Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

I woke up earlier than the others and fussed around in the kitchen, frying up hashbrowns and eggs with bell peppers. It turned out to be just enough to feed the three of us. Today was photoshoot day, and I wanted my star to have lots of energy.

We packed all the accessories we could think of into bags and Phaedra's suitcase, and she dressed in jeans and hiking boots, and a green blouse knotted neatly in the center of her chest, turning it partway into a bikini top. How silly that we'd spent a day shopping for a specific outfit, when this woman obviously knew how to dress herself ten times better than whatever I had in mind. On the other hand, what really mattered was the excuse.

As I loaded the car, I considered it. What if I'd just walked up to Phaedra and said, "hey you dress nice - can I do a photo shoot with you?" ... Well, she would have probably said yes, because she's the adventurous sort. But the whole thing would have felt like some kind of flirtation tactic, without any substance. We probably wouldn't have followed through. And, I didn't really know what photoshoots were supposed to be like, so the fact that I was obviously winging it would have gone from charming to embarrassing. Plus it would have been a little weird to get Ken involved. No, this was the only way it could have happened.

We were on the road in a relatively short time, with Ken riding shotgun. I commented that while the weather looked good so far, it would be annoying if we got all set up in the forest and suddenly the clouds rolled in.

"Bah; pffft! Stop! Stop it right there!" he yelled. "That's just the sort of thing you don't say! Actors know it. Directors know it. The crew knows it. It's like, 'Well at least I didn't fall off stage!' SMACK! 'Oh. Well at least we didn't knock over the props!' WHACK! 'Hey, well, at least the props didn't break!' CRACK! You just don't say it!"

"Whoah, okay. You're right. Absolutely."

"You just don't say it. It's like ... It's like ..."

"MacBeth?"

Ken smacked the dashboard. "God damn it!"

"Sorry, sorry!" I said, waving one hand defensively.

Phaedra laughed. "You guys worry too much!"

Our first stop was a fallen oak tree that I'd spied off the road near the graveyard in Soquel. I collected some leaves for use later, stuffing them into a bag as we walked around the site with an eye for potential photographs. One good setup involved Phaedra sitting on the main fork of the fallen tree, in the brown sweater. There was a lot of poison oak around, which she didn't like.

I said, "Okay, so what I'm gonna need you to do is -- see that bush? Just roll around on top of that. With your shirt off. And try to look like a forest spirit."

Phaedra grinned and flipped me off.

"Hey don't blame me," I said. "Blame whoever scouted this location!"

Ken said, "Dude; you scouted this location!"

"Dammit!" I shouted.

Ken pointed at me. "You're fired!"

"You can't fire me, I'm the director! That's it; I can't take this insubordination! I resign!"

"Right!" Ken said. "Now I'm the director! Phaedra, I need you to take off your shirt and roll around in that bush..."

We decided to keep the site in mind. The important thing was the bag of oak leaves, and with those in hand, we drove off.

Next we stopped at Camera Club on Mission Street and picked up a fully manual camera on the cheap side. Ken, bless his heart, was ready to front the $200 deposit, but they never asked us for the money. We traded sneaky glances as they rang up the charge, which was about 20 bucks for one day. That cleaned out my pockets nicely. I already had some film, but it was 200 speed. 36 exposures. It would have to do.

We drove up to UCSC and parked at the turnout. Everyone had a full load of ill-packed baggage to cart down to the forest, including some leather welding gloves for tree climbing, a tupperware container of banana bread, a single can of coke, and a horrendously ugly lime green blanket that looked tie-dyed at first glance but was actually just thoroughly stained. I marveled at how perfect the weather was, but silently so as not to trigger any hexes.

We set up on the bench near the little spring in the stone pool. Phaedra opened the suitcase and we reviewed our props. A brown sweater, a dark-blue sweater, a polka-dotted tank top, a white tank top, a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, and a gossamer green serpent outfit that had been a halloween costume, because why not? I instructed Phaedra to change into the white tank top. Ken held up the blanket, and Phaedra changed facing it.

"Ha haa!" I cackled. "Little does Phaedra know, Ken has special X-ray vision: He can see through tacky lime green!"

"I don't mind Ken," she said. "But I don't really feel like flashing random strangers."

Assuming my role as director, I declared randomly that our first shots were the field shots. Phaedra and I went to the little hollow in the grass straightaway, but poor Ken got lost in the bushes and had to plunge his way through a nasty wall of foliage to find us again. We stood picking leaves and twigs off him for a minute, then Phaedra took off her shoes and sat down in the designated spot.

We fussed over angles and I gave her some directions on hand positioning, and poked at individual spokes of grass leaning into the shot. I was enjoying the opportunity to think about details that I didn't usually have a reason to. Then I laid down flat on the ground to get the right angle, and crammed the camera against my face. Three pictures and we were done.

"All right, that went well!" said Ken. "What say we go straight for the moneymaker shots?"

"The what shots?" I said.

"It's a technical term."

"You're sure it's not some kind of pornography term?" I said.

"I ... What? No! It just means the shots that are the most important or expensive. Jeez, man!! Mind in the gutter!"

"Hey I don't know these things!"

We made our way over to the foot of a huge redwood tree, and began clearing out a patch of earth, keeping only a scattering of the light-brown spines on top of the dark, fragrant mulch. Ken fetched the oak leaves in the bag while I fussed with the drooping redwood branches to get them out of the shot.

"Here," said Ken. "How about you scoop some of those spines into a pillow? Then Phaedra's head won't be at a weird angle."

"Good idea," I said.

That done, I heaved myself a ways up the side of the tree and out along the horizontal trunk of a smaller tree that had fallen sideways through the canopy of the larger one. Looking down, this provided a view almost directly over our cleared area. It was only about eleven feet up, but when Ken passed me the camera I could fit more than enough of the ground into the shot. It's a good thing it worked, because I didn't have a second location in mind, and the camera didn't have a zoom lens.

It was time. Phaedra discreetly shed her tank-top and laid down where I pointed. I fussed a little more about the exact positioning of her knees and the angle of her back, and Ken carefully placed oak leaves in and around her hair. She suggested that she smile enigmatically for the shot, which was okay by me. I took four shots, two without leaves in her hair, two on the 30th-of-a-second setting instead of the 60th-of-a-second because I didn't trust the light readings of the camera. It would be days before I knew whether I'd messed anything up.

Phaedra got up and dusted away the spines. Ken handed back her shirt. I passed the camera down to Ken and dropped to the ground, and we all tromped back to the benches, chatting about other shots we might try. I cracked open the coke to celebrate and we all took a swig.

Next, Ken suggested a couple of shots involving the square cement pool in the stream. Phaedra took off her shoes and walked out around the side of the pool and leaned against an outcropping of greenery, and we liked the angle so much we took two shots at different elevations. We only had the one roll of film, so each shot was precious.

