“Okay. Well, you said it.”

Ben watched him for a fair while. A tentative moment, but neither of them turned away. They sat still together. In a shaft of light over Tate’s desk dust motes were swimming, diving, spinning, as if there were a kind of life in them, in the air everywhere, that you could only see from certain angles. Ronny was agitated but held still, knowing how rare it was to be so close to Ben like this, certain it would not last.

FEBRUARY

Distance was a variable. Ben worked on finishing his incompletes from the semester before and tried to keep up with his current coursework, too; that meant a lot of time with Ronny during the week, working together in the study lounge or in the library. About eight p.m. or so Ronny went to do his duties as night editor for The Tar Heel and sometimes they met up again afterward, at eleven, when the newspaper was picked up by the printer. Ronny could feel their closeness during the week. On weekends there was another feeling. Ben moved steadily from girl to girl. Sometimes Ronny met them and sometimes he didn’t. It was easy to think Ben was trying to prove something, but that was what Ronny wanted to think, wasn’t it? So there was predictable, increased space between them, especially on Saturdays, when Ben and his friends spent the evening at He’s Not Here.

If this was uncomfortable or maddening it was Ronny’s fault and he told himself so; he had a choice, he could go places on his own. All over campus were flyers about the Carolina Gay Association and its coffeehouses, its meetings; there was a gay disco outside of town and a gay bar in Durham. There were boys in Ronny’s classes he suspected were the same as he. But he liked the feeling he had already claimed. Maybe that was sad, but it was enough for the moment.

He went to a dorm party a couple of weeks before spring break and drank something called PJ that contained grain alcohol. Never had he been so drunk before, and he lay down under a bulletin board in the elevator lobby to keep from falling over. A tinny stereo was booming in the TV room, where the alcohol was. There were a lot of people in the lobby. People there stopped to check on Ronny and chatted with him. Sheria came to gape at him and thought he was hilarious. She sat on the floor and talked to him. “Are you seeing double?”

“Nothing holds still long enough for me to count.”

“I need to find Sara, she has to see this.” Sheria was sipping her own glass of PJ. “Did you really not know how strong this stuff is?”

“No. It tasted like Hawaiian Punch.”

“That’s what they mix the Everclear with.”

“I just kept drinking it.”

“Poor baby. Did you have anything to eat?”

“Yes. Part of a pizza.”

“Oh, you’re probably going to lose that.”