“How do you know Gabe’s not spiking his coffee?” Brian asked, dragging me back to the conversation.

I didn’t know this. But it seemed a stretch to equate Gabe being quiet with Gabe being drunk on the job. And though these drunk boys were just shooting the shit behind their teacher’s back, I felt bad for Gabe since he wasn’t there to defend himself.

“That’s an idea,” Hunter whispered in my ear. “Want me to spike this for you?”

I shook my head and said softly, “I have homework to do later.” His bare shoulder next to mine sank like he was disappointed. I couldn’t waste energy puzzling that out when I needed to rescue Gabe’s reputation. Gabe mattered to me, and Hunter did not.

“I like Gabe,” I said loudly enough to carry. “He reminds me of someone.”

“Who?” Hunter asked. “Tommy?”

Although it had been hard for us to hear each other before, Hunter’s one word seemed to have rung out clear as day for everybody. “Who’s Tommy?” Kyle asked, and the others sat up to hear the answer.

I did not think this was the time or place or company to state that Tommy was Hunter’s easygoing father, and that Hunter and I knew each other from way back when. I could not trust Wolf-boy on top of everyone else with the stable-boy secret.

Hunter was thinking the same thing. He shifted the subject. “I like the way Gabe trusts us to comment on each other’s stories.”

“He goes too far,” Brian said. “Pedagogically speaking, it’s one thing to create a student-centered classroom by asking for the students’ voices. It’s another thing to let them bulldoze each other.”

“Is it bulldozing to express your opinion?” Manohar asked. For some reason we were having a hard time hearing each other again. He was shouting. “If you let a creative-writing student think her story is great when it isn’t, aren’t you doing her a disservice? If she sucks, she needs to know so she can change her major before it’s too late.”

I opened my mouth and quickly closed it again. My eyes were on the prize, keeping Manohar from going to Gabe with the stable-boy secret. If the price was allowing him to take potshots at me in public, I could pay it.

Summer said what I didn’t dare say. “You’re assuming that the student making the comment knows what he’s talking about. What if he tells another writer that she sucks and discourages her, when her work is very good? What if the student making the comment is, for instance, an economics major and is only taking creative writing in the first place because the honors program requires it, and in actuality he doesn’t know shit?”

“This is just a replay of class,” Hunter said. “If we’re going to talk about creative writing, let’s be less specific.” I wished he were coming to my aid, but I knew he was only taking control and keeping the peace, as usual.

And I’d had enough. “I don’t think it’s possible to talk about creative writing without being specific.” I turned to Kyle, across from me. “Do you have a really sharp knife?”

He blinked at me, then peered into his cup. “Is this a trick question?”

“No. I only came up here because I need to borrow a very sharp knife, and I thought you might have one.” I didn’t add that thinking of him as “Wolf-boy” had called to mind the necessity of a knife in the wilderness. This connection made no sense anyway since he was from Brooklyn.

Brian raised his hand and called out, “I have a really sharp knife.”

“May I borrow it?” I asked.

“My father gave it to me.”

I squinted at him through the mist. “May I borrow it without telling your father?”

“Why don’t we go get it from our room,” Hunter called across me to Brian. “Then we’ll take it down to Erin’s room and use it. It will never leave your sight.”

I clamped my teeth together to keep from saying anything about Hunter’s presumptuous “we,” his decision that my use of Brian’s knife needed Hunter’s input. I could not forget his hands on that girl.

Brian scowled behind his shades, but no one was immune to Hunter’s charm. He stood and nodded to Summer. “Save my seat, would ya?”

“Kyle will save it, won’t you, Kyle?” Summer asked. “I’m comfortable here.” She winked at me.

I assumed that was the signal to me that she felt comfortable with Manohar—more than comfortable. The mango daiquiri was probably helping. I felt uneasy about leaving her there. But after all, half the people crowding the bathroom were chicks, and home was three floors down.

Carefully I crossed the slippery floor, assuming Hunter and Brian would follow. I reached for the handle on the bathroom door, but a man’s hand reached past me and opened it first—Hunter, I saw, glancing over my shoulder. I stepped into the hallway, the air dry and freezing in comparison, and told myself the temperature change was the reason I shivered.

