They did, in a cold letter no more than three sentences long. The following August, I moved to the panhandle.

McGarry Hall was the dorm where Frankie had lived his first two semesters, and the one he’d told me to request. I’d been lucky enough to get a room on his floor, but I found out from the R.A. that he’d moved out just before I arrived.

When I got back to the dorm that first evening, my phone was ringing. A synthesizer wailed through the receiver. “Hello?”

“You made it!” Frankie said over the music. “Great!”

So far, nothing had been great. I’d spent the entire afternoon in the Civic Center just off campus trying to sew together a schedule, standing in one registration line after another, only to find out most of the classes I wanted were filled. On top of that, McGarry Hall was a huge, filthy city of a dorm. It was made of aluminum and mud-colored brick, was ten stories tall, and was home to over eight hundred students. In its center was a narrow, hermetically sealed airshaft they called a courtyard, the top covered with a fiberglass dome the color of an eggshell—the only source of sunlight for the inner rooms. No one had access to the courtyard other than from the windows, out of which had been dumped (over years, I guessed) garbage, books, mattresses, and broken furniture. My window, on the second floor, was half-submerged in refuse.

“Where are you?” I asked.

He explained that a great opportunity had come up, a friend’s roommate had split town at the last second, and Frankie had filled the slot. He was living in an apartment now across Tennessee Street. I asked him where that was. “You’re kidding. I’m ten feet away from you! McGarry’s on Tennessee, and I’m right down the road on the other side. You can almost see me from your window.”

“There’s garbage outside my window. This place is a dump. Why didn’t you tell me you were moving out?”

“I didn’t know till yesterday. Don’t be such a sorehead.”

I apologized. I asked him when we were going to see each other.

“Oh my god,” he said, “tonight!”

But I never saw him that night. He had to find out where a particular party was going to be held and said he would call me back with the location, and then he called hours later only to say the party was a bust because the host’s ex had shown up with the ex of the host’s current, and it was too much for the host to deal with.

“Cool,” I said, faking comprehension, hoping he wouldn’t pick up on the disappointment in my voice.