 
Innocence

College Nights

Book One

By

Lucy St. John

Smashwords Edition

© Copyright 2014 by Lucy St. John

Chapter 1

We became fast friends that freshman year, the five of us did. Everything was so shiny and new. Everything was right there, in front of us. Our whole lives. Our loves. The men who would come into our lives at the leafy paradise that was Old State, amongst the mountains of central Pennsylvania. A fantasy land, really. A place to learn, sure. But a place to experiment. A place to be bold. A place to find ourselves -- and each other. A place to become the women we were meant to be.

What a journey! What an experience! What a time in all of our lives!

I won't bore you with a lot of preliminaries. Suffice it to say that the five female freshman from various parts of Pennsylvania and beyond came together like all coltish freshman women do. We had wobbled out of the nest of home and flown off to the big, wide open and inviting skies of Old State, intent to spread our wings. And how did we find each other? How did we form the friendship -- the fierce alliance – that would become The Five?

Well, I guess you could say we gravitated toward one another because we were the same. And because we were so different, too.

The parts of personality that we lacked in ourselves, we found in one another. And that made the five of us strong. It made us smart. It made us bold. It made us confident. So much more so than we could have ever been alone.

Together, we were more than the sum of our parts. We were The Five. And our classmates, both the college men and the other coeds, came to know and accept us as such.

To borrow a phrase from the guys, we had each other's backs. Or at least we thought we did. Until terrible things happened to one of our own, changing everything and each one of us in ways we could never hope to understand in the heat of the moment. Nothing less than our very futures were altered that night. But I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I? I have a tendency to do that. It's part of what college is all about. If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't going fast enough. You aren't learning. You aren't growing.

And from the very day I stepped foot in my college home in what they called the dorms of East Halls, I was determined to grow.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Monica Creed. I hail from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I guess you'd call me a Daddy's Girl. My father was chief of police of our safe, little borough in the western suburbs. I thought he was a god – tall and lanky and always so handsome in his uniform. I loved riding in his unmarked Chevy Blazer, which the borough let him take home at night. This, because Daddy was always on the job, always on the clock. One never knew when tragedy would strike and his handheld radio would squawk with a call. A rape. A murder. An armed robbery. A domestic violence situation. A fatal accident. A drowning. You name it.

Our town was idyllic, to be sure. A slice of middle- to upper-class American suburbia that seemed a safe haven, especially when your father is chief of police. But bad things happened. Bad things happened everywhere. I learned this lesson from my father, always such a careful man. And he had schooled me on being careful, too. The lessons stretch back as far as I can remember to when I was a little girl. Daddy knew all the dangers that could befall us in the big bad world. He saw the invisible piano that dangles so precariously over all our heads, held there by the thinnest of strings. He sought to protect me from this. He sought to teach me to protect myself. He sought to keep me safe.

But maybe he made me too cautious? Perhaps, he had sheltered me too well? Because by the time I went off to college, I was busting to break loose. I loved him utterly. I love him still. But I needed to move out from his shadow and shrug off his protective, reassuring arm over my shoulder. I needed to live on my terms. I needed to make my own mistakes and learn life's hard lessons for myself. We all do.

That doesn't make the experience any easier – or less painful. One can only hope to survive it and become the stronger for it. But there is always collateral damage. Someone always gets hurt. Always. And sometimes they don't recover.

Of course, I didn't know any of this yet. Hell, I didn't even know how I would live as an independent woman off at college. I didn't really know what any of it meant, not really. Not yet. Not even after dad and mom had finished moving the last of my things into my dorm room, back on move-in day.

His work finished, Daddy stood, forlorn, in that small space, not sure what to do with his hands. Mom sat silently on the twin bed she had just made up for me. She looked so tired. At the time, I thought it was simply sadness. Looking back, seeing her drawn face in my mind's eye, I guess I should have known she wasn't well. I'd find out later, though. Another bolt from the blue to rock my world. We never know what's coming, do we? We can go off to college to try to learn all that we can. But the armor of knowledge has no power to protect us from the unexpected. Life laughs at our plans. And time steals everything, doesn't it?

Time is the ultimate thief, to be sure. But it can't rob me of my memories, so sharp, like photographs, in my mind. There's my dad, Chief Andrew F. Creed. All his friends called him Drew. Or just Chief.

I called him Dad. He was my world for seventeen years. Seventeen of the best years of my life. I still believe that. But I had never seen him like this: His head bowed, staring at the floor. His hands fumbling with his keys. He carried the crowded ring of keys of a janitor, and he couldn't help fumbling with them, though there was nowhere to go. Not yet. Not without saying goodbye to his only daughter.

But Daddy was at a loss for words. And he didn't want to show the tears welling in his eyes.

I stood before him a 17-year-old college student. I would turn eighteen in a few weeks. I was a woman, about to go off on my own. But in his eyes, I was the little girl in her white Confirmation dress. This was the image of me I'm sure he still had. One I believed he would always have of me.

So how do you show him you've changed, grown?

His little girl was now a coed on a college campus of some 25,000 students and in a college town of nearly 50,000. He had already given me the speeches. He had armed me with cans of mace and a loud whistle for my keychain. He had lectured about how sexual assault is the Number One crime on college campuses, especially here, at isolated, alcohol-drenched and football-crazed Old State. And most especially among freshmen women at their first college kegger.

I listened to all his statistics, I really did. But all along, I just knew it couldn't happen to me. I don't know why, I just did. Perhaps, it was the aura of invincibility and false sense of security that comes from being a police chief's daughter. I would be proven right in my assumption, as naive as it seems now. But just barely right. And unfortunately, not everyone would be so lucky. Not this year on this campus, when a monster would move among the fine fall foliage that made this place a picture-postcard of everything that is great and good about American colleges.

The attacks began shortly after the weather turned cold and the colorful leaves fell from the trees and the death of winter beckoned. On those nights, the denuded trees struck skeletal poses as sinister shadows moved across the sprawling campus. And the slightest sound could set a young woman's pulse to racing. Yet, the biggest of all threats could be the handsome, seemingly smart college man alone with us in a vacant room, when the door is closed, the music is turned up loud and the alcohol-fueled party is raging right downstairs. In those moments, no one can hear you scream.

Growing up is a dangerous business, all right. Growing up at a huge college, fueled with hormones and alcohol and the heady mindset that comes with one's first experience with complete and utter freedom, can be most dangerous of all.

Indeed, it can ruin lives, just as college is meant to mold and mint lives and careers.

I wouldn't know just how correct my father was, not for a while yet. But I would come to use everything my dad taught me – all the careful caution and investigator's instincts he had instilled in me – to fight back against the monsters. In this way, I would become a full partner in The Five. Because we would all fight back, each in our way and according to the special talents and strengths that made us unique. Combined, we became a fierce force for good. A feminist force for a feminist cause – the simple right and dignity for no to mean no. For our bodies to be our own. For our persons to remain free from another's deranged violence, wounded impotence and misplaced sexual aggression.

We would call our fight a fight for justice. But really, it was revenge -- and rightfully so. But all this was in the future. At present, on my first day at Old State, I needed to say goodbye to the best man I would ever know in my life. My dad.

In my new dorm room, my emotion-stricken father shuffled his feet. He drew in air, making a wet sound that was very close to a sob.

"So, this is it," he managed in a choked voice. "I'm so proud of you, Mon."

He still couldn't raise his eyes to me, lest he lose it. My mom, exhausted on the bed, was already weeping.

I stepped toward my father, me in my blue sweats emblazoned with the college football team's logo.

"I'm ready, Dad," I said in a small, gentle voice, reaching for his fiddling hands and stilling the jingling of his keys.

"You made me ready."

Slowly, my father raised his wet eyes. They were red and tired. But they brightened as they looked at me. His quivering lip curled into a smile.

"Look at you," he whispered in awe. "Look at my little girl."

He dropped those keys with a clatter, squeezed my hand, then swept me up into an oxygen-stealing bear hug, as if trying desperately to hold on.

I felt his breath as he leaned down and kissed the top of my head, inhaling wetly as if to breathe in my scent. He tried to choke it back, but he wept. In small, little sad sounds, he wept. And then I did, too.

My mother, sobbing openly now, stood and joined in the family hug. She wrapped one arm around me and one around my dad. But her hold had none of the strength of my father's.

We stayed that way for a good while.

Then, Sonya Kessler, my new roommate and the second member of what would become The Five, burst in, one of her colorful, angry paintings in tow.

"Oh wow," Sonya said, seeing the three of us, red-faced and teary-eyed.

"I didn't mean to crash your goodbye," stammered the stunning, raven-haired, ethnic-looking woman, who was already an artist.

Sonya had an eye for everything. It devoured the world. And then the world was reflected back in her art. I often wondered what she really saw in that first moment in our dorm room, when she encountered me and my little family, about to be changed forever.

My dad broke his smothering hold on me, and none too soon. He turned his back to the stranger in the room, quickly raising a hand to wipe his eyes. I looked up at my new roommate, and I was blotchy-faced and teary-eyed.

"Hi," I muttered.

My mom was already staring at the canvas in Sonya's hands. It was a jagged, energetic painting of a line of young men in football helmets and jock straps. Nothing else. Sonya set it carefully against the desk on the empty half of the dorm room – her half – then walked up to me, her hand outstretched and a smile on her beautiful but unconventional face.

Her face was angular, and her slender nose had a bump in the middle. But make no mistake, Sonya Keller was drop-dead gorgeous. Hers was the kind of unconventional, ever-intriguing beauty that stops both men and women in their tracks. I would learn that she was Russian on both sides. Her parents were first generation Americans. Her grandparents came over from the then-Communist Soviet Union. She grew up in Johnstown, a second-rate, down-on-its-luck steel town best known for its famous floods. I knew of the town because it was about ninety minutes east of Pittsburgh.

"I guess we're roommates," Sonya said as she pumped my hand. "Sonya," she offered. "You must be Monica. At least that's what it says on my orientation paperwork."

"That's me," I said, forcing a smile onto my emotionally wrecked face. "I hope you don't mind. I kinda staked out my half of the room." I jerked my head to my already-made bed and the suitcases and boxes stacked beside it.

Sonya shrugged. "First come, first served," she said. "My brother is bringing in a loft. I'm gonna get rid of my twin and bunk up high. That way, I'll have more wall space for my art."

I nodded uncertainly.

"You painted this?" my mother said accusingly, as she walked over to the painting leaning against the desk, eying it sharply.

"The boys?" Mom said. "They have no pants."

Sonya walked over, appraising the work alongside my mom.

"Yeah," Sonya enthused. "Isn't it great? I wanted to strip the crazy culture of football down to its elements. Guys in their helmets and jocks. I got the guys on my high school team to pose for me. We tried it first with them butt-naked," Sonya went on. "You know, just their little helmets down there, and their big helmets on their heads. But I felt that would be too much for people to take in. So we went with the jockstraps."

"Naked?" my mother protested. "The boys were naked, standing right there in front of you?"

My mother was aghast.

"Sure," Sonya said. "I love painting penises. Each one is so different. But it just didn't work artistically with this piece."

"You have naked men pose for you?" my mom went on. "In here? With my daughter to see?"

"Mom!" I protested.

"I work in the studio, mostly," Sonya assured.

"Mostly?"

My mom just wouldn't let it go. By now, even my dad, having recovered his composure, was taking an interest in this controversial panting -- and in my new, free-wheeling, artistic roommate.

"I assure you, it's completely natural, Mrs., ah." Sonya glanced down at her paperwork. "Mrs. Creed. Every artist works with nudes. It's just part of the development."

"My daughter has no interest in developing like that!" Mom scolded.

"Mother!" I cried again.

Sonya shifted her big, brown mysterious eyes to me and cracked a sly, knowing smile.

"I'll keep her safe, Mrs. Creed," Sonya said.

My dad shifted his perplexed gaze from the painting to me, then back again. In that moment, he realized that a risqué painting by a feminist college freshman was the least of his worries. He also recognized that mom was embarrassing me in front of my new roommate.

"All right, Cynthia," my dad said, taking my mother by the shoulder. "We best leave these young ladies to get acquainted."

My father turned to Sonya. "You won't need to protect my daughter," he said in a neutral tone. "I taught her to protect herself. But you two, you look out for each other, okay?"

He smiled one of his handsome smiles at my new roommate.

"Yes, sir," Sonya said, instinctively showing my father the respect that his bearing demanded of almost everyone, even the suspects he arrested.

"Good," he said, then nodded at the art.

"I like your work, Sonya," he added. "You have a good eye. You see a lot. I should know. I've been training my eye to see everything since I first walked the beat."

Sonya's jaw dropped. "You're a cop!" It wasn't so much a question as a confirmation. "I should have known! You have this thing about you. This presence. I'd love to try to capture it on canvas. Would you consider sitting for me?"

My mom looked up at her husband, her face filling with skepticism, even disdain.

"As long as I can keep my pants on," Dad joked in that winning way of his.

Sonya laughed. So did I.

"Deal," she said, holding out her hand. My dad shook it.

"Alright then," he said, as my mom shook her head in silence. "How about you walk us out, Mon?"

My dad, his arm around my mom, held out the other for me. I tucked under his wing one last time. Sonya watched us leave the room where our lives were about to change.

Little did any of us know then just how much they would change. Then again, no one ever does, do they?

Chapter 2

Watching my dad and mom pull away in the unmarked Chevy Blazer, amid all those other incoming freshman and their families on move-in day, I felt sad, sure. But underneath my nostalgia for the first seventeen-plus years of my life as a doted-on dependent was a buzzing energy. Part of me was ready to burst, even as I waved goodbye on the curb of East Halls. Behind the wheel, my dad's jaw was set against another tide of emotion, and in the passenger seat, my mom's fragile features were already dissembling again in a torrent of tears.

I stood there like a good little girl until the last trace of the Blazer was gone -- out of the parking lot and down the road, past the towering football stadium and out toward the interstate for the long ride back to Pittsburgh.

And then I was free. I was Monica Creed, college freshman. It happened just like that. A wave washed over me. I transformed on that very spot on the curb.

I probably didn't look any different, clad in my college-branded blue sweats, my sandy-brown hair tied back, little to no make-up on my face for moving day.

But I sure as hell felt different. And as I registered these strange feelings, then turned back toward my new home in East Halls, I stepped toward an exciting, uncharted place called the future. A place known as adulthood. I place that had no rules, no limits. The only guidepost was experimentation. Trial and error. And there would be no more lectures but the ones in my college classrooms.

From now on, I would grow as a person – as a woman – by feeling my way forward. Feeling my way into love or lust. Into seduction and sex, should I want it. Feeling my way into the life that beckoned. All of it, right before me. Wow! What a moment!

Still, as much as I felt these things washing over me, I had no idea what was in store. All that was in store. I just knew it would be big. For better – and there would be a lot that would be better – and for worse – there would be bad stuff, some very bad stuff – all of it would be big. Game-changing big. And it would help shape who I was and the direction my life would take.

From then on, my life would be my doing. And there is no better feeling in the world than that. For me, college was worth every penny, right then and there. Just for me having experienced that single, thrilling moment.

One probably gets a similar transformative thrill the first time she steps into her own apartment, or gets a great job, or buys a house, or accepts a marriage proposal. But for me, on that day, there had been no bigger moment in my life.

I didn't know how to express what I was feeling. Heck, I didn't even know if my fellow freshman all around me were taking a moment to feel the same thing, as they toted their boxes, hugged their parents and waved at departing vehicles as they vanished from sight. I hope they did. People say I'm too much in my own head. But I like it there. Because I take the time to process things like this. Things like my first, free steps on campus as a coed.

And where did those steps take me? Probably the least glamorous place on earth. As I made my way back to our dorm floor, I ducked into the bathroom. All those tingling feelings of my newfound freedoms had worked their way down to my temperamental bladder.

I had to pee.

The bathroom was no-frills. Showers with plastic curtains to the right, and a line of about four stalls to the left. There was a wall with sinks and mirrors in between.

I ducked into a stall with a half-open door. I slipped down my sweats, hovered over the seat and looked up at the ceiling as my flow began. My tinkle was like a little song in the toilet. Kinda cute and cuddly, actually. Then, from the stall next to me, came the shuddering thunder of flatulence, then the warm stench of a beer-fueled bowel movement.

Gross, I thought, as I pawed for the toilet paper. But before I could make it out of this suddenly vile place, a sarcastic voice sang from the next stall.

"Ohh, Dude," the male voice intoned. "This is one hell of a download, if I do say so myself."

A guy, I thought, panicking. There was a guy in the next stall. A gross guy, taking a stinky shit – right there in the stall next to me!

I couldn't help but protest.

"And you're proud of this? Why?" I curtly asked.

"Wonders of the human body," the grunting guy said, then let loose with another trumpet call of flatulence.

"Oh God," I groaned, trying not to breathe as I wiped, then hiked up my sweatpants. "Why don't you flush, instead of letting it marinate?"

"I always check the color of my stool when I'm done," the disembodied voice from the next stall answered. "It's a good way to keep tabs on one's health."

I was fighting with the lock on the stall door, trying to free myself from this god-awful gas chamber.

"I'm sure it has something to do with whatever beer you consumed last night," I squeaked, just as the door unlatched and released me from this colon-laced confinement. I sprinted to the sink, taking shallow breaths through my mouth.

I fiddled with the water knobs, then pounded the liquid soap dispenser. I heard some rustling from behind the closed stall door, then the watery whisk of a long-overdue flush.

I was scrubbing my hands as the stall door swung open. My face was crimson with embarrassment. I don't know why I should have been embarrassed, but I was.

I glanced up in the mirror and glimpsed the tall, lanky guy buttoning his jeans. When he looked up, I was struck by how handsome he was. His hair was long and unkempt in that surfer-dude kind of way. He sauntered toward the sink.

I had enough soap on my hands to prep for surgery. He studied me in the mirror as I averted my eyes.

"Sorry about that," he muttered, taking his place at the sink next to me.

"I'm Josh," he said, turning to me and holding out his hand – his unwashed hand.

I glanced over and looked at his hand, which I wouldn't have touched if he paid me. Then my eyes found his very handsome face.

"Maybe after you wash it," I said, pulling my own well-scrubbed hands from the hot water and reaching for the paper towels.

"So, were you sick or something back there?" I jerked my head toward the stall he'd emerged from.

"Huh?" he grunted, as he leaned down to wash his hands. "Oh, that? No. That's par for the course for me. Especially after a night of drinking. I got up here yesterday and spent the evening at an upper-classman friend's place in town. Had one too many, I guess. Either that, or PBR gives me the shits."

My face screwed into a look of discomfort. "Okay. How about we drop the subject?"

"Fine with me," Josh said, straightening from the sink and shaking the water from his hands. "I just dropped one hell of a loaf, so I'm feeling ten pounds lighter. Wanna get something to eat?"

He held out his damp hand to me. His blue eyes sparkled like the ocean. Well, at least the eye that I could see peering through his tousled, long hair that hung down into his angular face did. He cracked a sly grin.

I took his hand and gave it a light shake. It was still wet, and immediately afterward, I grabbed for another towel.

"Ah, maybe another time," I said. "I kinda lost my appetite just now. I wonder why?"

"I'm guessing you don't have brothers," Josh said.

I shook my head.

"My advice," Josh said in a superior tone. "Best get up early to use the facilities, cause there are at least ten other dudes on this floor with bathroom habits worse than mine."

"Worse?" I said, shocked.

Josh nodded knowingly.

"Trust me," he assured. "What you witnessed just now?" He jerked his head toward the stall, which I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. "Sweetness and light compared to the mustard gas some of these guys spew around here. Consider yourself warned."

I looked him up and down. My eyes liked what they saw, the thin but muscled chest and his long, lean legs clad in faded and ripped designer-label jeans. The packaging just didn't match the unappetizing experience of the stall. And here he was, the best of the toilet bowl-challenged boys on our floor?

I dipped my head. "I will," I said. "I guess I should say thanks."

"No need," Josh grinned. "Welcome to coed college dorm life."

"Yeah," I muttered, my thrilling flush of freedom now replaced with the more repellent realities of dorm life. "Whoo-hoo," I sang, twirling my index finger in feigned excitement. "Can't wait until we shower together."

It was just an offhand bathroom remark. But Josh made me pay for it.

"Now that can be arranged," Josh said in a sultry voice. "And that could be some fun."

My face fired with embarrassment – and perhaps, desire. Was he reading me, this seductive sophomore (he was no freshman, I was sure) with bad bathroom manners and beer-induced bowel troubles?

"I was joking," I insisted.

Josh's sly grinned widened into a smart-alecky smirk.

"Sure you were," he teased.

I didn't know what else to say. In fact, I could hardly speak. He had flustered me.

I inhaled air, turned on a heel and made for the door.

"Hey," he called. "You never told me your name."

"Monica," I said without turning. "It's Monica Creed."

"Pleasure was all mine, Monica Creed," he sang as I pulled open the door.

"You got that right," I replied smartly, as I barreled through the door, escaping that coed bathroom from hell.

So much for my wonderful life as a newly-free freshman, I thought.

Chapter 3

By the time I returned to my dorm room, Sonya had more of her colorful but bizarre paintings on the wall. But now there was another coed in our room, checking them out. Sonya glanced up as I entered our room through the propped-open door. I must have appeared flustered from my bizarre bathroom encounter with Josh, because the all-seeing artist did a double-take.

Sonya stopped chatting about her work and addressed me. "You okay, roomie?" she asked, narrowing her perceptive, almond-shaped eyes.

The renewed attention on me warmed my face. I shrugged.

"Just be careful when you use the bathroom," I mumbled, stepping deeper into the room as both young women watched me. "You never know who will be in the next stall taking a bowel movement. Suffice it to say, it isn't pretty."

Sonya adopted a knowing smile. "So you ran into one of our male neighbors," she observed. "Guys do like their shit, don't they? They're so Neanderthal that way. I grew up with brothers, so I'm used to it."

I shook my head. "Not me. I'll be waking early to use the facilities."

I turned my attention to the visitor in our room.

She was pretty but plain-looking. And this wasn't merely the fact that she was sans make-up and nice clothes for move-in day. The coed before me had the appearance of a young woman who didn't go in for the whole girly-girl, dress-up thing. Instead, she bore the awkward bearing of a tomboy and the slacker appearance of a skateboarder.

Sonya noticed my inspection of her guest.

"This is our next-door neighbor," Sonya said. "Monica Creed, meet Lauren Marks."

Lauren looked at the tile floor, even as I extended my hand. "Pleased to meet you," I said, taking her limp hand in mine. "Welcome to Old State."

Lauren glanced up and attempted an uncertain smile. "You too," she managed. "Nice to meet you."

"Lauren noticed that your father's a cop," Sonya said, gesturing toward the framed pictures on my desk of my dad in his dress blues. "She comes from a long line of police, too. Guess I won't be able to get away with anything."

Sonya meant it as a joke, but I resented the implication.

"I'm no narc," I protested. "That's my dad, not me. He's chief by the way, not a cop. And he's the best man I ever knew, but I'm not following in his footsteps. Far from it."

"Easy, Creed," Sonya said, raising a palm as if to back me off. "Bad choice of words on my part. No offense, alright?"

I nodded but my jaw was set and my back, up. I noticed the shy Lauren Marks studying me.

"Blue's in the blood in my family," she said. "Both my brothers are cops. My dad, my grandfather and an uncle, too. I didn't play with dolls. I learned how to respect and shoot guns. But I don't feel the department treats female cops with respect. That's why I'm going into forensic science. We not only catch the bastards with science; we help put them away in court. I like that."

I saw a different Lauren then. She spoke with confidence and certainty. She knew what she wanted and why she was here. That was more than I could say for myself. I also better understood her appearance and demeanor. She had grown up in an environment overcharged with testosterone. She could have gone entirely the other way into frilly femininity. Or she could hold her own against boys, covering up the female parts of herself that the men considered a weakness. This didn't mean that Lauren wasn't a woman, far from it. She just didn't have much experience being one. This made her innocent in a way. And it would fuel – hell, it would make all of us, the rest of the Five – want to show her the way. We would seek to turn Lauren into a woman in full. Her femininity would be our creation. We'd be her proud surrogate parents, pushing her into dates, taking her to wild, beer-fueled frat parties where all the testosterone she confronted growing up would see her as the prey. Maybe, we just pushed too hard. Anyway, I should have never doubted that Lauren Marks would hold her own. In the end, she was tougher than all of us. All of us, combined.

"Sounds intriguing," I said, and meant it. "Wait until you meet my dad. You won't be able to shut him up. He always feels the need to talk up law enforcement as a career. Says it's noble work, and you can look at yourself in the mirror in the morning."

"It is," Lauren declared. "I'm already sold. But I'd still like to talk to him."

"Huh?" I muttered, distracted for some reason.

"Your father," Lauren said. "I'd like to ask him his management perspective regarding the equal treatment of women in his department. It goes beyond hiring. I'm talking about equal treatment – fair treatment – within the department culture. The thin blue line cops always talk about. I'm not sure female cops have ever penetrated it. Not really. Not fully. Not completely."

"My father is very fair," I said.

"I'm sure he is," Lauren answered. But it was the automatic reply of a robot, and she averted her cautious eyes as she said it.

"Anyway," she shrugged. "All those male cops in my family? They're just as guilty. It's a guy thing, just like the dude you encountered in the bathroom. They stink it up for us so we can't stand it. So we retreat. Give in. Go away."

Lauren shook her head with resolve. "I'm not going away."

Her vow hung in the air with such serious intent. Then, Sonya pierced all the police talk with a well-timed question.

"So who was it?" Sonya asked me.

"Hmm?" I hummed.

"The dude in the john?" she clarified.

"Oh, that," I said. "Said his name was Josh. Come to think of it, I didn't get his last name."

"Josh Elliot?" Sonya said, her voice rising in amazement. "The guy is gorgeous. And you gave him shit over his shit?"

I cocked my head, reconsidering whether I had committed a social blunder over his bowel movement.

"Well, it did stink," I said in weak defense. "And then he made some crack about showering together."

"Wait. What?" Sonya nearly shouted. "He asked you to shower with him? You didn't tell us that! Now dish, girl. Dish!"

"I don't know if he was flirting," I mumbled, flustered by Sonya's intense interest and her admiring praise for Josh's aesthetics. He was hot, no doubt about that. But was he toying with me?

"Did he mention showering with you or not?" Sonya drilled.

"He did, yeah." I hemmed and hawed. "But he could have just been goading me over the whole guys' gross bathroom habits thing. In retrospect, I probably came off like some snotty school marm."

"Damn it, Creed," Sonya snapped. "Don't you see what you've done?"

I was dumbstruck. No, I didn't see.

"You handled it perfectly," Sonya said. "Hell, it's like a meet-cute right out of those schmaltzy romantic comedies Hollywood churns out."

"I don't know," Lauren interjected. "I don't think I've ever seen a movie where the main characters encounter each other in a coed bathroom, right after the guy just finishes an epic dump."

We all laughed at that. The entire situation was so absurd. And to hear it put into Lauren Marks' unvarnished words was just too much.

