One afternoon, not long after The Night of the Incident, Troy stopped me in our room. A rare moment of communication.

“My parents are coming this weekend,” he said. “They want to take us out to brunch.”

It wasn’t a question, more a delivery of an uncomfortable fact that neither of us wanted to hear, like announcing that a nearby nuclear plant just exploded.

“Oh,” I said back, and then, without thinking, “Um. Sure. I’ll be around.”

Goddammit. Why, in this moment, I didn’t think to come up with an excuse—literally any excuse—is beyond me. This is what I do. I panic. I say yes to things. I can’t say no, especially not to food. What was I supposed to do now? I considered driving my bike into traffic just for a believable pardon.

“Oh, OK. Cool,” Troy said. I could tell he was thinking the same thing. I wasn’t supposed to say yes. He was just delivering the message, one I’m sure his parents forced him to deliver. Either that, or all of his other friends were too obnoxiously fratty to bring around, and I was simply the safest option. As far as they knew, I was Troy’s only friend.

When the weekend came, we walked silently to the only brunch place in town, where his parents were waiting. They were just as serious-looking as the first time I’d met them, on move-in day nearly a year ago. Stern and intellectual. Both doctors.

The entire meal, Troy barely spoke more than a few sentences, lifting his eyes from his plate only to stick his knife in the cup of butter or to take a sip of orange juice. It felt like we’d all just gone to the same funeral.

“So, I’m gonna have to be the one who turns this meal around,” I thought. “Just like I fix everything in this relationship.”

For the rest of the meal, I spoke to Troy’s parents as if they were my own, regaling them with stories of our inseparable friendship, the nights we spent keeping one another awake, watching movies, and comforting ourselves to sleep.

What can I say? I know how to work for a free meal.

•  •  •

A month later, as the school year was coming to an end, and my time with Troy was finally almost over, I had my own moment of drunken weakness.

By then, I’d been selected as the dorm historian, a meaningless role that had only one responsibility: writing the dorm newsletter. Except the newsletter wasn’t actually a newsletter, but an Onion-like page of satire taped to the back of the dorm’s bathroom stalls. A dumb piece of potty-time entertainment that fell to me.