Ken had Phaedra sit on the edge of the wall that enclosed the pool, and she shed her tank top and trailed a finger in the water while we took a couple of back-angle shots, repositioning her hair as my newfound fussy-director instincts suggested. I wasn't really sure what the contrast between sunlight and shade would look like so I split the difference with the camera settings, which felt like a mistake.

Just then a dog came sniffing through the woods, and, being a dog, plunged right into the pool. We retreated before it could climb out of the water and shake itself, but the water was thoroughly muddied. No more limpid mystic faerie pool shots for us!

We took some pictures of Phaedra sitting in and leaning on a root formation, in the two sweaters -- brown and blue-green. To get one angle I laid on my back with my head tilted up, aiming the camera down the length of my body. We skipped over the seat-on-the-tree shot I'd planned on my scouting trip, because it looked bad in two dimensions. I was actually learning a few things: It's important to consider how the parts of a scene will look without the separating effect of depth perception. To get a quick preview of that, all you need to do is close one eye. Neato!

I suddenly thought of a behind-the-scenes video I'd seen a few years before, showing a director holding up a camera lens on a stick, with no camera attached. He was squinting through it and waving it around the scene. It looked silly at the time. Couldn't he just use his eyes? Now I understood.

We took a through-the-branches shot. I instructed Phaedra not to smile, so it could look enigmatic and stuff. A couple of humorous shots of Ken and I on the picnic bench. A snack of banana-bread, a sip of the coke. We couldn't do a shot of her leaning over in the little moss-coated glade because the sun was gone, so we had her lean over on a portion of the trail. I got jabbed by a stinging nettle while framing the shot.

For the finale, we positioned Phaedra on the top of an old, flat stump surrounded by tiny green saplings. One shot with her shirt, one shot topless. Since I knew Mike would appreciate it, I walked around to the other side of the stump and got one of Phaedra from behind. Yep, no hiding it. An obvious ass shot.

"Wow," I thought. "I actually have to think about framing a shot so it doesn't just direct my eyes right to her boobs or her ass, and it's surprisingly difficult."

I told Ken about my thought, and he said, "Yeah, there's a whole discipline to that, especially in cinematography. Like, you don't shoot women getting up from chairs, or facing away from the camera unless it's from the waist up, and so on, because if you do, some of your audience is just going to space out and not pay attention to anything else."

"That's kind of pathetic!" I said.

Ken shrugged. "Well, maybe. But you have to factor it in. ... I mean, what else are you gonna do? Flash a title card, like 'In this next scene please don't just stare at the boobs, thank you, signed the director?'"

"Hah!" said Phaedra.

All the film was used up. The whole adventure had taken only a few hours. We were ready to do some socializing, so we packed up the gear and trudged happily back to the van.

"Well, that was a success!" I said.

"I agree," said Ken.

"Yeah, that was fun!" said Phaedra.

We had no plans until about 7:00 when we were due to take a whole pile of people to the Beach Boardwalk for a student orientation event. The best place to start gathering people for that would be Beth's, at the Merrill sub-college, so we decided to go there and hang around for a while.

A few of her housemates were home, making the place feel cramped. We sat around in the living room and told Beth the story of the photo shoot, and promised her a look at the pictures once Mike had picked out the ones that were too sexy for general viewing. She pouted, teasingly. "Sorry," I said. "That's the rule!"

After an hour or so we started calling friends on the house phone, running down the list. They showed up two or three at a time, and soon the apartment was so full that no one could sit down any more. From somewhere in the back of the crowd Linda shouted "To the Shaggin' Wagon!" and began striding towards the door, pointing the way. The crowd became a parade and marched down to the Merrill parking lot, and as they loaded into my van I counted 13 people, some of them strangers to me. Friends of friends. Ken took shotgun.

We made our way slowly down to the Beach Boardwalk. The van rocked occasionally from all the horsing around in the back, which made me paranoid about cops. As we drew close to the maze of streets near the beach, Beth fought her way to the front of the van and directed us to a parking spot. I actually felt the suspension rise by several inches as the crowd poured out.

There was a ticket table set up just outside the main entrance, and we stormed across the street to it. Ken was surprised to meet a friend of his there, and he immediately engaged her in conversation. Perhaps it was the festive mood I was in, or the feeling that I was part of a group, or something I sensed about this woman, but whatever it was, I walked right up to her and put my arms around her from the side, hugging her while Ken talked. She did not seem upset or even surprised. The three of us chatted that way for a couple minutes, and Ken eventually said, "So I assume you two know each other?"

"Uh, nope," I said, and let her go.

"Why the warm greeting?" he said.

She looked at me with an amused expression on her face.

"Holy crap," I thought to myself. "What the hell was I just doing?" To her I stammered: "Uh, I... I don't know, exactly. For some reason I just instantly like you."

She blinked her eyes and shrugged. "That works," she said, and turned back to Ken.

I should have apologized, and perhaps asked what her name was, but I was mortified by my own behavior. While she talked to Ken I crept slowly away from them and merged into a group of friends.

We wandered into the boardwalk proper, and got wristbands for free rides. Ken finished his conversation and caught up with us. Our first stop as a group was the bumper cars. I got in line with Neil, Linda, Lisa, Ken, and two girls that had ridden with us in the van that I didn't know. Ken hovered close to them almost protectively, keeping up a conversation, and I guessed that he was in recruiting mode. Trying to expand the friend group. I learned later that their names were Sarah and Elena, and they were roommates in the Merrill dorms and new arrivals to UCSC.

After the bumper cars we drifted back the way we came, moving past the entrance to the roofed area by the candy stores. A display table was set out with no one attending it, piled high with saltwater taffy, so we helped ourselves to copious handfuls both coming and going. Back at the entrance our group fragmented further, and Ken and I continued south.

We rode the merry-go-round, snatching the iron rings from the dispenser and hurling them towards the clown's mouth. I saw my old friend Brent sitting on a bench nearby snacking on a chocolate coated ice-cream cone. I waved, and he waved back, a bit lethargically. We caught up and I learned he was sick with some kind of virus. Tanya was nearby so we chatted a bit, then Ken and I resumed walking.

At the entrance to the Big Dipper we ran into Mike and Scott together, each trailing a few people, then Kenny came running up and jumped into several people's arms. Dominic strolled up and engaged in similar but raunchier antics. Then Colleen came sprinting in and jumped into my arms, knocking my glasses painfully into my face. I didn't mind. Soon we had a giant group of people again, rowdier than before, and when we plunged up the ramp to board the Big Dipper we occupied an entire car.

We screamed our heads off, and when the ride dumped us back out on the promenade we headed north again, managing to keep the entire group together. We drifted up another ramp and into the line for the Tornado -- a more sinewy roller coaster with smaller cars. I was shocked to realize that the attendant working at the controls was Clint, a member of my football team at Harbor High five or six years ago. To my relief he didn't recognize me. It would have been painfully awkward for both of us. I kept my tinted glasses on and tried to face the other way.

