Dean got to the street that Brian said the dorms were on, and had trouble for a minute figuring out which of two buildings it was; both were adjacent to the t-shirt shop Brian had described in e-mail, but Dean couldn't exactly remember the street number of the particular building Brian was in. He stood out in the walkway in front, looking up into the dark windows of the many-storied concrete buildings, depressing structures flung strangely a few blocks away from campus, in the middle of a random side-street. He did remember Brian's floor and room number, and picked one of the two buildings, as an arbitrary guess, after standing there attempting, vaguely, to discern which building it was via psychic osmosis. As if, he thought for a second, he might be able to detect the faint radiation of Brian's depression through the concrete.

"Who is it?" Brian's voice, over the buzzer.

"Me. Let me in," said Dean. A pause. And then, the buzzer rang him up.

Dean passed groups of sweat-shirted college boys with echoing voices as he made his way up the elevator and down the badly-lit hallway, toward Brian's room. When he arrived at the correct room (it looked to him, cell-like) he found Brian sitting alone in the lower half of a bunk-bed (there were two of these beds in the small, perfect square of a room, and the walls were the same gray-white featured in the hallways, which was actually some kind of concrete or rock, to which nothing could be stapled, taped, or otherwise affixed. It was as if they had gone out of their way to make the place depressing). He could see, of course, that Brian was drunk; he had the blurry, distracted expression about him, a large, opaque plastic glass in one hand, and he eyed Dean with the sort of unguarded, desperate expression that Dean knew, admitted feelings that Brian would later deny.

"Oh Dean," he said, holding his glass upwards to him (a toast?). I just wanted you to be the first to know, I'm totally out. I mean, just now, I admitted to everyone around here that, you know, well, what I was saying just now. To these guys around here. About the outedness. And they are shocked! Can't you see their expressions?" He pointed around the room, to no one. "And the reason for that being that, take a look at yourself. You are looking quite very good, as usual, since you always look this way. And I've got to get on board with that. I mean, while you're here, and everything. Which means I'm gay. As you like to remind me. Dean." He offered up the glass. Dean laughed. Brian was somewhat comical when drinking, although it was a short-lived sort of pleasure to see this side of him, really, knowing that it was only reflected back in some awful liquor cabinet mixture in Coke, and wasn't a regular feature of his personality. After saying (and doing) all manner of intimate things, Brian would deny most to all of it the following day, with maddening changes of subject, abrupt conversation enders like: "I've got to get off the phone."

"You're growing--what's that? A fucking... Jazz beard? A goatee?"

"Oh, that." Brian put his free hand to his face, and stroked the goatee. "Hmm." His clean-cut, uptight athletic appearance was mostly at this point supplanted by the rumpled dorm dwelling boy with unwashed clothing look, the boy too cheap to buy a razor look, that thousands like him sported campus wide. "I knew you'd hate it. But you know, around here, these things, they just sort of grow on you in the night. Like whatshis rumple--"

"Rumplestiltskin," Dean offered. The goatee looked terrible. Brian looked maybe like he'd lost ten pounds, and he had reddish circles under his eyes. He was wearing a totally careless t-shirt with a hole on the right side, just under the seam on the collar. It had a Bank of America logo on the front, and just had to be some type of promotional giveaway item, like the kind that you get when you sign up for a credit card. Seeing him made Dean ache. There was something that someone had to do, to stop it from getting any worse. So, here he was. He was the one to do something about it. That was what he was getting out of life so far: be the one to do something about it.

"So, Brian," he said, sitting down next to him, in the bunk bed. He put his arm around Brian's back, and felt Brian lean into him, like he was losing his will, or possibly his balance. "I see you've been doing a little drinking here, so far. What do we have here..." He peered over the edge of the cup, which Brian held up gamely. Coke and something. Smelled like nothing. Vodka.

"That's right," said Brian.

"You know, Brian, I have a pretty lousy story I could tell you about my dad, who shared your fondness for drinking rather than dealing with, say, things that came up, according to my mother, not that I particularly remember too much about it. Anyway it seems that he got into a car accident where he hit a convertible full of cheerleaders going to some type of mid season football game, or something that cheerleaders were likely to be doing, way back in the late 80's at some point, and permanently disabled one of them, whose name is Sharon Marie Bauer. Like, right there on Bay Street and 1-5, suddenly he ended her own personal popularity contest, and made her into a pitiable person with her life course totally redirected, due to a few too many whiskey sours, when he was out with this really absurdly younger woman that my mom still likes to get really angry about. They knew each other somehow, my mom and this woman. I never got the details. At any rate although I'm told that dad didn't exactly jump at the chance to claim responsibility for injuring this poor clueless pom pom girl and wrecking her dad's 63 Mustang convertible, the family sued the living shit out of my dad. I mean, it was very ugly. He's still paying for to this day. And surely, so is this pathetic girl, who happened to get in his way. She still lives somewhere in Santa Cruz, is my understanding. She never got to leave home.   Imagine that! She is still being taken care of by her parents."

"What is this woman, like, 30, now?" He had Brian's attention; Brian was sleepily leaning against Dean in the bunk bed and looking up at him, reproachfully.