"Nooo," Sonya sang, amid the chuckles. "Not the taking a dump part. The way Creed, here, acted all tough and aloof. See, we're in college now."

"No shit," I shot back, my face still red, breaking myself up all over again.

"Yes, shit," Lauren corrected, giggling. "Yes, a lot of shit, frankly."

And we all laughed anew at this.

Finally, Sonya pressed her point. "The college mindset – especially, the college guy mindset -- is that people can have sex at any time, okay?" she began. "What's to stop them, get it? So sex becomes almost ordinary or something." She shrugged. "Like shaking hands or something. But Creed, here."

Sonya pointed at me with prosecutorial flair.

"She meets the hottest guy on our floor," Sonya continued. "Hell, maybe the hottest guy in the whole damn dorm. And how does she play it? Does she come off all impressed and fawning? Does she fall all over herself, tongue-tied and pathetic?"

Sonya paused for a beat, satisfied with her presentation on the wily ways of college romance.

"No," Sonya resumed, shaking her head slowly, projecting the full import of her lesson. "Creed, here, scolds the dude over smelling up the bathroom."

Sonya shook her head in awe, then added, "Brilliant, Monica. Absolutely brilliant."

Both women gazed at me in admiration. I actually smiled with some measure of pride. Perhaps I had handled the situation superbly.

"I think you might just have a shot with this guy," Sonya surmised. "But we're going to have to game plan this thing. You had a great opening, but you could still blow it."

"Gee, thanks," I said, not sure I wanted a shot with Josh Elliot, he of the irritable bowel, perfect hair and beguiling eyes.

"I'm just saying," Sonya said.

I frowned, considering the momentous sweep of my day, the first at college. I had gone from bidding goodbye to parents, feeling the unbridled energy of my newfound freedom, to reaming out the best-looking dude in the dorm. Well, if Sonya thought I had a shot with Josh Elliot, why not take it?

"Tell me more, oh wise one," I smiled.

Sonya smiled then, too. So did Lauren.

"Now this," Sonya began, "is what college is all about."

Chapter 4

Our dorm room became the hub for the first meeting of The Five. It would be the first of many for our group. There would be plenty of talk about guys, lots of gossip and much propping each other up when life or love would knock us down.

It became our support system, the collective making each individual stronger. The others' strengths bolstering individual weakness. It became a comfort zone, a confidence-builder and confidential seminar on everything a young woman confronts as she is coming into her own at college.

I would long for its cocoon of safety, security and secrets many times in my life. But there's just something about college that is irreplaceable. And there's surely something about college women who come together to form such a close-knit alliance that can never, ever be duplicated, replicated or replaced in our lives. It is of a particular time and place. And as we move out into the world, we become different people. The rush of the day and the relentless responsibilities of our lives change us.

The young women who gathered, one by one, in that dorm room on that move-in day wouldn't recognize the people we would become. But our older selves would always remember the naïve yet nurturing college women we once were. And that knowledge, sweet as it was, would make us long for what we could never be again.

We'd ache for it. Many times, when life threw a curve, I would ache for it. Perhaps, this is one of the reasons I am writing this now. Because as I do, I live inside my former self. And I don't remember all those things I didn't know then.

I first forget who I am. Then inhabit who I was. The Five are there again, just as we were.

And I have the joy, the sheer joy, of living with those wonderful young women once again.

The Five. Us.

Together.

Next to join our circle was the prim, proper Chelsea Daniels. She was Lauren's roommate, and she hailed from a textbook family and fine upbringing in a tiny, Norman Rockwellesque town up north. Her father was a doctor and her mother a lawyer. And the family's roots in the wiles of Wellsboro went back generations. They had the many acres of land to prove it. Acres that were now worth millions, due to the shale gas drilling phenomenon in that part of the state. A phenomenon that turned salt-of-the-earth farmers and other landowners into the nouveau riche. Rich beyond their imaginations, in fact.

Chelsea's family now had the money to send her to school anywhere. But both her mother and father were Old State alums. Her parents had met here at this fine land grant university that united all ends of the state. And deep down, I believed that Chelsea Daniels hoped to meet her husband here, as well. But coming from such a sheltered existence in such a small town still seemingly stuck in the 1950s, she had no idea how to go about doing this. On the campus of Old State, surrounded by so many men – men, not little high school boys – Chelsea was out of her element and a step behind the culture in terms of fashion, dating, social mores – and most especially sex.

Luckily, her newly minted membership in what would become The Five would change this. It would change it for the good, but also for the bad. Very bad, indeed. But that was the thing about the members of The Five. We couldn't help trying to make the others a little more like ourselves. And with Chelsea, we wanted to live vicariously in the thrill of her discovery of college men, their many endowments and, of course, the sex, itself.

She represented the uninitiated. In a way, the rest of us all longed for her wide-eyed innocence. But in trying to change Chelsea, we would help destroy what we secretly cherished. We would all play a role. But the men who would desecrate her were the real culprits. Yet, each of us who had a hand in Chelsea's awakening would hate ourselves – and one another – for having changed her. Chelsea, the small town girl who made the mistake of trusting, looking up to us, even, with those doe-like anticipating eyes.

"Lauren, there you are," came the soft, almost apologetic, and lost-sounding, voice from our opened dorm door. "I thought you'd be back in a sec."

Chelsea Daniels poked in her pretty head. Everything about her was top-notch. There wasn't a blemish on her face. Her make-up was understated, and not a brown hair was out of place. Yet, her whole look, as cute as she was, (and cute was the right word for Chelsea) was just a little outdated. It was as if she hailed from a time and place that was a step or two behind the rest of the world. And perhaps she did.

We all looked up. Lauren and I were on the bed, and Sonya was hanging the last of her precious paintings.

"Hi Chelsea," Lauren said, rising from the squeaky mattress.

"Wanna see the quilt on my bed?" Chelsea pleaded perkily to her roommate and perhaps the only person she knew on a first-name basis across all of Old State.

"Quilt?" Lauren Marks screwed her plain but attractive features into a question.

"Yeah," Chelsea said, stepping further inside, her anxious eyes darting about the small space that was the mirror image of her own, except for all of Sonya's colorful, bold and in some cases, sexually risqué, artistic touches. "It was my grandmother's, and her mother's before that. Mom says it will make me feel at home, even though I'm far away."

"Chelsea," Lauren chided gently, almost as a protective parent might, "the whole point of college is to get away from home. That's why you're here. For new experiences. New people. New things. Come in and meet our neighbors."

Lauren waved her roommate forward, and Chelsea obeyed Lauren's command.

"Guys," Lauren began, "this is Chelsea. She's from a tiny, little town up north, if you haven't guessed."

Both Sonya and I nodded at the cute girl in our midst, who was such the polar opposite of her plain-spoken, no-frills roomie.

"This is Sonya." Lauren gestured.

Sonya stepped forward with a smile and outstretched hand. "Sonya Kessler," she said, taking Chelsea's limp hand. Women didn't shake, now did they? "I'm an artist."

Chelsea's eyes wandered over the freshly hung paintings, a cautious, quizzical look on her face.

"Hmmm," she hummed. "Father wants to buy some art. Says it's a good place to park money. I'm just not sure he knows much about it. I'm afraid I don't either. But father says you can buy advice, good advice. Father says you can buy just about anything."

"Oh yeah," Lauren interjected. "Chelsea's rich, like mega-rich. All that shale gas drilling up north."

"Doesn't that fuck-up the environment?" Sonya accused, withdrawing her hand.

Chelsea actually flinched at the curse word, almost as if she'd never heard it before.

"Pardon?" the shocked small town girl managed.

"Never mind," Sonya said. "Well, your daddy's wrong about one thing. None of my paintings is for sale." Sonya waved a hand at her artwork as a showroom model might.

Chelsea nodded. "Guess he'll have to take you off his list, then," she retorted.

I smiled at that. Chelsea had a little zing in her. It was down deep, but it was there.

"I'm Monica," I said, rising from the bed and extending my hand, even though handshakes weren't Chelsea Daniels' thing. "Monica Creed. Why don't you hang out?"

I shrugged, and Chelsea considered this. Then she shrugged, too.

"So what are we talking about?" she asked, wide-eyed.

"Guys," Sonya answered, deadpan. "What else?"

"Yeah," Lauren intoned. "Creed, here, thinks the hottest guy in the dorm propositioned her to shower with him."

Lauren shot me a mock-accusing look and I took a half-hearted swing at her muscular shoulder. No doubt she had taken many harder shots.

"I never said that," I protested.

Chelsea watched it all with the dazed look of an uninitiated spectator following the bouncing ball of a tennis match.

"So what do you think she should do?" Sonya asked, staring at our newest member of the club.

Chelsea was struck dumb.

"Shower?" she squeaked. "Together?"

"Well, the bathroom is coed," Sonya explained.

"Oh, I don't know," Chelsea said in a whisper. "I think I'll just listen for a while."

Lauren smiled at her roomie. I could tell even then that Lauren liked her, liked her a lot, in fact. But it was more than that. Lauren felt protective of Chelsea, an instinct that only grew more powerful and fierce as days, weeks and months wore on.

"You do that, Roomie," Lauren said. "Listen and learn."

"Okay," Chelsea agreed, sitting down daintily on the squeaky mattress. "But later, can I show you girls my heirloom quilt?"

Lauren shook her head. "Enough about the quilt," she muttered. "Maybe you should wonder if the first dude you invite into your room will like it."

Chelsea pulled back.

"Oh, I don't know about that," she demurred.

"You will," Sonya assured. "Stick with us, and you'll know all about it, soon enough."

And with that, we became four.

Chapter 5

The strongest of us all, the most complicated and certainly the fiercest friend to mankind, was last to join our gathering.

Her entrance to The Five was preceded by the audible clicks of her ever-present camera. And not those cameras built into smartphones that everybody and her brother uses to snap selfies and post up on Facebook or Instagram. I'm talking about a real camera. A Nikon, I believe. Or perhaps, a Lycia. Whatever it was, it was professional grade, with the price tag to match. Amanda Livingston treated it like her baby.

The British-born photojournalist from a broken family didn't have all that much to her name. But she had that camera, and she kept it with her like a security blanket. Actually, that's not correct. It was her armor. When that camera was raised to her face, she was fearless. She would go anywhere, amid any kind of danger or threat, because the camera was her passport to see, to document, to report and to expose whatever crime or injustice there was so all the world could see.

She was the real deal, Amanda Livingston was. The rare person in which the job – no, the calling – was bigger and more important than herself. She gave herself to journalism -- to serious, muck-raking, change-the-world journalism \-- even though the world and the economics of the Internet were crushing journalism and turning it into some bastardized BuzzFeed form of intellectual popcorn and mindless eye-candy that could be consumed on a smartphone.

Not Amanda. She was different. A throwback. She believed that the image told the truth, and it took a professional to see that. Not some blogger with an iPhone. A professional with a real camera and a finely trained eye.

Her.

Sonya was the first to notice the intermittent clicks of Amanda's camera, emanating from just beyond our dorm room's open door. Sonya turned from our group's conversation around my bed. She raised a finger raised for quiet, then sharpened her brow as she focused on the doorway.

Click.

Sonya rose from the chair she had pulled up next to the bed. All our attention was now tuned to the doorway and the dimly-lit dorm hallway beyond.

Sonya stepped into the entranceway, only to discover Amanda, blonde and buxom, crouched down around the corner, with her camera to her face and focused on our room.

"What gives?" Sonya demanded, looking down, hands propped on her hips.

Amanda lowered the camera from her pretty face, looking up like a lost puppy dog.

Amanda shrugged, then straightened.

"Mind telling us what you're doing?" Sonya pressed.

Amanda stepped into the doorway, exposing herself to all of us in the room.

"I take pictures," she said in a small voice that made it hard to notice her accent at first.

"You mean you spy on people in the privacy of their own rooms?" Sonya corrected, not masking her annoyance.

"Hey, it's a public hallway," Amanda said, more sure of herself now, not backing down. The ring of her British accent was both clear – and intriguing. "The door was open. I saw an image, and..."

"And what?" Sonya demanded.

"And I took it?" Amanda said, her soft British accent so smart-sounding, so perfect. But why was Sonya acting so rudely?

"So what are you? Some kind of English Lois Lane?" Sonya's voice was smothered in sarcasm.

"Lois who?" Amanda asked.

That's when I stood up.

"Why don't you come on in," I invited. "I'm Monica."

I extended my hand in front of Sonya. My roommate glared at it, then shifted her sharp eyes to mine.

"Amanda," the photographer answered, taking my hand, ignoring Sonya. "Amanda Livingston. I guess we're neighbors. I'm in the flat a door down."

"Flat?" Sonya repeated, but no one paid any attention.

"So you're from England?" Lauren asked, popping up from the bed to get a good look at our interesting guest.

"Yes, London," Amanda answered. "But not lately. My father moved to America, and I've been staying with him. Well, caring for him, actually."

"Nothing serious," I put in.

"Not anymore," Amanda said, her eyes falling to the floor. "He died. Cancer."

"I'm sorry," Sonya managed in a low, chided voice. "Come on in."

Sonya and I stepped aside, and Amanda Livingston entered our room. And in that moment, she also entered our lives and joined The Five.

"What a wonderful space," she said, her eyes taking in everything. "Interesting work," she added, staring at Sonya's paintings. "Yours, I gather?"

Sonya seemed surprised. "Yes. Thanks. How did you know?"

Amanda shrugged. "You address things head-on. Very bold. No nonsense. I like that. It's honest, isn't it?"

"All art is," Sonya said. "If it's good."

"Ah, the quest for the eternal truths," Amanda nodded. "A well-traveled but lonely path."

Sonya couldn't help staring at our guest as she soaked in the space, the art, the air and the complex chemistry that was the five of us, together.

"So the pictures?" Sonya nodded at the camera slung around Amanda's shoulder.

"Just a moment that I noticed," Amanda explained. "If anything comes of it, I'll give you the image."

"What did you see?" Sonya asked.

This seemed to stump Amanda. Her blond brow furrowed, her porcelain skin crinkling ever so slightly on her forehead and at the corners of her blue eyes. "I don't know really," she finally said.

"Yes, you do," Sonya said, never breaking her stare. "You can tell us."

Amanda looked right into Sonya's face.

"I saw friendships forming, I guess," Amanda said. "Something I could rather use. Seems my roommate has withdrawn from university at the very last second. It's all very mysterious, really. I do hope everything's all right. Sometimes, they employ such euphemisms when someone is in hospital."

"Wait a second," Chelsea Daniels put in. "Don't you see? You scored, big time. I've heard that when a roomie flames out, sometimes you go the whole semester without a replacement. Don't you see?"

"Rather lonely, I expect," Amanda pondered.

"Lonely!" Sonya chimed in. "Private is more like it. Privacy, as in when you have a guy to entertain?"

Sonya watched Amanda to see if the Brit-born blonde was picking up on her meaning.

"Hmm," Amanda hummed. "Never thought of it quite like that. Then again, it's usually not an issue."

"You don't date much?" Chelsea commiserated. "Welcome to the club."

"Not that," Amanda corrected. "Heavens no. Rather, the men I date tend to be a bit older. So, they have their own flats."

"Older?" I repeated. "How much older?"

"Decades, usually," she answered.

"Ewwwe," Chelsea squealed in disgust.

"Don't tell me," Sonya said. "Professors. You get off on tweed jackets and pipe smoke."

Amanda shrugged. "Journalists, too. I like smart people. I like to be challenged. And I like to challenge them."

Sonya nodded. "Professors, all right. I'm sure you'll do well here. I bet the old boys can't wait to get to know you."

"Old dudes?" Lauren Marks intoned, as if her mind just could not comprehend the attraction. "Really?"

"Well, not ancient," Amanda corrected. "No actual geezers. I think the oldest was fifty-two. No. Wait. He had a birthday. Fifty-three."

Amanda looked about the room as all of our jaws hung open, as if unhinged.

"Fifty-three-fucking-years-old?" Lauren repeated in a halting, disbelieving tone. "And you find that attractive?"

Amanda cocked her head, then shrugged.

"I never really thought about it quite like that," she answered.

"Well, you gotta tell us more," Sonya insisted. "And you'll have to share that single room of yours should any of us pair up with a younger man who still has his own teeth -- but not his own flat. Deal?"

Amanda broke into a smile.

"Deal."

Chapter 6

We were complete then, the five of us, right there on that first day. Sure, there would be other friends, acquaintances, you name it. But none would elevate to the inner circle of The Five, formed on that first day. It was magic, really. Because as members of that group, we became more than the collective sum of ourselves. Yet, we wouldn't discover these things until put to the test.

And our first test walked through our dorm room door later that very day.

The messenger was a most unremarkable herald, Corey Stills. We'd later learn that the diminutive but muscled wrestler was a resident of our floor. Corey, who all five of us would find unattractive, was a hanger-on in the group of guys that really counted in the dorm. So this bestowed him with status, and obnoxious Corey took full advantage, lording his superior sophomore confidence over the five freshmen women he had been sent to summon.

He was but a gopher for the more popular and attractive upperclassmen of our residence hall. Nothing more than an errand boy, really. But through his connection, he would have access to the women the others would cast off. He was a class bottom feeder. And he recognized and completely accepted his status. This made him dangerous because he didn't care about feelings. He knew he would get his share of sex simply based on the college formula of hormones, stress, alcohol and naïve, unsuspecting freshmen coeds.

In other words, us.

Now, here he was with a message and a mission. And that was to summon me.

Me?

And the unlikely person who had dispatched Corey to our dorm room? None other than Josh Elliot, he of the sandy, surfer hair, the ocean-blue eyes and the long, lanky body that coeds could only dream about. Only for some, that dream would come true.

Would I be the lucky lady, new to the sexual freedoms of a college freshman?

The very thought made my heart clench, my pulse quicken and my throat tighten so that it was hard to breathe. It also sent tingles south. Down there. But I didn't want to acknowledge this, any of this.

It was all too much, too fast. Yet, how can we ignore our own bodies? Truth is, we can't. Yet at nearly 18, I hadn't gotten through the owner's manual, yet. I had all the equipment, all the urges, all the sensations -- but not the knowhow. Only experience can teach us. Only the men we bring into our beds can instruct us. Only the young women with whom we share our deepest secrets and suppressed intimacies can advise us. And what better place than college for all this learning?

Yeah, it all sounds great. Perfectly natural, in fact. But there are some lessons you're just not ready for. There are some lessons you are never ready for. In a way, my path to this most unwanted lesson began with Corey Stills' rap on our open dorm door. With that, and a long and winding series of events -- many good, but some bad, some very bad – that would lead The Five to its ultimate test.

And none of us would ever be the same.

Our faces turned in unison toward the door – five freshmen women looking up expectantly at a uniquely unremarkable upperclassman guy.

Oh, Corey wasn't that bad. Just a little too short and a little too cocky, as height-challenged guys often are. He had the tightly muscled body of wrestler, and he was decent-looking, save for the cauliflower ears from his chosen sport. His face was scrunched into a permanent scowl, as if mad at the world. Some athletes believe that going through life with a chip on their shoulders gives them an edge. Maybe it does. But it also must consume a lot of energy. And it can transform one's face into an unappealing mask -- eyes sharpened to pinpointed hot coals, brows sloped, forehead wrinkled, jaw set.

I often wondered if the fires of resentment that Corey Stills stoked in his guts didn't burn brighter because he was overlooked by so many women, as well. I wondered what this did to him, being overlooked by so many women, being the guy of last resort at the end of the night.

More troublingly, I wondered what Corey did about it? Later, after everything happened, I would wonder about this a lot.

"Hey, is there a Monica here?" Corey spoke, even as he must have seen the disappointment overtaking our faces at his mere, unremarkable presence. It was a woman's instinctive disappointment that our unannounced visitor wasn't more gallant, more handsome, more open in his features and personality.

I'm thinking, Corey probably got this a lot. He probably hated it, too. But if he read it in our slackening expressions, which I'm sure now that he did, he didn't let it show. He refused to allow it to trip him up. We were mere freshmen women. A dime a dozen in his book. Maybe in the books of most guys on campus, especially the upperclassmen.

Through it all, Corey's intense, sharp, angry-at-the-world gaze never altered. Why would it? It was this short, not-quite-good-enough athlete's armor against life's unfairness -- and women's fickle sexual attractions.

I was lost in thought, considering these things, as the faces of my fellow Five swung to me. I felt their gaze and my own face heating up. I didn't know what Corey might want. Hell, at that moment, I didn't even know his name. I only knew -- and this was pure instinct -- that I wanted no part of this person.

"I-I-I'm Monica," I stammered in a low voice. "Who wants to know?"

"Oh, so you're the one," Corey said, stepping deeper into our dorm room, totally uninvited.

He made a show of turning his head and checking the hall, then he kicked the doorstop with his foot, allowing the door to slowly swing shut. He stood there, blocking the entrance with his squat, wrestler's stance, until it closed completely.

I wasn't the only one who didn't like this.

"Hey," Sonya said, rising from a desk chair pulled near my bed, where we all had been huddling and talking. "What gives?"

Corey looked at her in disdain. Another beautiful woman he could never have.

"I'm not talking to you," he grimaced. "I'm here for the other one." He jerked his head toward me.

I lowered my eyes against his gaze. Was it fear?

Perhaps.

"She asked you who you were," Sonya pressed, not backing down an inch.

Corey Stills sucked in a long, exasperated breath, then cocked his head in disgust at the pathetic situation. Here he was in a room full of five women, five freshmen women ripe for the picking, and the only thing that registered on their fine faces was revulsion.

Why did this always happen to him?

"If you must know, the name is Corey. Corey Stills. I'm down the hall, and I'm here with an invitation," he said.

"We don't want any," Amanda Livingston answered in her superior British tone. "So we'll save you the trouble."

"Princess Diana, over here," Corey cracked. "Why don't you go back where you came from, 'cause I ain't talking to you? It's the Monica chick. And the invitation don't come from me, neither. I'm the messenger. And they always say, don't kill the messenger. Am I right, or what?"

"Okay," I piped up, finding my voice. "Tell me what you want, but would you mind opening the door?"

Corey glanced back at the closed wooden door.

"I just don't want word getting' out, is all," he said, jerking his head. "Lots of ears out there. Then, you have a dorm room full of losers. Or worse. Word gets to some prickish RA or something."

"Word?" I asked. "Of what?"

"That's what I'm here to tell ya," Corey said, taking another step in our direction.

My instincts were to back off, but I didn't.

"Your bathroom buddy requests your presence tonight," Corey said, his lips lifting into a self-satisfied sneer.

"My what?"

"Josh," he said, watching as my face morphed into excitement and anticipation at the mere mention of the dorm's hottest dude.

Corey noticed this, too. He would see the same reaction time and again by sticking so close to Josh Elliot. It had to eat at him, the way women reacted so differently for Josh, so open and ready for him. The exact opposite of the reaction to Corey.

And it wasn't just me who reacted this way to the mere mention of Josh's name. Every woman in that dorm room did the same – all five of us. Josh Elliot's reputation for hotness preceded the laid-back, languid sophomore.

Corey cocked his head. "So now you want to hear, all of a sudden," he smirked ruefully.

"That's what you're here for, isn't it?" Lauren Marks stated in that brilliant, no-bullshit way of hers.

"Easy, Butch," Corey condescended, extending a palm.

"Hey!" shouted Chelsea Daniels, who seemed surprised at herself for being assertive. "You don't talk to my roommate that way."

"You don't talk that way, period," Sonya corrected. "Now deliver your message and get out."

"That's what I been trying to do," Corey said, actually amused that he had riled us up as he had.

"Anyway," he continued, eyeing me directly. "Josh says you should come over to the room tonight. A couple of us guys have some, ah, alcohol, and we're planning to toast our first day at Old State in style. You made the guest list, girlie, though I'm not sure why. Musta made some kinda impression there in the John. Must really know how to work a bathroom."

I blanched red. I didn't know what to say. I wanted to go -- and I didn't. I surely didn't want to be in a room with a bunch of older college guys and a keg of beer.

But my excitement got the better of me.

"Tell Josh we'll be there," I blurted, before rationality could take hold.

Corey narrowed his beady eyes. "Whaddya mean, we?"

"The five of us," I declared, recovering now and recognizing the way to have my cake and eat it, too. I wouldn't have to go alone. I had The Five.

"Don't you know how rude it is to extend an invitation in front of others?" I pressed. "We all go, or none of us does."

"Josh didn't say anything about no one else," Corey uttered, but his tone was uncertain. His fiery eyes clouded with thought.

"Then tell him to forget it," I said.

"He really wants you to come," Corey stammered, scratching his head.

"It's a package deal," I insisted. "All or nothing."

Corey's eyes roved over the five of us. I guess he found us acceptable enough. What guy would turn down more women at a party, anyway?

"What the hell," he finally relented. "Knock yourselves out. What do I care?"

I smiled for the first time in the presence of Corey Stills.

"Okay," I said. "Invitation accepted. Tell Josh I said thanks."

Corey frowned.

"Tell him yourself," he said, turning toward the door, then glancing back to deliver his parting shot. "Be there around ten. Corner dorm, end of the hall. Knock twice and wait. And just you five. No more."

I shrugged.

"Just us," I assured. "Us five."

Chapter 7

It's amazing how a date – any date, the mere prospect of simply encountering men -- can send women into a closet-mining, make-up experimenting and fear-inducing tizzy of getting ready.

As soon as the somewhat creepy Corey Stills slunk from our dorm room, the five of us simultaneously exploded into a "what will I wear" panic, our first such wardrobe dilemma registered at the college level. It was a crisis made all the worse because none of us had completed the unpacking and organizing process.

At once came a chorus of the "I've got nothing to wear" overstatements that irrationally precede the inevitable trial-and-error process of selecting an outfit for the evening. But everyone must panic first, then pick an outfit later. Everyone, it seemed but the slacking, slouching, fashion-flouting Lauren Marks, she of the practiced skateboard counterculture.

"Time out, girls," she cried, attempting to put a stop to our wardrobe whining. "Ya' all sound like bitches."

We turned open-mouthed but suddenly silenced to the author of this blunt, reality check of a rebuke. And once Lauren Marks had the floor, she meant to use it.

"Way I see it, is, if we go in there dressed to the nines, it makes us all look clueless and desperate," she offered, her wise words slowly sinking in.

"This is a dorm-room kegger, okay? It isn't dinner at the Four Seasons," Lauren said, continuing to lay it out. "Jeans and a tight-fitting top will do. I'm not saying dispense with all window dressing, here. But consider the venue. Dig?"

Lauren had a point. Sonya was the first to acknowledge this.

"You know, when I visited campus on my high school tour, all the girls dressed in sweats to go to class," she began. "I mean, they looked like they just rolled out of bed, some of them. Some even wore shorts right into the winter. Abercrombie and Fitch it's not."

"The slouchier the better," Lauren agreed. "But it's gotta be real. It can't looked practiced."

Lauren directed this admonition at the prim, proper and stylistically out-of-touch Chelsea Daniels, her roommate.