At the bottom of the ramp we regrouped, losing a bunch of people, then ran directly into another group that had just finished riding the bumper cars. Linda decided that a picture was necessary, so we all lined up and had a passer-by take our picture. Looking around I decided that the term "group" was no longer appropriate. "Horde" made more sense. I wondered casually if we had enough people to start a riot. I put the question to Ken, who shrugged. "It's kind of a riot already," he said.

Ken was going to serious lengths to introduce new people. Many times during the night he'd stopped in front of some random student and methodically introduced them to every member of the group present, even those who had only been tagging along for a few minutes. I admired it, but I also had a vague proprietary feeling, like we couldn't just go around adding anyone to the group, we should screen them somehow. I only wanted nice people.

The group fragmented again. Some people dashed into the bumper cars and others went to a nearby food stand to redeem the coupons that came with their tickets. Ken got a pizza and a soda, and four of us sat down on a bench to eat. A young man and woman were sitting nearby, and after a minute or so Ken handed me his pizza and stood up, and formally introduced us all to them. When more people arrived later on he introduced them to everyone, including the man and woman. One of these new arrivals was a stranger named John. A tall, athletic freshman with French-Irish features, disarmingly handsome, and somewhat reserved. I saw something slightly aggressive and judgmental but still malleable within him, like he was trying to avoid turning into his parents and still casting around for other templates. I guessed that his good looks would bring some interesting drama to the group sometime down the road, as various women tried to take him under their wing. Later on in the evening he would find his way through the group and attach himself quite thoroughly to Colleen, but for now he got up and walked with us to the Giant Dipper. This time around we took up more than an entire car.

After the Giant Dipper we migrated south to the Tidal Wave, a big rotating disc surrounded by small sidecars that leaned independently. On the way there, Mike began yelling in his preacher voice - which projects very impressively - giving a sermon about the evils of random things that popped into his head, including tax forms, unsalted butter, the letter "J", et cetera. Half a dozen of us got in on the act, turning into his parishioners, and as he walked slowly along we got to our knees around him and began waving our arms dramatically, calling him "The One True Way" and "Chosen One" and "Keeper Of The Cheese". That petered out when we got in line for the ride, and as we jabbered, one of the newbies in the group admitted that she'd had no idea what the hell was going on, but got down on her knees because everyone else was doing so.

Halfway through the wait in line we all shouted for Mike to give us another sermon, and he got rolling pretty good, then suddenly drew a blank. So it went: "And you must open your SOUL to the powers of the LORD in his UPSTAIRS APARTMENT, and he will grant you the POWER to fight the ... the uh ..... aaah, shit." We laughed like hell, then a few of us started calling him a false prophet, and jokes spun up from there.

I met Tanya at the exit to the Tidal wave, and after that Mike tried a third sermon but only a few people responded. So instead he whipped around and started marching as if leading a parade. Ken joined him on the left, and I joined him on the right, marching in step. I started tooting the "It's a Small World" theme a half-note off key. About a dozen people were swept along with us. When that ended we were standing by the food displays again, so I redeemed my coupons and got a cup of fries, coated with salt. Not the best dinner, but oh well.

The boardwalk adventure wound down and eventually I sat on a bench by the exit, resting my feet and waiting for people to gather for the drive back to campus. There was everyone from the first trip, including four of the new recruits who stuck with us: Alexis, John, Sarah, and Elena. I crept up the hill in a low gear, treating the van and passengers carefully, and parked in the Merrill lot. So many people came stumbling out it was like watching a clown car unload at the circus. Ken and I gathered at Linda's, then walked across the campus to Lisa's apartment. There we settled down on the floor to watch the end of the Shawshank Redemption, pilfering from a huge bowl of Starburst candies.

On the couch, surrounded by a couple other people, Carolyn was under a blanket with a tall, slender man I'd never seen before. He had curly blond hair and a bit of stubble, and his expression was always bent just a little bit towards a smile, as though he was happy to be alive. There was something about him that said to me, "too attractive to trust," but that was probably just bleeding over from my own embryonic sense of possessiveness over Carolyn. Even though they were both sharing a blanket - a sign of intimacy - they were sitting straight up and their hands were separate. That was odd. After the movie they retreated to Carolyn's room for a while and then the guy emerged alone and left through the front door without so much as a glance at the rest of the household. Okay, so, friend of Carolyn's but not of anyone else. Someone from before UCSC probably. A boyfriend? But not intimate... What, an ex-boyfriend?

I wondered at my own sudden interest in Carolyn's social life. Oh shit; I had a crush. Big time.

Many people of the group left, and Ken conducted a poll over which movie to watch next. It came down to either Die Hard or The Crow, and in the final stretch Die Hard was outvoted. Linda and I derided The Crow mercilessly, expressing that love-hate combination that comes from seeing a personal part of your youth culture appropriated into something huge and profitable for other people.

After that, Linda, Ken, and I made our goodbyes to the household and walked slowly down to Merrill. Linda parted from us in the quad, promising to hang out soon. Ken and I got into the van began driving to Kresge. For the first time all day it was just us alone. We chatted and I steered to the subject of Carolyn.

"So who was that guy under the blanket with Carolyn?" I asked. "I didn't recognize him."

"Hmm? Oh, that's Kris, I think."

"How do they know each other?"

Ken shrugged, "I think they used to date."

"But not now?"

"Well, that was before Carolyn came out as a lesbian."

My brain did a somersault. "Carolyn's gay? Huh! That's weird. I mean, it's not weird generally, but ... I don't know, I just had this impression like she was into guys. Or at least, also into guys."

"Well," said Ken, "Maybe you're saying that because she's really attractive and you want it to be true!"

"Ah; hmm," I said. "You've got a point. Touché. She is really attractive." I sighed. "But it's not just that. I mean, maybe it's just that, but I have this sense like there's something in her personality... Or... Shit, I don't know. Like, you know how you can talk to some people and you just get this sense, like, 'Oh, that person is probably just into guys', or..."

"You mean gaydar," said Ken.

"Yes, exactly!" I said. "It's really obvious that Carolyn is not, like, straight and narrow. There's something more complicated going on, but, I didn't get that 'PING' on the gaydar, like, 'Aaah, you are in this category; I will just go hands-off and it's no romance and friends only with you.' "

"I know what you mean," said Ken. "I think complicated is the better word."

We drove in silence for a while. Ken said, "And actually I don't think she's gay either. I think she's bi. But I do think she sees heterosexuality as a trap. Like, if she gets married to a man, she has to be a certain kind of person and her future will go a certain way, and she won't be able to be her own person."

"Hah," I said. "I don't blame her for thinking that."

When Phaedra got into the van, Ken and I generalized the discussion to long-term relationships and heterosexuality. We continued with the subjects of repression, Freud, bisexuality, and phobias, all the way home. I boiled some noodles to go with some leftover pasta sauce, and we sat around noshing spaghetti and reading email, and our discussion continued right up to showering and a late bedtime.

