Disclaimer: RENT is Jonathan Larson's.

The loft was four walls and more sets of three making rooms off the sides. Some rooms had doors. One had a doorway, bare, splitting wood betraying the spaces hinges once took. Across the loft, a blanket fell six inches shy of the floor. It looked cold, somehow, completely devoid of insulation and so dim every splash of color leapt from the walls with an air of need to do one's duty.

I set down my bag. The reliable green canvas of the duffel was just bright enough to be out of place. "We're going to live here?" I asked Benny. Already my hair was sticking to my head, plastered thick with sweat. I cared. It was a slightly stylish upgrade on the pudding bowl cut and it looked God-awful on me, but I didn't think that at the time. I thought it looked quite attractive, actually.

Benny slapped me on the shoulder so hard I jumped. "Yup," he said brightly. He gave a cheerful sigh. "We get to share that bedroom." He pointed to the one without a door.

"Yeah. Sorry about that."

When Benny said he'd made arrangements to move in with a guest lecturer from Brown, I thought he meant a semester's professor. I thought he meant one of those whose office hours he haunted like a guilty man at church. The last thing I expected was someone I couldn't begin to recognize.

He had helped us haul our mattresses up the stairs, something he did not have to do. I liked him for that, at least began to, but I still could not say a word to him. Who was this person? Was I supposed to remember him? Because, and I could say this for absolute certain, I didn't.

Now I turned to him, clapped my hands and said, "Oh! Now I remember you!" He had quite literally been a guest lecturer, giving lectures for a Monday and a Tuesday, then he was gone. I remembered him, not by his name or looks but by what he said.

That I remembered his words over the fact that he was at least six foot two and had showed up to teach in jeans and a flannel shirt spoke to his brilliance.

Collins chuckled in the way that always made me wonder what he was thinking. There was something approving in that chuckle. I needed it. I needed someone to tell me I was going right. Even in college we had our grades. What did we—I have now? We would measure our lives by money, by dates, by how many days it had been since we called home. We could measure in conscience, whether or not we were allowed to sleep at night.

But it was nice, for that moment, to have someone indicate that I was keeping a good track.

"Anyway, we can rig up a blanket or something for a doorway," Collins said, and Benny and I nodded. We never did rig up that blanket, but within a few months it wouldn't matter. Any blankets we had went to keeping us warm—or at least, less cold.

"That's my bedroom," Collins continued, pointing, "and there's the bathroom. Kitchen. It's pretty self-explanatory."

It wasn't a nice place, but comfortable enough. Collins knew that. He knew it was a bit of a dump and a bit of a mess. But he didn't apologize for that. Collins knew what his place was. It was also his home, and it would be mine. Somehow he knew that. He introduced us to the loft and let us make our own judgments.

It was Benny who pointed to the blanketed doorway to our left, when I was too polite or chicken, and asked, "What's through there?"

It's best he did. Otherwise I would have had nightmares about what terrors Collins kept hidden behind that blanket. I would have imagined things completely out of character, things completely out of reality. Behind that blanket was a fire-breathing dragon that fed on human flesh. It particularly savored the ripe, young flesh of recent college graduates, especially naive boys.

(In my fear, the sexual connotation of the simulation was completely lost.)

But Collins said nothing like that. He just said, "That's Roger's room. He went out but he'll be home later." And in my mind, the fire-breathing, flesh-eating dragon was named Roger.

--

I took "he'll be home later" to mean I would meet Roger later, but by eleven o'clock he hadn't come home and my eyelids were beginning to feel swollen. I carried my pajamas and toothbrush into the bathroom, changed and brushed. I hesitated, looking at my blue plastic toothbrush against the white of the sink, then picked it up and carried it to my room, where I stowed it in my bag along with my wadded-up day clothes.

I poked my head into the main room of the loft. "Hey, Benny, you coming?"

Benny sat at the table with Collins, both drinking cheap beers. They paused and looked at me. "Uh..." Benny glanced back at Collins, then at me. And I felt, suddenly, like a ten-year-old, lost and pathetic and needy. "Yeah, in just a few minutes."

I knew and he knew and Collins knew that it was a lie.

I nodded. "Okay." And I went and laid down on my mattress. I pulled covers up to my head and listened to Collins ask Benny, "Is there anything with you two?"

"Ah, no," Benny said, pausing at the question like such a prospect had never entered his head. It had never entered mine either, but I hated the feeling. Already Benny was forgetting me, and even under the quilt brought from home I felt cold. "We're just friends."

"Maybe you should go," Collins suggested, and I felt a sudden affection towards him.

