The Parties

From high above — from the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator, such as existed in the 19th century, or one of those camera-equipped drones that exist in the 21st, which certain male students love to fly among the maples and conifers of Westish College, past the grassy practice fields and big stone bowl of the football stadium, far out over the rippling blue-gray water of Lake Michigan — you could see, in the early September dusk, amid the dark rectangles of roofs and the deep-green treetops, the bustle of preparations for the Parties.

Ribbed aluminum kegs were loaded out of trucks and vans and hauled through gaps in fences into backyards scorched tan by late-summer heat or up the peeling steps of porches and through the propped-open doors of ramshackle manors. Ladders leaned against garages. Young men perched in the Vs of trees, stringing the boughs with holiday lights. Workers in the matching shirts of a rental company inflated a bouncy castle two stories high, one orange turret after another snapping to attention.

Oblong bags of ice were slung like sandbags from hand to hand. Kegs were tapped and sampled, the froth poured into the dirt. Draped across the upper stories of the manors hung banners made of stitched-together bedsheets, all of which bore the same three words, painted in navy capitals: we are one.

“Ding-dong!” called Dahlia as she flung open the door to Irma’s room.

“You’re early,” Irma said, unable to conceal her excitement.

Dahlia laughed. “You sound surprised.”

Irma was surprised — surprised and happy. Dahlia was never early. Dahlia was late, when she showed up at all. You waited and waited, you tried to focus on your schoolwork instead of checking to see if she’d texted, and then, when you’d mostly given up, Dahlia waltzed in, full of lame apologies. And you didn’t mind at all but were simply happy to see her. At least, that had been Irma’s experience.

The heavy door swung closed behind her, and Dahlia bounced into Phumber 405, square-bottomed shopping bags hanging from both shoulders. She plopped the bags down on the rug and made an ironic little curtsy. “How do I look?”

“You look amazing,” Irma said, and meant it. “But I thought we were supposed to blend in.”

Dahlia laughed. “What do you want to do, skulk around in ninja costumes? We’re going to a party. The way to blend in is to stand out.”

Irma had, on principle, never been to the Parties, but she thought Dahlia would certainly stand out. The dress she’d chosen fit her frankly. It was short and prismatic and made of tasseled beads that caught the light. Her dark blond hair was pretzeled atop her head in a way that showed off her face and neck and made her eyebrows, which were darker than her hair, pop in a way Irma loved. The best part was Dahlia’s fire-engine-red lipstick, which she wore as well as a person could possibly wear it, so that the word siren leaped to Irma’s mind.

Dahlia rummaged in her bags and brought out a box of vodka seltzers. She cracked two raspberry-colored cans and handed one to Irma.

“Za zdorovye,” she said in her old-Russian-man voice. They clinked their cans together.

Irma, who rarely drank, tilted the can to her lips and counted to nine.

Dahlia scooped up Anderson Cooper, who was nosing through her bags, and carried him over to Irma’s closet, where she flipped through the hangers. There wasn’t much to see — baggy earth-toned dresses, stained jeans, flannel shirts from Farm & Fleet. After much searching she selected a simple outfit: Irma’s denim cutoffs and a white tank top. Dahlia tipped her head in assessment, shifting her updo perilously far to one side. “You have a killer body,” she said. “Try taking your bra off.”

“What?” said Irma. “No way.”

“Why? I thought you were a radical feminist.”

“I am,” Irma said. “One who wears a bra.”

“You’re hilarious. Do you have a red one?”

“No.”

“Or a black one? We need to create a little drama.”

“Those are all my bras,” Irma said as Dahlia rifled through a drawer of embarrassingly worn and dingy gray-tinged undergarments.

Maybe it was her almost-empty can of vodka seltzer or her relief that she didn’t own a red bra, but Irma felt she’d entered nirvana as Dahlia faced her on the bed and, with a series of pencils, brushes, and powders and an expertise Irma didn’t know she possessed, began to do Irma’s makeup.

“You look hot,” Dahlia kept saying as she held Irma’s chin in her hand and, with an expression of deep concentration, swiveled Irma’s face from side to side. “Hot.”

Irma felt anything but, though she enjoyed hearing Dahlia say it. What she enjoyed even more was Dahlia’s proximity, the gentle sweep of the mascara brush against her eyelashes, Dahlia’s fingers tucking Irma’s hair behind her ear.

“It’s so cool you never got your ears pierced,” Dahlia said.

Irma’s eyelids fluttered. “My mom wouldn’t let me when I was younger. She called it female mutilation.”

Dahlia’s thumbs traced Irma’s cheeks. “But didn’t you ever just, like, sneak out to the mall and get it done?”

“The mall was really far away,” Irma murmured. She felt really far away, aloof from her finicky mind, ensconced in a bliss of Dahlia’s attention. It was a shame this part of the evening couldn’t last forever; it was a shame they had to go to the Parties at all.

The entire student body seemed to be out, thronging the street and flowing in and out of the biggest tumbledown houses. Voices buzzed like hordes of insects behind the fences that girdled backyards. Students milled on weedy front lawns, sipping from giant cups, the sparse grass already churned to mud by footsteps and spilled beer.

Several raucous games of cornhole were in progress. A beanbag the color of Dahlia’s lipstick sailed through the air, its lumpiness shifting and contorting in flight, and skidded up the gentle slope of a wooden ramp. A group of girls skipped down the middle of the street, elbows linked as in a musical, long strands of colorful beads swaying across their dresses. They looked so young to Irma — freshmen, she guessed, who’d met last week at orientation and glommed together with sleepaway-camp intensity. The boys they skipped past wore gaudy party shirts splashed with birds and pineapples, or T-shirts, or no shirts at all, their chests hairless and tan. A football thrown from a rooftop clipped a power line, spun like a helicopter seed, and dropped into the crowd.