In the morning, Ken and I dropped Phaedra off at Mike's place on the UCSC campus. From Kresge we drove to the Merrill sub-college, and when we trudged up from the steep parking lot we found an orientation festival underway in the quad. Tents and tables and bunting ran in a ring around the taqueria, with students offering information on campus programs or shilling for clubs. Ken bought me a discount ticket for a trip to the Beach Boardwalk, and one for himself.

Beth was there, steering a table. She was feeling sick but still wanted to meet us at five, when she finished her duties. Ken talked with a smattering of other people I didn't know, and as I stood around gazing at the pageantry, I saw a tall fair-skinned girl with a long Egyptian face and piercing grey eyes, wearing a white fishing cap exactly like the ones my Dad and I wear camping. She walked past me and it was like bring drawn into a current. I had a compulsion to abandon my friends and just start following her around until I got a moment to talk to her. I restrained myself. This had happened to me a few times already on campus, and I was used to it now.

In the back of my head I thought: "I just bet there is an actual, non-trivial percentage of people on every campus, who meet up and get married and spend decades of their adult lives together, all because the girl walked by the guy in some college quad and the guy felt suddenly compelled to follow behind her."

I chastised myself for being such a sucker while Ken finished up his chit-chat. Finding nothing else to do at Merrill, we decided to take care of some more business. We went back to the van and drove down highway 1 to Ken's storage locker, midway between my house and the campus. He unlocked the outside door to the complex and we crept down spooky hallways of cement and washboard steel, to an undistinguished door in the back of the maze. Ken removed the lock and slid the door up to reveal a tangled pile of furniture, most of which I recognized from his dorm room last quarter. It was odd seeing it all crammed into this cube.

Ken started rummaging around, so I wandered the halls for a bit, then returned to the van. Soon he walked up with a microwave oven in his arms. "I wanted to return Beth's microwave," he said, "but hers is at the bottom of a huge pile, so I'm giving her mine for now." I nodded and we stuck it in the van.

That used up just enough time, and now we could pick up Phaedra. We jetted back to Kresge and knocked on Mike's door. He ushered us in and we relaxed for a while, swapping anecdotes and examining Mike's diverse and fastidious collection of toys and artwork. I was pretty sure he'd brought even more of his collection up from southern California, because a few months ago it had not taken up this much space. I took a long "nerd purity test" that Mike found on the local network, and got a score of "user", which I wasn't sure how to interpret. Eventually Mike had to leave for more RA duties, so he gave Phaedra a final smooch and herded us all back out onto the landing.

By then it was close to five o'clock, the time we were scheduled to meet Beth at her apartment, so we decided to drive to Merrill and deliver her microwave. I carried it through the quad and up the stairs to her room, with Ken showing the way, and Phaedra following up. We knocked on the door and one of Beth's roommates opened it. She indicated that we should be quiet, since Beth was still feeling ill and trying to take a nap, so we snuck in and I put the microwave on the counter.

There were now four people living in this apartment, instead of two. Apparently the housing crunch in the area had only gotten worse, and the campus management was cramming beds into the living rooms of apartments as well. In the place where Jen and Eszter used to sit on their couch and watch their tiny little TV on the table across the room, or do homework with papers spread across the floor, there was now a large bunkbed, divided off from the rest of the room by a flimsy curtain running from ceiling to floor. The curtain was currently drawn aside, showing a disorganized heap of luggage and appliances.

I looked at the carpet and remembered my first few nights there, sandwiched in the dark between blankets, alone and with someone else. Eszter. I shuffled briefly through a deck of memories. Her rounded, tomboyish face cast in silhouette against the ceiling by an arc of moonlight from the porch window, staring silently down at me, smoldering. The curve of her warm leg thrown across my stomach, as I tried to sleep and found it absolutely impossible.

I didn't dwell on the images long; there was no point. Briefly I thought about how many thousands of other memories just like that had been formed by other people in this same room, perhaps on the same floor. Now it was a no-man's-land bisected by a curtain, at least for the time being. I walked into Beth's room, where Ken was talking with her, and wished her a speedy recovery and a nice nap. She was very tender towards me, as though I had done something unexpected in wishing her well. Not for the first time I realized that there was something about her I didn't understand, some perspective that I really wasn't getting. I had to set it aside.

Ken and Phaedra and I returned to the quad and discovered Linda and her family unpacking furniture from a station wagon. Enjoying the chance to be chivalrous, I hauled a table and a box up to Linda's apartment. On the second return I discovered Scott, unloading things from the back of a minivan. Phaedra talked with her friend Gabrielle while I caught up with Scott and Ken together. This was my first experience with returning to a broad group of college friends after a summer vacation, and it felt peculiar. It underscored how weird it was that we had gotten so close, even though we'd spent almost all our lives in different parts of the country, or in some cases, outside it. I'd read somewhere that being in the military provided a similar experience: You get thrown into a unit with people way beyond your social network, and form a new one, with its own shared history and even stronger bonds. What had my college social group been through? Mostly a bunch of self-discovery and studying, with some romantic tribulations mixed in. We weren't saving or taking lives, just socializing each other. Definitely not like being in the military.

Scott began hauling his things up and Phaedra and I sat down on a nearby retaining wall to rest our feet. As we chatted, Scott passed by us four or five times, each time mentioning something in an aside. "Hey, did I tell you guys? I finally found a package of edible body paint. Had to get it from a catalog, special order. No bad taste this time!" ... "Oh hey, you know the Swinging Slugs dance group? I'm signing up new people at the fair. You should come by and we can do group demos!" ... "Hey, have you guys seen Kenny yet? I think I owe him some money. I lost a bet."

I got up and wandered around, picking through the other memories that the Merrill buildings conjured. I went into the main office in search of my ID card sticker, but I realized that I didn't even have my ID with me. While in there I saw the girl I'd seen before in the white hat, sitting on one of the couches and talking with some guy. I grabbed some candy from a nearby bowl to give myself an excuse to linger in the area, and deployed a college-age social tactic I'd learned few years ago: When a girl I'm interested in is talking with someone else, I ask that someone else a question and then "notice" the girl later on in the conversation, so she gets a chance to evaluate me without being put on the defensive. I asked the guy: "Oh hey, sorry to interrupt, but what campground did you stay in? Because it sounds like one I know..."

He answered and we chatted a bit. The girl added to the conversation. After a dozen sentences I flip-flopped and decided not to flirt with this girl after all. Her voice was slow and had an overly calm, almost drugged feel to it, which immediately made me knock her a few spots down the intelligence totem pole. Talking to her one-on-one would be a chore, no matter how fun she was to look at. No thanks.

I met up with Ken and Phaedra, and we decided to leave the campus altogether. We drove to Taqueria Vallarta and had burritos. Ken paid for me, as thanks for the spare room. It was the first time that Phaedra had eaten at Vallarta, and she liked it, though she wasn't prepared for the sheer volume of food. Once lunch had settled we decided to get some of our prep-work done for the photo shoot.

