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“Push off me.”
    I force my feet off his palms. My chest scrapes hard against the concrete, and one thigh glances the pipe where the insulation is gone. Reflex jerks it away just as I feel the lancing-hot pain.
    “You okay?” Charlie asks, when I shimmy through to the other side.
    “Turn the latch clockwise,” Gil says.
    When I do, the security gate unlocks. Gil pushes it open, and Charlie follows, still supporting Paul.
    “You sure about this?” Charlie asks, when we advance into the darkness.
    I nod. A few steps on, we arrive at a crude
R
painted on a wall. We’re approaching Rockefeller, one of the residential colleges. As a freshman, I dated a girl named Lana McKnight who lived there. We spent much of that winter sitting by a lazy fire in her dorm room, back before the flues on campus were shut for good. The things we discussed seem so distant now: Mary Shelley and college Gothic and the Buckeyes. Her mother had taught at Ohio State, like my father. Lana’s breasts were shaped like eggplants and her ears were the color of rose petals when we stayed too long by the fire.
    Soon I can hear voices coming from overhead. Many of them.
    “What’s going on?” Gil asks as he draws near the source.
    The manhole cover is just over his shoulder.
    “That’s it,” I say, coughing. “Our way out.”
    He looks at me, trying to understand.
    In the silence I can hear the voices more clearly—rowdy ones; students, not proctors. Dozens of them, moving around our heads.
    Charlie begins to smile. “The Nude Olympics,” he says.
    It dawns on Gil. “We’re right under them.”
    “There’s a manhole in the middle of the courtyard,” I remind them, leaning on the stone wall, trying to catch my breath. “All we have to do is pop the lid, join the pack, and disappear.”
    But from behind me, Paul speaks up in a hoarse voice. “All we have to do is
undress,
join the pack, and disappear.”
    For a moment there’s silence. It’s Charlie who starts to unbutton his shirt first.
    “Get me
out
of here,” he says, choking out a laugh as he pulls it off.
    I yank off my jeans; Gil and Paul follow. We begin stuffing our clothes into one of the packs until it’s bulging at the seams.
    “Can you carry all that?” Charlie asks, offering to take both packs again.
    I hesitate. “You know there’ll be proctors out there, right?”
    But by now Gil is beyond doubt. He begins to climb the rungs.
    “Three hundred naked sophomores, Tom. If you can’t make it home with that kind of diversion, you
deserve
to be caught.”
    And with that, he forces open the cover, letting a gust of freezing air cascade into the tunnel. It rejuvenates Paul like a balm.
    “Okay, boys,” Gil calls down, looking back one more time. “Let’s get this meat to market.”
     
    My first memory of leaving that tunnel is how bright it suddenly became. Overhead lamps lit the courtyard. Security lights fanned the white earth. Camera flashes pulsed across the sky like fireflies.
    Then comes the rush of cold: the howl of the wind, even louder than the feet stomping and the voices roaring. Flakes melt on my skin like dewdrops.
    Finally I see it. A wall of arms and legs, spinning around us like an endless snake. Faces pop in and out of view—classmates, football players, women who caught my eye crossing campus—but they fade into the abstraction like clips in a collage. Here and there I see strange outfits—top hats and superhero capes, artwork painted across chests of every description—but it all recedes into the great, rolling animal, the Chinatown dragon, moving to hoots and shouts and flashbulb firecrackers.
    “Come on!” Gil shouts.
    Paul and I follow, mesmerized. I’ve forgotten what Holder is like on the night of the first snowfall.
    The great conga line swallows us and for a second I’m lost even to myself, pressed tight against bodies in all directions, trying to keep my balance with a pack on my shoulders and snow underfoot. Someone pushes me from