There were speakers everywhere, pointed out upper-story windows, throbbing on porches, wedged in the crooks of trees, and the sum of so much blasted music composed a surprisingly gentle mélange above which burbled the happy shouts and shrieks of classmates greeting each other after a summer apart. So this, Irma thought, was the Parties.

Dahlia turned up the walk of a ramshackle house whose massive double doors stood open, admitting a steady stream of partygoers. She slid aside to let the boys behind them enter and plunked down on the porch swing. Smiling, she undid the clasp on her purse and, unflappably, as though at home alone, peered into her compact mirror as she reworked her magnificent lipstick.

Far out over the lake, unharried by human light, hung a white half-moon with a pumiced convex edge. A surge of nervousness washed over Irma.

“Do I look OK?” she asked.

“You look great,” said Dahlia without glancing up.

From an Altoids tin in her bag, Dahlia fished out an oblong white pill and snapped its middle seam. She held out her palm, offering Irma one of the chalky semi-ovals. Irma shook her head. Dahlia shrugged and tossed both halves in her mouth. She wore a look of steady purpose Irma had never seen. “Ready?” she asked.

Irma felt her shoulders stiffen as they had been stiffening for blocks. “Sure. But . . .” She searched for a way to stall without seeming to stall. “Aren’t we meeting up with Pammy?”

“Pammy’s at two-twelve.”

“Where?”

“Two-twelve Grant.” Dahlia gestured down the block. “Meathead Central.”

This shorthand way of identifying the party houses by number was familiar to Irma only from overheard talk in the dining hall. She was surprised to find Dahlia conversant in it. “We’re not meeting her?”

Dahlia shook her head, a firm enough no to dislodge a strand of her lopsided bun. “Divide and conquer.”

“OK.” Irma nodded. “So how do we proceed?”

“With what?”

“You know.” Irma dropped her voice to a whisper and patted her borrowed purse: “The project.”

Dahlia shushed her with a stern flick of her eyes. “You,” she instructed, “stick close to me.”

They entered a house thronged and throbbing with bodies, one disorderly column entering and the other departing, the hallway lit only by bobbing smartphones and the pale parallelograms of open doorways. Irma followed Dahlia outside to the kegs, where a tattooed guy wearing a cheese-wedge hat handed them foam-topped cups. They were circulating through the muddy yard when a tanned guy in a half-buttoned Hawaiian shirt approached, not tall but thickly built, with a mass of dark curls. His eyes, hazy pink with inebriation, were locked on Dahlia.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

“Nope,” Dahlia said.

“We took Intro to Creative Writing together. Freshman year. I remember the story you wrote from the point of view of the girl whose dad leaves her mom. My parents are divorced, and it really resonated with me.”

He seemed sincere, or at least sincerely drunk. His pupils were dilated, his eyes unblinking, as he fixed them on Dahlia.

Dahlia yawned. “I dropped that class.”

“I know,” he said. “I always wondered what happened to you.”

“Now you know.”

The boy paused, his drunken faculties taxed. Dahlia wasn’t giving him much to work with. At least not verbally. Irma, as she strained to hear their exchange over the party burble and bass, could sense the energy crackling between them.

“So how was your summer?” he asked.

“Terrific!” Dahlia replied in a voice of facetious joy that, as Irma could attest, could lift and carry its listener like a current. “I spent it looking forward to tonight.”

“The Parties are epic,” he agreed. “What else did you do?”

“I volunteered with a group that does harm reduction.”

His nod was full of confidence: He knew what harm reduction was. “For heroin addicts.”

“For persons who habitually use drugs,” Dahlia said in a tone of gentle correction. “I spent a lot of time packing safer-use kits. ”

“With needles and stuff?”

Dahlia nodded. “That’s mostly what volunteers do — pack kits. But if you hang around long enough, you wind up doing lots of things. Drive the van, run errands. Or you just chat with people. People like to chat. Don’t tell my mom, though. She thought I was interning at a marketing firm.”

The boy laughed at this. Dahlia smiled. “You’re a good listener, Josh.”

“It’s Ben.”

“It’s been what?”

Believing she couldn’t hear him, he leaned in close and enunciated to the point of shouting: “My name’s Ben. Benjamin.”

“Oh, Josh.” Dahlia reached out and tapped him playfully on the chest. “So you’re from Hawaii?”

He stepped back and eyed her with wary esteem, like she’d performed a magic trick. “Say what?”

Dahlia stretched out an arm again, this time to finger the loop of his collar. Ben-Josh glanced down at his turquoise shirt, which was covered in coral-billed toucans and girls in grass skirts. “Oh. Ha. This is my party shirt. I was confused about what you meant, though, because my dad lives in Maui now.”

Dahlia nodded. “Since the divorce.”

“Since the divorce,” he confirmed. “I lived in California till I was 10 — I loved it there. But after the divorce my mom wanted to be close to family. So we moved to Kenosha.”

“That must have been hard,” offered Dahlia.

Ben dropped his eyes toward his cup. “It was.”

Irma couldn’t tell whether Ben’s mawkishness was for Dahlia’s benefit or an earnest kind of self-regard. Nor could she tell what Dahlia was up to. Was this all part of the project, or did Dahlia’s voice contain genuine sympathy? So incomprehensible were their purposes to Irma that they might have been a duo of humpback whales, clicking ethereal songs.

Dahlia leaned close and cupped her hand to whisper into his ear. Ben, as he listened, lifted his gaze to the boughs overhead. He smiled when Dahlia finished, his eyes aglitter.

“I’ll be right back,” Irma muttered.

