“You really want to make an impression, don’t you?” Mom said.
I was wearing a blue paisley button-down shirt that had a few thin, almost see-through panels, pin-striped boot-cut khakis, and brown leather Chelsea boots that were so narrow they changed the way I walked.
“I’m about to show these Kentucky bitches how it’s done,” I said, cocking my knock-off Kenneth Cole sunglasses. Whether she intended to or not, she was the one who taught me that clothing could be armor.
Mom was waiting by the front door in black high heels and a black wrap dress, sunglasses on even though it was overcast outside. Like the kind of women you’d see in New York, I thought, then forced myself to forget it as I picked up our suitcases and set them outside the front door. She lowered her shades and looked me over. We were both geared up for the journey ahead.
Dallas–Fort Worth Airport to Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta Airport to Nashville Airport. An hour’s drive north on I-65, crossing the state border from middle Tennessee into Kentucky before passing the fields, farms, subdivisions, and town squares that eventually announce themselves as being part of a town called Bowling Green. Then it’s a right turn onto Normal Drive and you can steer yourself into the parking lot in front of Barnes Campbell Hall.
Welcome to Western Kentucky University.
We laughed when we finally found the entrance to campus. The first banner we drove past advertised the school’s freshman orientation program, known as the “M. A. S. T. E. R. Plan.” The sign happened to be hanging near a brick building that didn’t look all that different from a plantation.
“Master, huh?” Mom chuckled before turning at the stoplight. “Good luck, baby.” I broke out laughing too, almost giddy. I was just happy to see her smiling again, settling back into her perfect deadpan.
I had almost forgotten what I was wearing until I started carrying both of our suitcases, all filled with my clothes and belongings, up the six flights of stairs toward my dorm room. Mom would either wait in the rental car or make trips to Target while I walked up and down the stairs, passing kids and parents all wisely wearing T-shirts and shorts, speaking with Kentucky and Ohio accents.
By the time I’d hauled everything up to my dorm room, sweat had dyed my shirt a deeper shade of indigo. My aching feet made me wince with every step I took. Mom took one last look at me, scanning me from head to toe with her shades lowered. She smirked again.
“Well,” she said, looking up at my dorm. “Don’t have sex without a condom.”
She hugged me one more time, then got into the rental car without another word. She started to pull away before I could even register whether to laugh, or to chase her down with the thousand questions still on my mind. We did this to one another, shocking each other to distract both of us from an impending ache. It worked, in a sense. I just stood in the empty parking space, noticing that the air was thick with the chatter of cicadas. It hadn’t occurred to me how much I would miss her until she was already gone.
ALONE IN MY new room for the first time all day, I put my sore feet back down and slowly took off my boots. I unbuttoned my ridiculous shirt, prying the cloying fabric from my skin. I peeled off my jeans, balled them up, and threw them into the corner. The damp clothes soaked up dust and cobwebs. I’d need to do something about that dust.
Digging through my suitcases, I put on the first tank top and pair of shorts I could find, then started unpacking my books. When I got to my worn paperback of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, I sat down again and turned to the scene where a character walks past the arch in Washington Square Park. Going to my classes at NYU would’ve meant passing through that park nearly every day.
I didn’t just feel far away from the city now, I felt small. I felt estranged. I put the novel down and headed for the door and, I swear, by the time I crossed its threshold, my bare dorm room had played a trick on me.
On the other side of that door was a boy—one who hadn’t really spoken or introduced himself to other students all day; one who could’ve made up any new self he wanted—yet who was somehow the mirror image of the pin-striped and paisleyed Saeed who’d arrived that morning. He was from Lewisville—Oh, not Louisville, we say Lewisville… it’s, uh, it’s just north of Dallas… haha, I guess… I don’t know, it’s just a suburb, nothing special. He wasn’t quite sure how to explain his being in Kentucky. He didn’t have a story yet. He was the speech and debate scholarship student who found himself stuttering for the first time in his life and mangling his hellos. His hands were shoved deep down in his pockets whenever he talked, like if he dug deep enough maybe he’d find his bearings. When a girl who said she was from LaRue County pointed out the twin birthmarks on his shoulders—one darker, one lighter—Saeed offered up an embarrassed smile and a mumbled excuse about cobwebs and needing to find a broom. And if, by chance, you asked him if he thought that girl was hot, he wouldn’t give you a clear answer one way or another. He would just rush on to the next sentence and ask where you were from.
