That was their plan. Compared to the plans of many of our peers, it seemed like a recipe for starvation. But they’d be starving together.
I had started seeing a political science major named Wendy just a few weeks earlier, and unlike Jeffrey and Sara, we would be starving separately. Or rather, I would be starving alone. She’d made it clear on our first date that she wasn’t going to get involved in anything complicated right now, not with Michigan law only three months away. When I told her that I was heading for New York after graduation to play the drums, and that a long-distance relationship probably wasn’t in the cards, she seemed pleased, and our springtime romance was on.
I’d spent much of the day with Wendy, and now she was having some sort of last-hurrah dinner with her suite mates and would catch up with us at midnight by the fifth-reunion tent. At eleven o’clock I was in my room, just sitting with the bay window open, looking out into the dark courtyard and killing time before we all met up in an hour. There was a pounding on my door. I got up and opened it.
Jeffrey stood in the doorway looking wet from the rain, bloodshot eyes, hair a mess. Definitely drunk. He came in and sat down on the floor. The night was warm and humid, but he was shivering.
I asked him what was wrong.
“Can I borrow a T-shirt?” he asked. “This one got wet.”
All my things were in boxes. I dug around until I found a T-shirt and tossed it to him. He pulled off the wet one and put on mine.
“Thanks.”
He was breathing heavily, and when he looked up at me, it wasn’t the rain making his eyes wet.
“Jeffrey, what is it?”
Outside, the most determined of us were still in full party mode, despite the hangovers and the rain. A drunk student was announcing to the whole courtyard how fucking drunk he was, and in response a second guy yelled at him from inside one of the dorms to shut the fuck up, and in response to that the first guy reminded the second guy that it was a free country, and then his belch echoed across the quad.
“It’s Sara,” Jeffrey said.
“What? What about her?” The way he looked, my first thought was that she’d just broken up with him.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“She cheated on me.”
At that precise moment, another partyer outside began singing a loud, off-key version of the “Love Boat” theme. Love, exciting and new …
“What are you talking about?” I said. “How do you know?”
Come aboard, we’re expecting you …
“I … that guy really needs to shut up.” Jeffrey got up and slammed my window closed. He sat down again. “I need a cigarette,” he said. “I really need one and I’m completely out.”
“All right,” I said, except that I didn’t have any. I left him in my room and banged on a couple of doors, returning a minute later with the last of a pack, borrowed from a guy at the end of the hallway I’d been trying to avoid all semester, an aerospace engineer named Gilbert who apparently played the bass and was always asking me to “rock out” with him.
Jeffrey struggled to breathe normally—he was still crying a little—and lit his cigarette. Took a long drag. Then he told me what’d happened. How the information had come out in the worst possible way. In one of Sara’s short stories.
She’d been taking the advanced fiction writing class that semester with Tanya Mahoney. Since freshman year she’d been trying to get into that class.
“She said she didn’t want me reading her work this semester, that she was ‘getting close.’ To a breakthrough or whatever. I wasn’t suspicious,” he said, “only curious. I mean, for four years I’d read every word she ever wrote.”
They were the ideal couple that way. Sara loved to write, and Jeffrey loved to read. She wouldn’t show her work to anybody besides him, but he was always bragging about her talent, saying it was only a matter of time before she began to publish her stories.
After dinner that night, he’d been alone in her dorm room while she went to take a shower. While she was out of the room, he’d noticed in one of the open boxes a pile of her stories.
“What do you mean, you ‘noticed’ a pile of stories?”
“Okay, I dug a little. I was curious. I hadn’t read anything of hers for months.” He pulled a bundle from the back pocket of his jeans. “Maybe I was a little suspicious. It’s possible. I don’t know. Anyway, here. Read it.”
“You stole her story?”
“Yeah, I took it and left. I couldn’t stand to be there when she came back. Go on—read it.”
I unfolded the pages he’d given me. Sara was always telling us that her stories went long—twenty, thirty pages. This one was short, though, just eight pages. It was dated from the middle of the semester and titled “The Three-Day Affair.”