She maneuvered through the milling crowd and, once inside the house, climbed the broad staircase and locked herself in a second-floor bathroom. She dumped her beer down the sink, peed, and washed her hands. She Cloistered Pammy to say u ok? — Cloister was the traceless messaging app Dahlia insisted they use because it had the most advanced encryption and the best emojis — but Pammy just sent back a long string of emojis ending in a party hat and a unicorn pooping a pile of gold.

The project, Irma thought, had sounded much easier in theory than it could ever prove in practice. Tucked into her borrowed purse, and into Dahlia’s and Pammy’s purses, were sets of tattoo words they’d ordered over the summer and, by phone and Cloister from their separate hometowns, discussed how to deploy tonight. Their summertime plotting had been a blast, but what was she supposed to do with these tattoos? As much rehearsing as Dahlia had made them do, as much as Irma had supposedly known what to expect and what was expected of her, the reality felt very different. Someone was knocking on the bathroom door. Then whoever it was stopped knocking and started rattling the knob.

Her phone buzzed. It was a Cloister from Dahlia.

You can head out, Irma. I’ve got this

Are you sure?

Yes. I have a plan. So easy

Irma didn’t want to abandon Dahlia, but she really, really wanted to head out. If you’re sure, she replied. Be careful.

She unlocked the bathroom door and hurried down the stairs. During her absence — how long had she been in there? — the cavernous living room had transformed into a jam-packed dance party. The music, an ancient Prince song set to a machine-gun beat, pulsed and pounded. Pink and lime glow sticks waved through the dark. Irma paused at the foot of the stairs to chart a path to the front door. As she peered into the mass of bodies, she caught a glimpse of Dahlia. Dahlia’s hair was now down and freed from its bobby-pinned strictures, slashing through the dark and bright of the strobe. Her dancing was lofty, sinuous, dominant, summoning unknown powers. Ben-Josh, stunned at his luck, had his hand on the small of her back. It fell to the curve of her butt.

Irma slipped out the front door and double-timed down the porch steps. A breeze kicked up as she turned onto the sidewalk. Which houses were hosting the Parties was evident now, scattered up and down these blocks, pulsing with music and light. Trails of partygoers traipsed between them like ants. Irma shivered, though it wasn’t cold. She felt relieved to have escaped the party, glad to no longer be bumped into, spilled on, and ignored. But she also felt like a failure.

Back in her room, Anderson Cooper hopped into bed with her, and she squeezed him tight to her chest. As a rule she turned her phone off before she slept; tonight she tucked it beneath her pillow and left the ringer on in case Dahlia or Pammy texted. Around four in the morning, both did, almost simultaneously:

Veni, vidi, vici.

Cowabunga, dudes.

Benjamin Morris, Westish College senior, awoke to the atonal din of the chapel bells. It felt like somebody was pounding a meat tenderizer against the backs of his eyeballs. His room’s two shades were pulled. Streaks of painful daylight seeped in around the edges.

He rolled over, pressed his face into his pillow, and wrapped his other pillow around the back of his head. His stomach sloshed and heaved.

When the bells clanged again, he staggered to the bathroom and emptied his guts with as much accuracy as he could muster. After he’d finished, he lay on his side on the bathroom tile, his body curled in a fetal C around the base of the toilet. The fingers of his left hand reached up and clutched the toilet rim, gripping it for dear life.

A rap came on the bathroom door. “Benjy,” called his roommate Z. “You OK in there?”

Ben tried to issue a grunt that sounded like Come in.

The door swung open. “You were retching so hard, you woke me up,” Z said gently. “Feeling any better?”

“Uhhhng,” said Ben.

“Benjy,” he said. “I’m sorry, but the puke smell is overwhelming. I need to flush the toilet. You might want to cover your ears.”

The toilet roared beside Ben’s head, a sound followed by the curt, efficient whish whish whish of a fumigant being sprayed into the air. Ben smelled a bright gardenia sweetness. He shivered as a spritz of fine particulate settled on the hairs of his arm.

Z reached down and freed Ben’s fingers from their rigor mortis grip around the toilet rim. “All right, Benjy. Can you sit up now? Have a sip of water?”

Ben could not imagine sitting up, but he sighed and felt a little life return to his body. “What happened?” he asked weakly.

“I was going to ask you the same question. Seems like you got shit-faced and are now in a compromised state.”

“I was planning to take it easy,” Ben said. “Spend today prepping for the job fair.” Several Silicon Valley companies were visiting campus this week, and Ben had made appointments with them all.

“Sometimes plans go awry,” Z said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

The attempt to remember anything sent poisonous bolts of pain shooting through Ben’s eyes. “We went to the Parties,” he ventured.

“Well, sure,” replied Z. “Then what?”

Then what? He remembered fat orange paper lamps like swollen full moons, swinging from the trees. The clang of the horseshoe-shaped latch of the gate as they entered the yard. Saying hellos, slapping hands, maybe procuring a beer from the keg, maybe dancing . . . and then blackness and waking up in his bed.

Slowly, carefully, to avoid cracking his head on the toilet’s undercurve, Ben made his way to a sitting position on the bathroom floor. The room tilted and swam. “Man,” he said as he rubbed his temples. “I’m in rough — ”

“Dude,” said Z.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Z said. “Don’t move.”

Ben slumped against the radiator. Z pulled a towel from the rack, dampened one corner in the sink, and squatted beside him.

“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.

“Nothing,” Z said. “Hold still.”

The fluffy towel covered Ben’s face and fell to his lap as Z scrubbed at his forehead. Being tended to in this way reminded Ben of long-ago things: bright sunshine bouncing off water, his legs pressed into warm sand, the smell of baking sunscreen. His mom wetting a napkin with a bottle of water, his dad in sunglasses laughing. He closed his eyes and dozed into the memory.

Z stopped scrubbing.

“All done?” Ben murmured.

“Almost,” said Z. “Let me get a dab of soap.”

