Most nights, after I resigned myself to returning to McGarry Hall, I spent an hour or so in the lounge off the lobby, where I could read and thus prolong my return to the second floor. I was halfway through the door of the lounge one night when I saw Margolis. He was sitting in a battered armchair, rubbing a nail file against the calluses of his palms. He glanced up through his horn-rimmed glasses, then looked back at his hands. Clearly, he wasn’t there to see me. Part of my brain was relieved by this; the other part sent out signals that carried me to the love-seat crate next to where he sat with his legs splayed. One of my knees was trembling. I immediately pulled a book from my backpack and opened it and tried to slump into a casual pose. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his head shift slightly. I heard the nail file stop sanding his skin. He said, “You’re that guy.”

I blinked. “What guy?”

“That freak who’s been following me.”

I felt my stomach turn to liquid and forced my eyes down to my book. “Whoever you’re talking about, it’s not me.”

“Yeah, it is. I have your friggin’ face memorized. I was going to call campus police, but a friend of mine said it wasn’t worth it.”

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t look up.

“What’s that all about?” he demanded.

Your sneaker, I wanted to say. You tapped your sneaker on the men’s-room floor. Even as I realized the sentence might get me killed, its potential inaccuracy nearly made me laugh out loud. All my efforts had been the result of an anonymous shoe tapping on a men’s-room floor. For all I knew, that had been the one flickering moment in his life when he’d considered having sex with another guy, and the moment had passed. For all I knew, he was having a muscle spasm in his leg that day, or was looking for someone gay to beat up.

He said only three more words to me, and he said them carefully, like a schoolteacher at his wit’s end: “Knock it off.”

Then the friend he’d been waiting for emerged from the elevator, and he shoved up from the chair and left the lounge. On his way out, he turned around and walked back a few steps, staring me down and pointing two fingers at the end of his outstretched arm. I know it was meant as a demarcation, but it looked as if he were bestowing a curse.

Saturday evening’s party—the one Frankie had promised would be a blowout—was just that, and a bad one. But Sunday afternoon was worse.