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first.”
    “Well, thanks for coming by.”
    “Be safe,” he said.
    “Okay. Good luck with your meeting.”
    He looked at me as if he were about to say something, then instead he turned away and walked to his car. I waved to him as he drove away. Then I went back inside to get my luggage. We had a plane to catch.

CHAPTER
Ten
    Someone should invent a pill for guilt.
They’d make billions
.
    Luke Crisp’s Diary

    In June the Wharton 7 fell to 6 when Suzie dropped out of school to work for her father’s trucking company. Around that same time I gave in to Sean’s repeated request to move off campus into Chez Sean. Candace was against the idea from the beginning.
    “You’re really going to room with Sean?” she asked.
    “I take it you disapprove.”
    “Sean’s like radiation—okay only in small doses.”
    “You’re afraid I’ll start losing my hair?”
    “Your hair I can handle. It’s your soul I worry about.”
    “My soul,” I laughed.
    “You hang around Sean long enough and he’s bound to rub off on you.”
    “You’re making too much of this,” I said. “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
    She folded her arms. “You could become like Sean.”
    “It’s only a year,” I said. “How much could I change in a year?”
    “I don’t want to find out,” she replied.

    In spite of Candace’s disapproval, two weeks later I moved into Chez Sean. Living with Sean was a window to a whole new paradigm. Sean was naturally intelligent, maybe even a genius, but fundamentally lazy—a dangerous combination. He got good grades without ever studying. He was not ashamed of being lazy, rather, he wore it as a badge of honor, proclaiming himself ethically superior to the “poor working saps who sold their heartbeats to the devil of the marketplace.” On his refrigerator door was a sign which read,
    Life was meant to be lived—
not feared, sold, nor sweated.
Fear not death. Fear the unlived life
.
    The night I moved in, he raised a toast. “Let the masses cling to their sorry lives of quiet desperation. Let them rust in obscurity—we, my friend, shall be found among the living.”
    Over the next year I learned what he meant by “living.”

    When I was twelve years old, my father told me a story about boiling a frog. “If you throw a frog into boiling water,” he said, “It will jump out. But if you put the frog in a pot of warm water and slowly turn up the heat, it won’t notice the change and the frog will eventually boil to death.”
    I think that Sean understood this principle instinctively. He was the flame and I was his frog. The changes in my lifecame gradually, beginning with an occasional, casual invitation to a party here and there. Looking back, I’m certain that Sean purposely didn’t invite me to the wilder ones, knowing I would be uncomfortable and might avoid his future invitations. But it seemed that each party I went to got a little wilder. So did I.
    Sean, as a matter of personal philosophy, tried everything that came his way and, in the lofty name of freedom, urged me to do likewise. Most of the time I didn’t. Most of the time I ignored his temptations. Most of the time. But not always.
    My first fail was drinking too much. Both my father and I drank, occasionally, but never to excess. That changed. Sean drank a lot at home and I eventually began joining him. Only a little at first, then more and more. Everyone drank heavily at parties he took me to and soon I did too. For the first time in my life, I woke in a strange house with no idea of how I had got there.
    One boring Tuesday night Sean and I got hammered in Chez Sean. There was no reason in particular—we just didn’t stop drinking. I had a class the next morning with Candace, and I walked in late with my head throbbing, desperately wishing that someone would dim the lights.
    As I sat down, Candace said, “You smell like a liquor cabinet.”
    “I took a shower,” I said.
    “It’s like coming from your skin.