We drove downtown to the Goodwill store, and scoured the racks of clothes. I was looking for a brown sweater of the type and shade that matched the one I saw Phaedra wearing in my dream. Well, actually, she hadn't been wearing a sweater in my dream -- she'd been curled up on the forest floor topless. But I'd seen the sweater in a different dream, and since it was close to the color of the leaves, it would serve as a good backup choice if Phaedra got squeamish about putting her bare flesh on open ground when the time came.

Ken collected armfuls of potential garments and brought them to me for evaluation. I rejected each one with only a glance, which felt a little imperious, but Ken seemed used to this sort of thing. Early in this collaboration he'd declared himself the stage manager, and myself the director, and he seemed to know that a little bit of fussiness about "vision" was built into the relationship. Phaedra patiently modeled everything we presented her with, sliding each frock over her tank-top and doing a slow 360 in front of me. I kept apologizing to her, out of a sense that this objectifying routine could be upsetting, but after the second time she rolled her eyes and told me to shut up about it because she was enjoying herself.

We put one sweater on hold, then drove around town some more, trying three other used clothing stores with various levels of sexiness in their catalogue. As we went I realized that there was a whole universe of clothing that I knew almost nothing about. I'd gone to high school wearing jeans that my mother had picked out for me, the same brand of underwear I'd had since forever, and whatever shoes fit my humongous feet. The only choices I'd ever made about my wardrobe were about t-shirts. What business did I have directing a photo shoot with a pretty lady in it? As soon as the question appeared in my head I pushed it back out again. I didn't need to know about fashion: I was following my dream! Hah!

We didn't find anything better so we came back to the Goodwill and bought the sweater. $3.50, fronted by Ken. Satisfied that we had finished some business, we drove back up to UCSC.

As we were unloading at Merrill we ran into Linda again. "Hello, darlings! Have you seen Colleen anywhere?" she asked.

"Nope. Let's go find her!" said Ken, always one to add to a group.

We walked through the buildings to where we knew Colleen was living and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. Our next big idea was to look in the dining hall. None of us had cards to get inside yet, so we walked around the big bay windows, staring in, until Linda spotted Colleen at a table. We waved ferociously at her, and as soon as she noticed us we started making ridiculous faces and going "Nyeah, nyeeeaah" and pressing ourselves against the window. She grinned but also looked terribly embarrassed, and continued talking with the people at her table.

Colleen had multiple friend groups that didn't intersect, and they were not all as wacky as this one, and none of us recognized the other people she was eating with. We were probably torturing her by being weirdos in front of this other group, but we gave absolutely no shits about that.

Since we couldn't get in to introduce ourselves politely, we gave up on our shenanigans and decided to seek out Lisa or Kenny. Both of them were in apartments in the Crown/Merrill complex to the north, but we didn't known which, so we tromped amongst the buildings in a big circle, knocking on the numbers we suspected, singing horrible drinking songs all the way. With everyone shuffled around into new rooms, no one knew the right phone number, and since few people had their computers unpacked, emails wouldn't work either. So we just made a nuisance of ourselves. We tried six or seven apartments, and Ken accidentally found someone else he knew, but no Lisa or Kenny.

Crestfallen, we returned to the quad. ... But after lingering there for just a few minutes, a large group of people barreled into us, screaming our various names. Kenny, Colleen, Alex, Brian, Scott, Kate, and several other people I could not name, who had been absorbed into the group and would probably become new friends in a few weeks.

The group split, and Phaedra, Linda, Ken and I followed Kenny to his new apartment. For some reason I thought that since he was active in the student government he would have access to a better living space, but it wasn't so. He was sharing two bedrooms with six other people, and as usual, several people had to put most of their possessions in the living room, including their computers. It was a cramped mess, but there was a couch, so we all piled onto it. Phaedra plopped down on my lap, which might have raised eyebrows in other social groups but was completely unremarkable in this one. We hung around, catching up and telling dumb stories about what we remembered from last quarter. Everyone was excited about the new Rocky Horror performance coming up. Ken and Linda and I read from a book of dirty limericks that someone had tossed on the table, making them sound as lewd as possible. Then Kenny had to go out, but he knew where Lisa's apartment was, so as he was leaving he walked us over to it.

Lisa's new apartment was a spacious two bedroom place with a living room that wrapped around a partial wall to a kitchen, with space for a dining table along the way. It was on the top floor, so the ceiling rose to a roomy peak above the column at the end of the wall. A part of me registered bitter surprise that this area had not been somehow roped off with netting and hammocks and ladders, so even more students could be crammed inside. There were six people living here, but they had so far managed to keep all the computers in the bedrooms except for Lisa's, which sat on a small desk by the door. She didn't care so much where it went because she often used screen sharing software to write her papers remotely from Neil's place.

Lisa spotted me and launched herself across the room, snatching me into a bear hug on contact and grinning hugely, which was her way. Neil was there on the couch, next to Kurt. Kurt reported that they'd just gone shopping at CostCo and bought a flat of coke by accident. No one in the household liked coke. Phaedra offered to buy it for five bucks. Done! We chatted for a while and eventually went back to Kenny's, and Phaedra sold half her cokes to Kenny while she was there. He crammed them into the fridge.

Since we had soft drinks chilling and were all a bit hungry, Kenny arranged a collection and ordered a pizza. Ken and I re-enacted a scene from a movie, which went off course into an improv insult duel, then turned into a wrestling match on the floor with Phaedra and Linda placing bets. Kenny set up his computer and plugged it into the campus network, and Phaedra took the opportunity to check her email. Then Kenny moved on to the boxes in his room, unpacking them with the door open so the conversation could continue. The pizza was late, but good. I had thick slices of combination on a napkin as we sat around the kitchen table and traded nasty puns and reviewed our class schedules. It wouldn't be long before everyone was buried in coursework and gatherings like this would be much harder.

Phaedra left to walk back to Mike's. The evening wound down and Ken and I said goodbye to Kenny, and walked Linda back to Merrill. From there we drove to Mike's and watched some TV for a bit while Phaedra caught up with him. Then we said goodbye to Mike, and the three of us shambled slowly into the van and drove down to the house in Watsonville, and collapsed immediately into bed. It had been a long, active day.

One week left before classes start for the year. Phaedra is up from LA, sleeping in my spare room and visiting friends before she leaves on a trip to Costa Rica.

I got up, did a little extra cleaning, and drove to Kresge. Had to make a couple passes by the front gate because I wasn't sure if it was the front. I'd never been to the Kresge sub-college of UCSC before except to see Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation years ago. Odd how the campus is sectioned into these little kingdoms.

