okay, maybe everyone. But she didn’t object when I was the only one who said sure.

Maybe she was just being nice.

Of course she was being nice. She’s like the nicest person in the world. But why not me? Seriously?

Seriously? How about those oversized shades you’re wearing, that flannel shirt, Mr. Lumberjack, those cords you probably pulled out of the local dump, man? And that’s leaving out the wig.

Jeff sighed. I’m dressed for warmth. Practical.

"Shit, man. That is the problem."

I think she likes me. She laughs at my jokes.

Just feeling sorry for you, man. I mean, seriously, the kid who was the first one killed during the campus Assassin game? Out of like 600 players? That takes skill.

My luck to draw Jude from the start. He did eventually win the thing, you know.

Yeah, man. That dude is cutthroat. Those eyes.

What about his eyes? Jeff adjusted the wig again, pulled it down lower so that it met his shades.

The whole boring into your soul thing, man. But still, about Assassin. You—

I know, I know, Jeff interrupted. Black had been mocking