“I don’t have much stuff, just what’s in my dorm room,” Ronny said. “I only need to make one trip.”

“You’re going to take the room here, then?”

“He already paid the rent,” Mrs. Delacy said, patting her pocket as she walked with those tiny steps out the door. “I’m not giving it back to him either. This is going right to the bank.”

Ehringhaus

THROUGH THE CAMPUS UNDER THE GREEN canopy of poplars and oaks he walked, along the brick sidewalks past the bell tower, the football stadium, through the pine grove that led to the dorm. Barefoot, carrying his shoes in his hand, the brick path cool to the soles of his feet. Evening took shape, streetlights turning on one by one, lights in the windows in the dorms along the way, drifts of music, voices on the baseball field beside the last stretch of the path, not a game but a practice, though the stadium lights were burning up high on their poles.

The sight of it up the rise of green—Ehringhaus, a dormitory named for a former North Carolina governor—there had always been something about this walk that reminded him of his luck in coming here. He was in college, on his own, it belonged to him, he had a place he could call home that he could control, and this gave him a coming-home feeling, a sense that this was right. Fragments of thoughts led, if he allowed, backward to the years of high school, tumultuous in so many ways, the desegregation of public schools where he had lived, the sudden coming together of white people and black people, their confronting of one another, the denial he had felt in himself and in his family at the onset of integration. This had touched the streak of difference he felt in himself, the fact that he had no interest in girls when he was supposed to be obsessed with them; what this told him about his nature he had only understood once he was here. In high school he had held himself in check out of caution, but now he had begun to break open, to allow the world to carry him on its wave. This was the subtext of much of his life, the upheaval he could feel in these days of the middle 1970s, the breaking of old patterns, the sudden freedom to act in different ways from the past, so that his mother for instance, far from being trapped in a marriage to his father, could divorce him and marry again. He could follow her example in his own way.

In the dorm, he went by Ben’s room to tell him about the boardinghouse, about Mom and her marriage, about Ronny moving out of the dorm. Ben’s room was on the floor below Ronny’s in a suite at the end of the wing. There was never any telling how Ben would behave or what mood he would be in, indifferent, friendly, surly, drunk; especially true after they had quarreled the night before. The door to his room stood open and music spilled out. His bed and desk were empty. On the second of the narrow iron beds in the room lay Tate, wearing nothing but gym shorts, one of his girlfriends draped over him, her hair spread across his skin. Ronny was careful not to look at Tate too long. He was supposed to have broken a beer bottle in a bar and swallowed glass about a month ago. “Hey, Brainhead,” he called. “What the fuck do you want?”