Free Marine Park: Stories by Mark Chiusano Page B

I did end up getting a copy of the key, for the nights when Hayden went off with a girl, although those were very rare: because when I was there, he said that it was more important that we spend time together, and catch up; girls would be around forever.
    Hayden had taken a class last semester that he said had changed his life. He had started out majoring in business, like his father wanted. His dad studied econ and law in Tel Aviv and was a real estate broker here. But the class, called “Peace, Social Change, and a New Way of Viewing Human Interrelations,” made Hayden switch to sociology. You’d think those would have been difficult, stressful times for him, full of calls home and imploring his mother for support, but Hayden rarely called home, and actually didn’t know too much about how his parents were doing—just like they didn’t see much of him besides the semester’s bill, which they immediately sent up to Hayden. Even I asked if it would be tough to graduate on time with requirements, and he said, Please. It’s Brandeis.
    â€œPeace, Social Change, Etc.” was a class taught by an elderly Iranian man named Yahya, who had converted to Judaism twenty-five years ago. He was one of a whole new host of Brandeis professors who were beginning to wear jackets without ties, and in the winter, under his blazer, a blue turtleneck that had sweat stains seeping from under the arms. You had to write multiple essays to get into the class, and it was only the most talented and dedicated who did—everyone wanted a spot because every other week they went on peace retreats to one of Yahya’s numerous friends’ cabins, in the Berkshires, or on the North Shore, or near Walden Pond. There, they cooked meals for each other, drank pinot grigio with Yahya, and practiced looking into each other’s eyes when they conversed, while they listed one thing they appreciated about each and every member of the class. Yahya wouldn’t smoke with them, but he said that it wasn’t for him to set rules for them to go by, and when, on the first day of class, they put smoking pot into the legal section of their new social constitution, he said that this would be a good experiment in learning each other’s boundaries.
    This was after their trip to the Berkshires, and I was staying until Monday. Hayden was sitting at his desk, mixing songs on GarageBand, and I was lying on the mattress, trying to decide why it somehow worked that Hayden left all the walls blank in his room. Above his desk he had a quote—“We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living”—but that was it, with his computer and the wires of his speakers in a corner. It was barely ten when three of his friends came over, bringing with them their leftover dinner, which we ate on the floor, the new people sitting on the mattress and Hayden in his chair. He offered them a beer but passed on one himself. He had told me that he was beginning to feel that he had a small drinking problem and had made me promise that I wouldn’t let him black out that night. He had a habit of doing so, back home when we’d go to bars in the East Village.
    One of the girls got a text on her phone to say there was something going on in Gordon, which was a fifteen-minute walk away and just outside the main entrance to campus. There was a semi-famous DJ playing there who had been making the rounds of New England colleges. The walk was frigid, and when we arrived we found only six guys from the tennis team drinking pink champagne out of a bottle. They were sitting in a circle and passing the bottle to one another. Hayden seemed to know a few of them, and I was introduced, and we let the bottle go around maybe once or twice before it was empty. The tennis players were reminiscing about stories from their preseason camp, and Hayden was listening politely and asking clarifying questions here and there. For a while we