When he left, they didn’t notice. He went back to his room and passed out naked in his own bed.

In the morning he woke up grainy-eyed but less hungover than he would have thought. The whole night felt unreal. He lay in bed, wishing it were the next day or the next week. He wanted distance.

He thought, This will fade. In a few months, I’ll graduate, and then I’ll go to law school. This will become my wildest college memory. Embarrassing. Weird. Definitely drug-fueled. But an experience. And maybe, he thought for the first time, this is the sort of thing that happens to people who are close with Spencer Shaw. Maybe I ought not be that close.

He went downstairs to the kitchen. Spence was already there, drinking coffee with a couple of their brothers, all of them hungover. Trey hesitated in the doorway. He was relieved that Lexie wasn’t there. She must already have gone home. Even so, it was difficult to meet Spencer’s eyes.

Spence grinned right at him, unabashed, saying, “It lives! Me, I feel pretty good, except I think a cat snuck in and shit in my mouth while I was sleeping. Want to go to Waffle House with us?” Like everything was normal.

No jokes, no references. Like it hadn’t happened, which was what Trey wished. Perhaps Spence knew Trey well enough to understand he had regrets. Or perhaps it was only his regular discretion around all things Lexie.

They all went to Waffle House to sop their hangovers in grease. It was so normal. It reassured him, made his discomfort fade.

That should have been the end of it. A pebble dropped in a lake, disappearing at once, with ripples too small to rock anybody’s boat. And so it might have been. Except for the pictures.

There had been rain that night, but not a storm. No lightning. The flashes had been Ansel’s Nikon camera. Trey didn’t remember Ansel coming into the room, but then again he also didn’t remember shutting the door behind himself. Ansel had gotten really busy in his darkroom, too. There were a lot of copies getting passed around. They were everywhere.

The campus stayed the same for Trey and Spence, but it changed almost instantly for Lexie. Her job especially became hell. Young men came to her as if she were made of magnets. They looked at her with avid eyes, as if they could see right through her clothes. Every one of them knew exactly what was under there, after all. They told her so. They made suggestions and asked questions. When she bent to wipe a table, they would dash to stand behind her and mime pumping. The boldest and the meanest came in twos and threes to surround her, hem her in, put their hands on her. When she slapped the hands away, they’d laugh and offer train rides.