Brantley N. Slater squats, hovering over a toilet seat in a dormitory bathroom and waiting. Lately, for the past like week, he's been having extremely sluggish bowel movements. They always come in the middle of the night, and he can't get back to sleep once he feels the pressure in his colon.

(Brantley can't see how anyone on Earth could be capable of getting back to sleep with pressured bowels; in reality, he personally suffers from an unconscious, paralyzing fear of rectal incontinence. If Brant were ever confronted with this, he wouldn't be able to explain the reasons behind his bathroom anxiety. His mother, however, would be able to tell you a few stories.)

He had hoped that tonight's early-morning run would be different. It had felt different, kind of squishier than the last few, and a few burbles in his large intestine had promised at least some soft matter, welcome relief from the recent stony droplets that Brantley can only describe as 'turds.' In his optimism he had neglected his usual toilet paper routine, choosing instead to adopt the girl-peeing-in-a-dingy-gas-station-bathroom squat, avoiding all contact with the seat, which was hell on the knees but would save him some time.

When coddled in the plush sterility of his Beverly Hills home, B.N.S. has no problem flipping the lid, dropping his shorts and going about his business with impunity. In public, Brantley's average bathroom jaunt is about as stress-free as divorce. Each trip to the loo involves a complex matrix of decisions, a variety of digestive goals and environmental conditions that most people never even notice. Although Brant's rational mind frequently tries to convince him that his anxiety is unjustified, his tight-sphinctered upbringing just isn't having it.

Take his current situation, for example. He told Arlene as he crawled out of bed that he had to make water. This was a lie. Arlene, in deep slumber after the usual Friday night-type stuff, barely heard him; she mumbled something from a dream about her mama and turned the other way. Brant, like most people he knows, has problems using the phrase 'take a shit' when addressing female, but his little untruth was a deliberate act of deception, part of his cover. The idea was to book it down to the bathroom, squeeze out what he could as quickly as possible, and return within a plausible time frame for a Number One bathroom visit. Again, Arlene was asleep, and probably wouldn't notice if B. was gone for an hour, but Brantley's scatological neuroses run far deeper than logic.

So he had got himself into his jeans, not bothering with the belt he had looped into a neat spiral and placed on the low table before bed. Arlene had snorted a little when he opened the door and light from the hallway swept across her face. In the empty and impossibly bright hallway, he weaved to the bathroom, clipping his hip on a ceramic water fountain and cursing under his breath. He was very grateful that no one else was around. The contingency plan for late-night partiers in the hallway (who were inevitably lolling their heads against the walls as they sat on the floor with cups between splayed legs) was to carefully step over them and locate a bathroom not within earshot.

There was also no one in the bathroom - every stall door hung open. The variables for other people in the bathroom go like this: people shitting are very bad, especially if only stalls adjacent to the shitter are available; people pissing are bad, but provide acoustic cover for whatever embarrassing noises Brant might make; people brushing their teeth or performing other minor acts of hygiene are very bad because they have nothing to do but observe what B. is up to; people showering are good, because showers are usually far away from toilets, and because bath products' artificial freshness mask the odors of flatus.

Usually, Brantley (who, over the years, has come to loath the sound of his first name) lays four or five layers of toilet paper on the seat. (He suspects that, contrary to prevailing opinion, there are a wide spectrum of diseases that you can get from a toilet seat.) He arranges the toilet paper carefully, to ensure that no errant strand falls into the bowl, causing filth-water to creep up the paper to his ass; this has never happened, not to Brantley nor anyone ever. He seldom goes to the trouble of removing the flattened paper-ring from the seat when he's finished, leading the casual observer (were there one) to wonder if old Brant has an unhealthy fear of his own rear end, on top of everything else.

This time, per the white-lie-and-power-dump scheme, Brant hovers instead, hoping to shave a few seconds from his turnaround time. He is coming to understand that this is in vain; his hope for a quick, clean shit had been false. He's been squatting with his ass a half inch above the seat for like five minutes, and all he's gotten so far have been a few airy farts and a wet bubbly noise.

