Purely by eavesdropping—in the student union, in the cafeteria, in McGarry’s smoky, war-torn lounge area—I learned that in an ideal schedule, your classes were lined up one right after another and dominoed over two days. The classes I’d ended up with were spread out all over campus five days a week, separated by huge chunks of time. I could have walked back to the dorm during these idle hours, but I had quickly begun to hate it there. In the first week of the semester, the guys on my floor (all of whom seemed to know one another already) had poured rubber cement down the shower drains, turned the hall into an all-night bowling alley using a baseball and empty wine cooler bottles, and torn up the carpet in front of the elevator in order to have a Tide slide. After the R.A. lectured them, they painted his door with rubbing alcohol and set it on fire. This last stunt had all eight hundred of us standing outside at three A.M. while firemen wandered the building. The R.A. was furious, but no one would admit to the arson. The following day, someone carved COCKSUCKER into the door’s blackened varnish.

I began hanging out in the Strozier Library. It was a good place to study because people had to behave, and for someone who suddenly felt stripped of all privacy, Strozier was an excellent place to masturbate. All over the building, tucked into the elbows of the stairwells, were men’s rooms: narrow, institutional green boxes divided by granite slabs, antiseptic and silent. Having left home to come to this strange new place where I felt overwhelmed, the library immediately became a vital part of my survival: a quiet cubicle, a door with a latch, and a few solitary moments to jerk off.

Tap your foot for head someone had scribbled with a ballpoint pen over the door latch. The words were written in every stall of the third-floor men’s room in the annex, and they sounded like a line nixed from the Hokey Pokey, but I knew what they meant. Only I wasn’t looking for anonymous sex. I wasn’t looking for sex at all. I wanted to do my business alone and get back to my carrel. But at the beginning of the second week of classes, someone came through the door just after I’d gotten started. There were four stalls. I was in the last one. Soft footsteps crossed the tile and hesitated. Then a body settled into the stall next to mine.

He could hear my heart pounding, I was sure. I eased my head away from the granite wall that separated us, and then brought it down just enough to see his left shoe. It was a red canvas sneaker with three white stripes running down the side.

He tapped once against the floor.

I tapped once back.