I went home like you said I should. Somebody got killed before I got there. It wasn’t my fault, but that didn’t stop me. I didn’t make it all the way home, or to my parents’ house, as I’ve been calling it, after they gave my room to my little brother, after they realized I wasn’t coming back this time. But that time I went, or I tried, and didn’t make it. I didn’t want to see them, didn’t want to see anyone really, but didn’t know what else to do, couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. I ran away from what I had done. If I had known better I would have gone the other way, straight toward what scared me, rather than running, knowing what I know now, which is that I ran right into more of the same. To be honest I don’t know much better now, or whatever I think I know doesn’t keep me from running, doesn’t help me hold my ground. Maybe it's too late for all of that, for learning how not to run, maybe I’m just stuck. I would say I hope not, but things keep telling me different.

     It’s funny though: I ran backwards. I was going to James Madison, that school named after a slaver, like the rest of the country, and I hated it but was too scared to leave for good, so I just drank until it went away, drank until I did something dumb, drank until I could not see all the dumb I was doing or who I was doing it to or where I did it, drank until they almost kicked me out, begged them to let me stay, made all kinds of promises, then kept on drinking. My first week I looked out across the sea of students grazing the greenery, from rocky wall to rocky wall, the campus postcard, and thought, Golly gee I’ve gone and joined a club of white folk. They were just like me, I couldn’t believe it. I had been so focused on getting out of my parents’ house that I had not seen it until that moment. I felt deceived, I’d been deceived, by myself and everyone else, and I blamed us all but punished myself and tried to forget what I saw. Pretty soon everyone around me started falling victim to those little cults of brotherhood, pretty soon everyone was wearing t-shirts with embroidered Greek letters, and then the letters stayed even when the shirts weren’t worn, suddenly almost everyone I knew was branded, had banded together as if for survival, and maybe they were right, I wanted to fall victim too, but I also hated those fake little tribes, their parties were all cloistered and haunted, but I couldn’t stop going, not at first, at first I tried to adapt, to survive. What choice did I have? All of them! I was young and poor, the world at my feet! Now I’m young and in debt, the world has crushed me! It’s all over all over again.

     When I think of it now I think of a pinball, that’s me, or better yet a pool cue, not silver and shiny but chalky and scuffed, an eager target, carom here, carom there, without even the dignity of my own hole. That’s how I met Cho, but meet isn’t the word for our smashing together and ripping apart, not the word for how I fled from what it all suggested. Without conviction I told myself repeatedly, even out loud in the car on that drive, that I was too drunk to remember, and while there was a lot that I couldn’t explain, large gaps in the night’s events, that couldn’t account for it all, if it could then I wouldn’t have gone on repeating it to myself, You were drunk, You were drunk, like some fucked up prayer, nor would I have run straight to Jake and those guys like to some disastrous refuge where instead of reflecting or refusing or working through or even closing my eyes I would simply get blasted again and forget that night and this one and all the rest. It’s fitting that not only was it no sanctuary but that they unknowingly dragged me through some kind of purging ritual, one that they put themselves through regularly as if they were constantly in fear of just what I had run to them from, afraid. This all sounds melodramatic, and maybe it should. I drove three hours to get wasted with some dudes. The dudes acted like bigots. Or maybe they were just bigots who sometimes acted like dudes. On the drive back up to school I told myself that I could not have known it would happen, not like that, repeated my astonishment and rage and despair at everyone and everything through a blistering headache and rejuvenated sense of disorientation. I did not, thankfully, tell myself they were just drunk. Pat yourself on the back whenever you can. But I also was unable to leave them completely behind.