But Benny only said, "In a minute. Mark's okay on his own." He said it so quickly, I knew he didn't care. Maybe he even knew I wasn't and didn't care.

On my first night in New York I listened to Benny and Collins talk. I squeezed my eyes shut, because the truth is that I couldn't stop crying. I wanted Benny here to whisper with me in the darkness. I wanted to be home in my own bed. I wanted to be with my family. I wanted to not be alone, and I wanted to not be someone's tag-along. The only friend I had in the entire city had cast me off. Millions of people, and I could not dream of approaching a single one.

I did hear Roger come home that night. I was almost asleep and miserable enough that my stomach hurt when a new voice joined Collins and Benny. He was short blurbs of sound, and then he came over and knocked on the doorway to my room. My room and Benny's. "Mark?" he asked quietly. I said nothing. "Mark... You asleep? Okay, man. I'm Roger. Welcome to the loft. I'll tell you tomorrow."

And then I fell in love with him.

At first, it was stupid. It was a crush. It was a little boy. And it was a rockstar.

The first time I saw Roger on stage, I didn't know him. It's hard to know the guy who doesn't speak to you over his Lucky Charms. He wasn't rude, exactly; if I spoke he did. He said good morning. Well, he grunted it, but without malice. He just wasn't awake enough for conversation at ten or eleven o'clock in the morning.

I chose to believe that if I had been upset, he would have been sympathetic. But until the night I went to his show, Roger was a cute smile and sparkling eyes, neither meant for me. He would grin over my head and nod at something Collins said and my heart would twist happily.

And then he wasn't just a nice face. He was the pulse in my groin. He was the stains on my sheets. He was a steady light in a dingy room, screaming bright into the microphone and blond hair showing through the undone top button of his spotty Hawaiian-style shirt. I didn't even want to go to the concert. I only went because I had to get out of the loft. I barely went anywhere, and I hated it, and then I found God in a stage beauty.

It wasn't a nice club. It wasn't a pleasant place to be. If Roger had not, in a strange display of affection, invited me to see his band play (told Collins he could come "pick up some fanboys" if he liked, gotten a one-finger salute in response, then turned to me and asked if I wanted to come), I would have left. It reeked of cheap, cheap alcohol and old urine—not wholly different essences. The overcrowding would have concerned any fire marshal who cared or knew the term "triangle shirtwaist". It was badly lit and IDs barely given a cursory glance, seedier than a garden in April.

And then he took the stage. He didn't step onto it. He took it. When Roger emerged to the forefront his band disappeared. Their existence hinged on his musical needs, and through a system of crackling, beer-soaked acoustics, Roger's voice filled the club and osmosed through my skin, and my blood carried it into my heart where it settled, comfortably paving an until-then-gaping hole.

The writhing chorus of bodies longed to take Roger home. Hundreds of minds remembered him with their fingers and hands and shower heads. Everyone wanted him, but after the show I was the one whose opinion he asked.

I was the one who took him home.

--

"Don't, Mark."

I glanced up. "Huh?" Roger had just gone out. He had a… fantastic behind. Fairly flat. The gentlest curves. I always stared at the doorway he went through, my mind lost in thought about his rear.

Collins shook his head. "Roger… isn't…" He shook his head again. Collins sat down on the couch with me like we were friends. Later, we would be, but at that point he was still the guest professor. I never could speak to professors. I could only listen to them. "Roger doesn't swing that way," he said conversationally.

I scoffed. "I'm not…"

"Yes, you are." The way Collins said it, it wasn't offensive. It also wasn't up for debate. He had given me the chance to take word willingly. Now he was going to insist. "Listen…" He said, "Roger found out I curved, he wouldn't even be in the room with me for over a week. And he didn't do it like he was angry, he was terrified. Leave him alone, okay?"

I frowned. I wouldn't have hurt him! I was attracted to him, that was all, and it was perfectly normal! "I just like him. I won't hurt him," I protested. What did Collins take me for? Couldn't he see that I was a nervous kid fresh out of college, not some sexual predator? For God's sake, I was a virgin!

(Yes, with men and women.)

Collins nodded. "You seem like a good kid, Mark." I all but glowed under his praise, slight and qualified though it was. Then he shook his head and said, "I'm asking you to do me the favor of not hitting on Roger. At least get to know him, if you must. Give it time until you're sure it's worth getting your heart broken over."

I had no grounds to object. Collins actually seemed to care quite genuinely, and to my surprise about me as well as Roger. Maybe my skin longed for Roger's touch, maybe my pelvic area long for his, but my stunted heart wanted more desperately for Collins' approval.

to be continued!

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