"I'll bet you don't even own a pair a jeans with holes in, do you?" Lauren asked her.

Chelsea averted her eyes. "No sweats, either, I'm afraid."

"Don't worry," Lauren said. "I got you covered."

Just like that, the furious, frantic wardrobe preparations had ratcheted back from our DEFCON One brink. But I wasn't so sure I favored this fashion retreat. After all, I was the original invitee. Josh Elliot had singled me out. He had requested my presence at his party. Didn't I have a duty to dress up? To play out my hand begun with our bizarre bathroom intrigue as best as I could?

I thought I did. And if the other members of The Five were going to dress down, I wasn't going to stop them. Indeed, their pre-planned homage to slouchy college student style would make me stand out all the more. Wouldn't it?

Well, that was my thinking at the time. After all, you can be part of a tight-knit group of college women, more than willing to do anything you can to help your sworn sisters when the chips are down. But that doesn't mean you cease being competitive with them. Not by a long shot.

"So what do you think?" Amanda Livingston was saying to me, her British accent ringing in the room as the others stared in my direction.

"Huh?" I mumbled. "Oh. Yeah," I recovered, nodding my head. "The last thing we want is to trot in there like a bunch of overanxious high school students fresh from a shopping trip to the mall. Right on."

In the end, I went with painted-on dark jeans, open-toe heels and a shoulder-less, extra-tight shirt with shiny beadwork. Sonya gave me a double take in her ripped jeans, retro T-shirt and flip-flops.

"Where's the prom?" she asked, returning from the bathroom.

I overdid it with my hair and makeup, as well. But when you commit, why not go all-in, I always say.

"It's not that dressy," I deadpanned, then lost confidence. "Is it?"

"Too late, now, Sister," Sonya said, smiling. "Let's do this. Let's see what college is all about."

Like a gunshot to begin a race, we exited our dorm room precisely 25 minutes after the designated arrival time of our invitation. And as Sonya and I stepped out into the dorm hallway, so too did our counterparts. Amanda Livingston, her tight, white T-shirt giving her prodigious breasts full relief, appeared at our right. And then on cue, the door to our left swung open. Out came Lauren Marks, looking ever the skate boarder, and Chelsea Daniels, clad in jeans and black top but still appearing to come from a time warp about five years in the past.

We appraised each other, allowed our dorm doors to fall shut, keyed the locks, then turned toward the source of the muffled, thumping music down at the end of the hallway. Those sounds heralded our first official college kegger. It was a rite of passage, to be sure.

"Shall we?" Sonya said, taking the lead, as was her nature.

Amanda and Lauren nodded. Chelsea gave me the once-over, then protested, "I thought we weren't dressing up?"

Sonya glanced over her shoulder.

"Can't blame our Monica," she said. "After all, she's the reason we got the invitation. If she wants to try to impress her bathroom beau, so be it."

Sonya shot me a glance, and I didn't know what to make of her fierce and determined expression at the time.

I would find out soon enough, though.

Sonya had issued a challenge. She would spot me my dark, designer jeans and sparkly top, and she would work that party for all it was worth. Her unmistakable target?

You guessed it. Josh Elliot.

What did I say about even the tightest female friends being competitive?

I was about to find out just how true that was.

Chapter 8

Sonya tried a knock on the wooden door, which thumped with music and droned with conversation on the other side. It was no use. The din on the other side of the door was too much. Sonya grabbed the knob and pushed in on the door. The rest of us jockeyed for position behind her to glimpse the scene as the door cracked open.

Sonya pushed the door open about five inches when she encountered a human blockade in the form of a towering and overweight guy with a Pabst tall boy in his hand. He took a slug of suds from the can, smiled and then shouted, "Who may I say is calling?"

In reality, with that wall of sound in full force, his question appeared more like a silent movie. The guy's lips moved but none of us really heard what he said.

"What?" Sonya shouted back.

The tall guy leaned down, then screamed in her ear.

"Who you with, Honey?" he shouted in a blast of spittle and beer breath.

The tall dude turned his head so Sonya could shout the answer.

"Josh Elliot," she began. "He invited Monica Creed. Corey Stills said the rest of us could come."

The dude lifted his florid face, which was flush with an alcoholic shine and sheened with sweat. He surveyed the faces of the rest of The Five, then broke into a wicked grin.

"You let Sneaky Stills into your dorm room?" he bellowed. "Better check your underwear drawer."

The drinking dude cracked himself up, then took another swig of suds to calm himself down. He wiped a palm on his shirt and extended the hand to Sonya.

"Name's Fish," he said.

Sonya looked at the guy's huge hand, then took it in hers and shook. The big, powerful guy was gentle with her, and she returned his smile.

"Fish?" she shouted back, cocking her head in question.

"Yeah," he boomed. "Cause I drink like one."

With that, he tipped the PBR tall boy to his mouth, opened his throat to the remaining beer and guzzled down the contents. Upon finishing, he smiled, crushing the can in his hand.

"You guys look A-Okay to me," he said. "Matter a fact, you look real good. Come on in. You need anything, you see me. Got it?"

He jabbed a thumb into the considerable flesh of his massive chest.

Sonya nodded, then looked back at us.

"Let's do this," she said.

Fish opened the door and stood aside, his bloodshot eyes walking over each of our bodies approvingly as we scooted inside the dark, dank dorm room.

A wall of sound enveloped us. So did the smell of stale beer and strong after shave, which the college men had apparently bathed in.

The common area of the two corner suite dorm rooms was jammed with people. The guys were uniformly upper classmen. Sophomores, mostly. Usually the juniors and seniors moved off campus. Upperclassmen transferring from branch campuses do wind up in the dorms. I suspected this was the case with some of the guys here. They wore their class rank proudly. But some were just as new to sprawling Old State as us colt-like freshmen women.

There were plenty of women packed in that room. I had a feeling. No. I knew that the party invitation had gone out selectively to the new coeds on campus. We were the pretty prey. And the upper classmen, who by virtue of their age could get easy access to beer and booze, would be the first sexual hunters to try to lure us into bed.

As my still-adjusting eyes roved around the crowded room, which thrummed with sexual energy and conversation, I noticed that the delicate dance had already begun. Many of the men had zeroed in on their targets. They were working their playboy playbooks to perfection: Keeping the woman's drink filled. Holding deep conversation in a dark corner. Displaying physical prowess with wild gestures, sweeps of one's hair and deep, penetrating stares. All this, while moving closer and closer, until the parts of their bodies that were touching out-numbered those that weren't.

It was a fact. Close quarters such this all but required physical contact. Just pushing into the room was like rolling through a car wash. Only instead of brushes bearing down, it was other bodies. Hands, torsos, crotches, thighs and breasts. Yours and theirs, brushing and rubbing into each other as one moved deeper into the room and others moved about among the throng.

We were right there, amid the crush of a college kegger. With Sonya leading the way, we slithered through the warm, sweaty crowd. I watched as Sonya slid between two well-muscled men, her breasts pushing into one man's chest, her ass grinding into the other's crotch, as they passed in the night. Sonya cast a knowing gaze up upon the man in front of her. He smiled down, just as knowingly. But no words were exchanged, as he held his full beer cup aloft, en route to his destination. And Sonya pressed on toward ours – the keg in the corner of the room.

We had to get our red cups of beer to become official members of this, our first, official college party.

Along the way, I rubbed up against my share of men. But I couldn't bring myself to raise my eyes to theirs, as Sonya had so boldly done. But the close contact was invigorating, even freeing, somehow. My, did college men have hard bodies. So well-muscled. Thighs like trees. Stomachs like washboards. Arms like athletes. And in between their legs, those pronounced bulges that stood out in their jeans and shorts. Well, I felt a few of those, too, as we navigated the crush of college humanity. This wasn't high school, anymore. That was for sure.

Yes, there are plenty of hunks in high school. But they aren't men. Not really. These guys were. And they made no apologies for it. They were college men living out the best times of their lives. And all the women who surrounded them at parties like this were their perks. That's just the way it was. Plenty of women accept that bargain. Hell, they welcome it. We are sexual beings, too. And it is the twenty-first century. There is no stigma for a woman being just as sexual as any man.

I told myself all this, even as I could almost see the sexual energy snapping like St. Elmo's fire between the close-knit, nearly aroused bodies in the tightly packed room. All of it fueled by alcohol, raging hormones and the heady rush of young adults' first flush of freedom.

But I didn't know if I was ready to buy into it. Not yet. I must have worn this reluctance and reservation like a Scarlet Letter, because I'm sure Josh Elliot sensed it as he approached us at the keg.

Surely, he sensed it and responded accordingly.

Boy, did he ever!

Chapter 9

We spotted him up near the keg. Josh was surrounded by three women, but he didn't seem to care. He leaned back against the wall in unpracticed perfection. His long locks falling into his eyes. Then, he would toss back his head, languidly, using a hand to brush his unruly hair back off his face. The women would watch. They would watch, and they would salivate.

Why would I ever think I'd have a chance with Josh? Why?

But as we inched up to the kegger, he noticed me. He noticed and something animated his otherwise casual, almost bored features. He pushed himself off the wall and plowed right through his admiring circle of coeds without so much as excusing himself.

He headed our way.

My way.

Josh pushed his way to the keg, where another dude was operating the tap. He wrested the black, snake-like hose from the guy, who jerked around annoyed. Then, the guy saw that it was Josh and relented, walking away with a half-filled cup.

"So you made it?" Josh said, gesturing with his free hand for my cup.

I handed it to him. Sonya watched the body language between us. All of the Five did.

I stepped forward as Josh held both the beer tap and my cup in one hand and pumped the keg with the other. His pumps were slow and sexual in a way, as the hose spouted foam, then beer into my cup.

"Thanks for the invitation," I managed, then glanced down at my filling beer cup.

"Figured I owed you one," Josh shrugged. "I didn't exactly put my best foot forward today."

"I'll say," Lauren Marks grunted from behind me. "Heard you really stunk it up in there."

Just then, Chelsea Daniels kneed her outspoken roommate, who grimaced and fell silent.

"Yeah, well," Josh allowed as he filled my cup to the brim, then lifted the frothy red cup to me. "Have a few of these, then see how sweet yours smells."

My face flared crimson. I could barely move to take the cup. Sonya elbowed me, and I came to life. I reached for the cup with both hands. Josh held his aloft.

"To college," he said. "And the many wonderful things we will come to know here."

I mimicked him, lifting my cup, then guiding it to my mouth.

I sipped at first, but Josh eyed me over his cup.

"Uh-uh," he hummed with a mouthful of beer. "Drink," he urged, then showed me how. He tilted back his head, opened his throat and chugged the entire contents of his cup. He righted his face, and his luscious lips dripped with foam.

"Go ahead," he said, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.

Everyone was looking at me then. I wished I could slip through a crack in the beer-stained floor. But I couldn't.

I tried my best, I really did. I went through the same motions Josh just exhibited. But when it came to pouring the bitter beer down my throat, it just wouldn't go. I jerked my head upright, coughing on the foam.

A line of upperclassmen holding cans of beer toward their mouths, shook their heads in unison at my pitiful drinking display. One of them said, "You can lead a freshman chick to beer, but you can't make her drink."

And then with that, the guy turned to his buddies who held the sides of the unopened cans to their mouths where small holes where cut into the cans.

"Let's show her how, boys," the guy said, as we all watched. "Shotgun on three."

The guy counted down, and then on cue, the guys pulled the tops on their canned beers, sending the flow shooting out the holes in the sides of the cans. The contents shot down each of their throats in seconds.

"Ahhh," the dude exhaled in satisfaction. "You'll learn, frosh girl. They all do. The frosh females come to the foam, sooner or later. They all do. It's mother's milk around here. Isn't it, guys?"

All the guys smiled knowingly and nodded, even Josh.

I felt stupid, so I sipped at the beer. I didn't like it any better, but I would force myself. Before I could think of a single thing to say, Sonya stepped forward.

"Wanna go again?" She jerked her head at the guy with the empty beer can.

His alcohol-animated eyes widened.

"You wanna do a shotgun?" he asked.

"If you're up for another?" Sonya dared.

"Oh, I'm up for it, all right." He turned to Josh. "You in?"

Josh raised his cup. "I'm cool. Besides, I should serve our guests." Josh gestured to the rest of the Five, who held empty cups.

Amanda Livingston, a Brit weaned on beer at an early age, thrust forward her cup. "I'm ready."

Josh took it, and set to dispensing beer from the tap. Lauren was next in line with her cup. Then, Chelsea. Even Chelsea Daniels took to the beer better than me. But she was from a place in Pennsylvania where there was nothing better to do than drink. And before her family became wealthy from their fracking rights to their land, they were rural Pennsylvania farm folk for whom Yuengling beer is one of the basic food groups.

When everyone had a beer in hand and the shotgun-prepared beer cans had been distributed to Sonya and the guys, we were ready for another toast. It was just one word, first shouted by Sonya as she carefully raised her can aloft, and then echoed by everyone:

"College!"

That one word meant change. It meant growth. It meant exploration. It meant discovery.

And it meant beer!

Sonya and the guys pulled the trigger on their shotgun beers. A fantail of foam sprayed in my face, as all the others drank their cans and cups dry. I was still sipping. Still behind. But I found if I didn't breathe through my nose, and if I tossed my head back far enough so the beer hit my throat, instead of my tongue, I could stomach it.

The rest of them were already wiping their foam-spotted mouths and extending their cups for more. But I was catching up. And soon, the alcohol would catch up with me, turning the party into a dreamy, shimmery sexual fantasy of electric bodies throwing off sparks as they gravitated closer and closer and closer. All this, as the night wore on, and the alcohol took effect and raging hormones asserted control.

But was any of it real? Or was it my beer-induced, bleary-imagination?

I remember that evening in a series of images, experiences and sensations. All of them indelible in my mind's eye.

"Hey, Elliot," Sonya shouted, jabbing an elbow good-naturedly into Josh's ribs. "You and me," she teased. "Shots."

Josh smiled at Sonya. Who wouldn't? She was drop-dead gorgeous – and adventurous, to boot. Hell, downright fearless, in fact.

Sonya Kessler was an artist who truly believed that her own body was an artistic medium and that all of her experiences would feed her art. So why not feed her experience? Why not attempt to experience it all? Everything? The whole world?

In response to her challenge, Josh reached behind the keg and retrieved an amber bottle of Jack Daniels, holding it up for Sonya to inspect.

"I suppose you don't like whiskey," he said. "Most girls don't."

Sonya stepped forward, pushing her body into his, then turning her face up to his.

"I'm not most girls," she said.

Josh smiled down.

"No," he agreed, uncapping the whiskey.

"You sure as hell aren't."

Chapter 10

I got better at drinking beer. Mark this down as my first lesson learned at good ol' State. The Coors Light on tap turned the evening into some sort of magic carpet ride across the freedoms and choices of college.

I watched as the Five scattered and worked the room. A room crowded, hot and teeming with sexual energy and a driving beat. Sonya, of course, had intrigued Josh. The drop-dead gorgeous guy with his long hair, languid movements and laid-back, even disinterested air, had invited me to this party. Originally, I was the only person of our group who was issued an invitation. But even in those early hours, I knew the Five was special. I had already forged a bond to each of my fellow members. I wouldn't hear of going to my first college kegger without them.

Did I regret this now? Did I regret it, as I watched from across the room, as Sonya playfully poked Josh's chest and employed her classic combination of smoky eyes, sassy personality and sultry sexuality to effectively erase me from the evening's equation?

I don't know. Perhaps. And maybe that's why I took better to the beer. What did they say about crying in one's beer? Drowning one's sorrows? Well, I wasn't shedding tears. But maybe I was weeping inside. Not for being wronged by Sonya, or even for being passed over by Josh. Rather, for my own role in blowing it. I must have come off as some prissy Pollyanna in my battles to gulp that first cup of bitter beer. It would turn off anyone, wouldn't it? Certainly, a guy who could have any girl in the room and who already had a head start on kicking that keg had immediately lost interest, like a beer going flat.

Now, Sonya had her hooks in. And they were mighty strong hooks, indeed. She was a player. I think I knew this the moment I laid eyes on her. But I underestimated her talents with the guys. And how.

Amanda Livingston was yet another belle of the ball that night. Blonde, beautiful and busty, why wouldn't she be? And once the guys heard the sexy ring of her British accent, it was game over. The fact that Amanda was super-smart, tart-tongued and had a desert-dry sense of humor only added to the challenge for those college guys flocking around her. Oh, and Amanda could drink, too. She could drink most guys under the table, in fact. All this made her a coveted and imported museum piece in this plain, Pennsylvania college town. The guys couldn't get enough. Hell, they were falling all over themselves just to get her another beer.

Watching her, I noticed Amanda wore this bemused look on her face. She laughed, but it wasn't with them. It was at them. These dudes didn't have a chance. What was worse, they didn't even know it. You had to admire Amanda for the way she played them for suckers and fools. It was sport for her. A form of entertainment. She was toying with them. But there was something deep to Amanda. She ran very deep. And it would take a special man to mine her heart -- and for Amanda to admit him to her secret, inner world of special sexual favor. But once inside, it would be a paradise. I had no doubt about that. None at all.

Finally, there were Lauren Marks and Chelsea Daniels. By all appearances, they were polar opposites. Lauren was definitely dressed down in her skateboarder aesthetic. And it wasn't simply her choice of clothes that seemed to hide the woman that she was, but wasn't ready to show to the world. It was her attitude, as well. Her brashness and bluntness – and to some extent, her bluster. All of it seemed designed to ward men away. But this was misreading Lauren's defense system. This was Lauren's armor. Her outward shell that protected something soft, tender and feminine on the inside. Her clothes, her attitude, her disciplined un-sexuality were designed to ward off the wrong kind of guys. But for someone. The right someone, Lauren remained an unopened flower. And when the right sunlight shone, she would bloom. And her radiance would steal one's breath.

Chelsea, meanwhile, was flush with femininity, yet, awash in innocence, if not naiveté. This made her more girlish, rather than a college woman with guile. She harbored an undeniable physical attractiveness that men surely noticed. But she lacked an underlying, knowing and manipulative sexuality that most women her age had developed, to one degree or another. All this made Chelsea seem sisterly, in a way. Not sexual.

Again, it would take a special man to unleash the woman inside Chelsea Daniels. But for now, she exhibited the kind of girlish beauty and pure innocence that made you only want to smile. She was still sugar and spice and all things nice, and part of you wanted her to stay that way. The way she had come to us from her small town up north, with her behind-the-times fashion, her wide eyes and her natural sense of endless wonder. But college was a place of learning. And Chelsea would learn, too. Only some of the lessons would be cruel. Criminal, in fact. But those were sorrows for another day.

Tonight, this night. Our first as college coeds, Chelsea was sipping at her beer, chatting with a small circle of rather nerdy guys. And along with Lauren, her protector, by her side, all was right with the world. And even with Old State.

I liked looking at my girls, each a different side of the other. And each a different side of me. I wanted to be more like all of them. But for now, I was Monica. The police chief's daughter, so prone to be careful and calculating. Trained to be observant, to read people and their intentions. Drilled by my father to anticipate, to expect, to be ready.

But ready for what?

Here I was at my first college kegger, a free and emancipated woman on all counts. And what was I doing? I was locked inside my own head. I was living life vicariously through the eyes of my newfound friends. The Five.

It was like reading a book. I was one step removed. I was there, yet invisible. I was the night's omniscient narrator. Privy to everything. But a participant in nothing.

It was the safe way to life a life. But the experience -- filtered and secondhand as it was -- wasn't really living. Still, I could not break out of this parallel existence. It was the way I was raised, I guess. And it was endlessly fascinating in the vicarious way that watching someone through a window is fascinating. The way those YouTube videos of other people's unfiltered, unedited, messy little lives can be fascinating.

But it's not living. It's not dangerous enough to be living.

It's watching life from the cheap seats, way up in the stands.

And then, a voice spoke to me amid the din of the party. At first, it didn't register, what with me lost in my thoughts and observations, as usual.

Then, it came again:

"What are you looking for?" the voice asked, faintly at first. Then, again, louder and with conviction.

"You," the voice said. The male voice.

I turned to see the bespectacled guy with wavy hair and intense eyes. He looked a little like a young, pre-Hippy John Lennon. But his rounded wire glasses were a little too much like a costume. Yet, the eyes behind them were alive with thought and intelligence. I could see this right away. And it drew me in.

I swung my face to his, our eyes locking.

"Me?" I mouthed, then raised a hand to my chest. A who, me? gesture.

"You," he repeated, not even blinking, pulling me closer in his tractor beam of a stare.

"What are you looking for?" he asked again.

It was a damn good question.

Chapter 11

"Me?" I repeated, somewhat defensively. "Looking?"

The guy nodded, smiled, then narrowed his eyes, as if scrutinizing me. It felt uncomfortable, yet thrilling at the same time.

"Everyone is," he answered.

"So what are you looking for?" I asked him, moving closer to him, there in the dark corner that became a strange place of calm amid the cacophony and chaos of the party.

He shrugged. "An end to all the bullshit, I guess."

"Bullshit?" I repeated.

He jerked his head toward the half-drunk people at the party. By then, couples, including Sonya and Josh, were in intense hookup phase. And the ones who weren't were in intense party phase -- drinking their faces off, as the practice is known.

I gazed around the room, trying to see what he was seeing. But my eyes kept stopping on Sonya as she pushed her ripe body into Josh's lanky, lean frame. His free hand – the one absent a drink -- dangled down, feeling its way around the small of her back and along the curve of her hips. Her own free hand was down at his thigh, and Sonya was slowly, sexily moving it higher and higher, toward his manhood.

Before I knew what was happening, the John Lennon dude had stepped behind me, pressing his front to my back and leaning his clean-shaven face so that his cheek nuzzled my neck, his breath warm on my shoulder.

"What do you see?" he whispered, turning his mouth toward my ear, his deep voice and hot breath sending a wonderful shiver down my spine. And with it, an unaccustomed thrill echoed down there.

"People," I answered, turning my face toward his.

"People," he repeated, his animated eyes lighting at our word play. "Doing what?"

"I don't know," I began uncertainly, then added, "having fun?"

"Fun?" he challenged, then nodded toward the party people as if we were unseen anthropologists observing a new civilization.

"Look at them," he whispered, his voice in my ear providing narration as if this were a National Geographic special, as my eyes panned the room.

"Drinking in excess to dull their senses," he continued. "Suppressing their inhibitions and insecurities. Allowing baser urges and instincts to take control. Adopting new personas outside of their own personalities. Personas that they will conveniently assign to alcohol in order to disassociate themselves from all responsibility for their actions. You call that fun?"

I looked out at the scene as described by my new, strange acquaintance. Yet all I could think was why couldn't I allow myself to be one of them? More to the point, I stared at Sonya, her hands high on Josh's upper thigh now, and his hands low on her rounded hips. And I wondered why couldn't that be me?

"It's college," I finally stated. "People are cutting loose. You can't be against freedom."

He grunted a laugh. "Freedom," he sarcastically said. "These people wouldn't know freedom if they fell over it."

My eyes were locked on Sonya and Josh. He was leaning down, his long hair shielding both their faces, but I was sure they were kissing. Kissing and rubbing and feeling each other's wonderful bodies in a blissful, unrestrained exchange of passion.

Yes, I thought. Freedom. Fucking freedom!

"They look pretty happy to me," I answered.

"Which ones?" he asked.

I shrugged.

"You made an observation," he pressed. "Obviously it's based on something."

He turned his face to me, noticed the sightline of my stare and followed it to Sonya and Josh in their erotic embrace.

"You're jealous," he said, his voice ringing with both satisfaction and recognition.

"No!" I insisted, swinging my face to his, both of us so close. The heat of my anger rising to my cheeks.

"That wasn't a tell," he smiled.

Bastard!

"You probably shouldn't play poker," he added, his self-satisfied grin widening.

I gritted my teeth and girded to hurl a sharp-witted response at this infuriating man.

But I had nothing. Zip. Nada.

I turned away from him, my angry, narrow eyes falling once again on Sonya and Josh. I didn't know who I was most mad at – my John Lennon wanna-be, my oversexed roommate or the gorgeous guy with bad bathroom habits whose invitation had landed me in this dorm room dilemma.

"So what do you see, Smart Guy?" I huffed.

He raised his face to the crowd, panned the room, then lowered his mouth to my ear once again.

"I see a roomful of mimics," he began. "They're not free. They're slaves. Slaves to what their pop culture upbringing has led them to believe college is all about."

As he spoke, my brow furrowed in thought and my eyes narrowed in renewed concentration, as I began to see the college kegger tableau before me with new insight.

"Don't you see?" he continued. "They're acting out a scene from Animal House or any one of a dozen other college movies. They are attempting to live up to the stories they've heard about college and Old State. All the myths passed down by parents and older siblings and upperclassmen friends. None of it is their own experience. No more than a mime aping human action and emotion is genuine."

My eyes roved the room. My God, I thought. Maybe this guy is right. It did look like a half-assed college movie. The claustrophobic room jammed with coeds, sexual energy and alcohol was a scene, not true sensation.

Or perhaps I was simply telling myself this since I was the detached observer of the scene, not a participant in the glorious sensation of it all.

"I don't see an ounce of free will on display," he concluded, his whispered words sinking right into my soul. Whatever he was saying seemed so important somehow, as if he were mainlining the secret truth of the universe. I felt like I should be writing it all down.

"I really don't," he continued. "They're all just going through the motions of what they think they should do, desperately trying to live up to some artificial, manufactured ideal. Most of them will go through life the same way. They'll get a degree for a job that may or may not exist in our economy. They'll meet a member of the opposite sex. Eventually, they will get married, more out of some conventional obligation and social pressure to procreate, than any real profound, deep and intrinsic connection that some call love. They'll have their two-point-whatever offspring. They'll live in the suburbs, go to soccer games and later, get divorced when all the acting and pretending finally falters and nothing – no amount of food, booze, pro sports, Hollywood movies, Disney vacations, Internet porn, prescription drugs and conspicuous consumption – can fill them up. And then, they'll collapse in on themselves like the hollow, empty vessels for broken dreams that they have been all their lives. Finally, the pantomime ends, and everything turns to shit."

What the fuck? I thought.

I had never heard anyone talk this way. Ever. But it sounded brilliant. It rang with truth. I looked out at the party and saw a bunch of scared, desperate people attempting to pull off their best approximation of what a college party should be. Because none of us really knew for sure. We were all just going by what we had seen in movies, on TV and heard from family and friends. We were all clueless, really. So everyone was just acting. Mimics.

Holy shit!

I turned to him. He studied me.

"Do you see it now?" he asked, his eyes reading my thoughts.

I stared back at him in awe, then nodded. He cracked the semblance of a smile at the corner of his mouth.

"Yes," I whispered in astonishment.

"YES!"