“This way.” He reached his arm around me and touched my shoulder. He walked ahead of Brian and me, three doors down. Brian fished his key from the pocket of his bathing suit. Hunter reached his own key first and turned it in the door.

Their room was set up exactly like mine but looked completely different. As Brian opened a drawer in his dresser to retrieve the famed knife, I scanned his floor-to-ceiling collage of psychedelic posters. Hunter quietly sat on the opposite bed. His wall was blank, almost as if he and Brian were having an interior design standoff.

I stood awkwardly between them. “Manohar got the small room? How did that happen? I’ve talked to a lot of people in this dorm and there’s always a story behind who gets the small room.”

Hunter patted beside him on the bed, an invitation for me to sit.

Blushing, I shook my head.

He spoke without skipping a beat. “I didn’t want it. That room is claustrophobic.”

“And I came out of the closet when I was thirteen.” Brian turned to us, brandishing a glinting dagger. “I’m not going back in.” He came toward me with the knife, handle first.

“Brian!” Hunter jumped up from his bed. “Don’t give it to her when she’s never used one before.”

“She asked to use it,” Brian said. “Isn’t that why we’re here?”

“You’re going to use it for her. Or I will.” Hunter took the dagger by the handle. “Sometimes Erin doesn’t know what’s good for her.” Barebacked and blade down like a jungle man ready to stab the python that crossed his path, he led the way out of the room.

Brian and I exchanged a glance and followed. “What do you need it for, anyway?” Brian asked me in the stairwell.

“I’m almost out of face cream and I can’t afford another tube. If I cut it open and put it in a plastic bag, I think I can get another month out of it, maybe six weeks.”

Hunter turned suddenly on the stair below us. Brian and I both jumped backward, but Hunter knew better than to turn with a knife point out. The knife was down by his side. “That’s what this is about? You don’t need face cream. You look fine.”

“That’s because I’ve been using it,” I said at the same time Brian said, “That’s because she’s been using it,” and rolled his eyes.

We exited the stairwell at the second floor. I unlocked the door, ushered them inside, and opened the inner door to my little bedroom.

“What’s your story, then?” Brian asked, already nosing around in my stuff. “How did you end up in the closet?”

“I volunteered,” I said from the doorway. “I like it.”

Hunter whispered, “You always did like sitting in the closet.”

I hugged myself as a chill raced across my skin.

He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He was fingering the filmy green fabric of the belly-dancing costume on the back of my door. In a normal tone he said, “I still can’t believe you’re taking belly dancing for your phys ed credit. It will never do you any good.”

“I think it’s so cool!” Brian exclaimed.

In the back of my mind I knew I should have thanked Brian for coming to my defense. All I could focus on was Hunter, who had touched another girl in the shower and now had the gall to stick his nose in my business. “What phys ed credit will do me any good?” I asked suspiciously. “Horseback riding?”

“You said it,” he muttered. “I didn’t.”

“I liked the idea of getting my abs in shape,” I said truthfully. “I’ve been doing it for three weeks and look.” I thrust my tummy forward to show him. It was flat. Not that he cared.

Brian stuck his head out of my bedroom to see. “You should get your belly button pierced. Say it like you mean it.” He disappeared through the doorway again.

“Are you kidding?” I called. “Do you know how much that would cost, not to mention the price of a charm to plug the hole?”

“Your grandmother would be furious,” Hunter said quietly, “just like the last time you got a piercing.” He touched one finger to the diamond stud on the side of my nose.

We held one another’s gaze for a long, electric moment.

I knocked his hand away and whispered, “Everything I do isn’t designed to make my grandmother furious. I don’t give a damn what she thinks.”

I flounced through the doorway, into my room. Brian’s rummaging hadn’t bothered me at all, but now that Hunter was coming in behind me, I glanced around frantically.

Nothing was out of place. Nothing would betray any more of my secret fantasies to Hunter. He already knew them all anyway.

Brian stood before a cheap frame nailed to my wall. “Wow, a rejection letter. You should take this down. Doesn’t it discourage you?”

