“Pick a girl,” Marcus said.
Sam considered his choices, finally nodding at a girl with a dark-brown ponytail and glasses in a denim dress and sneakers.
“Target acquired,” Marcus murmured, and headed out to the dance floor with Sam a few steps behind him. “Hey there,” he said with a smile when he reached the girl. “Those are great glasses.”
The girl touched the frames, looking puzzled and—Sam could see it already—charmed. “Thank you.”
“I think I might need glasses,” Marcus said.
“You should get your eyes checked,” the girl replied.
“If I do that, will you help me pick out a pair? Like, where’d you get those?”
The girl told him the name of the store. Then she told Marcus the name of her ophthalmologist, and how long she’d been wearing glasses, and how it felt when she got her first pair and discovered that the green blur above every tree trunk was comprised of individual leaves. Marcus listened attentively, touching the girl’s arm, then her shoulder, finally playfully tweaking her ponytail. A few minutes later, they were on the dance floor, the girl’s arms draped over Marcus’s shoulders and her glasses perched on his face.
Sam attempted to put Marcus’s lessons into action when he spotted Gracie Chen Cohen around the campus. Gracie had a notched eyebrow and a pierced belly button and a tattoo of a koi fish, brilliantly orange and green and gold, spiraling down the length of her left hip and thigh. Sam had noticed the tattoo when he’d seen Gracie striding through the quad in a pair of cutoff denim shorts. Remembering Marcus, Sam had approached her the next time he saw her. “Hey,” he’d said, “that’s a great tattoo.”
“Isn’t it?” Gracie had said with a grin.
“I’m thinking about getting a tattoo,” Sam lied. “I don’t have any yet.”
“Oh, yeah?” She didn’t seem too interested, but Sam was undeterred.
“Where’s the best place for a tattoo virgin?” When Gracie told him, Sam asked, “If I decide to do it, can you come help me pick one out?”
She’d agreed. （“Toldja so,” said Marcus when Sam gave him the news.） That weekend, Sam had gotten a tiny infinity symbol inked on the inside of the second toe of his right foot, and a date for Friday night. He and Gracie had been a couple for six ecstatically happy months. Gracie had been the most sexually confident woman he’d ever been with. She had a vibrator, insisted on equal-opportunity orgasms, and was happy to show Sam how to help her have them. Sam and Gracie had sex in a bar’s bathroom. In her off-campus apartment, he’d gone down on her until she’d almost writhed off the bed in delight, and then she’d hopped back onto it to return the favor. Sam was blissfully content, and imagined that Gracie was, too. But then, precisely at the six-month mark, Gracie had dumped him. She’d done it kindly, she’d sworn it wasn’t him, it was her; she’d told him that his person was out there, but that she wasn’t it. Two weeks later, she’d started dating a woman named Elise.
“So you’re gay?” Sam asked when he’d gotten Gracie to agree to meet him for coffee. “You like women now?” It was, he thought glumly, the logical next step in the progression. First women would stop liking him, then they’d stop liking men completely.
“I don’t know about women,” she said, and smiled a dreamy smile. “But I definitely like Elise.”
Sam glared at her. Gracie’s smile disappeared. “Sorry,” she murmured.
“So you’re bi?”
“I’m Gracie,” she replied with a shrug. “Just Gracie. And I know who I am.” She put one of her small, capable hands on top of Sam’s. “Do you?”
“Of course.”
She kept looking at him, her gaze unyielding. “Yeah, but do you really?”
“Yes!” he’d said, his voice rising. “Yes, I do!”
Gracie had followed him home to pick up the last of her things. Not five minutes after she’d collected her toiletries from Sam’s bathroom and retrieved her vibrator from under his bed, the phone rang. Sam knew immediately who was calling.
“Hey.”
“What happened?” Sarah couldn’t always tell when something had gone wrong for him. Sam didn’t always know when something was upsetting Sarah. But, more than half the time, he would feel something—a pain behind his eyes, a twinge in his side. Usually, Sarah could feel his tug at the other end of the rope that would always connect them.