That night, after my circus of a family left and Troy’s parents silently slipped away, we went to the dining hall with a handful of our other dorm mates and I started piecing together Troy’s persona. He’d wanted to go to another school, he told the group, but got stuck with this one. He wanted to live in another dorm, but they stuck him with this, too. With each new answer, it became increasingly clear that he was trying aggressively hard to seem cool. I was waiting for him to point at me and say, “I asked for a straight albino Jamaican, but they stuck me with you.” But that never came.

After dinner, we wandered as a group around campus, hoping perhaps to stumble upon some party. Troy became our group’s de facto leader, and we followed him aimlessly, before realizing he had no idea where he was going. Eventually, we all wandered back to the dorm.

That night, after we’d each gotten in bed, he asked me if I was rushing a fraternity. The only thing I knew about fraternities was what I saw in movies: innocent freshmen standing naked in kiddie pools full of Jell-O, humiliating themselves because a bunch of old dudes did the same thing before them, all to live in a grimy old house with fifty other disgusting guys whose rooms smelled consistently like burnt ramen and soggy cereal. Besides, I’d never heard the term “rushing” before, except in the literal sense. I pictured an army of small-muscled freshmen running at an old frat house with lances and spears, like in Lord of the Rings.

“No?” I guessed out loud. “I mean, I thought about rushing, obviously. But I don’t think it’s for me. Are you?”

I could hear him sigh, presumably because he’d gotten his final confirmation that we just weren’t going to work out. I don’t even think he answered.

•  •  •

In the days that followed, Troy and I gave up all pretenses that we were anything beyond two random people who happened to share the same two hundred square feet of bedroom. He made his friends, and I made mine. But we’d still occasionally find ourselves at the same dining hall table, and I’d gradually piece together the real Troy. Troy clearly aspired to the stereotypical college boy cliché: party at night, nab some drunk freshman and convince her to give him a depressing hand job in a shower stall, stumble back to the beer-pong table, give a bunch of his dude friends high fives, and eventually pass out in the bushes somewhere behind fraternity row. That was the image he projected at least. But I knew the real Troy, which made his phony frat-boy image all the more insufferable.