So he stands up, shrewdly abdicating the plan as his knees scream "thank you," just as the bathroom door groans in surprise and someone walks in. Brant catches a glimpse of bathrobe through the slats on either side of the stall door. A second after the figure passes, Brantley, still standing, gets this ghost of cool air, the wake of whoever just passed, on his bare genitalia; he can't help but be aroused in a vague and low-key way.

Brantley hears a knob squeak and a shower comes to life. This is a great relief. He begins collecting toilet paper from the giant quadruple-roll dispenser with great swoops of his hands, preparing the usual many-ply sanitary cushion that has become necessary since his knees gave way. He will leave it there when he's finished, skittish about touching anything that's touched both his ass and a toilet seat.

McCarthy definitely still had his Tripping Hat on when he left Gray for his room. He was beaming like a fucking chandelier.

Jason, Steve, Tanya, Jeremy, Matt, Dominic and Merry had all gone to bed, all in the same room, in fact. After a private conference in the men's room, Jeremy and Matt had returned to the room and pushed their beds together, announcing that the resulting extra-long double was up for grabs, and that they'd sleep in the lounge so no one would have to walk home in the snow. Dominic suggested that the girls get the bed and the rest of them sleep on the floor, because who says chivalry's dead? Merry felt it asinine that two should get a bed and six should sleep on the floor. Jeremy said that in that case, he'd be happy to join the bed group, but only if he got to sleep between the two girls. Tanya opined that a four-and-four arrangement was the only fair way to do it. Steve questioned the physical possibility of fitting four people in two narrow dorm beds. Jason joked that Steve was just angling to get in there with McCarthy. (Steve's gay, McCarthy's bisexual.)

As the rest of the group debated, Jeremy and Matt decided they had done their part and went to sleep in the lounge. Steve found a blanket and claimed one- half of the impromptu double bed. Dominic curled up in Jeremy's easy chair (found on the side of the road at the beginning of last semester) and picked up a snowboarding magazine. Jason set about making a nest out of the roommates' dirty laundry; Tanya quietly joined him and when they were done they lay down to snuggle. Merry went to the bathroom.

McCarthy, who had been on Matt's computer looking for trippy fractal images on the Internet, decided he wasn't quite ready for bed. He grabbed his thigh-length leather coat and left the room without a word; everyone else was busy with the post-trip veg-out and he was still seeing stuff.

He hadn't wanted to tell them, because he had learned rather quickly that when you're tripping with other people, it's important that everyone think they're in the same place, seeing the same shit, thinking the same way. It doesn't matter so much at the end of the night, when everybody's tired and jittery and vaguely hating everyone else, but if you're the only one not seeing a tree breathe an hour after dropping, people start to pity you, or wonder what's wrong with you, and either way it's a tense scene. It's like suddenly everyone's afraid of acting like they're on drugs and making you feel left out.

McCarthy body-checked his way out the door and paused on the concrete stoop to zip his jacket and pull his Tripping Hat over his ears. Most of the binge drinkers had gone to bed, and campus was quiet - he could hear his crystalline breath, and the hum of sodium vapor lights on cement posts, their orange heads suspended in gauzy, twinkling coronas. Campus was laid out in miniature, light refracting purely for the pleasure of McCarthy's enlarged pupils.

Satisfied with his decision to leave the slumber-bound group and invigorated by the cold, he set a course for Milton, stepping only in others' tracks and smiling to himself.

* * *

When McCarthy got back to the room, Nils was on the phone.

"Ah-o know. Why'ncha caller an asker?"

Nils was on the couch they stole from the lounge, the cordless tucked between his shoulder and head as he played a NASCAR game on the old N64. The low, wide table scavenged from a yard sale was covered in cigarette ash and empty cans of Olympia. Jerry the Jamaican Junglist was on the radio, spinning some far-out dub techno.