It just happened. I met one guy who lived down the hall from me and that guy’s roommate and another guy who lived on the floor just below mine and then my roommate—the six-foot-four son of a tobacco farmer who’d never been outside the state of Kentucky—and I closeted myself again. No one shoved me back in there. Maybe I’d just been standing in the doorway of that dusty closet, tripped, and somehow fell back inside.
It shouldn’t have been that easy to un-become myself. The lies and omissions started to roll off my tongue and I got more confident; I stopped mumbling and stuttering. I began meeting people’s eyes, shaking their hands confidently, and introducing a person who I wasn’t exactly, all while smiling. It felt good, like the first sip of an ice-cold beer after a long, hot day. I could be this person. I knew exactly how to be him. The kind of man who always feels the need to make it clear he doesn’t swing that way. Lewisville had raised me well.
There were so many freshman orientation mixers and icebreakers that by the time I strolled up to the cookout hosted by the neighboring all-girls dorm, I already had a sudden crew of very nice, corn-fed bros. Peter from Chicago was planning on doing Rush Week. Bryce from McCracken County was thinking about auditioning to be Big Red, the school’s mascot. Steven from Danville knew someone who’d make a run to the liquor store for us. These guys loved basketball. Everyone in Kentucky loved basketball, they said. They wore T-shirts with the sleeves unevenly cut off so you could see their farmer’s tans. They all had girlfriends or had left girlfriends back home or were eyeing girls at the cookout who could be fucks but never friends. I’d never thought of myself as “one of the boys.” I could’ve made an educated guess about where these boys would’ve sat in the cafeteria back at Lewisville High School, a table I wouldn’t have been invited to join, but here I was: an alternate version of myself in an alternate future from the one I’d been planning for years.
Our RA persuaded a group of us to do trust falls, despite the fact that most of us had only known one another for a day. We paired up on the lawn in front of the dorm. It was just about dusk. The sun eased itself down behind the hills. Breezes actually felt comforting when they slid past you. We all smelled like fresh-cut grass and barbecue. Fireflies and gnats flitted about. And maybe it shouldn’t matter as much as it did, but every time I fell, hands were there to catch me.
I WOKE UP in the top bunk in my dorm room the next morning with my body pressed against the cool, white cinderblock wall next to my bed as if I’d been trying to spoon it in my sleep. The sound of my roommate’s heavy snoring dissolved the initial shock of not being in my bedroom back in Lewisville. I climbed down as quietly as I could and tried not to stare at him, sprawled over the edge of his bed. I had never shared a room with another person before. The bed almost seemed to rise and fall in time with his labored breathing. I got dressed and snuck out, as if I’d been an intruder in someone else’s room.
Kentucky was green, furiously, vibrantly green. Only now, miles and many landscapes away from home, could I tell how parched Texas was by contrast. Even in spring, our greenest green still looked yellow compared with Kentucky. After just a few minutes of walking around, my eyes clouded and I couldn’t stop sneezing. Allergies chased me back into my room. From that morning on, I wouldn’t step outside without taking allergy medicine first. Even breathing in Kentucky had different rules.
In the food court later that week, I finally met some other kids who’d also gotten speech and debate scholarships and would be competing with me on the team. Debate kids aren’t all that different from theater kids, except we’re more arrogant, tend to speak faster, and have a habit of constantly trying to outdo one another with stories and arguments. Just as I had code-switched my way into fitting in with the guys days before, I started throwing shade, lacing every other sentence with sarcasm, discussing poems and plays, bragging about my aspirations to make it to New York eventually. How many versions of myself I’d perform by week’s end was anyone’s guess.
We finished our lunch and walked to our next session together. Once seated, I saw my crew of dorm guys on the other side of the auditorium. I waved and they smiled, waving back but staying put. I stayed put too. This self was just a little easier to wear. We were there to learn about peer pressure and the perils of getting too drunk at parties. And maybe it’s because all week long I’d been thinking so much about what I wasn’t telling people, I couldn’t help but notice the gaping absence in the middle of the presentation. Something was very loudly not being said.
“You know this is all about that Autry girl, right?” whispered Maggie, one of the speech kids who happened to be from Kentucky. When I shook my head no, she gave me the kind of raised eyebrows that precede not gossip but real news.