Chapter 12

His name was Alec Keegan. His family hailed from Boston, originally. Some of his ancestors were on the Boston police force, way back when. His father moved into corporate security and worked for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Who knew pro football was so dangerous? But Alec told me about going with his dad to the secret security booth high up in the stadium. There, high-powered cameras could focus on anyone in the crowd. And Alec would watch them, all the fans. Getting drunk. Stuffing their faces. Cheering on multi-million-dollar athletes who sold their services to the highest bidder and had very little loyalty to any one team, much less the fans in any given city.

Yet, all those Pittsburghers would pony up thousands of dollars for season tickets simply to cheer on their colored uniforms against the uniforms of other teams. Because that was the only thing that remained consistent. The players, the coaches – they were all interchangeable. Only the uniforms stayed the same. So people were rooting for laundry, but they invested so much of their little lives in it. A Steelers loss could ruin a guy's whole week. And for what? For what?

"There was a 'Seinfeld' episode about it," Alec said, as we walked the quiet campus after having left the party that night. How could we stay? We couldn't. Not after Alec, in all his wisdom, had exposed it for what it was – a sad parody and naive approximation of a party.

"Didn't see it," I said. "I like the way you talk about it better, anyway. I like the way you talk about everything."

"You're a looker, too," he said, as we walked in the cool late August night that portended the approaching fall.

The vast campus was quiet, save for the muffled sounds of music that would emanate from some of the dorms as we strolled. Half the student body had yet to arrive. I had no idea what a small city Old State would become once the semester was in full swing. On this night, it seemed like the entire, sprawling campus belonged to us.

Me and Alec.

"What are you studying?" I asked him.

"Liberal Arts," he answered. "It's the only thing that's not like training for some pathetic job that you'll hate for the next forty years. It's food for the mind. And the soul. It fosters independent thought and personal exploration. All the other stuff." He shook his head. "It's like going to a vo-tech to become an auto mechanic."

He turned to me. "What about you?"

"Undeclared," I said.

He laughed, and I felt embarrassed.

"Don't make fun of me."

"I'm not," he said. "But it's so you. And that's okay. You're still gathering information. There's nothing wrong with that. You require more input before reaching a conclusion. I'd rather that method, than jumping to a conclusion with no supporting data."

"So I'm not pathetic?" I asked, walking with my head down, fearing his answer. Fearing that he would turn his high-powered facilities for observation upon me – and find me wanting. Even worse, uninteresting.

He stopped, turned to me, taking me by both arms.

I faced him, lifting my eyes to his.

"No way," he said. "Never."

My heart pounded. I felt heat rising into my face. I didn't want to blush like a little girl right in front of him. I lowered my chin. But he reached up and lifted it, my eyes returning to his.

"I noticed you tonight," he said. "Remember that. I noticed you. Not the other way around. I was invisible. You had some secret light shining down on you. I saw you watching when I was watching. I saw you looking, seeking, searching. It pulled me to you. We're seekers, the both of us. Don't forget that."

"I won't," I said.

And meant it.

"I told you what I'm seeking," he said. "But you never answered my question."

So much had passed between us in such a short and intense period of time, I had forgotten his original question. How stupid was I?

I hoped my inner turmoil didn't show on my face. I did not want to disappoint this man.

The night breeze blew and a wisp of my hair feathered across my face. Alec reached up and used his gentle fingers to brush the hair from my eyes. We stared at each other a long moment. I felt a physical attraction to him. And I'm not just talking about his looks, either. It was like a magnetic force between us. It pulled me right in.

Before I knew it, I was leaning my face toward his. My mouth, toward his. My parted lips, toward his.

But just as we were about to kiss, Alec stopped me, holding me firmly around each bicep.

"I find you interesting," he said. "I'm flattered that you find me interesting. But if we were to kiss now, well..."

His voice trailed off.

"Well, what?" I said, annoyance and perhaps a little hurt creeping into my tone. My face felt hot. My insides were a knot of emotion. I knew my skin was blooming crimson, betraying my embarrassment at having attempted to kiss him.

"It's just that it would be us acting out a moment that nearly two decades of conventional cultural wisdom has drilled into us should happen," he said, consternation twisting his features as he tried to explain as delicately as he could.

"I mean, it would almost be a cliché," he uttered.

My eyes fell to the ground.

"Great," I grunted. "I'm a cliché."

"No," he said. "See, no."

For the first time, the oh-so-smart and analytical Alec Keegan was tongue-tied. It was a small victory, but I would take it.

"Then what?" I demanded, glancing up, my features sharp and agitated.

Alec smiled defenselessly, then threw up his hands in surrender.

"You know what? I don't know. I. Don't. Know. Isn't that great?"

His voice rang with astonishment, and I couldn't help but feed from his enthusiasm.

"Don't you see?" he said.

I shook my head, my once-kissable lips in a pout.

"By resisting that moment, now we have a chance at something truly original," he said, his hands squeezing my arms to underscore the import of our breakthrough. "That's why I don't know. It's why you don't know. No one does. It's unwritten. Yet to be invented. And it is wholly uninfluenced and uncontaminated by our predictable popular culture."

"It is?" I asked in a small voice, lifting my questioning eyes to his enlivened ones.

"Yes," he said. "It most assuredly is."

"So what do we do now?" I asked.

"Why don't we just walk and take in the night," he answered, releasing my arms, but taking my hand in his.

"A night like no other," he said, striking out into our uncharted future, and dragging me along with him.

But he didn't have to. There was nowhere I'd rather go.

Alec Keegan made each moment exciting, like never before.

Chapter 13

Maybe we didn't find he keys to the universe that night. But it was wonderful, just the same. Seeing the campus like that – like some unopened present in the pre-dawn just before Christmas morning – would stay with me for the rest of my life. It was a metaphor for beginning. For starting anew. For striking off on the journey of a lifetime. I saw the campus – and the future – more clearly in the dark of that night that I ever would in the daylight. We walked and talked for hours. But I can't for the life of me remember what about. Not after our non-kiss and the revelation it imparted to Alec. It doesn't matter now, anyway.

I had found my teacher. My mentor. My special friend.

Had I found a boyfriend? A lover? A soul mate?

Alec would laugh at such questions. They're so conventional. Small-minded. Irrelevant.

Indeed, I laugh at them now. Because what I had found was so much bigger. I had stumbled upon truth.

No bullshit, as Alec would say.

He walked me back to the dorm. We didn't kiss, of course. That would have been acting, playing out a meaningless, pre-determined scene found in every college movie under the sun.

But we did hold hands that entire night. And I never felt closer to someone of the opposite sex, outside of my own father.

There were no grand words exchanged at the moment of our parting. A simple, goodnight. And then Alec retreated into the enveloping dark. And I walked on a cloud into the dorm and down the hall to my room.

Excitement thrummed through my body. I didn't know how I would sleep as I keyed the lock and stepped quietly into the darkened room. I tip-toed and slowly shut the door, trying not to make a sound.

That's when I heard the low moans.

I turned, cat like. I saw the slight glow of a nightlight – or was it a candle – near the floor underneath Sonya's loft. I couldn't see because Sonya had draped a sheet over the loft. It hung down like a curtain, creating a private space under the loft. I noticed that she had removed her mattress from the loft's high perch. It now lay upon the floor, behind the muted glow of the shroud.

And projected on the sheet, backlit by the candle, were the silhouette images of a man and woman, he atop her. The movements of bodies intertwined played like shadow puppets on the sheet.

I froze where I stood. I felt like a Peeping Tom – both guilty and intrigued, at the same time.

It was Sonya and Josh, I was sure. Were they having sex, actual sex right in our dorm room?

I didn't know. But whatever they were doing, it was close to it. When the man rose up, his silhouette was shirtless. And when Sonya lifted herself to a reclining position on her elbows, I could see the projection of her erect nipples, as she displayed herself to him. And as she reached for him, reached down there, for him, I saw the projection of his erect manhood flash like a long, thick sword projected on a movie screen.

My breath caught in my throat. I didn't know what to do.

My mouth was cotton, so I couldn't talk. I don't know what I would say, anyway.

Instead, I remained silent, as if my life depended on it. I slowly slipped off my shoes, and tip-toed to my bed. My eyes kept glancing to the sheet, which danced with silhouette images of their silent sexual shadow show. It was all rhythmic movements, subtle moans and rustling sheets.

I sat ever so gently on my bed, trying not to make a sound. My heart stopping with every squeak from the overused springs. I lay myself flat and still, like a corpse in a coffin. And I stayed that way, staring straight up at the ceiling.

I tried not to hear, as breathing quickened and rhythms accelerated. But my eyes kept sliding to their corners to see those beautiful, interlocked bodies in shadow.

Alec would say this was yet another college cliché. Two beautiful people hooking up on the first night, after their first party. And it probably was.

But for a police chief's daughter from whom all the bad boys with sex on their minds shied away, it wasn't cliché at all.

It was breaking barriers and taboos that I wasn't ready to break. And despite myself, the buzz of sexual pleasure built down there. The thrills and excitements of the entire night, gathered at that special pleasure place that I so tried to ignore.

But the next thing I knew, my hand was there. Down there. Against everything I was taught and everything that I thought I was, my hand moved against my will. And my knowing fingers played my body like the ripe sexual organ that it was.

My release was both blissful – and mournful. But above all, urgent. Even a little violent. I stifled all sound as my body broke into tiny pieces, all tingling with pleasure, then slowly, as the waves receded, reassembled.

Afterward, I slowly surrendered to sleep, salty tears of guilt and imperfection sliding hotly into my hair as I stared straight ahead at the ceiling, wishing I was anyone but myself.

Wishing I were anywhere but here.

At college.

And all alone.

Chapter 14

The next thing I knew, mid-morning light was shining into my eyes. I opened them, then immediately regretted it. The shaft of sunlight streaking in through a gap in the dorm-room curtains nearly blinded me. Then my beer-foggy head bloomed with hangover pain, which was sharp at my temples and diffuse but definitely there everywhere else in my throbbing head.

What had I done to myself?

My alcohol-addled brain tried to replay the events of last night, but the videotape must have been jammed. Sure, I remembered the highlights: Sonya stealing Josh. Alec Keegan wowing me with his good looks and his even more interesting musings on life. And then, all those sexual silhouettes behind the sheet shrouding Sonya's loft.

I dared open my eyes again.

Through slits in my eyelids, I spied Sonya's bunk. But unless my clouded mind and my overly sensitive eyes were playing tricks, there was no sheet hanging down to shroud her bunk. There was no mattress on the floor as the setting for Sonya and Josh's sexual playground. And as I raised my eyes, holding a hand to shield the sunlight, I spied just one lump under the covers atop Sonya's loft.

It was a small, Sonya-sized lump. But I couldn't be sure. She had the covers pulled all the way over her head. I could only imagine that if my brain felt like wet cotton, how did Sonya's feel? She had started doing shots with Josh relatively early last evening. And then she went long into the night.

If college nights were full of possibilities, discoveries and experimentations, college mornings were foggy things that made one second-guess everything from the evening before. I would come to know this as an unassailable law ruling the physical universe at State. But on this first morning after, I was but a novice, not fully aware of these new laws of nature. Or should I say un-nature? Because much of what had occurred last night was unnatural.

What I wondered most was how much of it was real? And how much was my brain and body operating on beer – and the flights of fancy (sexual fancy) it can produce in the mind?

I allowed my eyes to fall shut. I wanted to retreat back into the blissful blackness of deep, dark, dreamless sleep, from which I had just awakened. But it was no good. Another after-effect of beer was pressing on my body. I had a full bladder. Would I dare another morning trip to the co-ed bathroom?

I had no choice.

Luckily, I was still dressed in my outfit from last night. Not that I looked very good as death warmed-over. But at least I needn't fumble around for clothes. This was yet-another symptom of college nights: Waking up in wrinkled clothes and reeking of bad breath and radiating blood-shot eyes. I had the trifecta, all right.

I pushed myself from the mattress. The change in elevation sent my temples to throbbing. I halted in a sitting position, my feet dangling to the uncarpeted floor. I held steady for a minute, trying to recover, then moved to a standing position. Once again, getting to my feet sent another sharp wave of pain through my sloshy brain. But at least I was upright.

I didn't even bother with a mirror. I shuffled feet toward the door, slipping on a pair of flip-flops as I went. I just prayed there would be no coed close encounters as I sneaked down the hall to pee.

I paused at the bathroom door, trying to listen. It seemed quiet enough. If I was wrecked, then maybe the entire dorm floor was obliterated and still in bed. I prayed this was the case.

I took a deep breath and pulled open the door. To the right were the shower stalls. To the left was the relief for my badly strained bladder. I entered and looked around. Just as I assumed the coast was clear, a shower curtain swept open with the fanfare of a magician unveiling a magic trick. The sound of the shower curtain rattling open caught my attention. And before I realized it, I was staring at a naked Corey Stills. The short, creepy but well-built wrestler was displaying himself in the now-open shower stall.

And when I say displaying, I mean it.

His penis hung there for the world to see. And the shock of it kept me from turning away. Where I come from – a household with no brothers -- you just aren't accustomed to seeing a penis first thing in the morning. And this wiry exhibitionist had an exceptionally large one, at that. And it appeared to be swelling larger, poking out half-erect.

Corey caught me looking. And before I could turn away, he cracked a sick sneer, making no move to cover himself. Why would he? He was clearly proud. Hell, he had probably been waiting for one of us female freshmen to come walking in, just so he could fling open the shower curtain and flash his weenie. He was that kind of dude.

Well, mission accomplished. My breath caught in my throat, and my face burned hot with embarrassment. But Corey wasn't done. He had to rub it in.

"See anything you like?" he teased, still letting it all hang out. In fact, it appeared to grow bigger. Harder. This was turning him on!

I couldn't believe it.

At least his tawdry taunt snapped me out of my shocked stare. I had no comeback for him. My mind was too numb, my tongue too tied. I simply turned, darted to a stall and barricaded myself inside.

I tried to do my business, but I developed stage fright. And I could hear creepy Corey snickering from the shower stall, as he casually towel-dried his naked body for all the world to see.

But alas, no one else entered. And with my mind occupied, my bladder released. A morning pee never felt so good. I practically sighed in ecstasy, but then Corey would think he had turned me on.

Instead, I took my small pleasure where I found it, then got the hell out of there, my eyes locked on the tile floor in order to escape any further shock shows that morning.

As it was, it was strike two as far as the bathroom was concerned. But I had yet another story to tell. And The Five was not going to believe this one!

Ewwe! Just Ewwe!

Corey Stills' schlong!

Chapter 15

Later, I'm not sure how much later, we rallied for a late breakfast in the dining hall. Chelsea Daniels took the lead in gathering up the weary, hung-over members of The Five. Chelsea had had a few beers, herself, but she remained the perky, perfect small town girl for whom everything, her whole life, came up roses. It was hard not to smile at her. As usual, Chelsea had Lauren Marks in tow. The two had become fast friends. Heck, we all had. But between them, it was something special. They were opposite sides of the same coin. Together, they just worked.

Chelsea rapped a knuckle on our door, then belted out a gentle yoo-hoo through the wood. Sonya, still a lump under the covers atop her loft, didn't so much as stir. But I did. Now, in addition to my hangover, I had hunger pangs. The call to breakfast was just what the doctor ordered. I got up and shuffled to the door, unlocking it, then zombie-walking back to my bed. I plopped down on the squeaky springs.

"Rise and shine," Chelsea sang, leading the way into our room, as Lauren, then a rough-looking Amanda Livingston, followed.

"What in the hell happened in here?" Lauren uttered, her ever-alert eyes darting around the room. She moved to inspect the unmoving mound atop Sonya's bunk. Lauren lifted the covers and peeked underneath.

"Wow, girl," she said. "You should use that color in your next painting. I do believe you're green."

Lauren chuckled at her own joke, and so did Chelsea.

But Sonya could only groan. Then, she snatched down the covers and pulled them over her pounding head.

This time Amanda gave it a go. The Brit weaned on warm beer had downed more than her share, as she toyed with the college guys like a clawed cat with a ball of string. She wowed them with her drinking prowess, but didn't give the time of day to their sexual advances. Amanda possessed an iron constitution, like Winston Churchill or somebody. No matter how much she drank, she kept her wits about her.

So her hangover advice rang with wisdom and gravitas.

"Come now, Sonya," Amanda said gently, raising a small bag of salt and vinegar potato chips to my roommate's cover-shrouded head.

"Here you go," Amanda went on. "Have a salty crisp, then let's get some good grease in you for breakfast. Do you good."

Amanda slowly lifted the covers, then held the chips at the opening. Slowly, a disembodied hand reached out and dipped into the bag. Sonya withdrew a couple of chips, then her hand retreated underneath the covers. We could hear her munching on the chips under the covers. After a few seconds, her hand reappeared for more.

Amanda smiled.

"There you go," she said. "Nothing better for a hangover than salty crisps," Amanda said in her wonderful accent. "Next, some orange juice, bacon, eggs and potatoes should fix you right up."

Sonya took another handful of chips. But when her hand reappeared, she didn't go for the bag. Instead she held it there, then uttered a single command from under the covers.

"Sunglasses," she moaned, in a deep, raspy voice.

I was running a brush through my hair and knew just what she meant. Sonya's rounded, dark and oversized sunglasses were on her desk. I retrieved them and placed them into her waiting hand. She slid them on under the covers, then slowly emerged from her cocoon.

"It's alive," Lauren joked as Sonya's pale face, behind her dark, Jackie-O shades, came into view.

Sonya didn't take the bait. Instead, she called out again, as if we were all her foot servants.

"Sweats and a T-shirt," she uttered.

I looked back at her. I could see that her eyes were closed behind her shades.

"Which ones?" I asked.

"Anything."

I brought her her clothes. She put them on underneath the sheet.

"I'm going to need help getting down," she said. "Motherfucker if this room isn't still spinning."

I looked at Amanda, and she cocked her head in acknowledgement. She had obviously been there before. I hadn't. And seeing Sonya, and even the pale, tender-voiced Amanda, convinced me to never want to go there. If only I had kept my vow.

We all helped get Sonya down from her bunk and then stood sentry around her until she was steady on her feet. Her small frame and attractive figure looked lost in the all the fabric of her loose sweats and oversized T-shirt. Part of this was because Sonya didn't want to mess around with a bra. She had gone to bed butt naked after her dalliance with Josh. And now she wanted to shuffle off to breakfast, then retreat back to her solitary perch for the rest of the day.

We walked her toward the dining hall as one might walk a frail, elderly woman. We flanked her on both sides, Amanda and Lauren on opposite sides lending their forearms, as if the dark, bespectacled coed were blind.

Sonya might as well have been. Because she sure as hell wasn't ready to see who would show up in the nearly-deserted, about-to-close dining hall at the tail-end of breakfast service.

Yes, it was Josh Elliot. And as if to bedevil me, Corey Stills was with him. I even thought I saw him wink at me. Then Corey reached down and grabbed his junk over his sweats, as if to remind me of his full-monty in the shower.

Gross!

But none of this compared to the play-by-play banter of it all. Banter about the events of last evening. Banter about Sonya sucking face (and who knew what else) with Josh. And banter about my sudden disappearance from the party and the mysterious man who accompanied me.

Banter by the Five. Banter of friends on their way to becoming an inseparable team. On our way to becoming family.

Even with hangovers throbbing and stomachs lurching the morning after our first college kegger, it was hard not to feel good being around The Five.

Being one of them.

Nothing, no one, would ever quite take their place in my life. This makes me smile. And it makes me sad, too.

You can never go back. Writing this is as close as I will come. Maybe that's why I'm doing it. Perhaps, it's why I'm telling you everything. And we haven't even come close to the full story. The whole wonderful, awful, unforgettable tale.

And how it changed all of us from who we were in that dining hall on the day after unstoppable events had been set in motion.

I can only shake my head – in awe, in regret and in wonder -- over all that would happen.

All that was coming.

Chapter 16

The coffee, maybe more than anything else, seemed to bring us all back from the dead or the semi-dead. Sonya sipped at it black. And while she kept her oversized sunglasses on in the middle of the dining hall, she joined the conversation, which swirled over last evening's events.

"You had your pick of the litter," Lauren said to Amanda, who wasn't kidding about downloading some "good grease" to absorb any remaining alcohol in her finely tuned British system.

"Litter being the operative word," Amanda scoffed after a mouthful of scrambled eggs, then another sip of steaming coffee. "Those boys are pups." She shook her head. "Not my cup of tea."

"Yeah," Lauren allowed. "But you weren't drinking tea last night, were you? Didn't all the alcohol make them look any better?"

"You mean beer goggles?" Amanda asked.

Lauren chuckled. "Yeah," she stammered. "I guess I do."

"Wait," Chelsea put in, trying to follow the conversation, despite her small town sheltering. "Beer goggles?"

Both Lauren and Amanda swung their disbelieving faces to the innocent in our midst.

"I feel like I'm in a Disney show or something," Lauren chided her best friend. "There should be a laugh track with your every line. Beer googles, girl. How guys, even dumpy guys, get better looking as the night – and he drinking – go on. They say half the population would never copulate, save for the sexually stimulating effects of alcohol."

"Oh," Chelsea allowed, her face showing that she was still processing the information. "I do notice that Daddy looks at Mom kinda funny after he's had him some Yuengling on Saturday night. Do you think that's it?"

Lauren cocked her head and rolled her eyes. "Well, do they find an excuse to scamper off early to bed?"

"Sometimes," Chelsea said, her eyes widening with realization.

"I think it's safe to say they aren't up there playing Monopoly," Lauren advised.

"But Mom's so pretty," Chelsea said, a sadness creeping into her tone. "Why would Daddy need beer goggles?"

"Alcohol has all kinds of wonderful effects," assured Amanda, taking up the sexual schooling of Chelsea Daniels. "For a lot of people, good sex is about overcoming one's inhibitions. A couple of drinks – or your Daddy's Saturday night Yuenglings – can help with that."

Chelsea considered this and seemed to accept it. "So why didn't it help you? With all those guys interested in you at the party? Some were good-looking, I thought."

Amanda took a breath and seemed to review the evening's events in her mind's eye.

"I suppose their looks were fine," she finally allowed. "But their brains, or at least their maturity levels, well? Let's just say even super-strength beer goggles weren't going to fix that. There's never been a beer goggle to improve a person's personality, I guess."

"So sophisticated, aren't you?" Sonya spoke from over her coffee cup. Her voice was flat and her face, unreadable, behind the oversized sunglasses.

"The blonde British bombshell needs someone to satisfy her mind," said Sonya, picking up steam and her voice rising sarcasm. "Isn't that special? Guess you look down on all of us bottom feeders content with sexy sophomores and jealous juniors, huh?"

Amanda's fair skin blanched crimson. She appeared taken aback.

"I'm not judging you," she said, the words catching in her throat. "I'm judging them. And myself. You want to know the truth? The hard, unvarnished truth? I grew up without my father. And I had to cross this park to get to elementary school in London. Nearly every morning, there'd be some geezer in the park flashing his Longfellow at me, see? I let it shock me. But no more. Sex is sex. And I've seen every size and shape of penis there is. But what I never had, not really, was a father figure. So if you ask me if I'm hung up on older guys? I am. At least I know why I do what I do."

Amanda narrowed her eyes at Sonya and threw it right back at her.

"But why did you come on to the guy who invited your roommate to the party?" Amanda demanded. "Why don't you tell us that one, Sonya?"

Now I was the one whose face was red. Because there it was. The question of the hour, yet unstated all morning.

Until now. Until sassy Sonya, mean and grouchy from her vicious hangover, got under Amanda's thin, British skin.

The rest of the women were quiet as mice, their eyes, big as saucers. And they were looking back and forth between me and my sunglass-shielded roommate, torn asunder by one Josh Elliot.

The British bombshell had detonated one, all right. And the shrapnel was tearing both me and my roommate apart.

Was The Five going to disband before we even began? Things were that close. It could have gone either way.

"I-I-I-" my stammer began. "I had no claim on Josh."

I managed to get out the words, sending up the white flag of surrender and extending the olive branch. All to try and head off a confrontation between me and my roommate so early in our delicate dorm-life domestic situation.

But Sonya Kessler, that gifted artist so dedicated to the truth and to bulldozing her way through the bullshit, would have none of it.

She raised her face to Amanda, then surveyed each one of the Five staring back in judgment.

"I have no claim on Josh, either," Sonya began, the steaming coffee cup just below her chin. "And I have nothing to hide. Nothing to apologize for. Nothing to explain. Haven't we evolved beyond the so-called whore-shaming? Isn't a woman allowed to be just as sexually bold as a man?"

Chelsea dropped her eyes to the table. She had grown up in a small town where such words coming out of a young woman's mouth could still get one ostracized, if not burned at the stake. But rest assured, every guy in town would have that easy girl's number. And the sleazy ones -- the guys who never got any but talked like they did -- would write the loose girl's phone number on the bathroom wall in every bar in town. Right under the heading, "For a good time, call." But they didn't know. No one did. Every encounter was a private affair born of the moment and of the unique chemistry of the two lonely, incomplete people colliding in the night. But that wasn't good enough for some women who were naked and upfront about their sexuality. It was that simple. And that complex.

I understood Sonya's point. And I held no ill will toward my roommate and would-be friend. I didn't hold any of it against her, not even bringing Josh into our room for their sexual games under the thin veil of her bed sheet, draped over her loft. If I felt guilt, it was my own.

"I'm sorry," Amanda offered. "I didn't mean to imply..."

"I know," Sonya said, sipping at her coffee. "If I had to explain last night, I really don't know that I could. But I do know this. Us meeting. Becoming friends. That is the relationship that's going to last from yesterday. Not that--" Sonya's words trailed off, then came back a whisper.

"That thing I had with Josh."

Sonya dipped her head, took another sip of coffee, then lifted her face to mine.

"I probably do you owe an apology," she said, the bloodshot eyes behind her dark sunglasses staring straight into my face, I was sure. "Not about the Josh thing. But for the situation I put you in. That had to be weird."

I knew Sonya, with her vast powers of perception, was attempting to read me. She was analyzing me for any hit of reaction. I dropped my head, then shook the very notion of her apology away.

"I really don't know why I did what I did," Sonya pressed on. "I think we were all feeling this heady rush of leaving home and being free. And then we all met, and the five of us have this chemistry because we are so different, yet we all fit together somehow. And then Monica has this great story about the gorgeous guy taking this gnarly shit in the bathroom. Then we – well, she – gets invited to his party. And then the moment we stepped into that room, with all the music and the people – college students. And we're one of them. We belong. And the beer, of course. And Josh, with his hair and the way he flips it back, off his face. And shine of the alcohol in his eyes. And the hint of boyish mischief there. All of it. It's all like this big dare, you know? Like I'm there with you all. My girls. And I have to show you how cool I am, or something. And I have to show Josh that I'm cool. And then something clicks, and I start drinking. And that's it."

"Sonya, we all said you didn't have to explain," Amanda put in.

But the backpedaling Brit was just being polite. Every one of us was rapt by Sonya's stream of consciousness soliloquy. Lauren Marks' mouth hung open, perhaps at the naked honesty Sonya had revealed. Chelsea Daniels was wide-eyed at the unabashed, unapologetic nature of Sonya's sexuality.