"No, means we broke up like six months ago."

McCarthy threw his coat and Tripping Hat on the top bunk, went to his desk and got his weed and papers from a drawer. He pulled his University-issued swivel chair up to the table, took out a bud and started to break it up on Nils' laptop.

"Naw, she was pissin me off anyway. I was like..."

On the tiny television screen, Nils' car crossed the finish line and the results came up: he had finished fifth. He got up, tossed the controller on the couch and went to the mini-fridge, returning with a plastic bottle of cheap vodka from the freezer. The bottle was a quarter full, and to McCarthy the layer of frost that coated its bottom quarter glimmered brightly.

"No, fuck that little fuck. He ain't even here anymore."

McCarthy started to roll up the shake. He could see every crevice in his skin with amazing clarity, and he kept getting distracted by how old his hands looked.

"Like I give a shit. Cept there's been no glamity in like three months. Last time I had sex was on Thanksgiving."

Nils, standing in front of the couch like he was about to sit, took a tiny pull from the bottle and looked over his shoulder at his roommate. McCarthy shook his head to clear the faint blue and green shadows hovering over the contours of Nils' face, and made a gesture with his fist and thumb that meant, "lighter?"

"Atsa long story, my friend." Swaying gently, Nils shoved his hand into the pocket of his stiff jeans (Nils' pants always looked to McCarthy like they'd been starched by Nazis) and limply tossed something sparkly in McCarthy's direction.

"Don't wanna get innuit, man. Freshman ears in the room."

McCarthy was too busy staring at the 'Party Naked' inscription on the disposable lighter to listen.

"Fuck you, man. You annuh nigger posse kin go fuck yourself. All Real World an shit."

He came back to reality, threw the joint and lighter onto the top bunk, then climbed up after it.

"Look, you know I got no prollem with..."

McCarthy stuck the joint in his mouth and lit it, shielding the flame with a cupped hand against wind that wasn't there.

"Know what? No, Horace. Horace. Horace, listen. Know what? I will be the first." Nils finally fell backward onto the couch, and the cushions creaked violently. "I will be the first to tell ya she's a nigger." He took a triumphant hit from the bottle.

The end of the joint caught merry fire, and McCarthy blew it out like a candle, then brushed the tiny embers off his bed.

"Arright, arright. She's not a nigger. Yeah, whatever. Hey, tell Amy to call me. Right on, bro. Snoff." He beeped the phone off and stretched his head back to look at McCarthy, upside down. "Tsup, killer? Wanna do up a Rittie?"

McCarthy leaned down and passed him the joint. "All set. I'm goinna bed soon."

Nils shook a 20mg pill from a prescription bottle on the table and put it on his laptop among particles of marijuana. Squinting into the smoke from the joint between his teeth, he crushed the pill with a quarter and cut two lines with the edge of a matchbook.

"You're not anytime soon, I take it."

"One of those nights, Collie." He passed the joint back over his head to McCarthy and bent down to do a line.

After the joint was smoked, McCarthy jumped down, ducked into the closet, undressed, wrapped himself in a towel and went to the shower.

When he came back, Nils was still on the couch but all the lights were off. The only illumination came from Nils' computer, open on his lap, and a bit of dull orange light from the streetlights outside sneaking under the window shade.

McCarthy pulled on some boxer shorts and removed his towel in a single movement that he hadn't yet quite mastered, and climbed into bed. As he throw the covers over his legs, he noticed Nils' screen: he was looking at a picture of some hippie black girl running through the woods.

* * *

She watched Brant leave the men's room. He was carrying a towel and a pink plastic toiletry basket (definitely not his, she thought) and his hair was wet. Except for bare feet, he was fully dressed, even wearing a sweater.

