Harry stalks wordlessly back to the moldy grotto that is their restroom and spends twenty minutes scrubbing his face with a washcloth he finds wadded up behind the toilet bowl. He succeeds in dimming the elaborate spiral mustache that now adorns his right upper lip and a large portion of his right cheek. The cross with which Shortstack has seen fit to decorate his forehead is more stubborn. It’s possible that she got in two or three coats there.

Harry storms back out to the front room.

Loudermilk is standing alone in the kitchen area slowly consuming a Pop-Tart. He hands Harry a plastic tumbler of water emblazoned with an image of the school’s mascot, a goofy Minotaur.

“I don’t know how you do it, man,” Loudermilk is saying.

Harry really wants to discuss the matter of his own face, but Loudermilk is basking in some sort of postcoital reverie and is difficult to reach.

Loudermilk languidly lowers himself onto a food-spattered stool. He says, “They fuckin’ loved you.” He ingests the last of his postmodern strudel. “Not, of course, that they didn’t love me.” He blinks. “What? They had to go to work. You know they work there, right?” He means the bar.

“Handy.” Harry means the location. Either the tap water or the novelty cup tastes of heavy metals. Perhaps both.

“You know, that’s exactly what I was thinking? But anyways, what I’m trying to tell you is they were so into you. They were so totally into it, dude.” Loudermilk gazes guilelessly at Harry. He asks to know what happened to Harry’s face.

“Fuck you, Loudermilk,” Harry says.

Loudermilk counters with what he deems a better activity. He says that they should go check out the lay of the land, maybe take a gander at a certain awesome apartment he’s heard about, pick up their fellowship check.

This is to say, Troy Augustus Loudermilk has been accepted into the Seminars for Writing with full funding for the next two years. It is, of course, the reason they are here. Loudermilk will receive an annual stipend of twenty-five K. In the local economy this is a pretty significant chunk of change. It’s enough, even, for two people to live on, no problem. Plus, Maxim magazine, in its annual February “Campus Lyfe” feature, has rated this the nation’s most sexually adventurous Greek community with the lowest rate of STD infection. Other undergrad communities are infinitesimally more adventurous, but none is so pure. That was really the clincher. Loudermilk had underlined the article and taken notes in the margin and taped it to his bedroom wall back at SUNY Oswego. Only one other school into whose graduate poetry-writing program Troy Augustus Loudermilk was accepted even made it onto the list, the University of Texas at Austin, which had a pretty weak showing, anyway, at number 17 overall.

This is the sense in which the Seminars was a no-brainer for them.