When they were eighteen and Sarah had given up on her piano soloist dreams and had gone to study music and English at Wellesley, Sam decided, in the way of thousands of young men before him, to head west. He’d enrolled at UC Berkeley, where he’d found, without his sister, that he’d felt unsurprisingly adrift.
It didn’t help that he kept getting dumped. Most of Sam’s friends had gone through breakups where they’d been the ones to call it off, or where the end had been mutual. Sam, in spite of his best efforts, in spite of the romantic gestures that he made, in spite of being considerate and thoughtful, and always remembering birthdays and anniversaries, was never the dump-er, always the dump-ee. Somewhere between the three-and six-month mark, when the first glow of infatuation was waning, first Tory, then Rebecca, then Celia had decided that she needed to be free. Tory, his senior-year-of-high-school girlfriend, had gotten interested in another guy （a college guy, and what could Sam do about that?）。 But Rebecca had just shrugged when Sam asked her why she didn’t want to be with him, looking as sad and as puzzled as Sam had felt. “I don’t know,” she’d said. “There’s just something missing. Something that isn’t there. I can’t say it better than that.”
Celia had been more explicit. “I ask you what we should do on the weekend and you say ‘Whatever you want.’ I ask where you want to go to dinner, and you tell me I can pick. And then, when we get there, you don’t even order for yourself! You just make me pick two things I want, and you order the one I don’t get!”
Sam was bewildered. “Isn’t that a good thing? That way, you get two things you like.”
Celia had given an exasperated sigh. “I want a guy who respects my opinions, sure, but I want him to have a few opinions of his own.”
After a twenty-minute debriefing with his twin （“I never liked her anyhow,” Sarah told him. “She had weird teeth”）， Sam sought the solace of his fraternity brother Marcus—more specifically, the solace of Marcus’s bong. Marcus lived on the fraternity’s third floor, in a room so cluttered with clothing and notebooks and classwork and pizza boxes and care packages from his well-meaning mom that it was impossible to see the floor. Sam had to carefully plot a course by identifying stable surfaces on which he could step. Gingerly, he made his way from a geology textbook to a pair of gym shorts to an open graphing notebook before finally reaching safe harbor on the bed. In spite of his slovenly habits and a room that looked like an ongoing audition for Hoarders, Marcus managed to attract an astonishing variety of women with what looked, to Sam, like an almost magical ease.
“You want to know the truth about women?” Marcus asked as he applied his lighter to the bottom of the bong. “They call themselves feminists. They think they want to be in charge. But do you know what they really want?”
“No,” Sam said. “Clearly, I do not.”
With his free hand, Marcus thumped his chest and gave a Tarzan-like yodel. “They want a caveman.”
Sam frowned. His father was not a caveman, and his dad had been married to his mom—happily, as far as Sam knew—for almost twenty-three years. Sarah, his sister, did not seem drawn to chest-thumpers.
“They might not say that’s what they want,” Marcus clarified. He hit the bong, held his breath, and let it out in a series of coughs that made the air even thicker with resinous smoke. “They might not even really know that’s what they want. But women like decisiveness. Strength.”
“So, they want to be bossed around?” This was sounding disturbingly like some of what Sam had read in the men’s-rights subreddits, where every man was owed sex and where women were targets, or Bettys, or bitches, or worse.
“Some women like that, I guess,” Marcus said. He scratched at the scruff on his cheeks. “But most of them just want someone who knows what he likes, and knows what he wants, and knows that he wants her. And a woman wants to feel like you went out there and fought to get her.”
Sam must have looked confused, because Marcus got up, dislodging several textbooks, an iPod, and half a basket of laundry, and crossed the room to pat Sam’s shoulder. “Just watch me tonight.”
A few hours later, Sam and Marcus stood in the fraternity’s living room, each holding a beer. Sam had shaved and changed his shirt. Marcus had done neither of those things. The scent of pot still clung to his clothing; his eyes were red-rimmed, but still sharp as he scanned the crowd.