The faucet ran. The towel returned. This time Z scrubbed twice as hard, like when Ben’s mom got angry at Ben’s dad and cleaned Ben like he was a bathroom, not a boy.

Ben opened his eyes. “What’s going on?” he asked quietly. Only now did he see something in his roommate’s eyes that spooked him — befuddlement, distress, even fear.

“Don’t freak out,” Z said.

“Why would I freak out?”

“You won’t. You shouldn’t.”

“Dude,” Ben said. “You’re freaking me out.”

“I’m sure it’s just a joke,” Z said. “A prank.”

“What is?”

Z’s eyes swiveled around the room, his expression fluctuating by the nanosecond. Ben could see how badly Z wanted to find some magic solution to whatever the problem was, but he was a roommate, not a magician. Z held out a hand, having resigned himself to saying what he’d been trying to avoid: “Maybe you should look in the mirror.”

Ben grasped Z’s hand and let his friend haul him to his feet. He took two shaky steps and lifted his eyes to the glass.

“What — ”

“There must be a per — ”

“ — the — ”

“ — fectly good explana — ”

“ — fuck?”

BAM BAM BAM

Monroe Devine, Westish College senior, through the pleasant haze of a dream about muskie fishing in a brand-new boat, became dimly aware of a pounding on the bedroom door. “Mmmmm,” he said.

Warm fingers jabbed between his ribs. “Wake up, poser,” the fingers said, their voice melodic. “One of your bros seeks an audience.”

“Mmm.”

BAM BAM BAM

The voice, the fingers — they belonged to Pammy. Pammy Chang. He remembered, now, the magnificent things they’d done at dawn. Over the summer he’d had an inkling this might happen. He rolled toward her and hooked a bare leg over her bareness.

“Monty!” The fingers jabbed harder. “He’s going to break the door.”

BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM

“OK, OK.” Monty, now fully awake and annoyed, raised his voice: “Come in.”

The door flew open and smacked against the wall, doorknob denting plaster. There stood — who else? — Vic Robinson, panting and fuming.

“Devine!” he shouted as he pointed at his forehead. “What the fuck is this?”

Monty squinted at the thick black marks between Robinson’s eyebrows and hairline. “I don’t know,” he said. “What is it?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, you dumb piece of fuck!” Robinson was not a small guy. He was pretty much the antithesis of a small guy, a lumbering defensive lineman with apelike arms who was listed at two sixty. He was Monty’s least favorite football teammate and his housemate to boot.

“Yikes,” Pammy said, and let loose a low, musical whistle.

“Who did it?” Robinson bellowed.

Before Monty could hazard a guess, Robinson pointed a giant index finger at him. “You did, you puny spunkwad! Put on some pants so I can pound your ass!”

“Bobinson, that’s an enticing offer,” said Monty. “But there’s a lady present. We should be respectful.”

“Respect this!” shouted Robinson. He grabbed from Monty’s desk a textbook, the four-inch-thick Principles of Chemical Equilibrium, fresh from the campus bookstore, its spine uncracked. He lifted it over his head with both hands and, using the same downward-swinging motion a gorilla would use, slammed it into the water-stained carpet.

“That book cost ninety-four dollars,” Monty informed him. He was enjoying the heck out of this. Someone had pranked the cretinous Robinson, and for once it was not him. With an anguished bellow, Robinson hoisted Distillation Design overhead and slammed it down on top of Principles.

Pammy, the sheet wrapped toga-like around her bare torso, was fiddling with her phone, which she’d fished out of her lizard-print bag on the nightstand. Monty admired the cool self-possession that enabled her to check her messages while Robinson stormed around.

Then he realized she wasn’t checking her messages but discreetly filming Robinson’s tantrum. Now that was cool.

“What is it?” Robinson demanded. “How do I get it off?”

“I don’t know,” Monty said truthfully. “It wasn’t me.”

“I put bleach on it.” A note of pleading interfered with Robinson’s rage. “I put the scouring stuff for the bathtub. That blue-crystal shit.”

“It wasn’t me,” Monty repeated.

“The hell it wasn’t. What is it, a tattoo?”

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” Monty said. “Or to anyone. Sexual assault isn’t something to joke about.”

Robinson’s gigantic chest, which had been heaving noticeably beneath his we are one T-shirt, heaved a little more slowly. He seemed to be calming down.

Monty looked at him. “You weren’t sexually assaulted, were you?”

Robinson glared. “Me?”

“Yeah, I mean . . . you’re sure nothing happened? I mean . . . you were probably pretty drunk, right?”

Robinson shook with rage. His chest heaved harder than ever. There was one more book on the desk — Physical Gas Dynamics. Up it went, and down. “I’M A DUDE!” he roared. “I WAS NOT SEXUALLY ASSAULTED!”

After Pammy posted the video, Dahlia flooded their text thread with messages, begging for details, but Pammy didn’t respond, and seemed not even to be online. Irma tried to match Dahlia’s enthusiasm by declaring the video a masterpiece. Deep down, though, she was starting to feel concerned. Pammy’s video proved that the plan they’d concocted over the summer had entered not only the realm of reality, but also the realm of the internet, where nothing was ever forgotten.

She scrolled to the top of the thread. The earliest comments came from Pammy’s friends — friends from the art department, friends from her a cappella group, friends back home in Indiana. Random internet friends, of whom Pammy had many.

what is this??? r u making a movie? (please say yes)

I have literally watched this 50 times

I heart everything you do, boo

Then, plainly, someone recognized the angry book slammer, and the video began to circulate throughout the football team, followed by the campus as a whole. Commenters began to refer to him by name:

Oh man somebody wrote on Robinson’s forehead. Fricking classic.

dude that is just cruel

Vic those are some gorgeous undies

Now, as Irma watched, with Dahlia hovering over her shoulder, another shift was occurring in real time. Like a wildfire leaping a highway, the video had escaped the confines of Westish College and begun racing through a new, concentrically larger audience. Instead of one person typing a comment, there were a dozen. Each time Irma refreshed the page, the numbers of views and likes surged.