     The drive was three hours, give or take. A little skip along 81 then straight down 64. My home or my parents were in Virginia Beach, down 264 to the end, but like I said I didn’t make it that far and got off 64 in Norfolk. When did I decide to turn off toward Jake and them? Who cares. The sun was down by the time I hit Charlottesville. It was fall and the leaves were turning, but only up in the mountains did they have any color, farther south they were all just brown. Or so I recall. Brown leaves can be beautiful too. I am not sure I saw them. I saw Cho and the road. I repeated my mantra and turned the music up loud. It was just past the Hampton tunnel, around Willoughby. It was dark by then, the headlights had that glare, the taillights seemed to chime. That stretch of road around the tunnels has this metallic feel, after so long on a highway with nothing but trees, everything suddenly goes high contrast as you pass the coliseum and then plunge into the great hospital corridor of the tunnel. The stench, the racket, the racing lanes seems endless, and then you are out. The highway floats above the spit and returns you to land. Right around there. I can’t pinpoint the place because it’s one of those folds in time we make in such plenty in this country, one of those zones of abandon, one of the many backsides we specialize in constructing, and among which we pass our days. Into the heart of one of these zones ran a terrified, determined child. I have never seen anything like it. He was dressed all in white. White sneakers, white socks, white sweatpants pulled up to the knees, white t-shirt yanked straight back stiff in the running wind. His hair was short, his arms locked and pumping as though keeping his legs and heart pumping too. No sprinter in the Olympics, with all their practiced grace, ever ran with such compulsion. No Hollywood soldier ever flashed so convincingly across their cartoon battlefield. I was in the right lane. Those legs pumped right through my lights. The kid ran almost as if he wanted to make it across. Everything slowed down and got quiet, a real movie scene, the legs flashed and returned to the dark and a truck raced up beside me and shattered the slow silence, the road ahead remained while the corner of my eye exploded, and out of that explosion in a slow arc over into my lights floated one of the kid’s white shoes. My foot came off the gas and the shoe came down to the road in the night. The lights ahead drew away, the lights behind receded. Eventually I stepped on the brake. A clearing widened in the traffic like an echo of the impact. I pulled over to the side and looked back and couldn’t make sense and stayed in the car. I sat and stared at the mirror and could not open the door. Ahead the red lights disappeared and behind the white lights gathered close. Soon the first pitiless driver weaseled around the blockade and punched up into the clearing. The car’s speed seemed cruel, but also gave me a kind of comfort. I found out later the kid was fifteen. His name was Juan Perez.

     That’s all I know, less than nothing.

     I remember the music of the moment. I was listening to Clipse, Lord Willin’. It was like waving a home town flag. No one else I knew listened to them, they all caught on later. As I sat there in the car on the shoulder out beyond the blockade, waiting for that first car to break through, let me breathe, release me from responsibility, encourage me to follow, to slide back into the march and flow, as I sat there, frozen, terrified, cowardly in the face of having nothing asked of me and feeling responsible for it——as I sat there the music returned to me, deafening, outrageous, loud enough to wake the kid. I had been listening to “Grindin,” a song made of bubbles and bricks. The drums aren’t drums at all but slamming car doors, three hammers crashing together and into the pause that opens up instead of a snare is a finger snap, wild chiaroscuro of weight and air adorned with these little tongue clicks and driven over by the slouch of the raps. It is unmistakable, dizzying. And now even today the slamming doors and snapping fingers bring me back to that moment in the car on the side of the highway, the doors slam and I feel the collision and the fingers snap and I see the shoe, the beat grips me like a puppet, my memory chopped and on repeat, all of it right on time. Sometimes I even cluck my tongue.

     It’s no longer clear to me, if it ever was, whether I decided then, pulled over and in shock, to go see Jake and them rather than my parents, or if I had already decided before and simply reaffirmed my commitment. I know I wallowed in indecision, then bathed in self-pity, then sank into despair. I shut off the music, stared at the lights, wondered at my incapacity to feel anything but my own suffering, until the flashing lights of an ambulance appeared and set me free. I rolled down my window and pulled away and drove for a while in the roar and gust of the road as though it were a substitute for the hush of mourning, but finally I needed distraction, so I flipped through the fat book of CDs that always sat in the passenger seat, chose something, and tried to listen.

