“She does.”

“What about you?” Ben asked. “Are you up and down?”

“You think I am?”

He shrugged. He had brought a can of beer and sipped it, then handed it back to Ronny. It was still football season and he wasn’t supposed to drink, so he kept an eye on the cars. So it was Ronny’s beer, officially. Every time they passed it back and forth their fingers touched. Ben said, “Doesn’t really matter to me. You got my back, I got yours.”

It was a strange statement, not quite like anything else he had ever said. Ronny let the words hang, gathered them one by one. Ben handed him the beer again, the brief contact of hands, and they were watching each other this time. “What’s Thanksgiving like at your house?” Ronny asked.

“Same as anybody, I guess. Mom cooks, my sister comes home, we watch football, me and my dad.”

“You have a big family?”

“No. My mom and her folks don’t get along. My dad’s folks are gone. What about you?”

“There was my grandma. She died last summer.”

“Was she the grandmother who bakes cookies type? Mine sure wasn’t.”

“No. She was tough. They fought a lot. Mom has a sister somewhere but we never hear from her.”

“I’d just as soon stay in town and take you out for Mexican some place,” Ben said.

“Sounds good to me.”

“I can still smell that vomit. Jesus. I need some of that VapoRub stuff.”

“I can’t believe you have to go through that crap.”

Ben tugged at his jacket, spat on the asphalt again, ran hands through his hair. “And I still don’t get to play. That’s what gripes my ass. But next year I will show these sons of bitches something.” He ground his jaw, stared up at the dorm; far overhead were the blinking lights of a passenger jet. “You know what a big help you been to me, don’t you?”

Ronny hardly knew what to say. Ben was giving him this fierce look. “You still have a paper to write tonight,” Ronny said.

“Yeah. Give me that beer.” Instead of taking the beer, though, Ben laid his hand heavy on the back of Ronny’s neck, squeezed him there. After a moment he broke off the touch, but it felt charged, the hand hot, Ben taut with the energy of it, the two of them like a circuit, suddenly alight.

After a while, shutting the car door, climbing the rise to the service road at the back of the dorm, Ronny said, almost hoarse, “You’ve been a big help to me, too.”

“I know.” Their shoulders bumping, jamming their hands in their pockets. “All right,” Ben said. “I’ll go write some. But you have to help when I get stuck.”

“I have to read Suetonius, too.”

“You just like to say that sucker’s name. I don’t think he’s real.”

“I’ll show you the book, shithead.”

“Oh, don’t try to cuss. You just sound stupid.”