He glanced at her then looked nonchalantly away. She watched his back as he went down the hall to Arlene's door and let himself in, fingering the little plastic device in her pocket, running the pad of her index finger over the gray rubber button.

When the latch clicked into place and the door was closed, she moved away from the bulletin board where she had been pretending to read flyers and walked quickly to the closed door. She took the little black thing out of her pocket and waited.

Muffled conversation, silence while they kiss, he babbles about the bathroom for a while, she tells him he's cute.

Finally, through the door, the woman in black hears the cellphone chirp. She holds the black thing in front of her, pointing it at the door; her thumb hovers over the gray button. The phone rings again.

The woman in black mashes the button; a red LED, the device's only output system, blinks calmly.

From behind the door: "What the fuck?"

The woman in black pockets the device and runs for the stairwell.

* * *

"Hey, um, my name's Hanna? I was in your Thoreau class?"

"Oh, hey, yeah, you did that thing about the Indians..."

"Yeah! Wow, I barely even remember that! So anyway, I found this phone? And I looked on the info screen and it had your name. And I thought I remembered you from that class?"

"Oh, the phone. Yeah, it's fucked. You can just throw it out or use it for decoration or whatever."

"It's fucked?"

"It doesn't work. It shat the bed the other day and I tried charging it but it didn't do anything. I'm getting a new one anyway so I don't need it."

"Yeah it does work! I'm using it to talk to you, and it rang a couple times today but I didn't answer it?"

"Oh, weird."

"So you want it back? I'd give it to you today, but I'm in Maine up at my friends cabin? And it's like a really long drive? And we just got here and we're staying til late? But I could give it to you tomorrow..."

"Eh, don't worry about it. I'm gonna have my number switched over when I get my new phone..."

"Uh, okay, you sure?"

"Yeah, just throw it in a lake or some type of shit."

* * *

Come 6:00PM, Hanna and the boys had decided to stay the night at Jared's, shortly after the drinking had begun. Jamie and Jeff had gone fishing while Hanna and Jared took a walk through the woods and flirted heavily. Now, as two smallish fish fried on the electric stove, the four of them stood around the kitchen with bottles of beer, except Hanna, who was sitting at the round table with her legs crossed and a glass of chilled Chablis.

"You shoulda seen this kid." Jeff lightly backhanded Jamie's chest with his beer hand. "We're out there five minutes and he's already reeling one in. Then he's got the thing like two feet away and he reaches over and almost tips the friggin boat over." Jamie, now uncomfortable, squinted down the neck of his beer and pushed his brown dreadlocks over his shoulder with a cupped hand.

Smiling, Jeff put his beer on the counter, took off his absurd tri-cornered hat (Hanna noticed the dandruff in his long, greasy black hair for about the thousandth time) and twirled it slowly around his index finger. "My man caught six fish today. Six fish! Plus that one that snapped the line."

Jared went to the table, pulled a chair around Hanna and sat behind her, put his beer between his legs and started working one of her three burgeoning dreadlocks, rolling it between his hands like a Play-Doh snake.

Jamie shook the frying pan absently. Jeff picked up his beer and poured some over the fish. Jared pushed the wooden bead up the tangled rope of hair a little too fast, and Hanna winced.

Jamie looked up from the fish. "Hey, if we're gonna to stay over, we're gonna need more beer."

"Can we make it? Don't the liquor stores around here close at like fuckin three or whatever?"

Jared, working furiously at Hanna's hair, didn't answer. Hanna turned over her shoulder.

"Jared, honey? I think Jeff asked you a question?"

"What? Oh, the liquor store? What about the liquor store?"

"What time does it close, genius." Jamie laughed and choked on his beer; Jeff smirked.

"No clue."

Jamie made little circles on the cracked linoleum floor with his foot. "We could call."

"There's no phone anymore. Somebody came up and made a shitload of long distance calls and I didn't pay the bill and they disconnected it."

Jeff pointed at Hanna with his beer. "You could use that girl's phone."

