By her third absence, Moore was openly flirting with the girls who’d been fawning over him the past several weeks. The following week, Jackie missed the midterm. I waited for an updated status to come through the system, telling me she’d officially dropped the course, but it never did. If she forgot to officially drop by the end of the month, she’d get an F at the end of the semester.

I knew damned well she wasn’t my responsibility or my concern … but I didn’t want her to fail a class, in addition to whatever that douchebag had done to her by ending their three-year relationship. But after more than a week of scanning and dismissing every girl on campus remotely resembling Jackie Wallace, I started to believe I’d never see her again.

Francis gave me a How’d that get there? look as I lifted his butt off my buzzing phone.

It was Joseph, one of the full-time maintenance technicians at the university who scored me occasional extra income doing odd jobs on campus – usually legit contract labour, sometimes under-the-table cash. I wasn’t choosy; I’d take either. ‘Hey, man.’

‘Duuuude … you busy tonight?’ Stoned.

I shook my head. Joseph was fond of his recreational pharmaceuticals, especially at the end of a crap week of dealing with some of the more condescending academics, harried admins or bosses on power trips of their own.

‘Just studying. What’s up?’

Francis took advantage of my distraction, plopping his fluffy, twenty-pound body on top of my textbook and half my class notes. I shoved at him halfheartedly and he swiped my pen off the sofa in retaliation.

‘On a Friday night? Dude, you have got to stop that shit.’ This was a frequent assertion of Joseph’s. He knew I wasn’t going to change – he just felt like he had to restate his objection from time to time. ‘When are you going to live a little?’

‘Soon as I graduate, man,’ I promised. ‘Soon as I graduate.’

Sighing heavily, he turned to the purpose of his call. ‘I’ve got a little … proposition for you.’

If I had a best friend, Joseph was probably it. The weirdest thing about our friendship was the fact that we had only two things in common. First, our nearly identical tastes in music, and second, an affinity for compartmentalizing our lives, something we did with equal compulsion.

After spotting me alone at several shows last spring, he’d walked up and stuck his hand out. ‘Hey, man – Joseph Dill. Don’t you work on campus?’

‘Yeah.’ While we shook hands, I tried to place him. He wasn’t an engineering classmate, but he seemed a little young to be a professor. One of the slightly older students from one of Heller’s classes, maybe?

‘Campus cop, right?’ His tone wasn’t contemptuous, but it wasn’t complimentary, either.

I cursed that job for the millionth time, for all that those ten hours per week paid enough to cover nearly half my tuition. ‘Oh, uh – not really,’ I said. ‘I just write parking tickets. It’s a work-study position. Still have to wear the dumbass uniform, though.’

‘Ah,’ he nodded, sizing me up. ‘So … you’re a student.’

Though we inhabit the same small realm, maintenance and groundskeeping personnel don’t generally interact with students. He gestured to himself after the merest pause, stepping across that invisible border. ‘Building maintenance.’ He smiled. ‘Thought I’d buy you a beer and ask what are a couple hot guys like us doing going to concerts alone?’

I smiled, but it abruptly occurred to me that Joseph might be interested in more than a conversation, because my g*ydar was blaring.

‘You’re legal, right?’ he asked.

‘Uh, yeah …’ Raising my red-banded wrist, I told myself this would be no different than turning down a girl when I wasn’t interested or in the mood – something I’d done often enough the previous three years.

‘Cool.’ After paying for two beers, he handed me one and clinked the necks before taking a long swallow.

I thanked him guardedly, not wanting to shoot him down before he asked a question.

He picked at his bottle’s label, finally coming to some conclusion. ‘So, my boyfriend is a musical-theatre guy. And f**k if I wouldn’t rather be chased by starving zombies than be forced to endure Rent ever again. He has no problem getting a friend to go to that shit with him, thank Christ. I don’t have the same luck with my musical tastes in our circle of friends, ya know?’ He eyed me then, waiting for either confirmation or a prejudiced response.

Relieved, I smiled at the thought of this guy, who looked as if he’d be more at ease in a biker bar than a Broadway show. On the heels of that thought, a buried memory pushed to the surface – my father, standing awkwardly next to Mom at one of her gallery showings, clutching a fluted glass of champagne. Dad was a sports-watching scotch/rocks guy, not an art enthusiast. But he loved and supported my mother.

‘I don’t really know, but I can imagine,’ I said.

Joseph’s mouth pulled into a half smile, and we’d been friends since then.

‘Okay,’ I said now. ‘Proposition away.’

‘You, uh, have experience fixing AC systems, right?’

‘Yeah?’ I’d worked for Hendrickson Electric & AC my last year of high school, assisting old Mr H on hundreds of maintenance calls and repairs – but I’d never been in charge of diagnosing a disorder. After a year of working with him, he joked that I’d learned just enough to be dangerous, which summed up my level of expertise perfectly.