Myles used to be a hotel. Babe Ruth would stay there when the Yankees were in town to play the Red Sox and you could actually see Fenway from my room. Rumor had it that he haunted the place, which remained a rumor until I actually saw his ghost, and I told everybody. They of course didn’t believe me, the fools. In any event, Myles was a sparsely populated dorm, relatively speaking, and what it lacked in proximity to campus it more than made up for in comfort.

We never had to know the hell that was a community bathroom down the hall. We actually had carpet on the floors and paint on the walls instead of formica tile and cinderblock. There was a bathroom in our suite, which we shared with two other guys, each of whom had single rooms while Travis and I lived in the larger, middle room. Myles was a nice place, certainly more livable and comfortable than the other freshman warehouses spread across campus, and we sacrificed meeting hundreds of people our own age that we would have forgotten about anyway by the time we graduated for relative opulence, privacy, and most importantly, windows that opened up instead of out.

I met Christopher in Myles. He lived just down the hall from Travis and me. School had just started, and I was sitting on the floor of my room, playing guitar when he walked by, looking like Jean-Paul Sartre or an incognito Nazi War Criminal in his leather blazer, thick-rimmed glasses, V-neck sweater, and combat boots. He strode past the door quickly, then backtracked three seconds later and stuck his head in.

“Whoa, that’s you’ playing?”
“That’s me playing.”
“That’s awesome, dude. I thought it was the radio. Good stuff.”

I am a terrible guitar player.

“Thanks.”
“Anyway, I’m Chris. I live down the hall.”
“Seth. Good to meet you.”
“You too, dude. Later on.”
Then he waved and was gone.

We both thought the other one was gay.