Free Goat by Brad Land

all at once. We pull into a parking lot. Find two spaces beside each other even though the place is packed. Everyone pulling things from trunks, picking them up, walking hunched toward dorms.
    We get out and Brett points to a brick building.
    That’s the back of our dorm, he says.
    It’s three stories. Brett tells me these things: our dorm is part of six buildings, three on each side of a courtyard. We’re going to live on opposite sides of the same dorm. The first two floors and some of the third are all fraternity kids. Phi Delts on one side, Kappa Sigmas on the other. The third floor is a mix of fraternity kids and whatever other guys get dropped there. Fraternity dorms are all guys and sorority dorms are all girls. He’s on the first floor on the Kappa Sigma side, I’m on the third floor on the Phi Delt side.
    I nod. Kids moving up the stairs carrying clothes, televisions, stereos, mini-refrigerators.
    We’ll get our shit later, Brett says. Too many fucking people right now.
    I can’t stop smoking. Neither can Brett. He starts walking toward the dorm, Daniel Hall, and I follow him.
       
    IT’S MONDAY, THE day before classes start, and I’m in my dorm room. My room has tall wardrobes on both sides of the door. A window on the far wall. My bed on the left side. My roommate’s on the right. If I stand between our beds I could touch both if my arms were cut off at the elbow. My roommate has this loft thing that he made. It’s like a bunk bed without the bed underneath. Instead there’s a small futon and our twelve-inch television, a mini-refrigerator and a stereo. On each side of the window is a desk. Bookshelves on both walls, but no posters. My roommate’s this kid Greg I know from home, not someone I know really well, just someone who needed a roommate like I did.
    I had to have a major so I chose Studio Art. Photography, painting, drawing, all that. I’m a junior. Brett’s a sophomore and he hasn’t decided what his major is.
    But there, sitting in my room, I start thinking about being an art major, and how much all the supplies cost and how I don’t have that much money and I don’t know where an art supply store is so I decide art’s not for me. I also figure art’s not for me because I’m sticking with my idea about pledging Brett’s fraternity and I know it’ll take up a lot of time and all the art classes are three hours long two times a week and I’ve got two of those plus two other classes. Brett and I talked about me pledging Kappa Sig and he says he wants me to if it’s what I really want. I tell him yeah it’s what I want. Fraternity rush starts on a Sunday, in less than a week.
       
    I GO TO the bookstore after I decide not to be an art major and decide to be an English major because the books you get to read look cool.
    I have a friend from back home who lives one floor down from me in Daniel and he’s in Phi Delt and after I leave the bookstore I go back to his room and on his computer I drop all my art classes and sign up for English classes, one American Lit and one British Lit, and that’s all I have to do to change my major. I have to take three other classes. Geology, Statistics, Religion.
    I go back to the bookstore and buy the books and put the receipt in my right pocket.
       
    CLASSES GO WELL the first week and I like the English classes and the Religion class but not the other ones so much. I go home on Friday because I know it’s my last chance before all the fraternity shit. I’ve got to leave early Sunday morning because the first rush events start Sunday afternoon.
    At home I sleep like the dead. I wake on Saturday and I have to get some new glasses because mine are bent from sleeping with them on. I get these small black-rimmed glasses. Keep the receipt.
    After I get the glasses I’m at a stoplight. And then there’s a face against my window, a fist tapping the glass, and I know I shouldn’t roll down the window but I do it anyway, this guy says a ride,