1
Auggie and Fer had been driving for three days when they reached the Sigma Sigma fraternity house, which sat on Frat Row on the south side of Wroxall College’s campus. For the last hundred miles, the Civic had been chugging and croaking, and it made a shrill, despairing noise every time they went up a hill—which in this godforsaken corner of the Midwest was about every fifty yards. Auggie was pretty sure he could smell something burning. It was better than the day and a half of Fer’s cheesy-tater-tot farts, though, that he’d experienced in the middle of the trip.
“Be fast, dick drip,” Fer said as he pulled into the Sigma Sigma parking lot. “Or I’m going to miss the shuttle.”
“I know.”
“So be fast.”
“I know, Fer.”
“So don’t sit there scratching your pubic lice. Get a fucking move on.”
“I hate you so much,” Auggie said as he jumped out of the car and ran toward the move-in tables set up in front of the fraternity house. It was mid-afternoon because they’d left Amarillo later that morning than they had planned, and Auggie guessed the rush of move-ins had already happened. A couple of guys around his age—they were sophomores too, he guessed—were lugging plastic totes toward the red-brick house, and another guy was folding bedsheets while he argued with a girl—sister? girlfriend?—at the back of a station wagon. No parents. No older brothers.
Fer laid on the horn, which was actually pretty pathetic because the Civic just squeaked a few times. Then he shouted, “For fuck’s sake, imagine some dude is jackrabbiting your hole and move your ass, Augustus!”
Auggie’s face was hot as he approached the move-in tables. He found the L-R sign and felt his face get even hotter. The guy sitting there was gorgeous: big, brawny, in a tank and shorts and Adidas slides, with blond curls spilling over his forehead. He was grinning as Auggie moved forward.
“Lopez,” Auggie said.
“Hi,” the guy said, shuffling the papers. He glanced up. He had blue eyes. “Dylan.”
“No, August. But I go by Auggie.”
The guy laughed.
“Oh,” Auggie said. “Got it. Hi.”
Dylan laughed again. He had a nice laugh. He had very white teeth. When he handed over the paperwork and a key, he said, “You know everybody’s talking about you, right?”
“No, I definitely did not know that.”
“Yep,” Dylan said. “They are. I like your videos. You’re super funny.”
“Thanks. I’m always looking for people who want to be in them.”
“Nah, man,” Dylan said. “Not really my thing. It’s cool, though. I’m following you on Instagram and Snapchat. dylan_j199. Add me back.”
“Cool,” Auggie said.
“You want a tour?” Dylan glanced at the other guys manning the table, who were all trying incredibly hard to pretend they were doing something else. “Someone can cover for me.”
The Civic squeaked again, and Fer roared, “Jesus Christ’s bloody tampon, Augustus, either go down on him or don’t, but hurry it the fuck up!”
“Maybe another time,” Auggie said.
“Hit me up.”
“Do you live here?”
“No, man. Senior. Some buds and I have a place off-campus. You should come over sometime. Hang out.”
“That’d be cool.”
“Hit me up,” Dylan said again, but this time with a lazy smile that Auggie felt low in the belly.
As Auggie jogged back to the Civic, he could hear conversation buzz to life behind him. One guy said, “Jeez, Dyl, let the kid take a breath before you bend him over,” and another guy said, “Dylan, you are such a fucking perv,” and Dylan just laughed—a low, rumbling sound.
“Did you get your complimentary scissoring?” Fer asked as he got out of the car. They had different dads, and Fer was taller, darker, and bigger—muscle that was softening as Fer spent more and more time at business lunches and meetings. The taller part, that was what irked Auggie. Of course, sometimes the bigger part was pretty fucking annoying too.
“For the millionth time,” Auggie said, “I didn’t need you to drive out here with me.”
“And let you go by yourself and give blowjobs to truckers for almost two thousand miles? Yeah, right, Augustus. Great idea.”
“And for the millionth time, I didn’t want you to drive out here with me.”
“Pay for your own fucking education then.”
“Just unload the stuff in the parking lot, and I’ll get some guys to help me carry it inside.”
Fer ignored him. He was working the biggest piece of luggage out of the trunk, grunting at the weight. “What the hell do you have in here? Your stainless-steel dildo collection?”
“Oh my God,” Auggie said, covering his face.
The unloading and moving-in process went relatively smoothly. The Sigma Sigma house was a massive, three-story Colonial with red brick and gleaming white pillars. It was relatively new construction, with high ceilings and big windows. Auggie’s room was on the third floor. The walls were a grayish brown, and someone had clearly patched and painted over the summer because there were no nail holes or broken plaster. Twin beds took up one side of the room, and matching desks occupied the rest of the space. One wall had been given over to two closets, which was where Auggie was going to have to store all his clothes—apparently, a dresser was not part of the standard package.
“This is worse than your last place,” Fer said on their third trip upstairs.
“No, it’s way better.”
“Do you have a roommate?”
“I don’t know; if I do, he hasn’t moved anything in yet.”
“He’d better not be a fucking psycho like your last one.”
“I think that’s everything, Fer.”
Fer grunted, hands on hips, still studying the room.
“I guess you can go now,” Auggie said.
“I want to see the bathroom. Your last place, you had that private bathroom.”
“You can’t just wander around the bathroom.”
“I’m going to take a leak.”
“You can’t.”
“I can’t take a leak? Jesus, Augustus, I don’t even know if you hear yourself sometimes.”
Fer left, and Auggie considered whether or not it would be better just to die right now rather than dragging it out for the rest of the time Fer insisted on staying. Instead, he rearranged some of his luggage and the moving boxes, snapped a selfie, and pushed it out on Instagram with the caption: The eagle has landed at Bro Central. Wish me luck! He repeated the process with Snapchat—he was still feeling out the relatively new platform, but he thought it had a lot of possibility. Almost immediately, he got a snap back: it showed a quarter of Dylan’s face and his mop of blond curls, and then grass, trees, and a swatch of asphalt. Dylan was grinning, and he’d scrawled a message on top of the picture: welcome to Bro Central, little bro!