“And this matters?” I asked, because even though his shame was palpable, this did not feel like the answer to my question. He nodded, though.

“What happened—what we did to Lexie Pine—it’s different now,” he told his hands.

I silenced myself. I listened. I let him set the scene.

In the early nineties, the Greeks whom Trey knew drank a lot and gobbled No Doz like it was PEZ during exams, but at Trey’s frat particularly drugs were seen as “hippie shit.” X was for Eurotrash, pot was for losers. Coke was the exception, because it felt so Wall Street. A real man’s drug, and many of his brothers were not averse to bumping up their weekends, privately in their rooms or bunched up in a bathroom stall. Never in the open. The norm was beer or swamp punch plus plenty of wine coolers for the ladies.

Spence was more chemically adventurous than most of his brothers, and he didn’t have a regular girlfriend. These things were probably what kept him from being the frat’s president. He dabbled in thoroughbred blondes, but he also went slumming with the patchouli-smelling girls who hung around the theatre department. The “Boho Hos,” he called them, not to be confused with the kind of uptight, bow-headed sorority girls who only did oral. Those were “Bow Hos.” Two syllables. Spence bounced back and forth between these types like the ball in Pong.

Senior year Spence was dating Lexie Pine, a scholarship freshman who lived across the campus in the older dorms. “Dating” was the nice word for it. They were not exclusive. Spence was a BMOC with a high-limit Amex, his dad’s old Jaguar, and a rep for bringing the fun to any gathering. A lot of girls ran around with him. But he kept circling back to Lexie.

She was everything he liked: discreet and sexually adventurous and very, very pretty. She was “skint,” as Spence put it, and maybe he liked that, too. She was also smart as hell and witty, and though these things were not on Spencer’s list, they were probably why he kept seeing her. He liked talking with her almost as much as he liked sleeping with her.

As for Spence, he could be an ass, but he was fun and charming. When he asked her out, she went. He was also generous, and this mattered. Lexie had a work-study job that got her up at 6:00 a.m. to wipe down tables and wash dishes in one of the food halls. Her clothes all had that musty thrift-store smell deep in the seams. She had no car, so she didn’t get to leave campus unless someone took her. Dates were the only time she didn’t eat with the prepaid meal card her work-study provided. She’d wear a cardigan with big pockets to lunch, so she could illegally tuck away fruit and cheese and cookies for later.