I parked in the lumpy too-small lot and began walking in. About 200 yards up a wide cement walkway channeling between rows of dorms, I ran into Mike and Phaedra walking arm in arm. Mike, a big man with curly hair, greeted me with a handshake and "Aaah, my Frank!" He had a toothy grin and I could tell he was in a good mood - broadcasting his usual kind of nimble intensity that tended to catch people's attention and make them think that something interesting was happening, or that if it wasn't, Mike would soon make it happen if they stuck around. Always the person most likely to follow through with creative plans, it made sense that he was in charge of the Rocky Horror performance this season.

Hearing his greeting, I thought, "It seems like I'm a shoo-in for the role of Frank. Wow!" It felt odd that he trusted me so much to do a good job, but I was eager to perform, and even though I had very little experience I definitely had clear feelings for how I wanted the character to come across. Those feelings would guide me; I was sure of it.

I hugged Phaedra hello. Short and curvy, with more swing in her hips than a whole Bollywood studio, Phaedra naturally drew attention, which she managed to hold lightly such that people fell into her orbit without colliding. A neat trick that she seemed to pull off by instinct alone. Case in point: I was here at Kresge to pick her up because I'd had a vision of her in a dream a while back, and wanted to recreate the vision by taking some semi-naked pictures of her in the woods -- and though Mike was her boyfriend, and my co-photographer Ken was close to her too, everyone was cool with this. I haven't met very many women who - without seeming to try - connect their boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, and potential boyfriends together into a group that hangs out on its own. Maybe I'm giving her too much credit, but ... even if she didn't deliberately make that happen, it would have been trivially easy for her to prevent it from happening. So some credit is due.

Mike walked us back to the van, gave Phaedra a final kiss, and watched as we drove off. Phaedra and I decided that our very first order of business was to check out sites for the photo shoot. We went around campus to a dirt turnout on the east side and I changed into my hiking shoes, and we began the walk down through the forest that would bring us to the park area known locally as Pogonip.

We passed around a gate that barred vehicles, and down a leaf-strewn road pressed into the hillside. Near the bottom we turned off the main path onto a switchback, and arrived at a charming natural spring. Water crept over the lip of a mossy cement pool and meandered along the ground between the redwoods, then over a shadowy ledge. Various people had fostered a menagerie of plants along the clingy shore, semi-local flora that I could recognize but not name.

I sat Phaedra down on a nearby bench made of logs and told her I was going to check the area out. Then I ran off into the woods, tromping around like a curious dog let off a leash. I hadn't done any forest tromping in about half a year, and it was fun to be back in the woods with a purpose. I looked in a million difference directions at once and found a couple interesting glades and angles. Kicked at the leaves a bit, in search of the right shade of ground. I was beginning to suspect that the right shade of ground didn't exist outside my dream.

When I got back to Phaedra she made a few suggestions for shot locations, including a root formation that she rather liked. We walked slowly out onto the fields beyond the forest, and found a hollow between some bushes that looked promising. We sat down next to each other and enjoyed the view, and talked casually about our relationships and relatives.

I told her I had something on my mind. She told me that she worked best when people were frank around her, and presented her with their thoughts directly. "Well," I said, "in the interest of being frank - har har, pun intended, because I'm going to be playing Frank - I should tell you that I'm a bit edgy. I kind of don't know where my limits are. Well, I mean more like where I want to put my limits, with you."

Phaedra understood immediately. She said, "Well, what I told Mike was, that if anything happens while I'm gone - I mean, if he does anything with some other girl - he shouldn't feel guilty about it. ... I don't want him to feel like he has to suffer and be lonely for my sake. We've both been in situations like this before, where the other person goes away for a long time, and I don't want him to be unhappy while I'm gone. So I said he should follow his urges and if anything happens we'll tell each other about it when I get back. Full disclosure; no guilt."

Her subject change was both clarifying and mystifying. I took the general feeling of her words at face value, and said "Well then. In the interest of avoiding guilt, I'm going to follow this urge then."

I stood up and moved over to her, then knelt down and laid on my side in the grass behind her, curling my body around hers with my knees on one side and my shoulders on the other. She smiled and pushed a hand into my hair.

We talked for a bit longer, more closely than before. I felt glad that I could still be as intimate with her as I'd been last quarter, and on a one-to-one basis instead of in a group setting. This was about where I wanted things. I got up when the grass became uncomfortable, and we brushed ourselves off and walked meditatively back to the van.

On the way out of the campus I popped in my Rocky Horror soundtrack tape and we sang along to the music. In Watsonville, I showed her the room she would be staying in, a large attic space running most of the length of the house, and she was delighted by the sloping roof and the large bed. There was no door on the room connecting hers to mine but that didn't seem to bother her.

In the evening we made beans and franks, and talked on. We'd had pretty good discussions through online channels before, but this was the first time we really met face to face in a room and just talked. It was great fun.

Since Mike was busy the entire next day, we decided to do some tourism and I suggested we drive down the coast. Before bedtime she sat on my lap and checked her email. We went to bed at the same time, her in the spare room, me in my own. I kept ranging slowly between calm and excited. Would something more intimate happen between us? I honestly didn't know. But it didn't have to happen the first day. For now we could go at any pace. I pushed my mind forward into sleep.

I woke up around 10:00am, and sat at my desk answering email for way too long. Tossed in a load of laundry. Did some math homework for about an hour, which roasted my brain, so I took a short nap. Upon waking I pulled on clothing and actually put my shoes on -- a major step towards getting out of the house. I stuffed some medication into the cat's mouth, hopped in the van, and drove to Santa Cruz.

Stopped for gas and bought some junk food while I waited for the car to fill up. Soda, ice cream, chocolate milk. Headed up towards UCSC. As I approached the main entrance I saw two students waving their thumbs by the side of the road, so I picked them up. They unloaded with me when I parked at Merrill.

I strolled to the Baobob lounge annex, a multi-purpose room with a few chairs and couches inside, and a section of open carpet. This was the designated spot for Rocky Horror practice. Ken was there, acting as director for everyone. He was also playing the role of Brad.

I observed that Beth was playing Janet, and Phaedra was playing as Columbia, wearing a decent approximation of the character's outfit: A glittery tube top, black garters, heels, a cane, and a top-hat. She'd borrowed the ensemble from someone else, and the tube top kept threatening to slide down every couple of minutes. Eventually Lisa dug out some safety pins and tightened it up.

Lisa was playing the part of the professor. She sat backwards on a chair, pretending it was a desk, and mouthed her lines with a very studios expression. It gave me a fine excuse to stare at her face, which was just as appealingly intense as always. There was something about her eyes that conveyed a kind of ferociousness. I wasn't sure how it worked. Dominic was skulking around playing the butler with a good measure of bug-eyed enthusiasm, wearing an ill-fitting sport jacket over his regular clothes. Mike was sitting on a couch, wearing boots and a sleeveless leather vest with decorative studs on it, so I assumed he was playing the Meatloaf role and would be called upon soon.

