I really wanted to get into that particular fraternity. It was said to be the coolest one on campus, and I didn’t know if there was anything I wouldn’t do to get in. And I finally got an invitation to one of their after-game parties, a game our university had unexpectedly won. This victory was the first time we’d beaten our traditional rival in three years, a rival who ranked well above us in the predictions. The unexpectedness of all of this had probably been why the party got wild enough that the police had shown up and shut it down.

The frat house had quickly gotten on overload. The music was loud, and people were hanging from the ceiling and pressed up against each other so that even the dancers couldn’t do much more than sway their hips without bruising someone else. I thought I’d hit the jackpot on my chances of getting a bid when a senior, Greg, who I knew to be the pledge chairman was thrown against me in a stuffed back hall. We were practically belly to belly, with me backed to the wall and he facing me, his arm stiff out above my shoulder to the wall, keeping those trying to muscle past us from crushing Greg into me. I was trying to impress him with my family’s prominence and the good grade average and community service record I could bring to the fraternity, but all he seemed to be interested in talking about was sex on campus and how free everyone here was to experiment before they had to settle down in life. He’d given me a beer, which I really wasn’t supposed to have, and we swigged as best we could between trying to make ourselves heard to each other over the loud music and the silly screaming around us.

He seemed to be getting crushed closer and closer into me, and I was feeling a little intimidated by the bulk of him and his bulging muscles pressing up against me, but in a titillating way I couldn’t quite get a grip on. Then we heard the sirens.

I heard him say, "Oh, shit," and he grabbed the half-finished bottle of beer out of my hand and disappeared farther down the hall. But as he left me, I heard a distinct, "You. You and me later, Dude," thrown at me in his wake.

This seemed great news. If I impressed the pledge chairman, I’d likely get into the fraternity; if I didn’t my chances weren’t good. I couldn’t sleep very well that night, and when I did get to sleep, I had strange dreams about that close encounter with Greg, which had been interrupted just when I thought I’d been making an impression on him. When I woke, I discovered I’d had a wet dream incident. But there wasn’t anything strange about that for a healthy college freshman, so I didn’t really think anything of it.

But I found I wasn’t being able to study in the noisy dorm the next afternoon, and, without giving it much consideration, I had taken my books and papers to a picnic table at a little park across the street from the fraternity house I was trying to pledge. I think subconsciously I must have reasoned that maybe I’d be noticed by someone with clout in the fraternity and could do some politicking.

I thought that the view into the park was obscured from across the street, but when I sat down; I saw that I had a straight line