This new audience was composed almost entirely of women. They were interested in the politics of the video, and a vivid debate sprang up. Was this a scripted scene and Robinson an actor playing a macho jerk? Or had some person or persons stenciled rape victim on the forehead of an actual macho jerk, causing him to implode, and Pammy, in documentary fashion, had captured it? These commenters tended to assume that, scripted or not, the video was intended not as a goof but as some kind of declaration.

“Hit play,” Dahlia commanded.

Irma hit play. The video stuttered to life. The lift and slam. The raw purple rage. The second slam. The fateful howl:

“I’M A DUDE! I WAS NOT SEXUALLY ASSAULTED!”

They watched it again. Dahlia shook her head in awe.

Suddenly footsteps echoed on the stairs. A rapid knock sounded on the door of Irma’s room. Irma looked at Dahlia, who made a rolling little hand gesture: Let’s get on with it.

“Come in,” Irma said meekly.

Ben-Josh entered, enraged: jaw set, nostrils flared, a throbbing artery peeking out from his bandage. But when his eyes landed on Dahlia, his expression turned soft and uncertain. He stopped in the middle of the rug, his backpack dangling from one shoulder.

“I know you did it,” he said.

“Hold on,” Dahlia said, her eyes trained on her laptop. “I’m in the middle of something.” She shut the computer and slid it inside her bag. Her movements so slow as to be hypnotic, she extracted a tube of tinted lip balm, spun out its tip, and applied it to her mouth. It was a shiny peachy shade. “OK,” she said when she’d finished. “Proceed.”

Ben-Josh opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He looked like he’d been dreaming of this confrontation, working himself up to a fever pitch — but now that the confrontation had arrived, it did not resemble his dream. “Why?” he said in a faltering voice. “Why did you do this to me?”

Dahlia peered at him in a neutral, curious way. “Are you going to cry?”

He steeled himself. “What I’m going to do is turn you in. But I thought the honorable thing would be to give you a chance to explain.”

Dahlia examined herself in her compact mirror, swished her lips around, and tossed the mirror back in her bag. “I have nothing to explain.”

“I came here to talk to you.”

“So talk.”

Irma found herself sitting perfectly still in her chair. Dahlia and Ben-Josh didn’t resemble her parents in any discernible way, and yet she felt an echo of what she’d felt when she was little and her parents would argue. Ben-Josh was utterly focused on Dahlia. Dahlia was utterly focused on ignoring Ben-Josh, even as she shifted on the bed in a loose-shouldered way that Irma thought needlessly risqué.

“We took creative writing together,” Ben-Josh said. “I really liked your stories.”

“I know,” Dahlia said. “You told me that the other night.”

“So you admit it,” Ben-Josh said. “You admit we were talking at the Parties.”

Dahlia frowned. “Why wouldn’t I admit it? We danced too. Don’t you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” said Ben-Josh, but with a hint of uncertainty in his voice.

“It doesn’t sound like you remember,” Dahlia teased. “Maybe you drank too much.”

“I remember,” Ben-Josh insisted. “But whatever! I want to know why you did this to me. I’m not Vic Robinson, you know. I’m not some moron creep.”

“I know you’re not a moron, Josh,” Dahlia said.

“My name’s not Josh.”

Dahlia nodded toward his forehead. “May I see what’s underneath your bandage?”

“What? No.”

“Are you sure? I might have some ideas about how to get it off.”

Ben-Josh’s face suddenly blazed with hope. “If you know how to get it off, you’d better tell me.”

Irma understood the nature of his hope: that Dahlia would produce from her bag the antidote. That the person who’d hurt him could also unhurt him. With a wave of her hand, his face would be restored to its original condition, wordless and lineless, clean and tan. His relief would be complete. Irma’s heart went out to him. He was bound to be disappointed and, by his disappointment, to be unstrung.

Ben-Josh and Dahlia looked at each other. He lifted a hand toward his temple. It hovered there, hesitating, for a long moment. Then, with a sense of irreversible decision, he pried loose the Velcro and unwrapped the bandage from his head.

Dahlia’s expression, when she saw Ben-Josh’s forehead, lost all semblance of control. It made Irma shy to see it, the way she’d felt shy to see Dahlia dancing at the Parties. Her pale blue eyes bugged wide, her features slack with rapture. In a flash the look was gone. Ben-Josh seemed not to have noticed.

“It’s one of those extra-durable jagua tattoos,” Dahlia said. “You’ll just have to wait for it to fade.”

Ben-Josh’s eyes were rimmed with red. “You said you could make it go away.”

“No I didn’t,” Dahlia replied. She continued to gaze at him, a private, fascinated smile on her lips.

“Damn it!” Ben-Josh yelled, his eyes wet with barely stifled tears. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? I have six job interviews this week. And now I’m screwed.”

“Why are you screwed?” Dahlia asked. “You’re just as bright and enterprising as ever.”

Ben-Josh’s hands whirled around his head in a putty-colored cloud. He was trying desperately to put the bandage back on, but in his agitation and haste he kept fumbling it.

“Here,” Dahlia said, and held out her hand.

Obediently, he gave Dahlia the tangle of bandage and dipped his head. With motherly deftness and calm, she unraveled and smoothed the twisted fabric. She wound the bandage three times around Ben-Josh’s head, pulled it taut, and secured it. “There,” she said, and patted him on the ear.

“Thanks,” Ben mumbled.

“Now Josh — I think you’re taking this too hard,” Dahlia said. “It’s a temporary tattoo. It’s not like you got raped.”

“You picked the wrong guy,” Ben-Josh said. “I don’t hate women.”