Next to him was a a guy I recognized from my math class but couldn't immediately name. Kenny I think? He had a laptop in front of him. Attached to it with a big strip of velcro was a ricochet modem, a fist-sized metal box that could pick up internet access. The laptop screen was showing a webpage with the script to the entire Rocky Horror Show movie, interleaved with thousands of lines of heckling -- phrases the audience could shout at the stage to participate. He was playing the role of official heckler, so people at the rehearsal could get used to some of the most popular lines and respond to them. Most of the time he just shouted lines from memory, internalized from seeing countless performances.

After a while Jen showed up, working through her role as Frank-n-Furter. She knew every line and didn't need much practice, except when Ken tinkered with stage direction. Jeremy appeared, took his shirt off, and played the part of Furter's creation. Ken stripped down to his underwear at the proper point in the movie. Strangers would sometimes drift to a stop outside the many windows, gaping at the performance, and when Ken spotted them he would dash up and stick his face a few inches from the glass, point his finger, and yell "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU STARIN' AT?" Then the rest of us would make rude faces and hand gestures until the rubberneckers went away.

We got through most of the movie, and repeated several key scenes. I pushed the biker around on his harley - a chair - and learned to do the time-warp dance, plus a little bit of line-dancing for Phaedra's tap routine. After an hour or so, Ken decided to change gears.

"Okay, guys. There's always a pre-show special. I've got an idea for this one. Check these out..."

He walked around to each of us, passing out copies of a document: A couple of pages of hand-picked lines from the script to the Wizard of Oz, arranged in backwards order.

"I figure we can put these together into something short. Might need a few props. I was picturing it like ... Well, it's essentially one extended butt-fucking joke."

I looked over the pages, and got the idea immediately. The lines were stuff like: "I hope your tail holds out!" "I hope my strength holds out!" "There's no use denyin', I'm just a dandy-lion!" "They really beat the stuffing out of you!" "I'm coming, auntie Em!" etc. We worked the idea for about half an hour and came up with some rough blocking, then people began to disperse for dinner and homework.

While Jeremy and I caught up, we walked over to my van so I could fetch my totally melted ice cream. I offered him some and he made a face like Dracula recoiling from sunlight. Our next stop was his dorm room. He sprawled across his bed to make a few phone calls, and I wandered out to the lounge just outside his door and sat on the couch with Beth and Ken to watch Joe-Bob Briggs talk about his current edition of the Saturday night movie: The Goonies. Joe-Bob skipped around, talking about Sloth, that awkward kissing scene, the organ made out of bones, and the pirate ship. Ken informed me the next Rocky practice was Wednesday in the CE Merrill lounge.

Phaedra stopped in, wearing fresh clothes and carrying a bag. "I'm off to work, guys. Figured I'd come by for hugs first."

We chatted and saw her off. She promised she'd have another gathering soon. Then Jeremy emerged from his room, announcing that it was time for a party at Aubrey's apartment, so we got up and began marching over there. Along the way he explained that it was a birthday party for Aubrey, and he wanted us to be extra nice to her, because she was recovering from a horrible week that included a breakup with her boyfriend - who'd been lying to her about several things - and some trouble with the proctors, on top of a huge pile of coursework.

Aubrey's place was another posh two-room layout like Jen and Eszter's, but cluttered with way more furniture. I got some introductions and shook hands. Aubrey herself was medium-height with a solid build and a short brown haircut. She seemed a bit subdued - which was understandable given the circumstances - and after chatting with her for a while, I saw an earnest, empathetic side to her that probably made her relationships very complicated. It didn't strike me as a negative - not necessarily at least - but something about it made me guess that she was prone to mixing her personal life up with sexual politics and I would not want to date her, at least right now. This did not stop me from stealing glances at her impressive breasts, though, and after a while I folded my own behavior into things and realized that Aubrey was probably catching men ogling her all the time and was pretty well fed up with it.

There was something in that idea that I couldn't quite grasp, and as I navigated around the party chatting with people, I wrestled with it in my head.

I didn't have much romantic experience with women. I'd had a girlfriend for a few months, years earlier, and gone on a handful of dates, and that was it. What little I did know was mostly from watching women socialize from afar. From what I understood, they got lots of attention from men - some way more than others - and the way they dealt with it fell on a spectrum. Some women seemed to appreciate male attention, or at least acted as if they did, and as they accepted it they found ways to redirect it to their advantage. They took sexual attention and re-cast it in order to express themselves, get things they wanted, or navigate socially by shifting the attention to others.

And then, there were women who reacted negatively. Not just by retreating or by looking uncomfortable, but with aggressive words and angry expressions, to drive the man away and convince him that his behavior was wrong. As far as I could tell, they knew that the attention was at least partially motivated by sexual interest, and that tainted it like poison in a well. It proved that the man was seeing them as a sex object - and therefore less than human - and intent on oppressing or controlling them for sexual purposes - and therefore he should be shunned.

I was not experienced enough to understand exactly how they divided the men who saw them as sex objects from the men who saw them as human. I knew they didn't like men who invaded their personal space, which made perfect sense to me. I knew that they didn't react well to men staring at their body parts, or staring at them in general, and I could sort of understand that. I knew they didn't like pick-up-lines or out-of-context flirting, but there seemed to be weird exceptions based on who the man was or what he looked like. I also suspected there was some internal factor that I could never predict, like the woman's self-confidence in a given situation, or how she felt wearing a particular outfit.

But one thing I knew for sure - from my own direct experience - was that no matter how many men they aggressively drove away, there would always be more, bringing more attention and interest. The supply was infinite. So, the women who got angry at sexual interest were doomed to get angry over and over again for as long as they lived.

That made me think there was some kind of progression. Like, women who got angry at sexual attention would eventually get tired of being angry, and they would enter a phase where they tolerated it, and then they would enter a phase where they started to make use of it and see the benefits of it. Then probably in late adulthood they would see it begin to fade away, and then they might miss it.

I wanted to believe in a progression like that, because it made a good counter-argument to another attitude that was rolling around in my mind -- an attitude that I think I shared with a lot of young people around me. We believed - even if just on a subconscious level - that if we tried hard enough to treat the men and women around us exactly the same - with the same social signals and gestures, the same expectations, and the same participation in the same activities - then the sexual dynamics between genders would smooth out and mostly disappear from society. We believed that the very idea of treating men and women differently, in any circumstance, would evaporate forever, and everything would be way easier, and a lot more fair. It just made sense. The change would spread outward from us in a wave and circle the world.

But, that wave was getting broken up into a chaotic mess by a huge underwater reef, made of romantic and sexual desire. All the messages were getting mixed. Men were grappling with their desire to make romantic or sexual advances, and women were working at cross-purposes -- some trying to exterminate those advances, some learning to manipulate them or even enjoy them.

And like everyone else, I didn't really know what I was doing. So I made it up as I went. Sometimes I did my best to act as though people didn't exist from the neck down. Sometimes I made it obvious that I was looking, and that I liked what I saw. Sometimes that attention was welcomed and taken as a compliment, and seemed to boost the confidence of the woman receiving it. Sometimes it made her scowl and turn away. And dammit, the difference between those outcomes didn't seem to be a matter of ideals of gender equality, but a matter of details: Approach, timing, mood. And some sort of calculus about who was more generally attractive - her or me - or at least, who thought they were.

