Standing upright a few moments later, I said, “I’m great.” He was looking at me, one eye squinted against a tributary of soap. “Swimmer’s cramp,” I said.

When we came out of the shower, there were several men in the locker room: morning regulars, it seemed, silently changing into bathing suits or gym shorts. One of them took off all his clothes and stood holding his swim trunks and fiddling with the drawstring. He had the longest penis I had ever seen. Its presence was almost threatening. I don’t know how long I’d been staring at it when I glanced over at Frankie, who was watching me as he tied his shoes.

“It can get pretty cruisy in there,” he observed as we were leaving the building.

I told him I had five minutes to get to my eight o’clock class.

We were hardly turning out to be the brother/brother team I’d envisioned. Our paths rarely crossed unless we arranged it in advance. We never spent an entire day together. We never hung out in my dorm room or in his apartment (I had the address but, a month into the semester, I had yet to be invited). Basically, he worked me into his schedule. He had his classes, his friends, his dates, and the people he had to “see”—a category that smacked of something lurid. It wasn’t hard to figure out that it had to do with Chip, and with what Frankie was dispensing at a regular series of parties held around the perimeter of campus. I showed up at a number of them, and he was like a turnstile half the party passed through on its way to fun.

I didn’t press him about what he was really up to. Instead, I went on supposition: it was speed coming out of his pocket, or quaaludes, or little plastic envelopes of cocaine. But the drugs were just part of my concern. I’d seen him leave—arm in arm, on different nights—with at least ten different guys, sometimes two at once. How did he do it? How often was he splayed out unconscious on a living room floor, surrounded by drugs and sex paraphernalia and strangers who used both? And beyond that, I wondered, when did he study?

Meanwhile, I lugged my books all over campus. I took the same carrel in the library most afternoons and gave myself a headache looking down at the page and up every time someone walked by. I read all of Aspects of the Novel in the third-floor men’s room of the annex. I lingered around the circus tent for weeks. One day, as I sat on the ground at the foot of a tree, reading and waiting for the guy from the library to show up at the tent, I spotted him through the open flap.