Free Please Don't Come Back from the Moon by Dean Bakopoulos

you'll
always
be outnumbered. Chances are, deep down these college guys will have as much meanness and anger in their hearts as you do.
    More rules, Nick says:
    Only go into parties with strobe lights, dark dance floors, loud music. Nobody will notice a stranger at these parties, and people are usually drunker and more open to widening their social circles.
    Split up. Don't show up all together, like some dork field trip from Maple Rock. Two to a party, that's the ideal for scoring chicks, but if you can only find one good open-door party, stagger your arrivals. Every twenty minutes, send two more inside.
    Get a beer. Have something in your hand when conversation lags. When a woman asks you something you don't know how to answer, you can take a long drag off the bottle while you figure out something to say.
    Avoid the obvious. If you go for the girl in the tight black dress, the stylishly cropped blond hair, and the unabashedly hard nipples, the college boys will watch you like a hawk all night. Even if she comes on to you, blow her off. People get protective of these women.
    Learn to dance. Guys who go to college in places like Ann Arbor hate to dance, they cannot do it. The trick is simple: have confidence. Find a few moves you can do. Be funny and loose. Act like you don't give a shit, which you don't. You get a girl on the dance floor, moving a few inches from you, getting a shiny gloss of sweat on her neck, you're doing well. Make the girl laugh, and you're home free.
    Above all, remember this: these girls in Ann Arbor know what they want. The ones that want it, want it just as bad as you. They'll get you more than you'll get them. You want a piece of ass, and sometimes so do they. The girls at the Black Lantern in Maple Rock make you think that you're the only human being on earth who wants nothing more than cheap sex. But you're not.
    The girls in Ann Arbor won't do this to you. They also smell better than the women in Maple Rock. They wear scents like Grass or Clouds or Tranquility. They won't choke you with flower smells. Girls in Ann Arbor smell like wind and fire. Their tongues taste like earth and salt.
    Do not, do fucking not, Nick says, under any circumstances, fall in love with a woman in Ann Arbor. Do not wake up in their sunny apartments the next morning, in their messy rooms full of books and black-and-white photography, in their warm narrow beds that smell of beer and salt and sweat, and say that you're in love. You're not in love. You're an outsider. You don't belong in love with this woman. Leave before she wakes up, even if you feel like you're making the biggest mistake of your life. She won't miss you.
    "I should have known you'd turn this into something poetic and meaningful," Nick says. "But it's not, Mikey. Trust me, it's not."

6. The Boy with the Backward Chakra

    T WO WEEKS INTO MY JOB , a little kid named Manny Holloway died on my watch. He was an asthmatic. I was sitting on the lifeguard stand, scanning the pool. It was ninety-five degrees and the pool was packed. We had three lifeguards out there. I was a little hungover, I guess. I'd stayed out too late the night before. I was dreamy. It happens up there on the guard stand, in the heat, the sun, the water gleaming, the sound of kids and the nearly naked bodies of women all around you. You think about things. I can't remember what had my attention at that moment, but all of a sudden, some woman was screaming. I looked over, and there was this pale little kid with white-blond hair and a purple face slumped over the side of the pool. He was wearing one orange water wing. People crowded around yelling, even though a tall, bald man was shouting, "Stand back! Don't panic! Give him air, give him air!"
    I had my mom's car that day, so I drove over to the hospital after I talked to the cops and everybody else. It had been a few hours by then, but the boy's mother was still there. She was a young woman, not much older than me, I thought. Later I found