Me? I admired her bravery. Her certainty at being uncertain. Her self-knowledge about not knowing all the impulses and instincts that drove her, yet being fearless about following them.

"I'm not explaining," Sonya said. "Shit. I'm trying to figure things out for myself. One thing I do know. I gotta watch the drinking."

Sonya slowly shook her head, as if in disbelief. Then she lowered her face to the coffee again, as if the cup were, sip by sip, replenishing her life force.

"You know what they say about we Russians," Sonya resumed, allowing a little sarcasm and self-reproach to enter to heretofore somber, straightforward tone. "Well, maybe I have the vodka gene. Who knows? I do know this; I drank that first beer, then it was off to the races. Some of it was probably nerves."

"Nerves?" I shot back. "Sonya, you are the most fearless person I know."

She smiled wistfully.

"Hate to disappoint you, Roomie," she said. "But I have insecurities, too. A boatload. Sure, I try to paint them over with the badge of being some great artists or something. But inside, I'm a house of cards. Last night, it all came crashing down. I really showed you my ass, didn't I?"

I shook my head. "I wouldn't want anyone else for a roommate."

Just then, Chelsea looked stricken. "I think I'm gonna cry," she uttered in a trembling voice.

Lauren rolled her eyes, but couldn't help but smile at her own roommate.

"Yeah," Amanda added. "All you girls are so tight. It almost makes me wish I had someone to share the flat."

"Dorm," Lauren corrected. "It's a dorm, not a flat."

"Like I said," Amanda repeated. "I almost wish for a roomie."

"It's just so great how you two can put aside that gorgeous Josh," Chelsea said, shaking her head. "So, are you two going to date?" She stared at Sonya, her face animated with small-town innocence.

"Date?" Sonya scoffed, as if it truly surprised by the question. She grunted a chuckle.

"He has no reason to date me," Sonya added, but seemed as if she were speaking to herself now. Chiding herself, actually.

"I mean, he got my cheese last night. There's no more bait in the dating mousetrap. It must have looked like the freshman follies. All the guys say there's nothing that comes off faster than a freshman's panties at her first beer party. And in one night. Our first night, I sure proved the rule. I'm a walking, talking cliché."

"But you two look so cute together," Chelsea said, her word ringing like a young girl's mournful tune. In other words, pathetic. "You'll see," she added, injecting manufactured optimism into her tone. "He'll probably call."

Sonya frowned. "This is college in the 21st Century. Not the 1950s. And it's not some syrupy romantic comedy from the 1980s, either. There are no mornings after at State. There's college nights, where anything goes. Then, there's the cold light of day. And the sun shines down upon all those walks of shame, back from the frats, the apartments and the guy's dorm rooms. But there are no dates. The guys know they don't have to. And frankly, most girls aren't into it, either. It's just simpler this way. You go to a party. You cut loose. You meet someone. You have a few drinks. You blow off steam. And if the connection is right, you blow him, too. Then, if he's sober enough, he gets you off, too. When it's over, you go your separate ways. Life goes on. Shit happens. And you get back to why we're really here. College. Career. Becoming independent. And totally self-sufficient."

By now, all enthusiasm had drained from Chelsea's pretty face. "Not very romantic, is it?" she glumly said.

"It's not meant to be," Sonya said. "All that shit? It's manufactured by Hollywood and greeting card companies. Don't buy into it because you'll waste your life waiting for a fiction."

Chelsea bowed her head in defeat. The table was silent. The sounds of clanging dishes rang out from the kitchen, where the dining hall staff was in full clean-up mode.

I forked some now-cold eggs to my mouth, but I was no longer hungry. There was so much to think about, wasn't there? We had become so close, the five of us, in such a short time. But after Sonya's sobering speech, I felt more alone than ever.

When did self-sufficiency become such a great thing, I thought? And when did the rat race of life become so busy that there wasn't room for another person on the hamster wheel? Were we becoming a nation of naval-gazing, self-improving individuals blind to everything around us but the dim glow of our smartphones and their hypnotizing effect on our lives? Was everything virtual? Was nothing real?

No. I didn't believe that. Because Alec Keegan was real. Conventional wisdom was his enemy. Popular trends were cause to go in the opposite direction. And uncomfortable moments and troubling thoughts were to be embraced and explored, not dismissed with platitudes, hard hearts and closed minds.

I wondered how much Sonya believed of her own words. Then I got my answer.

"Speak of the devil," Lauren said, her eyes focusing across the dining hall, as Josh Elliot, Corey Stills and a couple of their other cronies from the dorm shuffled in at the very last moment.

"Or should I say, the zombie?"

Our heads turned in unison to see this grand entrance of hung-over, hound-dog college men. Yet even under these circumstances and in the harsh light of day, Josh radiated star quality. He wore shades, too, against the light of day. And his long hair hadn't been washed. Yet even in a T-shirt and sweats, and moving at a practiced pace, he was sexy. And there remained a sensual side to the languid movements of his lanky limbs.

Despite herself, Sonya radiated shock. Panic even. The breath caught in her throat. Her color faded to an even paler shade of white. Then, she hunkered down, as if trying to disappear under the table. She lowered her face and raised a hand, as if to hide.

The rest of us watched the hang-over parade. The guys went through the mechanical motions of getting their trays, then ladling on the last of the food steaming up in the serving line. But then as they turned for the seats, Josh caught sight of our table. Sonya had her back to him, but he paused, as if the sight of her was as startling and unexpected to him as his was to her.

Lauren nudged Sonya in the ribs, then whispered from the side of her mouth. "He's looking."

Sonya grinded her teeth at the show Lauren was making. But Sonya slowly turned, like the accused facing her executioner. She peered across the dining hall from behind her sunglasses. She saw Josh with his Wayfarers on.

For the briefest moment, a pulse of electricity seemed to pass between them. Then, Josh tilted his head back in mute acknowledgment, then made a path for the opposite side of the dining room. His guys followed their leader. But as Corey made the turn with his tray, he saw that I was looking his way and he reached down with his free had to his crotch and gave it a squeeze. And he shot me a sideways sneer as he did so.

I swung my head away. But it was no good. Amanda, seated to my left, had noticed the exchange.

"What in the hell was that about?" she demanded.

The faces of the rest of The Five joined Amanda in staring me down.

I raised my head, my hot face coloring.

"Don't tell me?" Lauren uttered, her face twisting with revulsion. "Creepy Corey?"

She shook her head in disbelief. "You and Creepy Corey?" she repeated, her face morphing into new levels of distaste.

Now I was the one who was shocked, the breath caught in my throat.

How could they even think such a thing!

"No!" I finally managed to exhale. "No f-ing way. Ewwe."

"So why was the wanker grabbing his weenie?" Amanda asked, in a way only she could.

I cocked my head, my face still hot and red, then turned to Amanda.

"Well, what you said about those weenie waggers in the park?" I began. "Well, Corey gave me a show from the shower this morning."

"The full monty?" Amanda asked.

"And then some," I added.

"Big?" Lauren put in, trying to sound outraged but coming off as intrigued.

I nodded. "But that wasn't all," I said.

The Five stared back at me.

"I think he was getting an erection," I added.

In unison, the girls sang out: "Ewwe. Gross."

As if on cue, we all swung our heads to the guy's table, where across the dining hall the motley crew of hung-over dorm dudes dutifully forked eggs and home fries into their mouths. It was time to refuel. The guys were recharging their bodies for countless more rounds with beer, music and coeds. Such was the winning combination at Old State. And every guy on campus felt he was entitled to his share.

That was the problem.

As we stared in judgment at the well-endowed exhibitionist, Corey Stills, Sonya eyed Josh. A few hours ago, the couple was as close as two members of the opposite sex can get. Now, they were like perfect strangers.

"Guys and their cocks," Sonya muttered, as if this explained everything.

"Let's get out of here," she added, throwing her napkin on the tray and pushing her chair back, making a god-awful screech that caused her to cringe.

But I think she wanted Josh to notice.

And he did. But Sonya wouldn't have known.

She marched out of that dining hall without ever looking back. And we followed her like so many sheep.

Because we had her back. And we always would.

Or at least, we thought so at the time.

Chapter 17

I promised I would cut to the chase – those events that would change all of our lives that freshman year. Thinking about it like this, it's more like skipping the chase and cutting to the crash -- the spectacular, end-over-end, metal crunching, gas-tank-exploding conflagration that you are positive no one walks away from.

Well, it's coming. I promise.

But first I must tell you how our lives unfolded in the early weeks of that first semester, with the summer waning, the all-important football season beginning, the parties ramping up on and off campus – and the hormones of 25,000 college students surging like the tidal rush from a hurricane.

Amanda Livingston wasn't one to give in to the baser instincts of her hormones and the sexual urgings they stirred. The British are known for their reserve, their stiff-upper lip, if you will. And while Amanda possessed sumptuous lips – and a luscious body, to boot – the cravings that drove her attraction weren't carnal. These needs were secondary to whatever daddy issues and security needs were locked deep inside the little girl who grew up with a young, single and very attractive mother.

A mother not much older than Amanda was now. A mother ill-equipped to hold that title. A mother who did possess those carnal needs that Amanda attempted to deny and suppress in herself. A young, pretty mother who got very little help in a rough part of London, where people kept to themselves and looked down their noses at single moms, no matter how attractive they were.

Unless that mother happened to be offering something. Something to the men. Men with beady eyes who populated the pubs and had only one thing on their minds. Well, two. Getting drunk was a national pastime in England, after all. But it's a quiet and more reserved kind of drunk than what we know in America. In England, alcohol is a lonely Londoner's best friend. And the local pub is a social network and a second living room. It was to this venue that Amanda's mother sought refuge from all her responsibilities, represented by the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl at home. Amanda was an unwanted gift from her mother's older lover. A man of the world, not prone to marry and one never to stay in one place very long. A man Amanda would set off after, leading her to America and all its opportunity. More opportunity than she would have ever have found in her profoundly limiting, class-conscious home country that came off like a picture-postcard to most Americans. But we knew nothing about the realities of a place – and entire society – ordered upon the station and status of one's birth.

Well, suffice it to say, Amanda lost the maternity lottery. But she had broken free from the class-conscious confinement of her home country. She had come to America. And the wide-open country with its limitless stories to tell and to photograph, were her canvas.

She wanted to be a journalist. Amanda saw it as a higher calling. A noble profession. But it was born of a lonely little girl's days on the train, riding with her judgmental, scolding mother. Amanda would turn her face to the window and see the houses with their windows lit by warm light. Sometimes, she would see the people inside. She always imagined them as happy. And she wanted to know what that was. What real happiness was. What a real family was, for that matter.

From those early days onward, her focus was outside of herself. Outside of her life. It was on other people and other places. Hers would be a journey. And there is no better way to take a journey than as a journalist. A photojournalist, where one's camera, press pass and curiosity are license to see the world – and get paid for it, too.

Or at least the profession was once.

Amanda's photojournalistic heroes were all giants of the late 1960s, 70s and 80s. Their images, always on film, were dispatched from the far corners of the globe, sometimes days after the actual events. But the image, captured in black-and-white on the pages of the newspaper or in color inside a news magazine, was so stop-you-in-your-tracks arresting, so evocative of the moment, yet able to communicate an entire story, that people didn't care. Because a perfectly captured moment in time can stand for all time. These images operated on an unconscious level, and the all the information and emotion they contained became seared into the brain, just as the shadows of the image remained forever on the mind's eye. All this, from a single, lingering look at what would become icons of the age: Vietnam. Watergate. African famine. Eastern European genocide. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The Challenger explosion. Civil wars across the globe.

You name it. There's a searing image to symbolize it. And there was a great photographer behind the lens.

It's where Amanda one day saw herself. Only, the world had changed. Or sure, the globe still teemed with news. Egypt. Syria. Afghanistan. Ukraine. But the role of the photojournalist had been usurped by the smartphone. Specifically, the ever-ready, any-idiot-can-do-it camera these devices contained.

The result has been a flood of images, all immediately tweeted or shared around the globe seconds after they were taken. In short, it marked the end of news. Because we now learned of events in real time. Why wait for a newspaper, or even a TV news cast? It was all happening right there on social media. Twitter. Facebook. Wherever one looked online.

Now had replaced he news.

Who needed photojournalists? Not when technology turned everyone with a smartphone into one. And any photographer will tell you, ninety percent of the image -- hell, maybe ninety-nine percent – was being in the right place at the right time. Only now, when news broke out, it wasn't the journalists who were there. It was the people. And they shared their images with the world, not via the Associated Press, Getty Images or any of the old-world media being put out of business by the Internet. But rather on social media, instead.

Still, a girl can dream, can't she? She can fondle her camera like a lover. She can raise it to her face and enjoy the barrier of protection it provides a shy British girl who once peered into windows from the train.

It was armor, that camera. It made Amanda bold, where she otherwise might break like a little girl who never could do right by her mother. So she would never give it up. Not her dreams. Not her camera. Not journalism, even as it lay on life-support.

So she came here, to Old State, drawn by its once-distinguished journalism school and a recent star graduate who won the Pulitzer Prize at age twenty-four by exposing a sick, child sex abuse scandal going on inside the university's vaunted football program. One incident of vile sexual assault occurred right inside the football locker room, with an ex-coach and a boy he supposedly was mentoring. But no mentoring was going on in that shower. A crime was. Crimes stretching out over decades, but swept under the rug. Until, the young female reporter, fresh from State and armed with its teachings, kept digging while working for a local rag. Digging until she had the story that would blow the lid off a once-respected coach's crimes and upend the football culture on an otherwise idyllic and utopian campus that had always been like stepping into a picture-postcard of what college should be.

Amanda came for all of these reasons.

And for him. She came for him.

One of her heroes, now a professor and associate dean.

But what do they say about the disappointment of meeting our heroes?

Chapter 18

Professor Vic Connelly came off like Hollywood's version of a slightly past-his-prime photog. That's what they called them in the business. Photogs.

He had the rough-hewn good looks of a middle-aged Robert Redford. He never seemed to comb his thick, sandy hair, but it always appeared perfect, just the same. In his khakis and denim shirts, still draped with that photographer's utility vest he'd worn in every stinking shithole and hot spot around the globe, he still looked like he could hack it in the field.

But as Amanda watched him during his captivating Journ 101 lectures, with the auditorium filled to capacity and coeds gazing dreamily up at him, she knew better. He had grown soft. Comfortable. This was kryptonite for a photog, who thirsted for the action. Those mosquito-infested, shithole hotel rooms. The bumpy rides on the back of jeeps and trucks, whose blown-out shocks and rigid suspension systems sent jolts up one's back with every pothole. The smell of decay in the killing fields. The dark, awful sight of blood in the dirt. The surprised yet lifeless eyes of the dead. And the god-awful, animal-like howls of the wounded.

No. Vic – Professor Connelly – had left all that behind. Now, he had an old, arty house in a small college town. No doubt, the place was bedecked with framed, oversized prints of all his most famous images. And he clearly had his pick of coeds cowed by his credentials, his wise, knowing words, his heady, intellectual conversations and those irrepressible wisdom wrinkles at the corners of emerald-green Irish eyes. Eyes that had seen so much. Eyes that could see what no one else could as the tableaus of war, crime and inhumanity played out before them.

Eyes that could only pretend to smile because of all they had witnessed around the world.

But Amanda could see. She saw the hint of hollowness behind them. And no number of couplings with sexually adventurous twenty-year-olds, no amount of ego-boosting lectures in front of adoring students and no portion of ponderous faculty dinners and university functions would ever fill the void.

Amanda saw all of this and more, as she watched her professor in the grand lecture hall, his whiskey-varnished voice echoing in the sound system. And she knew how she would win him over, too.

Because she wanted him and all that he knew. She wanted to be all the places he had been. And she wanted to see through his vacant, yet powerful eyes that had perceived and captured so much history over the years.

So her pursuit of this wisdom, this quest for personal knowledge through conquest, began after class on fine, fall day.

As usual, a column of coeds surrounded the professor. He was taking their questions, inspiring their minds and basking in their fawning praise that so inflated his ego. It was a nice touch that Professor Connelly had put one of his own photo books on the class's required-reading syllabus. It was a good way to juice his royalties. And because he and his introductory course were so popular, he sold a lot of books. And to cut down the number that ended up on the re-sell market, he personally autographed the books for his students – and many students who wanted his signature on the title page. All, so the books became keepsakes, rather than dispensable, returnable college texts.

Amanda had to admire him for this. Vic Connelly was playing all the angles. He was comfortable, all right. Too damn comfortable. And she knew that deep down, the photog he once had been loathed this later self. And he longed for action. For challenge. For adventure.

Amanda took a seat in the front row of the auditorium, waiting until the mutual admiration society that surrounded the professor died off. It was a long wait. There was some un-witty banter, some thinly veiled sexual advances – all from the young women, no less. And there were autographs. The professor couldn't resist. He couldn't help himself. He was a middle-aged man in a candy store of coeds. What man wouldn't take advantage? No doubt, phone numbers were exchanged. Perhaps the willing young woman would text a sexual selfie, showing all she had to offer the professor in the form of after-class extra credit.

Watching this, getting a glimpse at the substantial and motivated competition, some young women might become discouraged. Some might even retreat and surrender, believing that another woman would claim this man, this older professor on the make.

But Amanda harbored no such insecurities. Like a good journalist, she had studied her subject. And she had practiced her pitch. And as the last smitten student shuffled away from the podium, their autographed books still wet with black Sharpie ink, Amanda went for it.

She began snapping pictures, as the professor patted together his papers and shuffled them into his worn leather satchel. Instinctively, he heard the clicks of the camera's shutter, even one as quiet as the little Lycia Amanda always carried.

"Who's there?" the professor asked blindly, raising a hand against the spotlight that bore down on the podium and blacked out his audience beyond the small stage.

Amanda kept clicking off pictures. The professor, his eyes narrowed and his forehead furrowed, walked ahead to the apron of the stage. Out of the focus of the light, his eyes readjusted on Amanda. Camera to her eye, finger on the shutter button, she clicked off a few more images.

"Hey," the professor protested, raising a hand as if to shield his face. "I hate pictures."

"That's an odd thing to say," Amanda observed, her British accent echoing in the large, empty space.

"I hate pictures taken of me," he corrected.

"But you're out from behind the lens, Professor," Amanda pointed out. "You are a subject, now. An author. An intellectual. A professor of extensive accomplishment."

He dipped his head and shook it.

"I'm not interesting," he mumbled, then began turning away.

"You're right," Amanda said in a loud, clear voice, halting the professor. She lowered the camera from her eye, as he turned around.

"So I bore you?" he asked. "My lectures?"

"Yes," Amanda answered, rising from her seat. "It's canned. Rehearsed. I can tell you said the same thing a hundred times."

"Maybe you should drop the course," he advised, even as his eyes locked on Amanda as she stepped up the staircase to the stage. Her shoes clicked on the wood and echoed in the room.

Once on the same stage as the professor, she said, "Maybe you should drop the act?"

She walked across the stage to one of her photojournalist heroes, as he tried to make sense of the curious subject before him.

"You want an autograph?" he asked. But his own voice sounded meek and pathetic to him.

Amanda grunted a sarcastic laugh.

"I didn't even buy your book, Professor," she stated.

"But," he stammered. "It's required."

"I remember when your images used to be required," she said, stopping right in front of him, staring straight into his still-confused eyes. "Essential to the public. Essential to the world. Essential to humanity."

The silence was deafening as she examined him.

Under the power of her stare, he felt naked and inadequate. But why?

"Besides, I have all your images," Amanda added. "All the essential ones. The ageless, timeless icons that you give to the world."

"So what's with the camera?" He jerked his head to the Lycia dangling from her shoulder strap. "Why the pictures of me?"

"A case study," she answered, then stared at him for a long moment with those penetrating, nearly painful, eyes.

"Of what?" he asked.

"Of you," she answered, as if this were obvious. "And of what happens to a legendary photog after he hangs up the lens."

He looked down, and his face seemed to sag.

"Who the fuck would read that?" he scoffed, his voice ringing with derision and self-loathing.

"I would," she said. "I want the inside story. Not the shit you shovel in your lectures. I want to smell and taste and hear the front lines. I want how it really was. How you saw it. How you shot it and brought it back."

He stared at the wood of the stage, then shook his head.

"I can't go back there," he said. "It's another life. Hell, it seems like another person."

"That's the first truthful thing you've said all day," Amanda replied. "Because this bullshitter standing in front of me sure as hell isn't Vic Connelly. No way in hell."

He lifted his head, and for the first time, there was fire in his eye.

"Who in hell do you think--"

"There," she said, quickly raising her camera and snapping images.

"Hey," he protested, raising a hand. "I told you about that."

"That's the Connelly I know," Amanda said. "I'll soup these and bring them over."

"Over?"

"Yeah," she answered. "Tonight. Your place."

"You still use film?" he asked.

Amanda just stared back, then cocked her head in a what-do-you-think pose. Then, she turned and left.

And Vic Connelly watched her as if nailed to his spot on the stage.

By damned, he thought. I did feel it. There for a second, I actually felt something.

And then a voice in his head answered:

"Life," it said. "That's what it feels like being alive, Vic, my boy."

Chapter 19

Amanda felt more sophisticated the moment she stepped foot inside Victor Connelly's rambling, old home, just off campus. The whole place had an unkempt appearance that was studied in its interesting mess. Wooden floors were stacked with newspapers and magazines. No iPads for this ink-stained journalist. And the walls were resplendent with blown-up and framed prints of all of his images. They were his true resume. A testament to his eye for truth and his once fearless and intrepid nature to go anywhere on the globe to get The Shot.

Amanda had knocked, but instead of Vic greeting her at the door, his voice called from the kitchen. "Come in."

She turned the knob, and it was open. Jazz music was playing softly on an actual turntable, no electronically reproduced music on some digital cloud. This was vinyl, and it sounded sumptuous.

Speaking of sumptuous, the smell of garlic and shellfish wafted from the kitchen, from where Amanda could hear the clang of pots. Her heels clicked on the wooden floors as her eyes feasted upon the space. This was the lair of a real man. A man in full. Visiting a college guy's apartment would never be the same. It wouldn't come close. It was yet another reason Amanda gravitated to older men.

Her eyes wandered from image to image on the walls. What a photographer Vic had been. What an eye. What an experience. All those places. All those events, now entries in history books. But he was there. He was right fucking there!

It's where Amanda longed to be. Ached to be. But for now, being with Vic would be as close as she could get. She could soak up his experiences and see through his eyes. This excited her. It excited her more than the prospect of a physical relationship with this handsome older man. But she remained open to this, too. In the end, Amanda was open to all experience. It was the one true thing in life. Being there. Bearing witness. Engaging with the world and everyone in it. For her, this was the only way to learn, to grow, to reach her potential as a journalist and true student of the world.

But she couldn't let Vic know how wowed she was of him and his work. She had played it cool, even to the point of criticizing his current comfort and relative resignation as an over-sexed college professor. Amanda had to continue playing this hand. She had to stoke his competitive spirit and get those juices flowing once again.

She proceeded toward the kitchen. The aroma of the dinner Vic was cooking intensified. And as she stepped into the space, she found him over the stove. A pot of garlic butter simmered in a skillet, while a double-boiler of mussels steamed nearby.

Vic turned, hefting a tall wine glass of red in his hand and lifting it to his mouth. His eyes smiled at her as he peered over the glass.

"A 98 Cabernet," he said after an exhale of pure pleasure.

"Where's mine?" Amanda asked, stepping forward into the kitchen, joining him near the stove.

"You're not old enough," he said, grabbing the long loaf of bread and breaking off a chunk, then dipping it into the garlic butter. He turned and brought the bread to her lips. He toyed with it there, coating her lush lips in the fragrant oil. Then Amanda lunged out and took a bite.

The bread was fresh and flavorful. And the sauce was exquisite.

"It's brilliant," Amanda said.

"There are two kinds of people in this world," Vic began as he watched her mouth. "Those who don't like garlic, and those who can't get enough. I can't be with the former."

Amanda chewed, then spoke. "It's delicious, but who said you are with me?"

Her tone was both curt and playful. Vic considered her as he lifted the wine glass to his lips. He studied her over the brim. As he lowered it again, Amanda snatched it from his hands, bringing it to her own lips.

The professor shook his head.

"You're going to get me in trouble," he said. But if this was a warning, his tone communicated that he wasn't heeding it. Not at all. Instead, it was a foregone conclusion. Amanda Livingston had him hook, line and sinker.

"Since when is Vic Connelly afraid of trouble?" Amanda teased. Her lips were not only shiny from the oil, they were now stained a deep red from the wine.

Vic didn't answer. He simply stared at her with the wise eyes that had seen so much. Eyes that were ringed with sadness, because one cannot go back. Not even if one longs to with all his heart.

He turned back to the mussels, using a hot pad to uncover them to a whoosh of steam, then stirring them with a large wooden spoon.

"They're almost done," he said.

"Aren't they supposed to be an aphrodisiac?" Amanda teased, snugging up against him, her ample breasts pressing into his back. If Vic minded, he didn't show it. Then again, why would he mind?

"I think you mean oysters," he said, still stirring the pot.

Amanda reached for the wine bottle and filled the glass. She took another sip, then handed the glass to Vic as he replaced the lid on the pot. He took it and drank. He watched as Amanda shrugged.

"I don't know," she said. "I guess I never paid much attention to aphrodisiacs. Never needed them. For me, the mind is the greatest aphrodisiac. Don't you find that to be true?

"Depends," Vic allowed, taking another sip of wine as the boiling pot bubbled over.

"On what?" Amanda asked.

"On the mind," he said. "I have a feeling yours is like extra-strength Viagra for a man my age."

Amanda smiled, took the wine glass, drank, and then gave it back.

"Now who's being self-deprecating?" she said. "You don't need Viagra. Not in a million years, and you know it."

"Oh," he stated. "What do I need then?"

"Your work," she answered.

"As a professor?"

She shook her head.

"As a photographer," she stated. "One of the three best of his era. I want you to tell me everything."

"And what will you tell me?" he asked, already under her spell, feeding off her challenge to him as an equal.

"I'll tell you what I think," Amanda answered.

"About my work?"

She leaned her face to his. She could feel his deep, heavy breath on her skin.

"About everything," she answered. "Absolutely everything."

Chapter 20

Imperfections are a photographer's friend. They love them, because through their lens, all those things that make our faces and our bodies unique become character. In shadow or striking light, things like wrinkles, large noses and pursed lips become interesting. The photographer's lens has a field day feasting upon them.

Just don't ever turn the tables on the shy shooter behind the lens. No photographer wants those powers of perception turned upon him or her. This is why they raise the camera to their faces. It is why they peer at the world through the peephole of their lens. It is why even the longing looks of a lover can cause discomfort. And when the lover is a fellow photographer, well then his or her stare is all the more disconcerting.

What does he see? What is she looking at? Surely, my lover is seeing right through me. All my faults, flaws and pretentions. I am naked in their eyes. I am small and scared and shy. I want to shrink away. I want to run. I want to hide. I need the security blanket of my camera to protect me.