Even the stuff that should have been simple, like location, was loaded with exceptions. At work? No, except sometimes yes. In the cafeteria? Yes, except sometimes no. In class? No, except sometimes yes. At a party? Yes, except sometimes no. Like here, in Aubrey's case, where she's just broken up with her boyfriend and would probably kick me in the face if I flirted with her. And I knew that, but I still kept glancing at her breasts when she wasn't looking, because they really were impressive, and god dammit what the hell was wrong with me?

Lisa walked up and wished Aubrey a happy birthday, and they began chatting, picking up where I left off. They sat down at the little kitchen table while I continued to lean on the wall.

"Thanks for having a party," Lisa said. "I needed this. It's probably the last social thing I can do for a while, 'cause I've got three papers to write."

"Ugh," Aubrey said, "I'm supposed to be studying but I'm way too tense."

I walked over and began giving her an unsolicited shoulder massage. She went "aaaah," and slumped forward, bonking her head comically on the tabletop. I moved down from her shoulders to her back. Back massages were such a common currency on campus that this didn't really register as flirting, which made it acceptable, but I knew that there was definitely a line and I was right up on it. After this I should probably move away and mingle.

Someone drifted by and handed Lisa a beer. "Alright, now the party's starting!" she said, cracked it open, and immediately chugged half of it down.

"Wow," I said, a little concerned. "Do you always go that fast?"

"Oh no," she said. "But if I'm going to have beer instead of liquor, there's not much point in tasting it, yeah? This is my one for the night. I'll get buzzed and that will be it."

Lisa and Aubrey chatted a bit more, and I finished up my massage and patted her paternally on the back. Ken and Jeremy came over and added to the conversation. Lisa jumped up, challenging some point Jeremy was making, and a group wrestling match suddenly began. Ken pushed Jeremy over the side of the couch, sprawling him on the cushions, while I tickled him. He let out a string of impressive hoots.

Emily walked over and shushed us, because there were people downstairs just waiting for an excuse to call in a noise complaint and get the party shut down. It was the first time I'd interacted with Emily in any way. A short woman with very Irish features and dark, wavy hair down past her shoulder blades. I liked her but she was a very reserved person, and I didn't have the confidence to approach her alone. Jeremy and the rest of us disentangled from the couch, swearing we would finish the match later.

Aubrey walked up to me carrying a bottle.

"Hey you," she said. "You don't drink, and you own a car, right?"

"Yep, that's me."

"Could you do me a big favor? Jeremy brought this bottle of Creme de Menthe, but he was supposed to get Creme de Cacao. Could you give him a ride to Z's liquors so he can exchange it?"

"Sure," I said. "Yo, J-Man! We out!"

"Wahoo!" he said.

"I'm all over this," said Lisa. "Let's go!"

Jeremy walked into the crowd and brought forward a girl I didn't know. Kat maybe? We all dashed out the door and down to the parking lot. Jeremy and his girl canoodled on the floor in the back of the van, and Lisa and I chatted excitedly in the front, talking about friends and parties and how both are different on a college campus. The conversation was more fun than the party had been.

When we got back, Emily was standing in the parking lot.

"Wait, guys," she said. "Don't come back to the party. It's been busted up by a proctor! They're probably going to write up everyone there."

Turns out we were lucky for going on an errand.

Emily joined our group and we walked back to the Merrill dorms. Aubrey and several other people were standing around near the stairs below her apartment. We chatted and decided to move the party to Jeremy's room. It would be very cramped, but perhaps we could spread out into the lounge nearby.

I sat on Jeremy's bed, up against the wall. Eight people crammed into the room. After about five minutes it was obvious that we needed more space. Aubrey suggested they check out the dance happening over in the Crown complex, and everyone split except Ken, Chris, Lisa, and me. Suddenly it was a lot quieter.

We sat around talking. Ken got up and put on the Austin Powers soundtrack, which was pretty good low-key party music. Chris fell over and rested her head on my leg, so I reached over and gave her a backscratch.

Lisa saw Chris and said, "I think you've got the right idea." She grabbed one of Jeremy's pillows and planted it across my lap, then fell across it. I petted her face and arms, and ran my fingers through her long, straight hair, spreading it out into a halo around her head. I noticed her eyes were a deep pure shade of brown. No wonder they made so much contrast with her pale face and hair. Slowly her eyelids closed, and she went, "hrrrrfffzzzzz," drew her knees up, and curled into a ball on my lap. I rested one hand on her head and the other across the leg of her corduroy jeans.

I was a happy camper. "Ahh, here we are," I thought. "A quiet, cozy moment to remember this weekend by."

Kat appeared at the door and informed us that the party was back on at Aubrey's but in a quieter mode this time. We all looked at each other, trying to decide what to do. Lisa sat up and rubbed her eyes.

"My backpack is still over there," she said.

We all strolled to Aubrey's as a group. Aubrey, Emily, Jeremy, and several other people were sprawled out, ready to watch a movie. It was Snow White, the version with Sigourney Weaver in it.

Lisa knew about my crush on Sigourney Weaver. "Ah hah," she said, and elbowed me in the side. "You're probably staying here!" She hunkered down to see the movie also. Ken and Chris said they were going to turn in for the night, and I hugged them at the door.

It was a good, creepy couple of hours. When the movie ended, Lisa jumped up and left for her room with her backpack over one shoulder. Jeremy left, creating an open spot on the couch, so I took his vacated post with Aubrey's legs across my lap under a blanket. We watched Aeon Flux episodes until about five in the morning, in a comfortable, hazy silence.

Finally, Emily and Aubrey got up to do some post-party cleaning. The other guests left, and I laid on the couch feeling too cozy to move, alternately watching the both of them move around and interact with each other. It was a strange thing to realize: I'd never seen two women who weren't related to each other do chores together. Not once, not anywhere, until now.

Eventually everyone left but Aubrey and I. She had about three hours to sleep before she went on a drive to visit relatives for Easter. I pulled myself up from the couch and put on my shoes and sweater in a tired haze, while making idle chat with her about relationships. She said she needed to focus more on defining what her needs were. We shared our frustration at how hard it was to find the line between one's own needs and the needs of a significant other. I was too exhausted to contribute much. Just before opening the door I shook her hand, aware of the line between flirting and friendship, and she let go and then made the choice to step forward and gave me a hug as well. I was very aware of her breasts but kept it to myself. It had to be her move, not mine, because then it wasn't a male sexual advance, and could therefore still be in the friendship category. I knew that, and went along. If I was to give my position a name, it would be, "friend zone with extra trust."

How did I even know that? I knew I hadn't read it in a book somewhere. I tried to catch that observation and examine it, but it was like trying to catch foam on a wave. I drove back to Watsonville and crashed into bed.