     I met Cho at Virginia Tech, at a party. I had gone, the weekend before, to visit Mark and them, or to get way from Harrisonburg, and to do so I went to Blacksburg, convinced it was someplace else. I could have gone there instead after high school but decided not to, turned down the offer, because I was a fool, not because I knew like I know now that it would not have made any difference. The only difference is if much later, far from campus, far from Virginia, somebody who you are talking to and trying to impress has heard the name before, which usually depends on nothing else but the fame of the football team, that’s how we all know it’s what we call a good school. Cho didn’t care about football, but did care about the school being famous. The night we met I had gotten drunk with Mark and them and went out to a party, or several parties, these things were always spilling over into each other, either in competition or support, either contagion or imitation, all that jubilant damage requiring yet another room. The first one we went to had a band shoved into the corner of an overflowing third floor apartment, they were loud but not too awful, danceable classic rock or some shit, stuffed and sweaty we swayed together, moist and pressed, the floor beneath us heaving. At some point there was this girl in front of me who kept tossing her hair back into my face where it would stick and cling and we would dance like that, connected, disconnected, connected again, she lashed and caressed me again and again with her wet, adhesive hair, that’s how she drew me in, pulled me close, pressed back against me, without even looking, we both could have been hideous, maybe we were and that’s why we attached at the middle, denim to denim, and tried to move like our pants and the people weren’t there. When the song was over we made out and then she left. I never saw her face, just the curtain of hair. Mark and them reappeared and patted my back, they had seen, they gave me encouraging smacks to the ass and off I went to find her again, past the band now playing a song as painful as the last had been triumphant, into the kitchen where I paused to accept a shot of whiskey, then toward the hall where I saw the hair, tangled and bobbing through the crowd and out the door, and like a shark after a jellyfish I swam against the current and its school of minnows and so on out onto the landing where there were still more people, parties washing out of every door. By then if not long before I had decidedly lost her, but with narrowed determination I plodded in and out of doors, into the closed party where everyone watched me without saying a word and pushed me back out with their eyes, the open party where I was welcomed and celebrated like an old friend by total strangers, the sausage party, the ladies’ night, the drug room, or rooms really, down the stairs was an apartment where everyone sat and stared into the empty space between them, giggling now and then at a word thrown up into that space like an anchor of smoke, while across the hall the living room was empty but the bedrooms were crammed full, everyone sealed off and snuffling over separate tables, it kept going on, the night was a labyrinth of wonders, but nothing at all surprising, it was exciting yet completely familiar, even the search faded into wandering, I forgot it completely and joined the routine, forgot what I was chasing, until I found Cho. I was actually by that time looking for a toilet, I think, and stumbled into a darkened bedroom, some of which in that building seemed to have toilets, while some not, I hadn’t figured out the pattern, hadn’t visualized the floor plan, and I stopped after opening the door to let my eyes adjust, looking for that special door to the water closet, when I heard a whimper and became, again, a kind of shark, a drunken, baby shark, believing that I had finally, after all this time, stumbled into my own skin flick. We all watched so much back then, not at all like today. Today everyone knows adult films are nothing but advertisements. But back then that whimper was a cry for help and help meant my johnson, I could feel the little superhero don his little cape, and so as romantic as a porn star I rubbed the wall and jerked on the lights and there she was, sitting against the bed weeping into a pair of panties which were held, as my doubling vision became again a single image, held and pressed tight against a bleeding palm. The door had closed behind me, the lever had lifted my pants. I must have been staring at the panties, which were purple, and at those hands, which were hairless and smooth, one of them marked by a teardrop of blood, because it was only when I took a knee by the bed and Cho lifted her eyes to my angled jeans that I realized Cho was a boy. I could neither easily retreat nor keep my balance and so I toppled to a seat beside him, where I was suddenly overcome, a feeling I had never or not recently felt, that I don’t know how to describe except with sentimental words like anguish and sorrow, which in my condition should have signaled inaction and yet somehow, instead, after what must have been a consoling mumble or two, I guided him to the bathroom, having solved the labyrinth in that moment as well, where I got him to release the panties and rinse the blood and wash the wound, my hands on his hands the whole time, helping to clean him up but also drawing him out of some hole. The wound didn’t seem so bad, I took a maxi pad from beneath the sink and wedged it into his hand. The whole time he kept right on mumbling and crying that she had left, that she had left with somebody else, and I kept saying Yea and Ok and I know and finally I’m sorry. As I put on the bandage he breathed a Thank you and put his head on my shoulder. I’m still amazed I didn’t jump, but leaned into it like it belonged there. I still don’t know how it happened, how I let it happen. I was not in the habit of embracing my friends, or anyone really. I finished the bandage and turned my face and kissed the top of his head, my mouth and nose in his short, coarse hair, and his arms came around me and mine around him and we gripped and grabbed and breathed and pulled and it happened. No one found us there. Afterwards we left one by one, in silence, but the apartment was empty, unlocked, abandoned, as though it existed for no one but us. Our goodbye was rushed; I rushed it. I took his number and ran into the night.

      When I got to Jake and them’s they were in the kitchen doing keg stands with the sloshings of a barrel bought the night before. I took my turn and soon it floated. It was just Jake, Will, John, and Pete. I didn’t tell them what happened. They told me about the night before, the party. They were all at Old Dominion, living in a house on 41^st. They told me that some girl passed out and shit herself in the bathroom. They said that Pete’s girlfriend had come over and caught him in bed with another girl. They said that Will had passed out on the couch with his shoes on so they took turns giving him a teabag. Nothing special, a regular Thursday night. We drove out to a bar on Granby. We played pool. I tried to forget. Shots didn’t help. I told Jake about the kid. At first he was stunned, lost for words, but then he recovered and asked what kind of shoes. Those guys always fought back with jokes, or mostly with jokes, those were their chosen blows, at least I thought, though now I’m not so sure just what they were fighting. Anyway I knew the answer. We shared a moment, and then it was gone. Will came back from the bar with a baggy. I took my turn in the stall like the others. I’d never felt so like myself. The others were glistening and chewing their faces. I watched from way down in a deep hollow. I think it felt like no longer pretending. The room drew back, fell away. We mowed down the bag and swallowed more beer and paid the tab and left.