"Something like that. Anyway, there are bunches of lawyers involved in the situation, and my dad has had to make this big show of really caring about it for the last one hundred years, on the advice of these lawyers, even visiting this Sharon and having to make all of these carefully worded and totally insincere statements to her family about the error of his ways, and the price Sharon will always be paying for his random and careless decision, one day. He still drinks, by the way. Anyway, that's it. That's the end of the story, except that, the story doesn't really ever have an end for anyone involved. Even me. I mean, this poor woman, can't even walk up her own front steps or move out on her own, because my dad, basically, is a drunk asshole who can't face up to his problems. Which feels really great to just sit around and think about, sometimes."

"Huh." said Brian. He took a last drink from the plastic cup, and handed it to Dean. "I knew your dad was an asshole, as you told me on many occasions -or was it your mom who said it--"

"It was mom," said Dean. He rarely, if ever, mentioned his father, whom he despised.

"So, I knew he was an asshole, but its weird sort of, don't you agree, that you never mentioned this thing about this person. This Sherry."

"Sharon. Well, Brian, being that you are drunk and therefore somewhat inaccurately nostalgic, as drunk people tend to become, you think we spent much of our time together over the last few years talking about things, our families or god forbid, our feelings, or whatever, rather than messing around and then having arguments about whether the messing around did in fact occur. Which, being the sober one of us here this evening, I am qualified to declare that it did." He leaned away from Brian, to set the cup down on Brian's night stand, which was covered with a riot of college papers, other, similar cups, bags of snack food items, and plastic bags of LSD. "Nice touch," he said to Brian, of the LSD. Brian had fallen almost completely sideways, and now his head was half on Dean's lap.

"Oh yeah, that. That's Jackie's. Jackson Plette. He's sort of got a business that he's running here, out of the top bunk. He's sort of weird about the merchandise, I mean, if it were me, I'd lock it up, inside of something. Anyway Dean--" he muttered, and looked sleepily up into his face. Dean was beautiful, always beautiful. He looked it again, tonight and always, wearing a new black corduroy jacket lined with wool. He had a very recent haircut, shaved expertly up the back of his neck. Dean did not look like a guy from the dorms. It had been awhile since anyone else had cut Brian's own hair; he'd tried it one day himself, in the dim yellow lighting of the communal bathroom, with a pair of safety scissors he'd borrowed from Tom. The sides had been starting to bother him.  

Dean looked well-rested and, as usual, slightly distant. Basically, like he was pretty damned secure with himself. Which irritated Brian, really, since Dean had a lot of things he should really be worried a little more about.

"I had a point to make, about your story," Brian said suddenly, veering back on track. It would have been easy to keep looking at Dean and forget this point entirely, so he had to continue.

"Go on."

"See, this thing, it won't happen to me. Like, killing someone, or whatever you are getting at. Because I don't have a car." It felt like a really sound point to Brian, how much damage could he really do, just hanging around this place for the rest of the year and (unthinkably) the three years after that, drinking a little bit like all the other normal kids in college, going to classes, maybe getting some sort of drag of a job at some second hand clothing store somewhere in town. Or loading produce trucks on weekends in Oakland, like Tom.

Nonetheless, Dean laughed. The story about his dad, it was so terribly not funny, more than Brian could ever appreciate sober (nonetheless, drunk). Like everything on earth, it had to happen directly to you, for you to understand just how bad it was. It was disappointing that Brian hadn't at least gotten some tiny thing out of what Dean was trying to tell him, about his own behavior, its potential consequences. But then, he was trying to make Brian out to be someone more than he was. Someone more perceptive and multi-faceted. Someone worthy of psychoanalysis and redemption. Which had pretty much always been the case, because otherwise, how could Dean explain away his persistent attraction to the cause. When Dean used to complain about Brian to his best friend from high school (Shannon, who he missed terribly; she'd moved overseas to Germany with her boyfriend last year) Shannon just laughed and said Brian wasn't particularly shallow or cruel or two-faced, he was actually, exactly like every boy she herself had ever dated or slept with.

Dean couldn't get angry. He thought about Mary, just then. About Elliott. He had to keep trying. He wasn't sure why.

"Let's go for a walk," Dean offered. He was in danger of (despite Brian's pitiable condition and appearance) taking advantage of the quiet conditions in the floor, and in the room. Brian would have done whatever it was Dean had in mind for him, right there in the room, on the lower bunk bed, which is why, of course, he'd gotten plastered first. "Get up," he ordered. Brian looked up at him sadly, sensing that he was missing a perfectly good symbiosis of conditions, privacy and intoxication, to finally, after four months of saying nothing about it to anyone in school, express his own particularly keen desire for sex.

Dean walked toward the door. Brian got up slowly, catching a reflection of himself in a mirror on the dresser. Which had a very sobering effect. He realized he was lucky that Dean was here at all, owing to Brian's own rather shabby and depressing condition. Dean was really better looking, and so much more funny and grown-up seeming, than any of those drawling, slack mouthed, pizza-mooching girls always buzzing around the other guys who lived in the room. If only there was a way to show this off, to one-up the other guys, without having to explain, exactly, the nature of the situation. "Hurry up," Dean said. He was already out the door, standing in the hallway under yellow track lights. Brian would follow him anywhere, tonight.

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