Over the course of that evening, Amanda Livingston felt all of these things. But she stayed anyway. She even relaxed. She let down her guard. She put away her camera. And she shed her clothes to stand naked before him. A professional photographer with one of the best eyes in the world. An eye that had witnessed great beauty and absorbed utter ugliness that only warlords, soldiers and medical staff usually see. And even many of them cannot handle it.

Dinner at the old, oaken table was languid. The jazz, the garlic mussels drenched in butter and olive oil, the wine, it all combined to free Amanda. She was floating. Here he was, the still handsome, if worn, Vic Connelly, feeding her morsels from his fork. Here he was pouring her glass full of wonderful red wine. Here he was staring into her ice blue eyes with his lidded orbs.

At first, she could not hold his stare. She let her eyes fall to the table, which glowed in shadow and light from the candles dripping wax between them.

He reached out with his hand, gently cupping her cheek and lifting her face to his. She raised her eyes.

"There," he said, staring back. "That's better. The only thing more exciting than seeing the truth through your lens is showing your truth – the truth inside you – to another person."

Her face felt hot in the dimly lit room. The heat of his gentle hand seemed scalding on her face. Her heart pounded. Her muscles twitched in fight or flight response. Her nervous system thrummed with excitement. The thrill of exposing one's closely guarded self to another.

This was the moment of truth for Amanda. She stared into Vic's eyes, those all-seeing eyes.

"So is this how you seduce all your students?" she asked.

Vic's serious expression never altered as he shook his head, solemnly.

"You're nothing like any of my other students," he said. "You're the real deal. I know, because I've worked with them. I've had the privilege to shoot alongside some of them."

"You don't need to flatter me," she said, blushing despite herself.

"I'm not," Vic insisted, his hand still holding her face, her soft, beautiful face.

"I haven't done a damn thing," Amanda said. "How is that the real deal?"

"It's knowing that you would do anything for the story," he said. "Those photographers I mentioned? The true greats? They put the story above their own lives. The truth was the only thing that mattered, all other considerations rescinded. So many of them are gone now because of it. But their work--"

Vic's voice broke and his words trailed off. Emotion, rare emotion, overtook his handsome features.

"Their work will stand forever," he said.

"So will yours," Amanda offered.

Vic shook his head. "My stuff is good," he allowed. "But it's not on the same level. It's not immortal."

He shrugged his head, then frowned. "Maybe that's why I'm here, instead of over in some hot zone. I never really laid it all on the line. Not really. Not the whole way. That's the cross I bear. But you."

He stared at her and she didn't flinch. She didn't look down. She held his eyes, allowing him to see. Allowing him to look right inside of her and glimpse the things that she couldn't see in herself.

"You would do it," he said, nodding with certainty, his strong jaw set. "You'd go all the way. I'm certain of that. And seeing that in you stirs something in me. Something that's been cold and still for a long time."

"What if I never get the chance?" she asked, her voice sounding small, strained and unconvinced.

"You will," he answered. "But don't think you have to travel halfway around the world for the truth. Sometimes it is closer to home. The power is seeing what no one else chooses to see. The strength is exposing what others are more comfortable ignoring. This is how another of my young protégés won the Pulitzer. She saw ungodly child sexual abuse where others saw only football gods. And she worked like hell until she exposed that ugliness, hypocrisy and hero-worship bullshit to all the world."

"You admire her?" Amanda asked.

"Hell yes," he answered. "And I beat myself up that I didn't have the strength to see what she saw, right under my nose. Goes to show how much my skills have eroded, I guess. Comfort is the enemy of good journalism. Remember that. Hell, just think of me. I'm the poster child for that particular affliction. You saw it the moment you stepped into my lecture hall. And you didn't give me an inch of slack about it, either. I never had a student do that before. And from that moment on, I never saw anyone but you. Just you. I wanted to prove myself to you, Amanda."

"You don't have to prove yourself to anyone," she answered. She was light-headed with all he was revealing to her. All his imperfections that only made him more attractive to her. But could she reciprocate?

"Maybe not," he said, reaching for the wine and taking a drink. They had been talking and his mouth was dry. Perhaps it was dry for other reasons? Perhaps he thirsted for her. The young, special student so fearless and so full of potential. If only he could go back. If only he could try again. But he couldn't. He could only reach out to this young woman who made him feel what had withered inside him these long years away from his true passion, photography.

And adventure.

"I'd like to prove it to myself, though," he said. "And I need to prove something to you."

Amanda shook her head. "No."

"Not about me," he said. "I need to prove to you something about yourself, Amanda. I need to show you something."

"What?"

"I want you to see what I see," he said. "In you. In your eyes. Your face. Hell, your whole being. The way you carry yourself. The way you hold the camera and see the world."

"How?" Amanda asked this even as she feared the answer.

"I want to shoot you," he said. "I want us to spend time together. I want you to relax and be yourself. Your true self. And I will have my Lycia. And when you least expect it, I will capture the real you. If I'm still any good, that is."

"You are, Vic," Amanda insisted. "You are good. Always were."

"Then let me try," he said.

She looked down at the table in shyness. But then something inside of her protested.

She raised her head and looked directly at him.

"Okay," she said. "But if we're going to do this, I need to come out from behind more than my camera."

She pushed back in her chair and stood beside the table in the flickering candle light. Standing just before him, she began unbuttoning her blouse. He motioned to stand and help her, but she held out a hand to halt him.

"No," she said, shaking her head and resuming her undressing.

"I want to present myself to you," Amanda offered, her voice strangely purposeful to her own ears.

"I need to."

He uttered not another word. He remained still as a statue. The only movement was his kind eyes, taking in her beauty, as Amanda shed what she showed to the world and stood naked, imperfect yet proud, in front of the all-seeing photographer.

She showed him her truth. The moment was both beautiful and powerful.

Amanda never felt stronger – or more sexual.

She stood for a long time before him. Finally, he reached for her Lycia, there on the table. He raised it to his eye, squinted through the viewfinder, then snapped pictures in the muted candlelight.

They would be beautiful images. And Amanda would see. She would see her full potential as a fearless, truth-seeking photographer in those lush, yet understated images of a heady woman about to come into her own as a journalist.

And when he lowered the camera from his face, Vic rose.

He stood before her looking down at this young woman who had somehow restored a fleeting feeling of his own youth. Then, he swept Amanda into his arms, her bare skin warm and soft to the touch. And they made love.

They made love on the sofa. On his worn-leather reading chair. In the bedroom amid a sea of white sheets. And in the shower, afterward.

The exquisite experience would change them both. But these new selves were still coming into focus.

What would Amanda do with all her new-found confidence and sense of purpose?

How would Vic harness his rekindled passion for photography and journalism?

These were open questions. And in truth, only events could answer them. Yet neither could have expected this. Nor would they have wished for such a story.

The terrible, brutal rapes would begin in less than a week. And the entire campus would fall under a curse of fear and suspicion. And it would be her story.

Amanda Livingston's story.

Chapter 21

You could divide that fall, our first at Old State, into two parts. There were the idyllic, innocent days of September and early October. These were carefree times: Sunbathing in bikinis in the quad under the Indian Summer sun, knowing that the guys high up in the dorms were looking down, some with telescopes or binoculars. Sonya, unstrapping her top to give them a show. The rest of the Five laughing, but wishing they could be so bold.

It was football games on Saturday afternoon, when the bowl that was the stadium would roar with the collective voices of one-hundred-thousand strong. And we, the heirs to a tradition, would attempt to pick up the pieces – and our school pride – following the humiliating, debilitating child sex abuse scandals involving one of our ex-coaches.

But when the game was on and our football players were laying it all on the line for us and our school, there was nothing to do but cheer. So we did. And we didn't apologize for it. This was college. This was State. And we were here for only four years, a flash of time really. But the time of our lives. And no one was going to steal that from us.

Classes opened us to myriad possibilities that lay ahead for each of our career paths. Sure, we complained about the homework, stressed over the exams and slaved over term papers, sometimes under bright desk lamps all night long. But we loved that, too. There was much to learn, and we were receiving the key to the kingdom of knowledge. It was all there for the taking. We were a band of happy thieves.

Of course, there were the guys. So many guys. But perhaps that term is too casual. These were men. Unlike high school, they were fully developed with muscles, beard stubble, or actual beards. Their voices, deep and rich. And their minds, while pre-occupied with sex, still found time to soak up the knowledge and learning we were all there for. In other words, there's a serious side to college men. We didn't always see it, but it was there. It's something a girl never glimpses in a high school boy. And damn, it's attractive. So sexy.

My man was among the most serious. Maybe, too serious.

I found Alec Keegan increasingly confounding. Sure, he was interesting to talk with, but that was all we did: Talk. Walk. Hold hands. Wander around campus. Share tables at the library or the student union. Get a bite at the pizzeria downtown.

I loved listening to his counter-culture take on nearly every issue. Alec could be counted upon for seeing another side to issues that most people wouldn't even think of, much less clearly consider and cogently analyze. It was heady, being in Alec's orbit. But it was also exhausting. And ultimately, it was unsatisfying.

Because after our talks and walks and hand-holding seemed to bring us closer than ever before, there was no follow up. We'd walk back to the dorms, and he would drop my hand, bidding an awkward goodbye.

Or when I would corner him, pressing myself against his body, wrapping my arms around his waist, he would freeze up. And even if I managed to push my face close to his, there was no heat, no chemistry, no desire.

It made me feel like shit, especially when the Five of us would gather and swap stories of our various encounters with the male species. Sonya would lead off, of course. She was painting a couple of the football players – at night in one of the art studios. The players knew they couldn't bare it all for the art, lest the university, already suffering a sex scandal with its football program, deal with another bout of bad publicity. But they could give Sonya a private show, for her private collection, to be kept under wraps until their college playing days were over.

And what artist wouldn't want to touch, to experience, her thickly muscled subjects. Her well-hung subjects, to be sure. I sometimes imaged the scene in the darkened studio. Just Sonya and a man. His shirt off. His shorts bulging in front. His muscles rippling. Her eyes crawling over every inch of his body. The two unable to resist the pull of the physical. And the passion when they finally gave in to desire and let their hands and mouths and body parts roam free and run wild.

These thoughts would set me to tingling down there. And when I was alone or in the dark of deep night, my hand would wander down there, and I would give in to these fantasies. My orgasm would shatter me into a million pieces of exquisite pleasure. Yet I would always feel the burden of guilt, along with the loneliness and embarrassment over how pathetic I really was.

Amanda Livingston remained far more circumspect about her deepening relationship with her handsome professor, Vic Connelly. Of course, having carnal relations with a student could get the teacher in trouble. There was a new era of sexual strictures at State in light of the football sex scandal. But this wasn't it. Within the cocoon of the Five, there was total trust and utmost secrecy. None of us would talk out of school, so to speak. It was just Amanda. She had that British stiff upper lip. She really didn't like talking about herself. And the prospect of revealing the details of her passions with a man were just not in her nature. But we knew anyway. We all knew. It was on her face. It was in the way she held herself. The newfound confidence and sense of sexuality she commanded and exuded. The two were having sex. There was no doubting this. And all I could think was, good for her. So what if he was older? So what if I could never imagine myself with such an older man? So what if I didn't see the attraction?

Amanda did, and she acted upon it. She saw what she wanted, and she reached out and took it. That was the lesson. My lesson.

Would I heed it? Would I have the courage to do so when the moment presented itself?

Even socially out of step Chelsea Daniels and her ever-present roommate/protector, Lauren Marks, were making the dating rounds. Mostly double dates, so Lauren could keep an eye on the innocent, small town girl. But their love interests (or, should I say, their like interests because things hadn't progressed all that far) were polar opposites. Chelsea had managed to find another just like her. A freshman from some obscure, small town in Pennsylvania (the state was full of them) who still wore the wide eyes of a fish wholly out of water. He was a preacher's son, no less. And that is the precise term he used – preacher. Not priest, not minister, not clergy. Preacher. It sounded as if he had spawned from some tent revival in the 1930s. But the rest of the Five teased Chelsea, anyway.

"You know that they say about them preacher's sons?" Sonya put in. It didn't matter that Sonya hailed from a devoutly religious family in Johnstown. Her uncle was an ordained priest in the Russian Orthodox Church. But this church wore its strictures loosely. Priests married. They served beer and liquor at all church functions, everything except the Sunday liturgy. And both marriage and funeral repasts were some of the most raucous, hard-drinking affairs this side of a Dublin pub.

"No," Chelsea said, her deer-in-the-headlight eyes as big as saucers. "What?"

"They're the wildest," Sonya said. "I mean, they grow up with the whole town thinking they are good as gold and nice as pie. But they can't wait to rebel. I mean they rock out on Metal. They get into booze at an early age. Usually, the altar wine first. But they are most twisted when it comes to sex. Most have addictions to porn, along with some weird hang-ups that involve wearing woman's underwear. And they want do it all the time. Always doggy-style. And sometimes, in the behind."

Chelsea went white as a ghost, as the rest of us tried to stifle laughter.

"Has he asked for anal, yet?" Sonya inquired, deadpan.

Chelsea's widened eyes rolled in her sockets, as if in search of an answer.

"Anal?" she squeaked in a choked, stricken voice, as if she didn't know a thing about it, yet the mere word cast terror in her tender heart.

"He starts talkin' like that, you tell me," Lauren offered. "We'll straighten his ass out, all right."

"Bet you would, too," Amanda observed, wryly.

"Damn straight," Lauren answered with pride.

"Oh, no," Chelsea exhaled, blushing. "He's not like that. Not Gordon."

"She's right," Lauren added, always sticking up for her roommate. "I mean the guy still goes home every weekend. With his pepperoni face, it looks like he's still going through puberty, too."

"Oh no," Chelsea dismissed this. "Gordon is much more mature than the guys from my high school. Much."

"That's not the benchmark you should be judging him by," Sonya said. "This is college. Old State. There are literally tens of thousands of guys within a mile radius. Men. College men. No way a virginal girl as cute as you should be settling for some pizza-faced preacher's son from the sticks."

"Easy there," Lauren said. "It's not like this is some big romance. We hang out. No biggie."

"How about your rocker dude?" Sonya pressed. "Someone said he has Kiss posters in his dorm room. Really? Kiss?" Sonya scrunched her nose, the one imperfect feature on her beguiling face.

Now Lauren was in the sexual gossip spotlight, and she didn't like it.

"Among others," she allowed. "Razar appreciates the group's irony."

"Razar?" Sonya sang. "Razar? This wanna-be hairband dude goes by Razar? Who the hell does he think he is to have just one name? Bono? Sting? Cher?"

Lauren shrugged, then rolled her eyes. "It's his thing, all right," she said. "I try to support him. His band's actually pretty good."

"Can't wait to hear 'em," Sonya said with sarcasm. "I do have to say, this is one weird group of women. We got the blonde Brit with her senior citizen prof. We have our small town girl with her equally small town perverted preacher's kid. We have our Philly chick with her wanna-be rocker. Then we have Monica, here. With who?"

All eyes turned to me.

"What's the rush?" I protested. "We've been here, what, a couple months?"

"According to that schedule, your geeky guy should get to first base by the time you're a senior," Sonya sassed.

"He's not my guy," I protested, heat rising to my face, along with my defensiveness.

"You spend enough time with the dude," she retorted. "And I'm sorry, he does not look like John Lennon."

"Before the beard and the hippie hair," I corrected. "You have to use your imagination."

"Apparently, so do you," Sonya snapped back. "If you want any kind of action, that is. You sure this guy isn't gay?"

I shook my head as I shook off the thought.

"No," I said. "He just..."

The silence was deafening. I really didn't know what the complicated Alec Keegan was, and I was growing increasingly frustrated and impatient.

"Thoughtful," I finally put in.

"Boring is more like it," Sonya said.

"We can't all have the eye of Josh Elliot," I spat back, knowing this remained a sensitive subject for Sonya.

Ever since that drunken first night when I found them behind the thin sheet draped over her dorm loft, their passions playing out like a pantomime projected by the dim light, she had tried to play it cool. But there was something there. And she would sneak off and disappear, sometimes for the entire night. She claimed to be working overtime in the studio. But I sensed it was something more. Something that neither Sonya nor Josh would admit, even to each other. No doubt there was a deep physical attraction between the two of them. The question remained, was there something more?

"Yeah, right," Sonya answered back in a voice now dripping with sarcasm. "I really have his eye. That's why he's pledging Phi Beta. So we can spend more quality time together. Sure. Tell me another one."

"Elliot is pledging a frat?" Lauren blurted. "It seems so beneath him, somehow."

"Fish is a legacy," Sonya said of one of Josh's best friends, the hard-drinking, all-night partying Zach "Fish" Jankowski, aptly nicknamed for his legendary drinking prowess. "And they're both sophomores. They want to get out of the dorms."

"And live in some second-rate frat where they treat women like shit and consider academics an afterthought," Lauren pounced. "Great move. I thought he was smarter than that. Heck, I thought with you around, he'd want more."

"Turns out, he does want more," Sonya sneered. "More partying. More women. More of his dumb, drunken buddies."

Lauren shook her head in disappointment.

"Don't shit on it too much," Sonya said. "We're all invited to the House's Homecoming party. It's supposed to be the best bash of the year, bar none."

The room was silent. No one met Sonya's eyes.

"And you're all going," she insisted, her eyes sharpening with her tone. "I need back-up here, so you are all going. Clear?"

"I-I don't know," Amanda began.

"What? You're too mature for a frat party, Livingston?" Sonya snapped. "Now that you're doing someone old enough for an AARP card?"

"It's just not my scene," Amanda answered.

"You're nineteen," Sonya shot back. "Yes it is. It's a lot more your scene than Professor Pussy Hunter's fuck pad."

Amanda's face bloomed red but she kept any anger out of her tone.

"All right," she said. "We back your play. We all back your play."

Now Sonya's face ran crimson. Despite all of her outward efforts to dispel any notion of her harboring feelings for Josh, she had revealed herself. She would not miss his first party as a full-fledged member of a frat for anything. But she wouldn't – couldn't -- go it alone, either. She needed the support of the Five. It's what friends were for, after all.

But had we known. Had any of us known, we would have stopped it. I like to think we would have stopped it, avoiding so much pain and sorrow.

Chapter 22

Once again, I had avoided discussing myself and my own screwed-up love life. It was another dodge, but it wouldn't last. They never do.

Our circle of sharing on that early Saturday evening gave way to the five of us getting ready for yet another party off campus. A friend of a friend had an apartment, and her roommate was old enough to buy beer and booze. The party itself would prove unremarkable. A mere beer blur in a haze of so many such gatherings across our college careers. The Five of us came, we saw, we sipped some beer and wine and we left – all as a group. There is strength in numbers, and together, the five of us were a small but formidable army. Nothing could defeat us.

That cool, mid-October night should have never ended. It was that perfect. Perfect weather. Perfect friends. A nice, little buzz. And walking in the small town toward our favorite pizza shop for a slice and a Coke to cap off another Saturday night was just what the doctor ordered.

Our heels clicked off the sidewalk as the whole of the campus seemed to be out on the streets. People were going and coming from the bars, which would be closing soon. They were pouring into the all-night diners, the convenience stores and our personal favorite, the Bartoli Bros. Pizza Shop.

The slices were fresh from the oven. The Italian guys working the counter and the kitchen were young and handsome, with muscled arms, mischievous grins and dark eyes that weren't shy about staring back.

I liked flirting with one of the guys there. I would look at him, and he would stare right back, his desire for me so naked and raw. It would be me who would always look away. But not tonight. Something in the air, the beer, in the night itself, spurred me on. Or maybe it was the afterthoughts from our earlier conversation about men – and my decidedly boring non-boyfriend.

Whatever it was, I felt emboldened. Plus, I was horny. Horny as hell, as a matter of fact. And as Sonya flung open the door and we fell into line near the counter, I looked around until I saw him, pulling out another piping hot pie from the oven, then slicing it up to be served.

I didn't even know his name. I thought of him as my Pizza Man. Once, Lauren caught me staring at him and him staring back. She made some snide comment. And then Sonya joked, calling him Guido, or something like that. And she teased about how he was probably dumb as a stump but hung like a horse, and I should go for it. I should get some action that my John Lennon look-alike was too cerebral to provide.

For all his smarts, Alec just couldn't see what was right in front of him. Namely, me and my needs.

That night, I kept my eyes locked on my Pizza Man. His movements were graceful – flipping the dough high in the air, using the long wooden arm to feed pies in and out of the oven and dancing around the other workers to bring fresh pies to the serving counter. He was lean and compact. Not too tall, not too short. He wore a white, sauce-stained apron over tight jeans that showed his muscular ass. The black, logo-emblazoned T-shirt hugged his pecs, and the short sleeves highlighted his biceps. But it was his face, dark and smooth and open, that drew me in. He had deep-set, smoky eyes underneath thick, dark brows and jet-black wavy hair.

And when we worked our way to the counter, he noticed me. As he brought up another steaming pie, he paused to take our order.

"What you have?" he said, his accent faint but his English less-than-stellar. He stared straight at me, even though Sonya was in front, her eyes poring over the various pies under glass. She glanced up at him and saw his stare fixed on mine. Sonya didn't like being overlooked, and she rarely ever was.

"Oh, it's you," she said, recognizing the guy from last time. He looked to be in his twenties, not much older than us. But instead of college, he was working a low-wage job. I think Sonya looked down on him for this. But I didn't. I just looked at him. I could have watched him all night long.

"You like making moon eyes at my friend, don't you?" Sonya said, trying to toy with him. "You like?"

My Pizza Man never broke his stare. He acted as if Sonya wasn't even there. It had to kill her.

"For you?" he asked me.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Dante," he said. "And you?"

"Monica."

"When the moon hits the sky like a big pizza pie..." Sonya began singing, very loudly in fact. Then, Lauren began giggling. Others in line were growing impatient. Most were buzzed to begin with, so it wasn't a long trip.

"Monica," he said, blocking out everything. "I like your name."

"Oh, God," Sonya said, then made the universal gagging symbol, sticking a finger into her open mouth. "I think I just lost my appetite. This is a bad version of Moonstruck."

"Yours too," I said.

Our stare was unbreakable. Around us, the whole pizza shop was swirling with commotion, but it was just us in that room.

"Sit with your friends," he said. "I bring it out to you."

"We didn't even order," Sonya protested.

"Something special," he said. "Specialty of the house. Sit. I bring you drinks."

"Diet," Sonya insisted.

"Sure," Dante agreed. "Anything. Sit."

Dante danced out from behind the counter and walked us to our table. He pulled out the chair for me, then pushed it in as I sat down. As I did, he leaned down and whispered in my ear.

"I'm off soon," he said. "You want, I take you home."

His deep voice and his hot breath sent shivers down my spine, along with pleasurable tingles down there.

I turned and found myself face-to-face with him. Our eyes locked and our mouths were inches apart. I felt a gravitational field between us. I had an impulse, a strong one, just to kiss him. To push my hungry lips into his thick, red mouth.

Instead, I froze. But I had my voice.

"Yes," I said. "I want."

He nodded, then smiled but only from on corner of his mouth. His mischievous grin aroused me even more. It promised much, that grin. And it nakedly exposed this man's passion for me.

In other words, it was something I had never seen on Alec Keegan's face. But seeing it now on Dante's dark, handsome features, I knew that this was what I wanted. What I wanted, what I needed, what I craved. Namely, feeling desired. Desired by a man who was unashamed to show it.

A hum began building between my legs. It felt wonderful.

"I be right back," he said, his breath hot in my face.

"Okay," I said.

And when he left, Sonya started in again.

"The waiter?" Sonya said. "You actually have a thing for the waiter?"

Her voice was loud, and even though the place was packed, I felt self-conscious.

"Shhh," I admonished. "He's going to hear you." I looked around and saw Dante putting drinks on a tray. He looked back at me and smiled.

"Who cares?" Sonya shouted even louder now. "He's a waiter. Hello! We're in college. There are like, thousands of guys around. You don't need to pick up a waiter."

Dante walked up to the table, expertly balancing the tray in one hand and placing the drinks before each of us.

"The pizza is coming," he said, smiling at me. "House special. Very good."

"I'm sure it is," Sonya said. "But I think my friend here is more interested in your pepperoni."

I wanted to die. I elbowed Sonya under the table.

"Yes," Dante said, not picking up on the American double entendre. "There is pepperoni. Very good."

"Hmm," Sonya kept going. "I don't know how good that really is. On second thought, pepperoni is kinda skinny. Not enough girth, if you know what I mean. I'm more of a sausage girl, myself. Something you can really get your mouth around. Or even better, salami. Yeah! Salami! Big fat salami!"

I wanted to slide right under the table. "Sonya," I hissed under my breath.

"Salami," Dante repeated. "Yes, I bring salami just for you. So maybe you shut up. Okay?"

And at this, the rest of the girls laughed. The dumb waiter that Sonya dissed had just given it right back to her.

I broke a smile, too. And I nervously shifted my eyes to him. I didn't want him to think I was in on making fun of him.

"I'm sorry," I said, my voice hushed, my face scarlet red.

He shook his head.

"No," he said. "I like you. I don't care about your rude friend."

Dante spoke as if Sonya weren't there. I loved that about him, because I knew Sonya hated this.

"Just get our pizza, pal," Sonya snapped. "We're hungry."

"Pizza," he repeated. "Coming right up. And fat salami just for you, right?"

We all laughed. Everyone but Sonya, who steamed and stewed. And when Dante noticed her discomfort, he laughed, too. And that set off a new round among us girls. I watched him as his handsome face morphed into a boyish, playful grin. And it made me feel good. He wore all his emotions on his sleeve, this man. I liked that about him, because I never had the strength to do the same. And we always admire in others what we lack in ourselves, don't we?

The pizza was a sumptuous feast of melty cheese, tangy sauce and a mix of meats and veggies piled high atop a wonderful crust. We ate and laughed and talked. And the night could have gone on forever, as the pulsating college campus streamed by us outside the shop window.

I tried to take in all of it. You know, soak up the moment? But as my eyes moved from the faces of my friends and wandered around the restaurant packed with college students seeking pizza to soak up some of the alcohol they'd drunk, they couldn't help returning to him. To Dante. And seemingly every time my eyes found him, working the busy counter or tending the hot oven constantly spitting out pies, he was looking back. Boldly. Unashamed. And with desire.

So when it came time to leave, and everyone threw in a few bucks onto the table, I hung back. I offered to stick around and pay, then catch up to everyone later. But Sonya called me on it. She called me on it right away. She always did.

"Someone's still hungry for Italian," Sonya snarked. The rest of the Five weren't sure how to react.

"It's late," Amanda said. "I don't know if I like the idea of you being on your own. This is how bad things happen."

"She's right," Lauren added. "You can see the waiter-dude another time."

I must have looked stricken, standing together with the money in my hand, glancing among the faces of my friends, all of which radiated concern for me. Their advice made sense, it really did. And in light of events to come, it was spot-on. But then I turned to Dante, and he was standing frozen in front of the oven, watching me. When our eyes met, he nodded, then smiled. It was the warmest, kindest smile. And my mind was made up. It turned back to the Five.

