Floyd Harbor. Joel Mowdy

      One summer I dyed my brown hair blond and combed it in a Caesar style, and I roasted in a tanning bed twice a week, twenty minutes at a time, cooking perfectly around like a rotisserie chicken. I owned three identical white silk shirts and blue jeans that hugged my ass, the legs gradually widening so that only my toes sticking out of leather sandals showed at the selvage. I clasped the two buttons at the top of the shirt and left the rest open.

      Oryn thought it was sexy that way. He gelled his hair back and wore only black except for his socks and undershirts, which were matching pastels that splintered from the bottom of his pant legs and over his collar. He’d dropped out of FIT when he landed a job with this company that designed and manufactured caps for toiletries, from shampoo bottles to aftershave, including big-ticket fragrances from the same designers of his wardrobe. He had an office on Fifth Avenue, leased a lofty apartment in Astoria, and on a whim dropped a few thousand dollars on a new sofa that became my favorite place to sleep. I loved it while it lasted.

      Before Oryn, I’d knock on James’s door in the dorms and say, “Come out, shit-head, let’s play the game.” We’d hit the bars along the Long Island Rail Road in search of an easy target, a fatty or a butter face. (“She has a nice body, but her . . .”) I had James on looks, but he could get her to trust him. He’d look her in the eyes. He took her by the arm with a hand on her back, told her to watch her step as he guided her around the pile of broken glass that had been a drunk sophomore’s bottle of beer, tell the sophomore to give up his stool for the lady. He borrowed the broom and dustpan from the barman to sweep up the shards and resumed talking to Kim, standing by her, gesticulating and looking her in the eyes.

      Then I walked over from across the bar.

      “Jared,” James said, “you have to meet Kim. Kimberly, this is Jared.”

      I leaned in close to her. “What’s your name, Kim?”

      Kim had been considering James. Maybe she’d imagined waking to him in sunlight under crisp, bleached sheets, but then I came along, so she felt guilty for getting his hopes up. Now she had to let him down. (Girls like that know how it feels—happens to them all the time.) In the same stroke, she didn’t want to lose the prize, which was me.

      I wanted to buy her a drink and I was holding my and James’s money, or I thought I was. Someone had lifted my wallet. This sucked for everyone because we had only had one drink apiece so far. Kim felt sorry and offered to buy me one. She offered James a drink, too, because she didn’t want to make him a third wheel—she knew how that felt. The girlfriend she had come with had left with her boyfriend an hour earlier.

      We ran out of cigarettes. Kim bought us a pack. She bought rounds and we toasted her every time, me slipping my arm around her waist and sliding her quarters into the slot on the pool table, James caressing her hand, both of us talking her into taking us to breakfast when the sun came up, fretting about the train fare going home, and digging into her backseat for change while she got out to pump gas into her hatchback.

      I had Kim in her car while James smoked in the train station parking lot. Another time, James hooked up with the girl.

      Once, we shared a girl in her dorm room.

      Everybody won. James and I got a night out. The girl got to feel like a princess. Sure, she probably felt duped when she called the number I gave her and got a Pizza Hut, but for one night in her sorry young life she felt like gold.

      Once, I was in love. It lasted four years. I thought I was in love three times, but the last time told me the other times were a joke. Her name was Shelly. She had freckles, and black hair like those women in shampoo commercials. It was the kind of hair a girl could wrap up in a sloppy bun or tie into a loose ponytail, and it was always perfect. The holes in the knees of her favorite jeans were perfect, too. She made me feel like I could do anything I wanted if I set my mind to it, that I could do so much better than working in restaurants out east. That was what I did before Shelly. I started as a dishwasher in the Hamptons and had worked my way through salad boy and line cook, teetering on the edge of sous chef. Shelly was the reason I went to Suffolk Community College and then transferred to a university close to hers in Nassau County when she graduated high school.

      “We’re going to be poor,” I told her. We were lying in the darkness of her bedroom. We were talking about university, about how we could survive for a few years on student loans and state aid. Too many girls she used to be friends with had dropped out of high school. Her sister got married and became a mother right after graduation. And then there was this girl Rebecca, Shelly’s best friend in middle school, who would graduate high school with a baby in her arms, a few contenders for the role of father. Shelly wanted something better for herself. Her family wanted better for her. Her father sold the boat he’d saved up for to help pay her first-semester tuition.

      “Can you handle being poor until we have degrees?” I said.

      Yes, she could.

      But in the weeks before she broke up with me, Shelly complained that I never took her out anywhere. A few days later, walking back from the diner down the street from her college, she said her feet hurt and she wondered out loud why everyone had a car except for us. Only days after that, her friend from acting class squealed about a bracelet her boyfriend had bought her, and Shelly threw me this look like I had done something wrong. She had to be massaged, the lights off, her radio set on some slow jazz with the volume low so the singer sounded nailed inside a box somewhere far away. She spread a bath towel over the sheets to keep them clean. Then she had headaches all the time, menstrual cramps. Then she just didn’t feel like sex. She wasn’t in the mood.

      “You don’t do anything romantic,” she said two days before she broke up with me. We were lying in her bed, watching Oprah. She always wanted me to watch Oprah with her.

      “Yes, I do,” I said.

      “Like what? Can you name even one time?”

      “That time I walked into Hempstead at three in the morning to get you Nyquil. You were sick. You couldn’t sleep, remember?”

      “That’s not romantic, Jared. That’s standard.”

      “Hempstead,” I said, “at night. It’s a bad neighborhood. You want me to die for you?”

      She took the remote, flicked through channels. “No, just something different.”

      Four years together ended on a cold October night at the start of my junior year. Wind tore the leaves off the trees outside her window. She was too young to be so serious, she said. Pacing her floor between the closet and the door, Shelly sitting on the bed and crying and holding out to me the silver promise ring I’d given her, I looked back to three weeks before and saw it coming. I was too frustrated to unpack the slow, plotted route she’d taken to sever herself from me—too choked with disbelief that it was happening now.

      “I guess I’ll see you around,” I said. I slammed the door behind me. Then I stood in the hallway, waiting for her to come looking for me, but after a long time nothing happened.

      One night, about a month later,