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worried about the academic side of things—I’d already preordered my textbooks, and none of them looked challenging.
    But socially?
    I reassured myself from time to time that it couldn’t be that hard to acclimate. If I didn’t fit in and make any friends to begin with, I would treat it like a scientific experiment. I would observe behavior, see what worked with kids who had lots of friends and what didn’t, and then adapt accordingly. It couldn’t be that hard. I was very smart—but I had to be careful not to seem too smart. I had started doing research online—leading social workers’ and therapists’ studies on group dynamics, power structures, and so forth, in my peer group. Some of the behaviors they deconstructed seemed a bit far-fetched to me. There was one in particular that I thought was kind of a stretch. A clinical psychologist named Dr. Mark Drake had done a study of a group of male college students who had, at the instigation of a “group leader,” behaved in some pretty horrible ways—drinking, date and gang rapes, and so on. Dr. Drake had concluded that the need for the group leader’s approval had convinced the weaker members of the group to do things they ordinarily, under normal circumstances, would never have done.
    It seemed incredibly stupid to me, and weak was not a strong enough word to describe the followers who had allowed one person to have so much power over them—and could be so easily influenced into doing things they knew were wrong. I found it incredibly hard to believe, and I finally decided that Dr. Drake’s conclusions had to have been faulty.
    Psychology, after all, was hardly an exact science.
    And even if Dr. Drake’s conclusions were accurate, this activity had occurred at a small, elite college in the Northeast where all the students came from privilege; it surely wasn’t much of a reach to conclude that this conduct had been the result of ennui.
    Surely the students at CSUP wouldn’t be like that. From all the research I’d done on the school, the majority of the student body came from the middle class. And I found it hard to believe that kids from a middle-class background would act as poorly as spoiled kids whose parents gave them everything on a silver platter. Some of the students at St. Bernard had fallen into that same category—and I’d avoided them at all costs.
    But I was also incredibly excited. I had my own apartment—my own place —for the first time in my life, and I was starting a new adventure, a whole new beginning. I was going to be me for the first time. At St. Bernard, everyone knew who my dad was—we all knew who we all were—but I didn’t want to be known as Terry Valentine’s son. I wanted to be just Jordy Valentine, another student among the seventeen thousand or so at CSU-Polk. I wanted people to like me for me.
    And there was another reason I hadn’t shared with my parents.
    It wasn’t like they’d care one way or the other that I was gay. Of course they would be supportive—they always were. But while I knew at some point I would have to have a conversation with them about it, the whole thought of talking to my parents about my sex life made me squirm. I was a virgin, and I wanted to get that out of the way before I went to Harvard. I’d watched a lot of pornography I’d found on the Internet, and I couldn’t wait to give it a try. Maybe, if I was really lucky, I’d fall in love.
    Mom and Dad were not homophobic. Dad’s assistant Lars was gay—and I knew Dad had written a check for several hundred thousand dollars to fight the passage of that horrible Proposition 8 ballot initiative he said was an insult to the U.S. Constitution. But knowing I was gay would just make them worry even more than they already were. The San Joaquin Valley was pretty conservative, and so was Polk. But the university had a reputation