     As we were getting in Jake’s truck someone said Let’s drive by The Wave. A noise passed among them. I asked what they were talking about and they said a gay bar. They talked over each other as the truck pulled out and I pressed my forehead against the window. Don’t worry we’re not going in, they said. You can go in, they told me. The drip felt like a string, like a rag in my throat. I tried to replay the last hour but kept skipping forward, back to the truck, the window, my gut. We pulled to a stop at a light and there it was, up at the next corner. It looked like any old bar. It looked like any other wooden shack planted in a Tidewater parking lot. Outside a few people stood smoking. Pete, riding shotgun, started to roll down his window. Jake told everyone to wait for the light to turn green. Will and John began to squirm toward the glass holding up my head. Open the window, Will said. I tried to swallow. The light turned green and Jake pulled forward. Open the window, Will said. Pete shoved his head out and shouted. We all know what he said, knew what he would say. He fulfilled the word’s purpose. He reminded me what I had been saying all those years. In high school the word rang in the halls and I thought for some reason it had stayed there, belonged to the building which we had passed through, dropped like a child’s regrettable toy. The shout was, in a way, telling me that I was born yesterday. Will reached over and jabbed the button and the window moved under my face and he started shouting too. What was happening inside the car then, that clamoring rage and glee, I had not seen it before, I told myself, I could not have expected it, I thought, I didn’t want this, I pleaded, this wasn’t really us, I lied. What came back to me, maybe not then, maybe years later, what made it clear, maybe not inevitable but clear, was another time in the same truck with almost the same people after getting stoned and driving through Taco Bell and seeing someone walking by the side of the road and Pete or whoever was riding shotgun that time chucked his cup of soda and missed but in the clamoring even then you could hear that this wasn’t new, wasn’t unexpected, but prepared for long before, we were finally completing our training, living up to our potential, becoming the men we were meant to be. John was shoving his face up next to Will’s and shouting too now as we pulled through the intersection alongside The Wave. Jake wasn’t shouting, a grin fixed his face. I watched myself remove Will’s hand and press the other button so that the window began climbing back up and was just about shut before they realized. They didn’t see it coming. They had not expected opposition, much less such bold, decisive action. I wasn’t thinking about it yet, but knew I had struck where it hurt, and was bound to feel the wrath. Will tried to get back at the button but I was better positioned, he tried, briefly, to hold the window down with his fingers but understood in time that I was not fucking around, that this was dead serious, I was the wrench in their wheels, if he didn’t pull out he would lose a finger, he yanked them back just in time. Numb but triumphant I pressed on. Will climbed over onto Pete in front to get a good shout out, the people smoking seemed to be shouting back now, incredibly we had not passed them but were still rolling along, conducting our drive-by of spittle and cuss, when Jake countered my revolt with the master controls in the driver’s door, which let him lock my buttons and open the window unopposed as I pressed down in vain against what I could no longer stop.

     In the years following I often imagined what it would have been like, how my life might have been different, if I had gotten out of the car, opened the door and stepped out as it rolled and probably fallen to the street but gotten up and had a drink at The Wave, if I would have been welcomed or despised, if I would have, could have shaken the malaise of those years, broken through the despair that followed so many years after, if I had opened the door and stepped out, maybe not while the truck was moving but back at the light while we waited and I repeated in silence that this was not happening, that it could not, that we wouldn’t really do what of course we had already done. Only much later did I recognize that even this wish was as fallow as my windowed protest, that I was imagining someone else saving me from what I was unable to do, as I stayed with Jake and them, slept on their couch that night and drove back the next day and then after not a very long while continued going to see them, taking that exit on the way to my parents’ house, looking for home like it was a place, continued stopping by to laugh and forget and serve up occasional frowns that they simply barreled over, buried under laughs. I was imagining what it would have been like if someone who was like me but wasn’t me had called or texted Cho instead of acting like we didn’t exist. Later when he made the school briefly famous, I started telling people that I had gone there, that I had sat in those very classrooms, that I could not believe what happened, but I could not say that I had known him, could not tell anyone, not even you.