"You think we should? Won't it cost money?"

"Who cares? Didn't you say she's getting a new one anyway? Jared, do you know the number?"

Jared paused to think of a snappy retort. His eyes lit up when he got it, and everyone was a little embarrassed for him. "They didn't take away my phone book, y'know." He snorted loudly.

Hanna left the room to get the cellphone, and Jared went looking for the phone book. Jeff leaned over to Jamie's ear. "Hey, how long before he's like totally obsessed with her?" They both smiled knowingly and took pulls from their beers as Jeff moved away.

They heard the phone's electronic ring from the other room, and Hanna appeared in the doorway, holding the noisy thing in front of her like, "what am I supposed to do with this?"

"See who it's from!"

"It says 'University comma L.' What the hell does that mean?"

They pondered this while the phone continued to ring. Jeff finally broke the silence.

"It's probably like a generic number for a college. Like when we call phones, it shows up on the ID box as William Blake College or whatever."

Hanna caught on. "Shit, I bet it's like someone from Arlene's old school! I should get it!"

She answered the phone. "Hello-ooo?" She stared at the refrigerator and bit her lip. "No, I'm a friend of hers, and I found her phone in the dining hall? And I was going to return it but I'm in Maine. Who is this? Her boyfriend?"

* * *

Nils was pissed. He had specifically allotted the next hour, and maybe the hour after that, for talking to Arlene. The night before had left him in a strangely excited emotional state, not unlike the feeling he gets after waking up from a dream where he's fallen in love with a girl from one of his classes, which happens surprisingly often.

"No, we broke up." He had like zero tolerance for conversation with like totally flaky girls, unless there was some possibility of the flaky girls going home with him.

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that! I'd heard so much about you! Everyone was talking about how great you were and how Arlene really needed a guy like you and from what I know of Arlene that's totally true."

"How'd you know I was her boyfriend?"

"I looked on the phone and it said you were calling from some college that started with L, and I knew her boyfriend went to Lancaster, so I figured it out." She seemed awfully proud of herself. This girl is a total cockpit, Nils thought. Wonder what she's doing up in Maine tonight. Wonder if any of her girlfriends are around. Maybe I should try to borrow McCarthy's car.

"So what else have you heard about me?"

"Well, you go to Lancaster, and you're like a senior."

"Are you a senior?"

She giggled. "No, I'm just a little freshman. I mean first year student. We're not supposed to be called freshmen anymore."

Nils was getting impatient. "Okay, look, if you see her..."

"Oh, and my friend Mary said she wanted to fuck you."

"What?" He had to make sure he had heard correctly.

She giggled again, and Nils could hear male laughter in the background.

"Which one's Mary? What does she look like?"

"You hung out with her a while ago... I think she said it was like you, Arlene, Mary, that boy Andy, and maybe Ian but I'm not sure. It was like two weeks ago, when you came out here to visit? Came out there."

"I think you're thinking of something else, cause I haven't been down there in months."

"No, she was telling me about this like just the other day. She said, 'I finally met Arlene's boyfriend.' And I was like, "I didn't know she had a boyfriend, who is it" and she was like, "He goes to Lancaster" and I was like, "How'd she meet him?" And she was like, "That's where she used to go to school. She only transferred like last semester." And I was like, "Is he cute?" And she was like, "Girl, I totally wanted to fuck him."

"That wasn't me. We broke up like five months ago." His voice was shaking.

"Oh." She was silent for a moment. "Shit."

Something clicked in Nils' mind. Suddenly he tore the cordless from his ear and smashed it into its cradle, then picked it back up and threw it against the heavy wooden door. It hit the steel knob and broke, sending large pieces of the plastic housing tinkling across the tiled floor.

* * *

Somewhere underground, just a few feet under a major four-lane highway, the woman in black, pale and shaking, dropped her headset to the floor, pressed her fingertips to her temples and cursed loudly.