Ugh, I’d forgotten about the rejection letter. It meant a lot to me to display it. That summer I’d finished the romance novel I’d worked on my entire senior year of high school. I sent it off to the publisher I’d written it for. After only a month, I’d gotten a rejection letter, which was very quick. They must have really hated it.

I searched my dresser drawer for the cream. “No, it encourages me. It’s my first firm step toward the writing career I want.”

Brian glanced over his shoulder at me. “Isn’t a rejection a step away from the writing career you want?”

“No,” I said. “All writers get rejections.”

“Not the ones who are published,” Hunter pointed out.

I grabbed the cream from the drawer and wagged it at him between my fingers. “Knife, please.”

Instead of giving me the knife, he held out his hand for the tube. I gave it to him. He set it on top of my desk and poised the knife blade above it. Brian and I leaned in to watch. I wanted to make sure Hunter wouldn’t mutilate the tube and spill its precious contents—and, I discovered as I edged closer to him, the air around him was so warm. My skin heated deliciously without touching his.

“This is like surgery. With a hatchet.” Lightly he slit the tube at the bottom along the crimp, then at the top where it flared out to the cap, then down the middle, connecting the top and bottom cuts. With the tip of the blade he lifted one of the flaps he’d made. “It opens like the space shuttle cargo bay.”

“Genius,” I said. “My hero.”

He straightened and looked at me. Brian and I straightened, too, because when Hunter straightened, the knife came closer to us.

“So, you have a plastic bag to keep it from drying out?” Hunter asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

When I didn’t move, he looked at Brian, then back at me. “Put it away and come back upstairs with us,” he told me.

“You go ahead.” I nodded toward my early American literature survey (bleh!) book on my desk. “I have a lot of reading to do.”

His face fell. Either he was an even better actor than I’d thought, or he was genuinely astonished that I refused to return to the party with him after he so gallantly performed surgery on my face cream.

“It was lots of fun though,” I said. “Quite an eyeful.” To Brian I said, “Do me a favor and make sure Summer comes home safe.”

“Will do.” Brian had already left my room and headed for the outer door.

Hunter stood there a moment longer, blond brows down, disoriented because another man had been put in charge. Then he recovered, resetting his face in the handsome default mode. “Have a great night, Erin. See you in class.”

“Thanks, Hunter,” I said in a tone that ran right up to the edge of sarcasm without going over. I walked him to the door, shut and locked it behind him, and dashed back to my bedroom to strip out of my damp bikini and bundle into soft sweats before I froze.

As I changed, I listened to their footfalls. Where my bay window ended on one side, my bedroom shared a wall with the stairwell. I didn’t want to switch my pillow to the other end of my bed because I would feel vulnerable with my head that close to the door—but some nights I was tempted when students whooped and tramped to the upper floors in the wee hours.

Tonight I was glad I could hear Brian’s fast shuffle, holding on to the handrail, and Hunter’s slower, heavier amble up the center of the stair tread. I listened to them ascend between the second and third floors, third and fourth, fourth and fifth, their steps disappearing behind the heavy fifth-floor door. This way I knew they were truly gone. The door was closed on the party. Hunter could get back to his blonde, and I could get back to work.

A few hours later, two sets of footsteps skipped back down: one fast as before, the other lighter and halting, tipsy. Brian’s voice chuckled at the outer door to my room. The door shut. Only the tipsy steps tripped between the beds, and then Summer was falling through my doorway, pushing my books aside and curling up in my lap.

I brushed her black hair away from her shut eyes. “What’s the matter?” I yawned.

“I mentioned the stable boy to Manohar,” she mumbled. “He got mad at me. He thinks I don’t really like him, and the only reason I was flirting with him was to get something for you.”

I could have been coy and said, I thought you were only flirting with him to get something for me. You genuinely like him after all? Gasp! Instead I said soothingly, “He lives in your dorm and you’ll have class with him the whole semester. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to work it out. He’ll come around.”

She rolled over and I scratched her bare back between the straps of her bright yellow bikini until Jřrdis came in from the art studio. I meant to read for early American literature survey (bleh!) all this time, but I dwelled on my own words to Summer. For once, I believed them. Summer and Manohar were brilliant and funny, and as long as they could step past the barriers set up by their own egos, there was nothing to come between them.