Melissa “Katie” Autry, a first-year student from nearby Pellville, Kentucky, went to a fraternity party in May 2003. She met two guys, Stephen Soules and Lucas Goodrum, and eventually snuck them past her dorm’s front desk and into her room. At one point in the evening, Autry called a friend who also lived in the building and said she had a guy in her room. The friend would later testify in court that a man got on the phone and said Autry had gotten sick in his truck and he brought her back to make sure she was okay. The friend heard another male voice in the background and the call abruptly ended.
Several days later, Autry died in a hospital. She had been raped, beaten, stabbed, and set on fire using hair spray in her dorm room. Soules eventually received a life sentence. And Goodrum—who apparently had ties to the family who owns the Fortune 500 Dollar General Corporation—was acquitted. The case forced WKU to change its campus security policies, especially regarding guests visiting residence halls.
“It was all over the news here,” Maggie added. “You didn’t hear about it in Texas?” She sucked her teeth when I shook my head again. Autry wasn’t mentioned directly during the one-hour presentation, a testament perhaps to the unique talent Americans have for talking all the way around exactly what needs to be said. I remember the orientation leaders continually emphasizing the perils of binge drinking; I don’t remember words like “rape,” “sexual assault,” or “consent.” Katie Autry was a specter between the lines. Her story haunted the room, all of us hearing and not hearing her at the same time.
THAT NIGHT, MAGGIE and I went to our first college party. The host, Rob, was looking me over from the other side of his house’s screen door, dressed in complete Catholic schoolboy garb, including knee socks, suspenders, and thick-framed glasses held together in the middle with Scotch tape. He was an upperclassman on the speech team and handsome as a good knife.
“My name is Sebastian,” he said in an exaggerated lisp the moment he opened the door. “Can I suck your cock?”
I can’t remember what I said in reply. Maybe I just giggled and slid past him with my friends, too embarrassed to admit that he could, in fact, suck whatever part of me he wanted. He pushed his glasses up his nose and dramatically bowed as we stepped into the house.
The party’s theme was teachers and students. In slacks, tie, and a dress shirt, I guess I was supposed to be a professor, though my costume was hardly inspired. Some students showed up dressed as figures from throughout world history or as specific instructors who’d become notorious on campus for being too lenient, too harsh, or just too weird. The older students on the team hosted the party every year to kick off the fall semester.
My first red Solo cup. My first pour from a plastic bottle of Burnett’s vodka. My first dark living room with an iPod hooked up to speakers. My first time hearing Talib Kweli’s “Get By.” My first time stumbling through the house from one room to the next room until I reached a closed door lit from the other side. I got curious and opened it. Clouds of smoke billowed out; heads turned to regard me as I was already apologizing, already closing the door and backing away when someone said, “Nah, let the kid in.” My first time realizing that I was, in fact, the kid. I was new again. I was green again. Whatever anxieties I’d been dragging with me all through high school, all the way from Texas to Kentucky, I didn’t have to drag them into this house. It was enough just to show up on the doorstep, my necktie poorly knotted, my slacks wrinkled, my eyes blinking as I stared at Rob. Newbie. Youngblood. Baby boy. My first time having a blunt passed to me and pretending to know how to smoke until someone had to show me how. Yes, that is exactly who I was supposed to be: the kid who couldn’t inhale, then inhaled too much, the kid who couldn’t stop coughing, the kid whose coughing fit made everyone laugh until they started coughing too.
Another first: the door opened and Rob’s tall, slender silhouette filled the frame. “There you are, professor,” he said. The older kids—even the straight guys—nodded and smiled knowing smiles. The same way they’d smiled when other guys and girls had paired off and slipped through the smoke back into the house’s dark recesses. This didn’t have to be a secret. It was okay to be a man who wanted another man. We all had bodies, didn’t we? And it felt good. For the first time, it felt completely good to want this. No hurt or shame or shadows were tucked into this want. When Rob sat next to me on the bed, I leaned close enough to smell his cologne, a welcome contrast to boys in the dorm who seemed to prefer Axe body spray.
“May I have a word?” he said, taking my hand and helping me off the bed. He’d been looking for me. He led me out to a backyard that, in the dark, seemed to go on forever. We climbed onto a huge trampoline and lay on our backs, staring up at the stars as they winked mischievously back down at us. I was drunk and high and I could hear crickets blending in with music drifting out from the house. Rob unzipped my pants and took me into his mouth. I realized a girl was sitting on the edge of the trampoline smoking a cigarette as she watched us. I didn’t mind. For the first time in far too long, I knew exactly who and where I wanted to be.