"I'll be fine," I said. "You guys go on ahead."

They all stared back at me, not saying a word. Concern poured from their eyes, but they could see in mine that my mind was made up.

"You have your mobile?" Amanda said, raising her iPhone from her pocket. I palmed my pocket for my own phone.

I nodded. "Yes."

"Keep it on and call me if you need anything," Amanda said. "I mean it. You never know who's a wanker around this place. Looks can be deceiving."

I nodded again. "I will."

And with that, I had taken my stand. I had made my decision.

For better or for worse, I was determined to explore this deep, dark college night with my own dark prince, Dante Bartoli, the attractive, muscled employee at our favorite pizza shop.

Standing there, watching my friends file out of the shop now beginning to slow down, I felt a heady mix of fear, adventure and sexual longing. But most of all, it was the tremendous excitement of knowing that anything – I mean anything – could happen next.

Chapter 23

Dante told the rest of his co-workers that he would close the place. I soon learned that he was no mere employee, either. He was the son of one of the three brothers who owned the shop, actually a small chain. It was one of three locations they had in the area. Pizza and college students amounted to a solid-gold business plan, and the Bartoli Bros. had the best pies around.

Dante had lived with his mother, who remained in the old country. His maternal grandmother was ill, and his own mother would never leave her. So he stayed, too, the man of the house, until he was 16. Then he came over. By then, the business was thriving, and there was more work than the family could possibly undertake. In short, his father needed him. So he went to work at the shop, never really finishing his high school education and with no thoughts whatever about college, even though he now lived in the biggest college town in the state.

As soon as the last of his co-workers left the restaurant at around three in the morning, Dante key-locked the door and turned out the neon signs in the window. He also extinguished the harsh fluorescents in the restaurant and instead lit a couple of candles that dripped red wax over empty Chianti bottles.

The flickering light animated his handsome features as he walked the candles toward the back of the restaurant to the table where I was sitting.

Nervous energy welled up inside me. I was all alone with this man, whom I knew little about. Yet there was excitement. So much, it was nearly excruciating.

"This way, they leave us alone," Dante said, placing the candles atop the red and white cloth covering the table.

"Who?" I asked.

"Drunks," he said. "The drunks who want to eat."

I nodded.

"I be right back," he said, walking away in the darkened restaurant with the practiced skill of one who knew every inch of this place. That's when it dawned on me. I was on his turf. He was in control. What had I signed up for?

Only I knew. And so did he. The attraction between us had been electric. Our eyes threw sparks every time they met. And the dim glow of the candlelight could not hide these facts. We were hot for each other. And I was horny. But how far was I prepared to take it? And was Dante prepared to stop, should I want him to?

He returned cupping a pair of long-stemmed glasses in one hand and an opened bottle of wine in the other. He rested the glasses on the table, then raised one to the bottle, pouring out the wine like the waiter he was. He presented it to me, smiling. I took it, holding it before me but not drinking.

"Taste," he urged.

I shook my head. "You're not serving me, Dante. Give me your glass."

He did so, and I stood to take it. Then I reached for the bottle and poured wine into his glass, then handed it to him. I rested the bottle on the table and retrieved my own glass.

Then, I faced him.

"To us," I said, staring straight into his deep, dark eyes and raising my glass.

"To us," he repeated, then gently clanked my glass with his.

We watched each other over the brims of our glasses as we drank. And then when we lowered them, with our lips painted red by the wine and our eyes smoldering with desire in the faint candle light, Dante stepped forward.

Without a word, he moved his free hand to the small of my back and pulled me into him. Our wine-wet lips met in a hot kiss, then Dante opened his mouth and explored mine with his tongue. That first kiss was all hunger and desire. And with him pressing into me, his body so firm with muscle and his package down there so pronounced and only growing bigger, I thrummed with want and tingled with arousal. All these impulses of pleasure, making their way south, down there.

Without looking, we unhanded our wine glasses on the table, freeing ourselves to explore each other's bodies with both hands.

My hands roamed up his strong, V-shaped back, then down to his tight, taught buttocks. I used both hands to squeeze him and push his awakening loins into mine.

He moved a hand up to the back of my neck, then firmly gasped my hair, tugging my head back and more deeply pressing his mouth into mine. I felt his other hand wandering down from the small of my back, over the rise of my behind, then reaching between my legs from behind.

His fingers were firm and urgent and they pressed and probed. Finally, he hiked up my skirt, which was frilly for the unseasonably mild fall night. He kneaded my ass cheeks, which were bared by my string thong.

I went from pressing his hardening loins into mine and reached a hand between us, guiding down over his rippled, washboard abs, and running it over his jeans, which bulged with the impressive outline of his hardening manhood. I rubbed and stroked it through the material, feeling the power and heat in its length and girth.

He squeezed my ass, then reached down lower, extended his fingers between my legs from behind, straining for the hot, humid and moistening zone of my privates.

His fingers wormed their way underneath the thin fabric of my thong, then flicked at my labia, so hot and juicy now. But he could not reach my pleasure button. Not from behind. But I pulsated with desire, nonetheless. And everything down there felt like a hot, cascading monsoon in some drenched, decadent rainforest.

Our mouths remained locked as I pushed back from him, reaching both hands to undo his jeans, ripping open his fly and unleashing his erection, which pulled at his tight underwear. I ripped those down, too, freeing him. I gripped his thick length, and he was molten hot in my hand. Then, I pumped him. His manhood rippled with veins and had a thick ridge at the head. But he was uncircumcised and his penis was sheathed in foreskin.

His hands moved to my front, and he lifted my skirt and ripped aside the front of my thong. Then his dexterous hands went to work on my delicate pleasure spot. It was as if he were fine-tuning the volume of my passion and pleasure until reaching an excruciating, mind-numbing eleven on the scale. My legs quivered with the electricity of our desire. I thought they would give out beneath me. I dripped with wetness, and he throbbed in my hand.

Then our mouths parted, he moved his face to my ear, his breath coming hot and fast.

"I want you," he said in a dry, husky voice.

Then, he thrust himself toward me, his meat pressing into my crotch. His hot hardness finding my molten moistness. The connection was electric. I felt my legs going weak and giving out. But I was still standing. And he was almost inside me. And I was so ready to give into him.

Then panic set in.

There was no condom, for starters. Our fully aroused privates were touching. Hell, he was already penetrating my outer area. But I was a freshman college student with her whole future ahead of her. And I saw all that being changed by a moment's unbridled passion. This moment. This moment right here. And I just couldn't allow that to happen.

So I said, "No."

I was surprised at how firm my voice sounded.

He stopped and pulled back.

"I can't do this," I said, my eyes unable to hold his.

"Not like this," I whispered to the tile floor.

"I give to you," he said.

I glanced up, unsure of what he meant.

He nodded at me, then dropped to his knees.

Before I could react, his face was pressed in between my legs. And his hungry mouth and his beautiful lips and his velvet tongue were tasting me down there. Tasting me and feasting upon me, sending shivers and whole ocean tides of pleasure rippling through my shaking body.

He did this until my pleasure built and built and built. Until it was unbearable. Excruciating. Mind-numbing

My hands tangled in his thick hair, wanting to tear him away but only pressing his face further into me. And as I reached a crescendo, my hand ripped at my own hair, then slid down my face, a finger finding my open, panting mouth.

I shattered into a million pieces until I floated above my own body. The vacant vessel that was me spasmed with pleasure, then collapsed into his arms. He held me to his body until the waves of pleasure receded, and I returned to myself.

Time was meaningless then. I have no idea how long I nestled in his arms, me sitting on his knees, as he rocked me and kissed my hair.

When I awakened, I felt wonderful and changed and, somehow, a little guilty.

I stirred, raised my head and looked up to him shyly.

"What about you?" I asked, then motioned to reach for him.

"I can put you in my mouth?" I offered, but it was a question more than a proposition. And he could read my uncertainty.

He shook his head.

"Shhhh," he exhaled. "Hush."

And he put a gentle hand on my cheek and tucked my head to his chest. And I could hear his strong, good heart beating inside him. All I could think was, this is passion. This was desire. And this was a man who could give a woman what she wanted, and nothing she didn't.

All of this was very rare in life, but most especially, at college.

Chapter 24

Dante drove me back to the dorms in one of the pizza shop's delivery cars. In the wee hours, the campus was quiet. Yet, it still moved with students trekking back from parties or from hook-ups with temporary lovers. I was now one of those people. A college coed doing her version of the walk of shame. But not really. I would not buy into those sexist judgments from an age of feminist suppression that was history now. Women weren't whores for exploring their sexuality. Especially not at college, this oasis away from the real world where we could be adults with none of the responsibilities. If you didn't live life to the fullest here, then when would you?

During the small talk after our ravaging sexual adventure, the ferocity of which had both shocked and thrilled me, Dante filled me in on his past. He was smart and drop-dead handsome. But he had absolutely no interest in college. He had a business – and his entire future -- right in front of him. One day, he knew he would own a piece of his family's pizza chain, the business passed from father to son. Just like the world used to work.

But could a woman like me be content with a man who rolled pizza dough every day, day in and day out?

The very thought was absurd and much too early in our – what was it? Could it even be called a relationship? Would I want to be seen around campus with my Pizza Man? My decidedly non-college-bound Italian stud-muffin?

I didn't know. I didn't know anything yet.

They only thing I did know was that Dante and I had shared a sexual chemistry that stopped a few seconds short of intercourse. All this, after being together all of a few minutes. I was no virgin. I had sampled a few awkward high school couplings. But nothing like this. Nothing as passionate and urgent. And certainly nothing approaching the mind-numbing pleasure of this. Not even close.

When Dante dropped down on his knees, he brought me to mine. I crumbled – literally dissembled – under the expert pleasure of his meandering tongue and hot, hungry mouth. And I didn't even return the favor. He wouldn't let me. What a man. What a lover.

He pulled the car marked with the pizza delivery sign to the curb of my East Halls residence. He shoved the transmission into park, then turned to me.

"I hope you had a good time," he said, one side of his mouth lifting into a knowing smile.

I rolled my eyes. "Yes," I said. "I definitely did. I just don't know how to thank you. Is that a weird thing to say?"

He shook his head. "No. You're polite. Not rude like your mouthy friend."

"Sonya," I put in. "She's harmless."

He waved a hand, as if shooing away the subject.

"I don't care about her," he said. "Only you. When do I see you more?"

It was a good question. I didn't know what to tell him.

My face must have appeared stricken with doubt, because Dante read something in my hesitation.

"It's late," he said. "You go, okay?"

This guy, he understood me. He just got me. I leaned over to him, wrapping my arms around his strong shoulders. I kissed him with meaning. Sure, I expressed my sexual gratitude toward him. But was I also communicating finality? Was this it for us, two star-crossed lovers separated by the town-gown borders of Old State?

I pulled back from him, catching his eyes with mine, then averting my gaze.

"Tonight was--" I shook my head. "I don't know what it was. But I wouldn't have changed a thing, Dante. Not one thing."

He nodded. "Me, too."

Then the leaned across me and pulled the latch on the door, shoving it open.

"Get some sleep, Monica," he said. "I hope to see you soon. All right?"

I nodded, grabbed his hand, and squeezed it firmly in mine. Part of me didn't want to let go. But I did.

I climbed out, turned to him, smiled one last time, then shut the door.

My heels clicked on the sidewalk, as Dante watched from the car as I walked toward the dorm. As I approached the door, reaching for my keycard to swipe in the lock, a voice called from the shadows.

"I knew it," the voice said. "You're just like all the rest."

It gave me a start, and I swung around.

I turned to see Alec Keegan, his face shrouded in shadow beneath the raised hood of his sweatshirt.

"Alec?" I exclaimed, my heart racing. "What are you doing here?"

He stepped from the bushes near the sidewalk, where he had been waiting. Waiting and watching. For me!

"What are you doing?" he asked, stepping toward me and raising an accusing finger. "That's the question of the hour, Monica. What are you doing?"

On instinct, I backed away from him, trying to play it cool.

"Going to bed," I said, fingering my keycard.

Alec sneered. "Jumping from one bed to another," he mumbled in a defeated tone. "Just like all the rest."

He shook his head in disappointment.

"I don't know what you think you know," I blurted back. "But you're wrong."

He jerked his head toward the street.

"So you're gonna tell me you're just getting a ride?" Alec said, his voice dripping with condemnation as he, literally, backed me into a corner by the door.

"What? You got hungry? For Italian?" He shook his head. "I think it was something else. Were you were hungry for something else?"

My back was pressed up against the glass door of my dorm. Alec was right in front of me now. I had nowhere to go.

That's when I heard Dante's voice, calling out as he sprinted down the sidewalk.

"Monica?" he shouted. "Are you all right?"

Immediately, Alec backed away, turning to size up the competition. And when he got a look at Dante, he turned back to me.

"This?" Alec said, his voice incredulous. "This is what you want? The Italian Stallion?"

Dante was upon us now, huffing air and exuding testosterone.

"What's going here?" Dante demanded. He looked Alec up and down, but the John Lennon look-alike wouldn't look at him.

Dante turned to me. "Are you okay? Does he bother you?"

I was so shocked, so confused, I couldn't form words.

"She's fine," Alec answered for me. "So why don't you leave us alone. Tell him, Monica. Tell him to get lost."

Dante stared at me. My eyes widened with confusion, and I didn't say anything. Alec read my consternation as his victory.

"See there, Sylvester Stallone," Alec said. "She's done with you. Your simian qualities were good for one thing and one thing only. Now that our little Monica has gotten her rocks off, she's back to living among the enlightened, not the Neanderthals. So beat it, Pizza Boy."

"Hey," Dante growled, becoming the very thing that Alec wanted – a beast. Alec wanted to provoke the beast so that I could see what Dante really was.

"You're rude, buddy!" Dante poked a finger hard into Alec's chest.

"Then do something about it," Alec dared, wanting to be the victim.

I watched this male dick-measuring contest play out like an observer, instead of the catalyst, instead of the cause. But I would not play that passive role. Not in my own life. No more!

"Stop it!" I shouted. "Both of you."

Dante turned to me. "I wanted to make sure you were okay."

I dipped my head. "Thank you. I'm fine. Alec was just going."

I turned to Alec, but he didn't move. "Leave Alec," I said. "Now."

Dante turned to him, setting his jaw and squeezing his hands into fists.

Alec sneered, then blew out air. Finally, he relented and began walking away.

"You, too, Dante," I whispered. "I appreciate what you did, but it's time to go. Just leave things alone, okay?"

He dipped his head, appearing defeated by my words. I was the only thing that could make him bow.

"Leave you alone?" he asked, staring at the ground.

I took a deep breath, then blew it out.

"I'm not saying that," I said. "I'm not saying anything, okay? It's just that I have my life here on campus--"

I hesitated, but then completed the thought. "And I really don't think you can be part of that. Do you understand?"

He lifted his eyes to mine, staring back until it was me who looked away.

Without saying another word, he turned and walked to his car.

I watched him go, so conflicted, so confused.

I whispered under my breath, "Dante." But he never heard me. And of course, I meant for him not to hear. But I couldn't wholly stop myself from crying out to him.

I watched him get in the car and start the ignition. Then I turned, swiped the card scanner, and entered the dorm.

When I pushed into my room, hoping to see Sonya so we could talk, I was let down again.

Her loft was empty, off with Josh, perhaps.

And I was alone.

Again.

Chapter 25

Sunday's slow slog to the dining hall just before breakfast's last call became a regular, weekend procession for us. It was mute parade, the five of us, clad in T-shirts, shorts or sweats, shuffling in our flip flops for coffee, OJ and eggs.

Some were hung-over. Some were dead tired. Some just weren't ready to face a day of homework. It usually took the first cup of strong coffee to get the conversation going. But as we walked to the dining hall and Amanda thumbed her iPhone, something halted her in her tracks.

"Oh dear," she exclaimed in her British manner.

That stopped us. We turned, and Lauren spoke. "What is it?"

"A student," Amanda said, her eyes still scanning the Web page on her smartphone. "A young woman. A freshman, like us. She was assaulted. Sexually assaulted. Last night. On campus."

"Raped?" Lauren clarified.

Amanda raised her widened eyes to ours. "It doesn't say, but I'm guessing so. You know the legalese the university police use, trying to make it sound as good as possible. Apparently, the poor thing was beaten, too."

"Motherfucker," Lauren whispered under her breath. "Don't these college dudes get enough pussy?"

"It's not about that," Sonya corrected. "It's an act of violence. Always. Rape is violence against women and everything we stand for. And if this woman was beaten as well, this is rage. Real rage."

Then I heard my own voice, dry and frightened in my throat.

"When?" I managed. "Does it say when it happened?"

Amanda lowered her eyes back to the smartphone screen.

"Sometime after 3 a.m.," she said.

That sent shivers down my spine. Because I knew an angry someone whom I had set lose upon the campus.

Alec Keegan.

The immediate leap in my logic shocked me. I didn't know why my mind had made such a connection. A connection between the wee-hours campus attack and angry, impotent Alec Keegan. But once it had, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I couldn't stop seeing Alec's enraged, judgmental face, made all the more ominous in the shadows. And I couldn't stop hearing his put downs of me. Saying that I was just like all the others.

All the other whores, was what he meant. Wasn't it?

The chill of it sent goose bumps down my spine.

After Amanda's bombshell about the coed who was sexually attacked on our campus, there wasn't much spirit among us Five to chat about our Saturday night. This was good, because I didn't know what to make of mine.

I had shared a heightened moment of unquestioned passion, excruciating excitement and newfound intimacy with Dante. Yet, we were the classic star-crossed couple caught on two different sides of the tracks. He was what us State students derisively referred to as a Townie. A local yokel whose life and livelihood were tied the college town through which we students passed en route to challenging careers in far-flung cities that would yield both personal and professional success.

At least that was what we students all believed. In that light, getting involved with a Townie just wouldn't do. Not in the judgmental eyes of most college students, it would not. The question remained, was I one of those judgmental Old State snobs?

Then, there was the far more troubling matter of Alec Keegan. He was the polar opposite of Dante. He had the all the college cred, the intellectual chops and the pensive, John Lennon good looks. But I had yet to feel any real passion from him. Sure, our conversations were heady, and he could make my mind swim with his rapid-fire observations on life, society and the whole cruel joke of college in a country where opportunity was sinking, not rising. But I wanted him to slow down, stop talking and simply look at me. See me. Deal with me!

Then, last night, I got my wish. But it was nothing like I'd imagined. Alec's passion poured out in the form of contempt. Contempt for me for being caught with Dante, whom Alec considered beneath both him and me. Alec's interest took the form of some bizarre, late-night stalking around my dorm hall, even though we had had no official plans together. And his passion took the form of rising anger -- dare I even say hate? -- as he condemned both me and Dante. Then, he stalked off into the dark college night, rejected, defeated and impotent.

Word of the attack on that same night, occurring in the wee hours when Alec and all his impotent rage had been unleashed upon the campus because of me, only added to my swirl of confusion, guilt and shame.

What if I had done something to push Alec over the edge? What if I were the cause of his anger, condemnation and judgment that he then took out on another woman? An unsuspecting college freshman woman just like me, who in Alec's eyes became my proxy and the convenient target for his rage? All of it -- his anger, these events -- unleashed by me and my actions?

Why did I even think such things? How could I even possibly think that scholarly, intellectual Alec could somehow be involved in a brutal sexual assault?

Maybe, because I had peered into his eyes. Perhaps, because I had felt the heat of his anger.

And maybe, just maybe, Alec had something to prove – to the world, but most of all to, himself and to me. Namely, that he was far from impotent.

I shuddered to even think it. But I thought it just the same. Obsessing as I sat numbly, not even tasting my breakfast.

Only thinking and imagining the worst.

Worrying like never before.

Chapter 26

One of us wasn't paralyzed by word of the sexual attack on campus. Amanda Livingston became empowered.

Within the text of that barebones digital report on her smartphone, Amanda had found her calling, her cause, her story. And right there at breakfast, she vowed to tell the story and uncover the truth about this and all the sexual assaults on campus. How the toxic mix of alcohol, testosterone and our sexually-charged culture combined to turn our leafy campus into a sexual assault free-fire zone.

With her camera and her journalism, Amanda would tell the stories of the heretofore faceless victims. All those college coeds taken advantage of when the words "no" or "stop" just weren't good enough for the college guys operating on alcohol, testosterone and a license to stick their dick in anything that moved. All the woman's protestations to the contrary, be damned.

Amanda would issue a clarion call for all those who suffered in silence to be silent no more. She would stand and speak for the sexual assault victims, whether it be date rape or a cold-blooded, anonymous attack.

Who were these women behind the stories of campus rape? College women whose only crime had been walking along our small town's seemingly safe streets or on the leafy sidewalks of Old State, itself. And then from the shadows comes a figure. A powerful hand clenched over a woman's mouth. Leverage, strength and weight advantages render her powerless. But his sexual organ is the real bludgeon. A battering ram. It transforms the woman's body into a vision of her attacker's hate. And he desecrates, befouls and batters her as surely as if he had used a baseball bat.

"By damned," I'm doing it!" Amanda declared, our eyes lifting to hers.

But where our faces still bore the shock of the sexual assault news, Amanda's was clear, confident and full of purpose.

"I'll go down to the college newspaper and talk to the editor," she said, thinking out loud.

"And Vic -- I mean, Professor Connelly -- he can advise me on the images," she raced. "The trick is going to be showing the injury – the physical and psychological scars of sexual assault -- without revealing the victims' identity."

Amanda's eyes wandered far away, attempting to glimpse the photojournalism that would strike the balance of putting a face on campus sexual assault without violating the privacy rights of victims. She nodded, seeing it, sensing the possibilities.

"It can be done," Amanda assured herself. "I'll frame the women within the larger context of the attack."

Amanda's eyes widened, as her visual, journalistic mind took the final leap.

"It's the campus," she said, returning to the hushed dining hall and searching our faces for acknowledgement. "Don't you see?" Her enlivened eyes seared into ours.

"It's us," she continued. "All women. All female students. We're the victims, too. The weapon is fear. It's sexual subjugation. It's physical dominance and submission. It's male entitlement mentality. But above all, it is the thought, the insidious thought, that we – any one of us – could be next."

Amanda nodded in agreement with herself.

"But it will be the victims and their own strength that will reclaim our campus for us," she concluded. "The light of their stories and the illumination of their images captured on the very spot where their attacks took place amid our idyllic campus. These things, this bravery, will beat back the dark of the crimes against us all."

We were all silent then. None of us dared to speak, lest Amanda had more. No one wanted to interrupt her torrent of thought and her plan of action.

Then, finally, Sonya, exhaled.

"Jesus, Amanda," she said in a whisper. "That's brilliant. Fucking brilliant. I want in."

She stared up at our British friend. But before Amanda could answer, Lauren piped up.

"I do, too," she added. "I want to help."

"Me, too," Chelsea chimed in. "Whatever I can do to take back our campus." She nodded, looking around the table. "I'll do it."

Finally, they turned to me. I stared back.

I thought of my father, then. The police chief who had raised a cautious girl who knew how to keep herself safe. But on this, he would want me to go all in. To lead. And to make our college safe for all. For if one woman could be hurt here, it wasn't safe for any of us.

I nodded back.

"This shit ends with us," I said. "No more. Our bodies are our own. And no means no."

"Fuckin' eh," Sonya said, clapping my shoulder.

In that moment, The Five had sworn a blood oath against sexual assault. But crime, hate and depravity aren't halted by mere words. If only.

None of us was prepared for what was coming.

Nor, how close it would hit home.

Chapter 27

That first fall at Old State was the best of times and the worst of times, to quote a cliché. That first attack was just the beginning. Unfortunately, there would be more. Soon, coeds were walking in tight groups, peering over their shoulders. The trees shedding their leaves struck skeletal poses in the night that seemed so sinister now, as if their knurled limbs were reaching out to grab us. And in the rustles of dead leaves, we heard the footsteps of would-be attackers around every twist and turn of the sidewalks crisscrossing our sprawling campus.

The place where we flocked to flower into adulthood – a once nurturing place of safety and learning, along with plenty of fun, friends and abandon -- had grown cold and uninviting. Only the closest of male friends could be trusted. Others were cast with a suspicious eye. Some women became afraid to be alone with anyone they didn't know well and trust completely. Alas, alcohol, always the alcohol, would be the great equalizer in this. Even in these troubled times – perhaps, most especially in such times – we students still sought it out. We craved release and relief from worry. The rapes made us want and need this all the more. So we partied on amid our fear. And a self-fulfilling prophecy would come to pass.

Namely, there would always be a target for the attacker who had no conscience. An unlucky woman need only forget herself and her where-abouts for one unfortunate moment, and another crime statistic would be notched in the books. And more fear, worry and foreboding would be heaped upon our campus, sinking deeply and unsettlingly into all of our hearts.

Sure, police were crawling everywhere. Their presence was a comfort. But in a strange way, it also elevated the rapist in stature. As days turned into weeks, and one attack turned into four, the unknown subject's ability to elude capture turned him into a mythic creature of horror. He became every young woman's ugly, evil, deflowering boogeyman. And soon, very soon, there was the inevitable talk of a serial rapist at work.

Against this fearful and oppressive backdrop, we fought back, each in our own way.

Amanda Livingston led the feminist cause at the college newspaper. Her writings were just beginning to shake loose the first stories of victims. They reached out anonymously from pseudonymous email accounts with their stories. But Amanda was clashing with her new editor, the whip-smart but totally infuriating Brandon Jacobs. The fighting would intensify as Amanda pushed harder and harder for her story.

But the sparks between the pair of hard-bitten, completely committed pair of college journalists held the potential for more. For between Amanda and Jacobs, there was grudging respect, for sure. Professional admiration would come in time. But was there also an undeniable attraction? Perhaps, even the beginnings of romance on those long nights in the newsroom when Amanda and Brandon would be the only two left at their desks?

Only time – and the college rape story – would tell.

Overall, and over all of us, a dread had descended in that late fall. I had gotten calls and lectures from my law enforcement father. He needn't have bothered. We were all being careful, to the point of paranoia.

But this was still college. And Homecoming Weekend was upon us. All the tension and fear only increased our need to blow off steam. The venue for this would be the legendary party of Phi Beta. Sonya insisted that all of us be there. Of course, she had her eye on just one person, the frat's newest member, Josh Elliot.

The late October air had turned cold as we walked in a group toward Frat Row. The Five of us were as tight as ever, even if Amanda really didn't want to go. A frat party just didn't live up to her higher-brow British sensibilities. And the frat frivolity would lure her away from her professor-lover, her newspaper editor-tormentor and the rape story that had consumed her. But Amanda was a friend and a member of the Five, first and foremost. She would not have missed this.

None of it would.

And it would prove to be the worst decision of our college careers.

