At the end of seventh period on Halloween, my teacher handed me the packet of hundreds of photos Mom had ordered back on picture day. I didn’t want to see whatever weird airbrushing had happened, so I crammed the pictures into my backpack before I, or anyone else, could see.

At my locker, I shoved my books on top of the already-dirty, bent envelope. Will walked over to me right after I’d buried it. “So, are we, like, not going to your house for horror movies this year?” he asked.

“What? I mean, no, I hadn’t really even thought about it.” We always watched slasher movies in my basement on Halloween, but I hadn’t planned anything. I didn’t feel like watching more identical, crappy horror movies that were all rip-offs of each other, and I didn’t want to have to deal with Luke inviting Sam and Patrick and probably the girls from homecoming.

“Okay, yeah,” Will said. “Just making sure, since I guess we’re all going to Jen’s house.”

“We are?”

“I think so. Patrick invited me. He didn’t tell you?”

“I guess not.”

“I mean . . . I’m sure you could just come. It wouldn’t be weird. He probably just forgot to mention it.”

“No, it’s cool. I’ve got plans.”

“Oh, okay, cool.” Will walked away.

I spent the night alone in my room, working on my movie outline and watching my download of Before Sunrise, and I enjoyed every goddamned second.

After my parents and Kate were asleep, I went downstairs to the family room computer and deleted my bookmarks to the horror movie websites I used to read and saved new forums and blogs that covered the kinds of movies and music Alex and I liked.

The week after Halloween, we had an overnight field trip to south Georgia. I was rooming with Luke, Will, Sam, and Patrick. There were only supposed to be four people in each room, but Luke and Will insisted that I should be in theirs, so the school made an exception. I honestly would have been fine sleeping on the bus.

The night before we left, I was worried about the guys seeing my pills or face washes and having to explain everything to them, so I spent an hour reading articles online about techniques drug mules use to smuggle contraband. One popular method was to use a body cavity as the transport container, but I thought that walked a philosophical fine line I didn’t want to cross, where I might have to admit to myself and my dermatologist that I’d lost my virginity to a condom full of Accutane I inserted into my own anus. Instead I popped enough pills for the trip out of the cardboard pack, put them in a sandwich bag, stuffed them into a sock, then wrapped the sock in seven other socks. I tucked the socks and my face wash and moisturizers inside two T-shirts and buried the bundle in the bottom of my backpack under my other clothes.

I sat with the guys on the bus ride down and listened to them talk about fantasy football for hours, rattling off players I’d never heard of and stats that weren’t interesting and would never matter.

Patrick noticed me at some point and tried to include me in the conversation. “Kevin, I heard you’re writing, like, a romance novel for Meyer’s lit project.”

“What?”

“My mom heard it from Luke’s mom or something. Is it like a funny romance book or something? I bet you could write a funny dumb romance book.”

Everyone turned to stare at me. Like all twenty guys at the back of the bus. My face turned red and I could hear my heart pounding. “Uh . . . no,” I mumbled. “Luke and Will are in the group, too, but . . . it’s a different thing. We’re making a movie. Never mind. It’s not a big deal or anything. Forget it.”

There was a pause that felt like an hour. Goddamn it. I’d already made this vow to myself a thousand times, but seriously, I needed to stop telling Mom anything. How had she contorted a movie script into a romance novel? Suburban moms are modern-day versions of medieval minstrels, spinning minor events into bullshit legends. Makes you wonder if Homer was a middle-aged mother and Odysseus was just her son who went for a walk one time.

“Yo, Kevin,” Luke said, “let’s do a scene where someone gets hit by a bus. Or, like, no, the killer disguises himself as the driver of the bus for this football team! Shit, yeah, everyone’s stuck on the bus with the killer.”

The other guys screamed and piled on more bad ideas inspired by objects around them at the time they decided to think about the movie. The way a trout would come up with movie ideas. Christ, they were morons.

Eventually they lost interest and went back to their original conversation, which was basically just Luke, Sam, and Patrick saying, “Remember at football practice when the Measure Man or Job, Joob, Jerb, and Merb or Nip Juice J ate twenty-six mozzarella sticks or jumped off a roof and sprained his ankle or farted really loudly?” It was like Mad Libs for uninteresting people who don’t think of new ideas.

At one point, Sam said to me, “Dude, why aren’t you laughing? It was hilarious.”

“Hearing about a secondhand fart just isn’t as funny as hearing the actual fart,” I said, like I was some ass scientist with a lab full of brown beakers. “I mean, I’m sure it would have been funny if I’d been right there next to the fart.”

Sam nodded. He had no counterargument to my airtight thesis.

We spent the day listening to bearded old men explain how the forts and moats that lost the Civil War were designed by the state’s most skilled racists. No one learned anything.

That night I unpacked my contraband in the bathroom under the cover of the noisy shower and was able to stick to my nighttime face-washing routine without anyone knowing. I stayed up pretty late in the hotel room with the other guys, listening to stories about the household objects they’d put their penises inside.

I didn’t say much. I wasn’t sure if I jerked off way too much or not enough, and it was too risky to say something weird in either direction. I felt like Goldilocks chasing that magic, perfectly normal, impossible-to-pinpoint median number of masturbation sessions per week. So I mostly sat on the bed against the wall listening.

