“I don’t see you at a lot of Pi-O parties,” he says into the quiet after we’ve been back on the road for a spell.

“I bet you’ve never seen me at any.”

“Aw, come on.”

“I’m not really a ‘frat party’ guy.”

“How do you know that if you’ve never been to one?”

“Just a hunch,” I say. “I’ve never even really thought about it. I’d never know anybody.”

“But, I mean, you’d meet people.”

“I know ‘people,’” I tease. “But I don’t really have any Greek friends.”

“You got me! You should come one of these nights. I’ll show you around.”

“I’m not a big drinker.”

“They are more fun when there’s beer,” he allows.

“See, when I was in high school, we were more like Alizé drinkers.”

He laughs. “What the heck’s that?”

“I don’t even know,” I admit. “It’s like fruit juice and brandy, or cognac or something. My friend Denise’s mom always drank it. As in, always drank it. It was like all she had in the fridge besides maybe a loaf of bread.”

“Isn’t ‘brandy’ and ‘cognac’ the same thing?”

“I don’t know,” I say again, laughing. “It was abundant and free, is what it was. They had this tiny balcony over their back yard, you had to go through the attic to get to it. We’d climb up there, Denise and I, with a bottle of her mom’s Alizé and one of my brother’s joints he didn’t know I knew about, we’d get high and sing Little Shop of Horrors all the way through. ‘Back-up singer’ was pretty much my life’s ambition at that point. I don’t know about Green River, but there wasn’t really an audience for show tunes at the cool kids’ parties in Boulder.”

“See, and my buddy John Forrester, he had this bad-influence big brother who always had a keg in his basement. It was a lot harder to stay sober on weekends than it was to find beer.” He laughs. “We had fun, though. Forrester got kinda, I dunno -- frisky when he was drunk.”

“Frisky?” I give my left leg a casual shake, then another, hoping to slyly shift my stiffening dick. Does ‘frisky’ mean something other than what I think I’m hearing?

“Nothing major. We’d kiss a little bit, mess around.”

“You and this John guy?”

“Uh huh.”

I sense that George has shifted in his own seat; I feel his eyes on me, but I don’t dare tear mine from the road. My hopes just got flung so high, I can’t look into his face and risk having them crash back to Earth -- the impact would kill us all.

“Mess around?” My throat’s full of sand, but the words crawl out.

“Just sometimes. You know what I mean. I mean, right? You’ve messed around with guys before?”

I nod. Is this titillation or terror? Why can’t I tell? Shouldn’t those emotions feel completely different instead of pretty much the exact same?