Chapter 28

The music blared from half a block away. The beer flowed as soon as we entered the old, cavernous frat house at the end of Frat Row. The party had been raging for a couple of hours. We opted to arrive casually late. And from the look of the wild-eyed crowd thrashing on the dance floor – or the amorous couples clutched in shadowy corners or already headed upstairs toward the brothers' bedrooms – we had some catching up to do.

Gaining entry was no problem. Sonya was on the list, of course. But the guy at the door, drink in hand, didn't even bother to check. His bloodshot eyes were glued to Sonya, then meandered admiringly to Amanda, then me, then Chelsea. Lauren Marks didn't receive the same admiring looks we had, but she received a pass inside, just the same. Because if Lauren and her skater aesthetic wasn't the door guy's cup of tea, there was always another brother who would find her attractive -- or at least, "doable" -- for the night. Above all, that was our passport to this drinking party, despite our age. We were college women. And women would always be welcome at frat parties. Indeed, we were one of two ingredients these decadent Greek gatherings could not do without. The other being alcohol.

Sonya snaked through the gyrating crowd toward the bar. Beer was dispensed in red Solo cups. Shots were given out in little, clear plastic Dixie cups. And there were Jell-O shots in small paper cups that one could squish into one's mouth. It was alcohol in all its forms, and the frat brothers couldn't wait to supply it to us women. Because with enough alcohol, some time, a little music and a couple of dances, most college women would be ripe for the picking.

This was what the party was all about at its core. An elaborate event to get the house brothers and their friends laid. In short, sex. It's why almost any woman was welcome, but each and every guy was scrutinized like this was the CIA before gaining admittance.

Sonya got the beers and passed them around to the rest of us. Her eyes swept the room, looking for Josh. She didn't spot him.

She turned back to us, shouting, "Here's to Homecoming." She raised her cup. We all followed suit.

"Hell, here's to us," Lauren shouted.

"To staying safe," Amanda added.

"To having fun," Chelsea chimed in.

Their eyes settled on me. All the best toasts were taken, yet I could feel the excitement welling up inside me. Yes, we had all needed this. And what we needed could be boiled down to one thing:

"To college nights," I said, and everyone smiled.

"What happens after last call is nobody's business," Sonya sang out, just before we all drank.

And from then on, the beer and alcohol flowed in a steady stream. The music took over. Our bodies moved to the beat. And the crowd swept us up with its heat, its rhythmic movements and all its disembodied body parts touching us, grinding us, groping us.

All was fair on the dance floor, because on the floor all those moving bodies became one thing. One hot and bothered living thing. No words were necessary. A guy need only come up to you, and if he looked good, the next thing one knew, the two of you were bumping and grinding, breathing and sweating, touching and kissing.

And when one's sexual arousal mixed just right with the alcohol, hormones and adrenaline, well anything was possible. Anything could happen. And the bedrooms were right upstairs.

In short order, I became lost in the crowd. And then, with the beat and the beer setting me free, I became lost to myself. Isn't that why we do this? To forget ourselves, if only for the moment?

I felt as if I were floating. My body wasn't my own. It belonged to the crowd now. And the other bodies belonged to me. Those bodies, blending with mine. Hands roving over me. All I could hear was the music. The beat. That driving beat. The same rhythm as sex.

The lights were dim. And the DJ sprayed all manner of psychedelic special effects onto the crowd. These lighting effects pulsated with the beat, at once blindingly bright, then in the next instant, nearly pitch black.

In these fiery flashes, the crowd seemed not to be real, but rather photographic images of a crowd. In the flashes of bright light, I'd see faces, poses and bodies intertwined. Then, blackness would fall again. And the next time the light flashed, the crowd and everyone in it had changed, striking a different pose in the next still image captured by the light.

I let myself go. I leaned into the crowd, and it supported me. I moved through it like an autumn leaf in the current. As it swept me up, I saw flashes of The Five: Sonya grinding on Josh. Josh grinding right back, their faces hot and sweaty and red. Their mouths open for breath. Their bodies, electric. The sight of it turned me on. They were a perfect pair, and I wanted to be with both of them. Both of them, together. In fantasies, I wanted to join their love-making. I wanted to re-write the script of that first night. And in this movie of the mind's eye, I was no longer shut out by the sheet draped over Sonya's loft. Instead, the two sexual beings stirred and smiled knowingly at me when I entered the dark dorm room, lit by a single candle. And when the flickering light caught their eyes, there was desire there. Desire for me. And Sonya, her breasts exposed, and Josh, his thickening member so heavy between his legs, would wave me to come. To join them. To frolic on their sexual playground, where anything could happen and nothing was taboo.

"Just fuck her!" I yelled out, as I watched Josh and Sonya from across the dance floor.

No one heard me amid the music. Or if they did, nobody cared. So I shouted again.

"Fuck her good," I screamed. "Then fuck me, too!"

The music swallowed my voice, as it swallowed everything else. But declaring my desire so openly was both thrilling and empowering. And it stirred me down there like never before.

Next, I glimpsed Amanda. She was sandwiched between two frat guys who thought they could score. Dream on, I thought. As if Amanda would ever give into their fantasy. Not a chance. Sure, she might enjoy the drinking and the dancing, even the bodies touching. But a look of bemusement never left her fine British features. This was all a form of mild amusement for Amanda, right down to the frat guys who thought they had a chance of bedding the big-breasted Brit as some porno tag team. Yeah right. The joke was on them. Amanda was in total control.

The pretty Chelsea was attracting her share of attention, too. And why not? She was drop-dead gorgeous. And we had successfully updated her style to the point of seduction. Clearly, it was working. Guys surrounded her, and Chelsea seemed exultant as the center of their sexual worship. I saw one of the guys clutching a handful of whiskey shots as Chelsea reached for one. But I didn't think any more about it. In fact, I didn't know if I was capable of actual thought.

In these moments, images and sensations were simply washing over me.

Finally, I saw Lauren. She wasn't homely, just a little boyish. Perhaps, she didn't understand her own sexuality. Or maybe she understood and it frightened her. Either way, she had attracted a man, too. And he was auditioning for her as she remained reserved, only grudgingly moving to the music while the guy put it all out there. The last real image I remember is of Lauren cracking a shy smile. She liked it, too.

Later, I don't know how much later, the disembodied hands and lingering brushes with other moving bodies morphed into a singular organism embracing me for its own. I felt strong hands and practiced leverage taking control of me. This entity had the skills of a wrestler. I was the one being pinned. Being subdued. Being taken down.

Next, I felt a groin pressing into mine. I could feel his pronounced package, not simply a bulge, but something more. Something angry and hard. He trust into my body, pressing his hardness through our clothes, as his strong arms pulled me tighter and tighter.

As I awoke from my waking dream, his mouth was on mine. His breath was sour with beer and alcohol and perhaps traces of earlier vomit.

I opened my eyes wide and saw his eyes staring back at me, so close. Once I realized what was happening – that this wasn't a dream or an entity, but a man -- I pushed him away with all my strength. But it was no good. He was stronger.

This is how women get attacked. How they fall victim. How they get raped!

I tried to scream, to cry out. But his mouth covered mine. And when I opened mine against his, he thrust his tongue literally down by throat. The bile in his mouth and on his breath nearly made me throw up.

I twisted and squirmed against him. But all around me was a moving wall of oblivious dancers. We might as well have been in a private room, for all anyone noticed.

I just remember thinking how crazy it was that this was happening. Right here. On a dance floor. Amid a room full of college-educated people who were all but oblivious to a sexual attack going on right next to them.

But one person did notice.

I should have known it would be him.

Chapter 29

One moment, I found myself in the unbreakable clutches of creepy Cory Stills. The short-statured but powerfully built wrestler was employing all his strength and all his skill to immobilize and subdue me, right in the middle of the fraternity's swarmed but oblivious dance floor.

The blaring music drowned out my screams. And Corey's wily wrestling moves thwarted my attempt to extricate myself. I couldn't even kick him in the balls. He had wrapped me up like an octopus would, and he was jamming his hardening crotch into me, poking and probing through our clothes. It was the same phallus he had so proudly exposed to me that day in the shower, hoping to shock me with its size and length. Hoping to excite me with its veined and hardening sexual power.

But it only repulsed me.

Now, creepy Corey was exacting his revenge. This time, he would not be denied. This time, he would make me deal with both him and his penis on their terms. He was the kind of man who would take whatever he wanted, the woman be damned.

And he had me all right. One of his arms was locked across the small of my back, pulling me into him, even as he thrust his angry loins into me. The other hand was locked at my neck, pressing my face to his. Holding my mouth to his, as he fed me his tongue so I couldn't scream.

Worse still, my burst of strength was all but gone. My fight was over. My limbs were going limp. I couldn't get enough air, not with his mouth covering mine and his face pressing up against my nose. I felt myself giving over to him. If he wanted to, he could reach under my skirt and rip my panties aside. He could have his way. I could not stop him.

This was how easily assaults occurred. And sometimes they happened in obvious, public places. And the knowledge, the sheer realization of it, stunned me. Because I was about to become a victim. A statistic. Another faceless woman whose brutalization was reduced to a police report and a terse news account, where legal euphemisms sanitized the violent deconstruction and brutalization of a human being.

But just when all hope seemed lost and I retreated inside myself for a measure of protection against the dehumanization that I could not prevent, suddenly – miraculously – Corey Stills released me. Not only did he release me, Corey seemed to all but disappear from before me. It was almost as if he had vanished.

Was it magic? Was it my guardian angel? Was it some hallucination brought on by the alcohol?

I would soon learn that it was none of these things, although the idea of a guardian angel would come the closest to describing what occurred – and how I was saved.

I've spent many a long night considering the odds. On one hand, I ask myself, what were the chances? On the other, I attempt to convince myself that it was just one of those things. A coincidence? Without doubt. But not an occurrence wholly out of the question.

Because what goes better with frat parties, beer and scores of hard-partying college students?

You got it. Pizza.

So it was that Dante Bartoli just happened to be delivering a mega-order of some fifteen pies to Phi Beta. It was a crazy, hectic night. Because with Homecoming weekend comes plenty of house parties. And this means pizza. The delivery business was off the hook. All this had placed Dante Bartoli inside the Phi Beta frat party at the precise moment I needed him most.

The fraternity's order required three trips to his car. The thermal delivery boxes that kept the pies piping hot held only five pies at time. Dante had to carry each all the way to the bar. Doing so, he hoisted the heavy delivery box high overhead, then navigated his way through the mass of dancers. He did this grudgingly. On one hand, it was a busy night, and Dante had many more miles to go before it was over. On the other, he knew the frat was a good tipper and a steady source of business for his family's pizza shop. So he lugged in the delivery boxes, one by one, and unloaded them at the bar.

It was on his final trip, as the DJ lights flashed and the beat thundered the dance floor, that Dante saw me. Or at least he glimpsed part of me, as much as he could, given that Corey Stills had his ferret face locked with mine. But Dante was an acute observer. His eyes roamed wherever he went. Did he like looking at pretty college women? Sure, who could blame him? Just like he watched me on all my visits to his pizza shop before we finally spoke.

This time, I caught Dante's eye but in a different way. It wasn't my beauty, but my distress. My distress at the hands of Corey Stills.

Dante Bartoli, being of the old world, would have helped any women in my situation. But I do believe he knew it was me he was saving. Even from across the room, amid all those dancers and crazy lights. He had watched me so long, my profile, the curve of my neck, the slope of my shoulders. Something imprinted on his mind made the connection. Whatever it was, there is not a day that goes by that I do not thank the fates that he was there that night. And that this good and watchful man had found me, amid the dance floor, at the worst moment in my life.

Upon seeing the wanton nakedness of Corey Stills' violence and dominance over me, Dante reacted. Instantly, he dumped the pizza delivery box from high over his head, sending it crashing to the floor. The Velcro flap that formed the door flew open, spilling the pizza boxes onto the dance floor. The boxes scattered like a deck of cards. Soon, unknowing dancers were stomping on them, mashing them down, even slipping on the still-hot cheese, sauce and dough.

But Dante was long gone from the growing scene of commotion surrounding the scattered pizza boxes. He moved with speed and authority toward me, toward us – my attacker and myself. When necessary, Dante pushed buzzed, bleary-eyed and unsteady dancers out of his way, until he came upon us.

Stills had his back to my approaching defender. He never saw what hit him.

Dante lay both hands down hard upon creepy Corey's shoulders, then heaved him away from me in one fluid, swift and devastating motion.

I felt Corey's grip give away, but I didn't know what was happening. Neither did Corey. As soon as Dante had ripped Corey off me, the wrestler swung around in annoyance, his narrowed eyes searching for the source of the interference.

Dante held me, asking if I was okay. Corey saw this and lunged at him. I screamed and Dante turned, just in time.

Dante loosed his cocked fist, landing a direct shot to Corey's mouth, breaking his lips against his teeth and sending him careening into oblivious dancers, then to the grimy, beer-soaked floor.

Corey was picking himself up to his knees when Dante stepped forward, raising a leg that took Corey in the stomach. His back lurched up, then he fell flat to the floor again.

Maybe he puked, the sharp kick to the gut unleashing the sour beer and whiskey in his stomach. When he gathered himself again, I saw Corey's face in a flash of light from the DJ booth. His mouth was red and leaking blood. His expression, dazed, his vacant eyes, bewildered. Still, those beady, porcine eyes radiated hate. Hate, vengeance and violence.

Corey zeroed in again. But Dante was ready. He allowed Corey to get to his feet. Then, he immediately moved in, cocking a fist and swinging before Corey could react.

This time, Corey danced away from the blow, then charged at Dante low, trying to turn the boxing bout into a wrestling match.

A growing number of dancers were becoming aware of the fight. A circle formed around the combatants. Soon, the dancing ceased and the dance of violence between Dante and Corey Stills took center stage.

Corey had both arms wrapped around Dante's waist and he was trying to bring him down. But Dante was agile, and he had good balance. He let Corey ride him, but he wouldn't permit the wrestler to bring him down. Instead, Dante balled his fist and pounded away at Corey's midsection, hitting him with upper-cut after upper-cut.

By now, the crowd was cheering. The D.J., aware that something was amiss, cut the music and brought up the house lights.

One guy shouted, "Hey, it's the pizza dude. He's fighting at our party, man!"

The door man signaled to a couple of other frat brothers, and they muscled their way through the crowd. Corey was still holding on, trying to twist Dante down. But the smaller wrestler was taking a beating. Dante was pounding him to the ribs. And he kept on pounding until the two frat guys burst from the crowd and grasped Dante from either side, pulling him off. Corey let go then. He raised from his crouch and wiped blood from his mouth, then looked at Dante with menace.

With the two frat guys holding his arms, Dante was vulnerable. And Corey finally saw his chance for revenge. Without a word, he walked forward, then unloaded an uppercut to Dante's liver, doubling him over in pain.

Corey was going to take advantage now, but I wouldn't let him. I pushed my way into the circle, raised my cell phone, and shouted at the top of my lungs, "Stop it."

Corey did, if only for the moment.

Holding the cell phone aloft, I said, "Leave him alone or I call the cops -- right now."

Corey's eyes darted to the phone in my hand. So did the eyes of the frat brothers, who instantly recognized the threat.

Someone from the crowd yelled, "Narc! That's so uncool."

But I didn't care. I pointed an accusing finger at Corey.

"He was attacking me," I said. Then I swung my finger to Dante. "He got him off me, okay. It's over. I just want to go, and he's going with me."

By now, the rest of Five had seen what was going on. Amanda and Lauren were pushing their way toward me.

Amanda got to me first, asking "Are you okay? Did this wanker hurt you?"

I shook my head. "I'm all right," I managed between gulps of air.

Lauren walked up to the bloodied Corey Stills, looked him up and down, then said, "Asshole."

She walked back to me. "Let's get out of here," she said.

I nodded at the idea. But before we left, I walked to Dante, looked into his dark, kind eyes, and said, "Thank you." Then I leaned in and kissed him on the mouth.

"Come with us so there's no more trouble," I said in a low voice so others wouldn't hear.

He nodded.

I walked to the crowd, near where the two frat brothers were. They parted to let me pass.

Just then, Sonya pressed her way past the crowd. She looked me up and down, then her eyes moved to Corey Stills, then finally, to Dante.

"What the hell?" she uttered.

"We're leaving," I said. There was no room for argument.

Sonya nodded, then looked back at Josh, who was getting a briefing from his fellow frat brothers. In just one glance, Sonya condemned the party to her would-be boyfriend, making it crystal clear that she was on our side.

We moved to go. It was Lauren who halted us.

"Chelsea?" she cried out. "Where's Chelsea?"

It was a damn good question.

Our eyes surveyed the room, but she wasn't there.

"Chelsea," Lauren cried out, panic infiltrating her voice.

There was no answer. None at all.

This wasn't good. It wasn't good at all.

But none of us knew just how bad it would be.

Chapter 30

Lauren appeared stricken. Stricken and panicked.

She had always taken it upon herself to watch over Chelsea Daniels, our naively innocent fish out of water from small-town, USA. But even Lauren, who hailed from a family of law enforcement officers just as I did, had become caught up in the beer, the beat and the frat brothers of the fraternity party. We all were guilty of this.

Aching to cut loose and have a little fun, the Five had gone our separate ways at the party. In doing so, we forfeited our strength in numbers. I had nearly fallen victim to an attack. And if such a close call could happen to the daughter of a police chief, what malice might have befallen our wide-eyed, innocent Chelsea?

I didn't want to think about it. But I could tell that Lauren couldn't stop herself from contemplating the very worst.

She dashed over to Josh Elliot. He was the closest thing we had to a friend in the frat. Lauren went right up to him, grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled his reddened face down to her level.

"If anything happened to her," she seethed.

Josh, who had been drinking, looked dumbfounded.

"Where is she?" Lauren pressed, her face an inch from his.

He shrugged half-heartedly. Even Sonya looked disappointed in her man.

That's when I walked up to my man. Was he my man? He was certainly my hero of the moment.

"You have to help us," I pleaded to Dante. "Our friend is missing."

Dante's eyes lifted from mine and found the steps leading up to the brothers' bedrooms. He nodded his head in that direction. I followed his stare.

"There," he said.

I looked back at him and nodded. And then Dante led the way.

He pushed his way through the crowd. And I followed, calling to the Five.

"Let's go," I shouted.

Frat brothers watched open-mouthed as Dante took the stairs, two at a time. We were not permitted in the living quarters. Only brothers and their guests. But Dante didn't care, and neither did we.

"Hey," someone called out. "You can't go up there!"

But the protest was feeble. And none of the brothers was in a position to stop us. Dante led the charge up the steps, and we followed – me, Sonya, Amanda and Lauren.

Dante brushed passed a bleary-eyed brother making his way down the steps. He did a double-take at the pizza guy in his uniform shirt making an unannounced house call to the living quarters of the frat. But the frat guy was too shocked or too drunk to stop him – or us. We paraded right past him.

By the time I hit the landing, Dante was already kicking open the bedroom doors. He didn't know who we were looking for, so he needed me there for the IDs. He waved for me and I joined his side. And one by one, I stuck my face into the kicked-open doors, only to see men and women in various states of undress and sexual activity. In most cases, it was one guy and one girl. Usually, they stared up, dumb-founded at us. Sometimes, they scrambled for covers to hide their naked or partially naked bodies. Some were in the middle of doing it, or close to it. And there were plenty of eye-popping erections and swinging boobs to be seen. Lots of white asses, too.

But no Chelsea.

Not all were couples. In a few of the rooms, there were various threesomes. Sometimes, two guys and a girl. Sometimes, one guy and two girls. We were witness to the wild side of the frat house after-party. The drinking, dancing and public groping that went on downstairs were merely the preliminaries. This, these closed-door, X-rated bedroom scenes, were what this party was all about.

Yet, in all the sexual practices that we glimpsed as Dante kicked in door-after-door in search of Chelsea Daniels, at least it appeared consensual. From the sublime to the ridiculous, at least both parties (and in some cases, three) consented to their unusual sexual practices.

So were we overreacting? Was it any of our business if Chelsea had found someone to enjoy some privacy with – and a little of the sexual liberation that came along with college?

Sure it was possible. Small town, sheltered girls liked sex, too. And when they are first liberated from their small worlds and circumscribed existences, sometimes they can't wait to experience all that college has to offer. Most notably, the men.

But this didn't sound like our Chelsea. And if anyone knew this, it was Lauren, who looked terrified, as she caught up to Dante and me.

Lauren screamed out Chelsea's name over and over. Each and every time Dante barged in on another amorous, undressed couple.

And then we found her.

Oh God, did we.

We had made our way down the long hall. And by then, the frat brothers were fast on our heels, ready to throw us the hell out of there.

Just then, a door swung open under the force of Dante's kick. And the stench of vomit hit us in the face.

We saw a partially naked figure on her knees deep in the shadows of the room. And in that moment, everything changed.

There she was. Our pretty, small town girl, having been stripped of all dignity -- and who knew what else?

Chelsea had managed to pull on her panties. But she couldn't seem to figure out how to strap on her bra. Her other clothes were scattered on the filthy floor, near where a puddle of her own puke fouled the room.

A soiled, king-sized mattress lay on the floor. It sheets were wrinkled and yellowed. But no one else was there. Just Chelsea, naked, save for her girly panties. She was down on all fours, crawling to collect her clothes. Begging to gather up what was left of her dignity.

I nearly threw up myself as we entered the room. There was the stench, sure. But it also was the shattering sight of Chelsea and what had been done to her.

My reaction was nothing compared to Lauren's. She shot into the room and fell to her knees, taking Chelsea into her arms.

"Oh, what did they do?" she cried, her eyes squeezing shut and tears seeping through. "What did the bastards do to you?"

I saw Chelsea's blank expression, peering over Lauren's shoulder. She was either bombed out of her mind, or she had been drugged. Because Chelsea didn't know what had happened.

Dante stayed by the door, dropping his head, shaking it in sorrow.

I walked in, haltingly. So did Amanda and Sonya. We stood in a small circle around Lauren and Chelsea, both still on their knees on the floor. By now, we were all weeping.

Sonya began picking up Chelsea's clothes. Amanda reached down for something else. She stood, holding a Barack Obama mask in her hand. Amanda held it up for us to see.

"What in the hell?" Amanda whispered, bewildered as she inspected the mask.

Just then, a couple of the frat guys tried pushing into the room. Dante moved to block the door.

"Get the fuck out of the way," one of them barked.

Dante held firm, and then Josh Elliot called them off.

"Take it easy, all right?" Josh pleaded.

"This is your problem," one of the angry frat brothers spat at Josh. "You brought them here. You deal with it."

Sonya turned and caught Josh's eye. They locked stares, then Sonya shook her head and glanced to the floor.

"What is it?" Josh called. But Sonya didn't answer. No one did. Not for a long while.

Lauren was helping Chelsea get dressed. She wasn't weeping anymore, but tears were streaming down her face. Amanda handed her Chelsea's blouse, and Lauren buttoned it up, as a mother might for a little girl.

Sonya turned to Amanda.

"Shouldn't we call the cops?" Sonya whispered. "I mean, this is fucked up."

Amanda bit her lip. "I don't know. Chelsea's really out of it. I mean, if she's drunk, she's not much good as a witness, is she?"

I turned and looked between them both.

"What if she was drugged?" I asked. "And what about that mask?"

Neither Sonya nor Amanda had an answer. We looked back to Chelsea. Lauren was getting her up now. Sonya bent down to hold her skirt, so Chelsea could step into it.

As she did, Amanda looked at our friend. But the vacant, distant eyes that radiated from Chelsea's blank face where not those of the wide-eyed girl we knew.

"What happened?" Amanda asked. "Did someone hurt you? Should we call the police?"

One of the frat brothers at the door overheard this.

"Cops?" he repeated. "No Five-Oh, okay? She had a little too much to drink, is all. Let's not turn this into a federal case."

It was the wrong thing to say. Lauren swung around, then darted to the door.

"You think the cops is all you have to worry about?" she seethed, eying each of the frat guys, but most especially Josh. "I'm from Philly. The Italian part. And we got ways of settling scores that got nothing to do with the law."

"You threatening us?" someone from the back said.

Lauren shook her head.

"I'm making a promise," she answered coldly. "Give up who did this to our girl."

"Or what?" one of the guys shot back.

"Or it's gonna rain shit," Lauren answered.

Sonya assisted Chelsea from one side and Amanda from the other, and they walked her forward. As they neared the door, Chelsea reached out an absent hand for Lauren.

"No police," she whispered. "My family. They wouldn't understand."

Lauren turned to her roommate, and her heart broke anew. I watched Lauren's face crumble and collapse before my eyes.

"You heard her," someone called from the door. "No cops. It's just one of those things."

Now, I was the one who'd had enough.

"One of what things?" I shouted back. "Tell me. One of what things?"

I stepped to the door and scanned all the faces. But the frat boys' eyes dropped, one by one, to the floor.

No one could answer me. And I couldn't answer my own question. For as we walked Chelsea out of that frat house that night, using a rear entrance to save her from the prying eyes of the party, which had resumed full throttle downstairs, we didn't know the full scale of the depravity that had been visited upon the most innocent among us.

The text would come early the next morning, sent to Chelsea's iPhone. Yes, we recovered her phone and her wallet. All her personal belongings were intact.

It was her person that had been shattered.

The text continued a message, all in caps. And it had the power to send chills down all of our spines.

"BETTER KEEP QUIET," it read.

The image underneath would never leave my memory. I'd see it in nightmares for the rest of my life.

It was Chelsea, on her knees on the filthy mattress. There were two male figures, both wearing Barack Obama masks – and nothing else.

One had Chelsea from behind, and the other was in her mouth.

Underneath the image was a final line.

"WOULDN'T WANT THIS SHOWING UP ON THE INTERNET, WOULD YOU?"

As soon as Chelsea glimpsed the message, she dissolved into tears, anew. Lauren, who had stayed up all night keeping vigil, rushed to her bed, then took the phone from her shaking hand.

Lauren looked at it, then clenched her fist around phone as if wanting to crush it. She gritted her teeth and wanted to kill somebody. Instead, she just hugged Chelsea and comforted her.

"Don't worry," Lauren said. "No one is going to see this, you hear? If it's the last thing I do, we're going to find these monsters. We're gonna find them and make sure they never do this again. Are you with me?"

Chelsea peeked up at her friend, witnessing the steely resolve etched on Lauren's face.

Meeting Chelsea's eyes, Lauren tried to smile. But it just wouldn't come.

"Don't you worry," Lauren assured. "You have friends. Good friends. The five of us have each other's backs, see? And we're gonna set this right. Oh boy, are we gonna make them pay."

Later, when the rest of the Five first saw that text and the repulsive photo, we didn't hesitate. Not one of us did.

We were all in.

The cause was justice for Chelsea.

And hell to pay for all those who had hurt her.

To Be Continued...

Don't miss the second installment in Lucy St. John's groundbreaking College Night Series:

Look for "Intuition – Book Two in the College Nights Series"  
Coming Soon from author Lucy St. John.

And if you are new to author Lucy St. John, don't miss her thrilling, evocative and erotic Morgan's Chase Series, now complete and available in audio, print and e-book.