“I do,” Dahlia said.

“I’m serious. I’m not your enemy.”

“I never said we were enemies, Josh.”

“It’s Ben.”

“It’s been what?”

Ben-Josh flung up his arms. “You know, I didn’t have to come here. Once I realized it was you, I could have gone straight to the dean. But I thought we could work this out.”

“How would we do that?” Dahlia asked.

“By talking. By getting to know each other.” He looked at her, his brown eyes brimming with meaning. “I brought something I wanted to read to you. Would you mind?”

Dahlia opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again. Irma could tell she’d been about to utter some caustic comeback but had thought better of it. Maybe Ben-Josh was getting through to her.

“Go ahead,” she said.

Ben-Josh undid the drawstring on his bag and pulled out a dog-eared paperback, its edges fringed by a purfle of colorful sticky notes. “It’s a passage from The Art of Loving. By Erich Fromm.”

He flipped to a page he’d marked and cleared his throat. With his curly hair and earnest expression, his book held reverently at heart level, he might have been a medieval swain about to plight his troth.

“This is my favorite book,” he explained. “Coach Schwartz gave it to me. I reread it every fall.”

He coughed into his fist and began.

“‘The most fundamental kind of love, which underlies all types of love, is brotherly love. This is the kind of love the Bible speaks of when it says: Love thy neighbor as thyself. Brotherly love is love for all human beings; it is characterized by its very lack of exclusiveness. If I have developed the capacity for love, then I cannot help loving my brothers.’”

Dahlia motioned for him to stop. “This is what you wanted to read me?”

“I haven’t gotten to the good part. But yes.”

“I’m not your brother,” she said, her voice disgusted.

“Just ignore the word brotherly. It’s not what’s important.”

“Ignore it? Give me that.” Dahlia thrust out an arm. Ben-Josh relinquished the book.

“This entire section is called ‘Brotherly Love,’” Dahlia complained as she flipped through. “And you want me to ignore the word brotherly? What about all of these hes, hises, mans, and mankinds? Should I ignore those too?”

“That’s just how people talked back then,” Ben-Josh said. “But the ideas are eternal. You have to read past the surface to get at the essence.”

“You’re a guy. You have the luxury of an inner life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means look at you,” Dahlia said, with a gesture that encompassed him. “All that muscle. All that self. Your body is protection. It’s a wall between you and the world.”

“What about you and your walls?” Ben said.

Dahlia glared at him. “What about them?”

“I know you think I’m a dumb jock,” Ben-Josh said. “But we have a lot in common. Could I read a little more?”

Dahlia shrugged. “It’s a free country.”

Irma pulled out her laptop and found a scan of the Fromm book online. She followed along silently while Ben-Josh read aloud, so she could see the places where he, conceding Dahlia’s point, altered the original language.

“‘Love,’” he began, skipping the brotherly, “‘is based on the experience that we all are one. In order to experience this identity it is necessary to penetrate from the periphery to the core. If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences, that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, I perceive our identity, the fact of our’” — he modified — “shared personhood.”

Ben-Josh paused and allowed himself a slight smile — pleased to have shared these words with Dahlia and to have successfully navigated this minefield of midcentury rhetoric. It seemed to induce in him a shy blushing joy to say the word love in Dahlia’s presence. Or perhaps it was the word penetrate.

Irma could feel, as she had at the Parties, the current of energy flowing between Ben-Josh and Dahlia. She decided she should leave the room. She didn’t especially want them to have sex in her bed, which seemed both gross and grossly unfair, given that she herself had never done so. But she did want the whole thing to be quashed, and a reconciliation between Ben-Josh and Dahlia seemed like the fastest route to a quashing. She stood from her desk and grabbed her bag.

Dahlia looked at her. “Where are you going?”

“Out,” Irma said. “I’ll be back in” — how long did it take to have a ferocious bout of love-hate sex? — “four hours. Or five.”

“I’ll come with you,” Dahlia said.

“You guys stay,” Irma said. “There’s beer in the fridge. Finish your conversation.”

“It’s finished.” Dahlia uncrossed her legs.

Ben-Josh flashed Irma a look of disappointment and gratitude, and Irma sighed and sat back down. All she’d managed to do was wreck a promising moment.

Dahlia turned to Ben-Josh.

“I don’t think you understand,” she said. “Whatever happened to you after that party happened. You have to deal with it yourself.”

“I’m dealing with it,” Ben-Josh said. “That’s why I came here.”

“So what do you want from me?”

“An apology, for starters.”

“But don’t you see you’re not going to get one? Worse things happen to people every day.”

“If I turn you in, you’ll be up a creek,” Ben-Josh said. “You might get kicked out of school.”

“For what?”

Ben-Josh jabbed a finger at his bandage. “For assault. For targeting me because I’m a man.”

“Some things happen to women because they’re women,” Dahlia said. “Other things happen to men because they’re men.”

“I’m trying to be nice to you,” Ben-Josh said.

Dahlia frowned. “I think that’s a misplaced impulse.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“What do I want you to do?” Dahlia shrugged. “I want you to fight for justice. I want you to find whoever did this to you and punish them to the fullest.”

“I see what you’re up to,” Ben-Josh said.

“I doubt it, Josh. I doubt that very much.”

“You’re messing with the wrong guy.”

Dahlia smiled. “That’s not how I feel at all.”

Ben-Josh had come here to persuade, through reasonableness and charm, but he had not persuaded. He’d been humiliated by Dahlia the night of the Parties, and now he’d returned of his own volition only to be humiliated again. Irma watched the yearning for vengeance enter his eyes.

“You’re fucked,” he snarled as he snapped up his backpack and stomped toward the door. “Utterly fucked.”

Irma was at the library trying to work on her thesis when her mother called.