I couldn’t figure out if their stories were actually true or if they were just trying to top each other. They were so competitive about everything, even the strangeness of the pillows and coat pockets they’d had sex with. Either way, the stories were kind of funny. Maybe I was just too tired to think straight, but I started having a good time. It felt like a sleepover from eighth grade, like how it was supposed to be.

Around three a.m., we finally turned off the lights. Will kept watching TV, but the rest of us tried to sleep. My face hurt from laughing as I drifted off.

Sam woke us up by shouting, “Shit!”

He ran to the bathroom and we asked him what happened, but he wouldn’t say anything. Patrick looked over next to him in bed, where Sam had been sleeping, and screamed. “Holy shit! Sam had a wet dream.”

I laughed harder at that quarter-size stain on the sheets than I’d ever laughed at any professional comedian, movie, or TV show. Patrick and Luke knocked on the bathroom door and asked Sam if he’d enjoyed himself. Sam said it was an incredible experience and we were all just jealous that we didn’t have one. He said the dream involved a refrigerator and I don’t know if he was kidding.

Throughout the day, while we learned nothing from old men about Native American burial mounds, Sam told all the other guys about his wet dream. He should have been mortified, but instead he got funnier every time he told the story. He’d spin this tale of his magical dream that kept getting grander and more ridiculous, like he was some traveling salesman pitching the world on his new discovery of nocturnal emissions.

I couldn’t believe how confident he was about it. He took the most embarrassing thing ever and acted like he was proud of it and no one gave him any shit. The algorithm that decides what and who is cool in tenth grade continues to make zero sense.

The hotel bathroom was calm and quiet when I washed my face that night. I turned the shower on, locked the door, and spread my products out on the counter. The other guys had each only brought a toothbrush and a shriveled, crusted-over tube of toothpaste. Actually Will hadn’t even brought those. He brushed with my toothpaste on his finger.

I lost track of time in the bathroom washing and moisturizing my face and taking my pill. There were lots of purple and pink scars around my mouth and nose, but there weren’t any big whiteheads. Definitely an improvement. I focused on the spots between the scars: patches of legitimately decent-looking skin. I smiled a little.

Luke knocked on the door. “Yo, we’re gonna meet up with Mac and Cheese and some of the other guys.”

I’d never spoken to either Mac or Cheese. They were best friends named Marissa MacDonald and Brie Castillo, but ever since we all watched the Passport to French Cuisine videotape in sixth grade, they’d been known as the singular entity Mac and Cheese. They embraced the name and normalized it so even teachers addressed these two living human beings like they were a bowl of orange noodles. The only thing I really knew about them was that in seventh grade Marissa gave Luke a gift set of Axe body spray for Christmas. I was extremely jealous when he showed it to us on the bus. Not of the gift itself, since it sort of implied he smelled like garbage. But just the idea of receiving a gift from a girl. I would have been happy to get whooping cough from Samantha Shales, the girl who went to court in fifth grade for choking her brother.

I said, through the door, “What are you gonna do?”

“Sam said he thinks Lewis brought whiskey.”

I barely even knew who Lewis was. And I didn’t feel like sitting silently in the corner of a hotel room abstaining from drinking and mumbling excuses for why I can’t have alcohol without giving away that I’m on heavy-duty acne medicine — all for the privilege of probably getting caught and then suspended.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll stay here.” I started rubbing the moisturizer, in pea-size dabs on a cotton ball, across my forehead and onto my cheeks.

“Sure?”

“Yeah. You guys can go, though. I should stay back here in case a teacher comes by or something. I’ll say we’re all in here and not open the door.”

I heard Luke walk back to the other guys and explain that I had a good point and would stay back to guard the room.

“He should come,” Patrick said. “It’s gonna be fun. Is he, like, scared or something?”

I stopped moisturizing and stood still.

“I don’t know,” said Luke.

“It’s fine,” said Will. “He just doesn’t like hanging out with other people sometimes. We’ll see him when we get back.”

They overestimated how thick those motel walls were. I could practically hear the three gross, wiry hairs on Sam’s chin crinkle when he spoke. “Is he embarrassed about his pimples?” he said. “He should just, like, wash his face with soap. That’s all you have to do. It’s not that hard.”

Luke knocked on the bathroom door on their way out. “Thanks for holding down the room. We’ll see you later.”

“Yep,” I said. “No problem.”

Once the sounds of their footsteps faded, the room was completely silent. I finished applying my moisturizer, patted my face dry, and put on a clean T-shirt. I sat on the bed and tried to calm down by focusing on the sound of my own breathing. But Sam’s words kept replaying in my head. “He should just wash his face with soap. It’s not that hard.”

What the hell did he think I was doing in the bathroom for the past twenty minutes? Should I show him the bag of pills I had to bring with me for those pimples? Should I point out the vein on my arm that gets drained every month and tell him it’s slightly more complicated than washing my face with soap? It would be pointless. He had no idea what he was talking about. Sorry we can’t all be like you, Sam. Flawless, smooth skin, carefree attitude, proud of your nocturnal emissions, for whom stress is an alien emotion. That’s the kind of mind-set that gets you killed by a bus in an intersection.

What did Luke and Will see in Sam and Patrick? Why didn’t they want to hang out in the room with me? We could have watched movies. Made prank calls. Laughed at Mac and Cheese instead of fake-laughing with them in some pointless attempt to make out with them.

Sam and Patrick were assholes. I’d made a great decision to stay back in the room.