“Hi, Mom,” she whispered, and cringed at the guilt trip to come. She hadn’t spoken to Ada since she’d left for school.

“You’re on TV,” Ada said, her voice screwed up into an ecstasy of rebuke.

“What?” said Irma. “Who is?”

“All of you. Westish College. Do you know a boy named Ben?”

“No,” said Irma. “What are you watching?”

“Hunter Stroman.”

“What?” Irma wouldn’t have recognized Hunter Stroman on the street, but she knew him to be the rising star of partisan cable news. “You told me you didn’t watch that junk.”

“I use the remote,” said Ada with a hint of umbrage. “I click around.”

“OK,” said Irma. “So Ben-Josh — I mean, some guy named Ben who goes to my school — is on Hunter Stroman?”

“Yep,” Ada replied. “Nice-looking boy. Except some lunatics ruined his face. Don’t you have a friend named Dahlia?”

“Me?” said Irma, aghast. Aghast that her mom had asked that, and her only options were to lie or decline to answer; aghast that Dahlia’s name, apparently, had been uttered on Hunter Stroman.

“No, my other daughter who goes off to her fancy college, steals my cat, and doesn’t return my phone calls.”

Irma waited a beat, knowing her mom would continue.

“Hunter’s back from commercial,” Ada said. “I’ll call you later.”

Irma navigated to Hunter Stroman’s home page and found the live feed, but the show was playing its exit music. She caught, as the camera cut back to the host, a fleeting glimpse of Ben-Josh wearing a navy sport coat and gazing with a dazed expression into his webcam.

MY ROOM, she texted Pammy and Dahlia. NOW.

By the time she sprinted across both quads and up three flights of stairs, the door to her room stood open and Dahlia was perched on her bed, the cat curled up beside her.

“How’d you get here so fast?” Irma asked as she tried to catch her breath.

“I teleported.” Dahlia looked at Irma and grinned. “Hunter Stroman! Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Should we wait for Pammy?”

“She said go ahead. She’s watching with Monty.”

Irma opened her laptop and hopped onto the bed beside Dahlia, who was wearing thick marl socks, sweatpants, and a fleece zipped tight to her chin. Irma glimpsed, on the bottom of one of Dahlia’s socks, bits of grass and gravel ground into the wool — she’d dashed over here without stopping to put on shoes.

Irma scrolled through the Hunter Live site to find the clip. Dahlia scooted closer to better see the screen. Irma could feel, through her own wool tights and Dahlia’s sweatpants, the gentle ebb and swell of Dahlia’s being. “Ready?” she said.

“Ready,” Dahlia said, and shivered with excitement. “I wish we had popcorn.”

Irma pressed play.

“And now,” began Hunter Stroman, “we return to a familiar topic: the takeover of our nation’s universities by radicals so faaaar from the mainstream” — bracing his hands on his desk, he flung head and shoulders to the left, sending the boyish flop of his hair past the camera’s frame; Dahlia chuckled — “that they might escape the earth’s orbit.

“This latest round of nutballery comes from a little college way up in Wisconsin. That’s right, Wisconsin, a place that used to be home to regular folks — farmers, brewers, autoworkers — but now, apparently, is as whacked-out as everywhere else.

“Joining us via video from Westish College, Benjamin Morris. Ben, welcome to the program.”

“Thanks for having me,” Ben-Josh said solemnly as his eyes flicked around his webcam without finding a spot to land. He was wearing, beneath his navy sport coat, a white shirt and a navy Harpooner tie, which was how football players dressed for class the day before games. Beneath his freshly combed curly hair marched those black block letters. The sight of them caused Hunter Stroman, as the camera cut back to him, to do a perfectly timed double take that threatened to capsize his chair.

“Whoa!” he said. “And I thought I had a rough weekend.”

Dahlia burst out laughing. “Incredible,” she said. “This is beyond my wildest dreams.”

Hunter Stroman seemed underprepared for this interview and perplexed by what had happened to his guest. He eyed Ben-Josh and stroked his chin as though Ben-Josh were a puzzle the producers had created to stump him.

“So you’re saying this was an art project?”

Irma, not unlike Hunter, was having a hard time concentrating. This much closeness to Dahlia, their legs pressed together, their shoulders touching, was almost too much to bear. She glanced down at Dahlia’s hand and felt a sudden urge to grab it.

On the screen, Ben-Josh frowned and fumbled his words — he was struggling to describe the project. “I mean, that’s how they would describe it.”

“And who exactly are they?”

“The girls who did this.”

“You’re a football player,” Stroman said. “I assume you’re bigger than these girls, unless they’re serious heifers. How were they able to overpower you?”

Ben-Josh, to his credit, cringed at heifers. “I remember very little,” he said, and added: “I may well have been drugged.”

Hunter Stroman’s eyebrows went up. Dahlia, with a cry of delight, grabbed Irma’s hand. “He’s really going for it!” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

Irma couldn’t believe it either; it was as though she’d willed Dahlia’s fingers to wind through her own. She lost all sense of what was happening on the screen.

Timidly, tenderly, barely perceptibly, she gave Dahlia’s hand a squeeze. Dahlia’s eyes were glued to the screen. Her hand, after a beat, squeezed back.

For the first time, it occurred to Irma to wonder what had happened between Dahlia and Ben-Josh the night of the Parties. Pammy had related in great detail the story of how she’d tattooed Robinson; Dahlia, in her enigmatic way, had said of Ben-Josh only that she’d bewitched him. But what did bewitchment entail?

“Look!” Dahlia cried. “There are two of them.”

As easily as she had seized it, Dahlia let go of Irma’s hand. Unable to contain her merriment, she bounced up off the bed. “He looks like a bronze statue of Ben-Josh!”

A new figure appeared on the screen. His tan was eternal and burnished, his hair tightly curled, his chest muscles thickened by weight lifting and mottled by middle age. He did indeed look like a bronzed Ben-Josh. From within the placket of his deeply unbuttoned shirt, chest hair cascaded like smoke from a live volcano.

“Joining us from Maui,” Hunter Stroman announced, “Ben’s father, Emanuel Morris.”

Ben-Josh’s dad was smiling a soft ready smile and looked much more at ease vis-à-vis his webcam than did his son. Behind him were plate-glass windows offering a panoramic view of rock and ocean and midday sun that resembled in every way a computer-generated backdrop but that Irma assumed was probably real.

“Tell me,” Hunter Stroman said. “How does it feel to send your son to an elite institution” — his fingers carved scare quotes around the phrase — “that costs forty grand a year only to have him call and tell you he’s been attacked by radical feminists?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Hunter. Feels like munching on manure.”

“I understand you’re a high-powered lawyer.”

Ben-Josh’s dad nodded. “Entertainment law. One of the best in the biz.”

“So what are the legal consequences of all this?”

“Great question,” said Ben’s dad. “These young men — football stars, I might add, dean’s list students, pillars of their community — were targeted because they’re men. It’s harassment. It’s a hate crime. No different than being targeted because you’re a woman, or you’re Black, or you’re Jewish.”

At the word Jewish, Hunter Stroman’s lips puckered quizzically, as though he’d found something unpleasant between his teeth. “Or for being Christian,” he suggested.

“Whatever floats your boat, Hunter. Point is, it’s sexual harassment according to Title IX, and Title IX’s a federal law. So if the school doesn’t act, they expose themselves to massive liability.”

Hunter Stroman nodded. “And the school hasn’t done anything.”

“The school has done jack,” Ben’s dad confirmed. “These girls are out there strutting around like peacocks, proud of what they’ve done.”

“Strut-strut!” cheered Dahlia.

“You could sue the college,” Hunter Stroman ventured.

“We could absolutely sue the college,” Ben-Josh’s dad agreed. “Or the assailants themselves. Don’t know why I said or. We could sue ’em all.”

“God bless America,” said Hunter Stroman. “We’ll be right back.”

“I can see why your mom watches this show,” Dahlia said, as a fit elderly couple water-skied through a commercial for blood pressure medication. “He’s terrific.”

Irma felt too agitated to be entertained — not that she would ever, under any circumstances, find Hunter Stroman entertaining. “Aren’t you worried?” she asked. “Ben’s dad sounds like he wants to take us to court.”

Dahlia laughed. “For what? It’s a temporary tattoo.”

“But he’s a high-powered lawyer.”

“So what?” said Dahlia.

Irma felt her tongue poking nervously between her lips. “So what if he decides to sue us? I can’t afford a lawyer.”

“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you,” Dahlia quipped.

Despite herself, Irma issued a tiny whimper.

“I’m kidding,” Dahlia said quickly. “Nobody’s going to sue you. Nobody’s going to know you had anything to do with it.”

Disastrous scenarios flooded Irma’s mind; she couldn’t share them with Dahlia for fear of seeming too fearful. She and Pammy and Dahlia would be named in a lawsuit. Irma would hide it from her parents, but Ada would find out from Hunter Stroman. The family would lose their house in a futile effort to pay a lawyer. They’d wind up in a trailer somewhere, a place so small and flimsily constructed that Irma would never, except when she was waiting tables at Cracker Barrel, which she would do for the rest of her life, be out of earshot of her mother’s continuous and totally valid recitation of how Irma had driven the family to ruin. And worse than Ada’s carping would be the way Irma’s dad, devastated by the loss of his tractor, his onions, his pumpkins, would never chastise her at all.

“But the whole thing was my idea,” Irma said.

“People don’t get sued for ideas,” Dahlia said. “They get sued for what they do.”

The commercial ended. Hunter Stroman reappeared, the sleeves of his blue oxford rolled. One hand reached up to smooth the muted arboreal plaid of his wool tie. His sad eyes gazed at the camera. Youthful but weary, freighted with cares, he looked like the nation’s overworked assistant principal who regretted the need to call America in for this chat. Ben-Josh and Ben-Josh’s dad hovered in inset boxes above his shoulders.

“Let’s start with the obvious,” he said. “We know there’s a fake rape panic on college campuses.”

“We know?” exclaimed Irma, as Dahlia nudged her ribs to shush her. “We know?”

“What we haven’t discussed is the endgame — men being banned from higher education altogether. As of today, 60 percent of college students are women. Sixty percent! That’s millions of young men left out and left behind. And it’s only getting worse.”

Hunter Stroman seemed, at last, to be warming to his topic. “We’re at a tipping point in this country. Men are getting their butts handed to them. We’re dying at record rates, our life expectancy is in decline, our jobs are getting shipped overseas. And that’s why what happened at Westish College matters. It’s not just some harpies with Sharpies showing off for their sicko friends.”

“Harpies with Sharpies!” Dahlia crowed, and held up a hand for Irma to slap. When Irma demurred, Dahlia high-fived herself.

“It’s a campaign of intimidation, and the goal is the end of men. Young Ben here didn’t exactly come over on the Mayflower. His people have had their troubles. But because he has a penis, he’s not allowed to talk in class. And apparently he’s not allowed to go out and have a few beers without being turned into a laughingstock.

“Well, I for one won’t take it anymore. I stand with Ben. And you should too.”

Hunter Stroman, spent from his efforts, blew a puff of air from his rosy cheeks and subsided toward his desk. “Young man, great to have you on the program.”

“Um.” Ben-Josh seemed a little stunned, perhaps partly because his penis had been mentioned on national TV. “Thanks.”

The camera lingered on him looking subdued and forlorn, his forehead marred.

Irma pressed stop. Dahlia leaped up from the bed and applauded.