The all-campus party wasn't to start for another hour or so, but half a dozen or so of Robbie's floormates were already congregating in the hallway when he emerged from his room.
"Hey Robbie, what are you going as?" called out Sam, who was dressed in black leather pants and a vest with nothing underneath.
"A jaded senior," Robbie quipped with a quick look down at his jeans and beat up sweatshirt from a faraway state university. He'd never bothered dressing up for the previous three Halloween parties and, with two papers coming up next week, he didn't even plan to go this time.
But his joke brought on a round of laughs, and Spiderman handed him a beer. "No time for studying, man," came Martin's voice from behind the mask.
"Guys, Robbie doesn't like dressing up," said Clara, his freshman-year crush, who was sporting a homemade angel costume. Robbie could see in her eyes that she was hoping he wouldn't take the beer; his drinking was one reason why they had never happened as a couple.
A touch out of spite for her, but mostly because he couldn't face another round with his econ text, Robbie took the beer. "Thanks, Spidey," he said. "She's right, though, I haven't bothered with a costume since I don't even know when."
"Where's your school spirit, man?" Sam asked.
Robbie hadn't noticed Sandra, their resident freshman know-it-all and his current crush despite that, was even there until she spoke up. "Sam, 'school spirit' is a patriarchal and racist construct..."
As usual, she was drowned out in a chorus of groans. "Racist, really?" asked Patty, one of two Black students on their floor and the only one present at the moment.
"Well, a case could be made, given how most public schools got their lines drawn," Robbie allowed with a conciliatory smile at Sandra, who was looking as cute as ever although she was also not in costume; he'd found himself looking that way at her a lot lately. She did not, though, look the least bit impressed with his partial agreement. Robbie nodded at her with what he hoped was a tender look in his eyes anyway.
"Guys, not tonight!" Martin said. "Don't make my Spidey senses tingle with political bullshit!"
As the conversation turned back into waters less treacherous, Patty sidled up beside Robbie. "I agree with you," she said quietly. "It's just, doesn't she think we've got bigger problems than that?"
"Thanks," Robbie said. "Nice dress, by the way," he added; Patty was dressed as a flamenco dancer.
"Oh, thanks!" Patty said. "Listen, are you sure you don't want to --"
Her voice broke off as a collective shriek went up. "Cameron!" yelped two or three of Robbie's friends in unison.
Robbie whipped around to see his fellow senior, Cameron, wearing nothing but a strategically placed slice of pizza. "Cheapest costume I ever had," he said with the goofy grin that was rarely off his face.
"Oh my God, Cameron, you've inspired me!" proclaimed Tammy, the hall social coordinator. She reached under her toga and pulled her panties off. "I'm going commando now!"
Robbie instinctively looked away and caught Clara's eye. She was red in the face and grinning in disbelief, and he enjoyed a beautiful flashback to their chats about sex freshman year. He'd been a virgin then, and he happened to know Clara still was. He felt like shielding her eyes. But Clara proved more than capable of averting her gaze diplomatically once the shock had passed.
All the women on their floor had become quite practiced at that thanks to Cameron.
Sam chucked Robbie on the shoulder. "C'mon, man, you don't want to miss how that goes over at the party, do you?"
"Got a feeling I'll hear about it tomorrow anyway," Robbie said between sips of beer. "We'll be hearing about all up and down Nickwen Street!"
"Just what would Nicholas Wendover have to say about that anyway?" wondered Martin. Nicholas Wendover Street -- nearly always abbreviated to Nickwen by students and townies alike -- was the street that ran behind Claxton College's east-side dorms, where all the campus hippies lived.
And a few stubborn squares like Robbie, who at that moment was wishing he could have taught himself to prefer the jocks on the west-side.
"Don't you guys know who Nicholas Wendover was?" Cameron asked.
"Heard he was an anti-slavery crusader back in the eighteen-somethings," Sam said.
"No, he gave Claxton a bunch of money but they didn't have a new building to name after him," said Tammy.
"Wrong and wrong," declared Cameron. "I can't believe we haven't been talking about him all week, since it's Halloween. Everybody grab another beer and I'll tell you the real story. Then you'll see why no one at Poirier will care about my costume."
"You gonna tell us who Poirier was, too?" Sam asked. "And what he did to deserve to have such an ugly building named after him?"
"Her," Tammy reminded Sam. "Renee Poirier, the internet millionaire."
"The English major who was smart enough to get a real job," quipped Martin, a computer science major.
"The straight-A student who ended up working for a C student," Robbie added. "Tom something. Why doesn't anyone including me remember his name?"
"Because he didn't give the college any money," Patty said. "A man after my own heart, that's for sure."
"Yeah, it's a wonder they didn't name the street after Renee Poirier and the building after Wendover," Cameron said, opening the beer Tammy had just handed him. "He was a jerk."
"Then why name anything after him?" Clara wondered.
"As a cautionary tale," Cameron said. "Especially at Halloween. It's easy to forget now, Claxton used to be pretty conservative back in the fifties. Nick Wendover was a student here then, you see, and back then where the student union is now...well, it was a student union, but back then it was an old farmhouse from before the college moved here, and the bedrooms on the second floor all had pianos for the students to practice on..."
***
The smell of burgers and fries and the sounds from the jukebox wafted up the stairs just enough for Nick Wendover to be aware of them as he attacked the piano again and again. He went at it as hard and fast as he could, spurred ever onward by a vision of himself surrounded by adoring girls and jealous guys at the west campus Halloween party.
Front and center among the adoring girls, of course, was Polly Johnson.
Dubbed the freshman heartbreaker of 1954 within weeks of her arrival on campus that fall, she still had half the guys on campus lusting after her two years later. Tall and voluptuous with a smile and a kind word for everyone including skinny little Nick, she'd always had her pick among the men of Claxton. Neither they nor the women who envied her were surprised when she'd ended up with Ronnie, then a promising freshman on the football team. Nor was anyone surprised that she remained with him and wore his pin now that he was the captain. Word had it among the men's dorms on west campus that Polly had even gone all the way with Ronnie at least once. The women of east campus were equally adamant that her virtue remained intact; jealous as they might be, they looked up to Polly and refused to believe she'd be a bad girl.
In Nick's imagination, of course, Polly was a very bad girl. Maybe even worse than Mary, the token female among his buddies, who had a bad reputation and enjoyed every furtive whisper about it from the more straight-laced girls. Nick lusted after Mary, but he loved Polly. He'd loved her ever since the French class they'd had together freshman year. It had still been fairly early in the semester when their paths had crossed outside class for the first time, still warm enough that she hadn't been wearing a coat over the beautiful plaid dress he'd taken note of in class. A few hours later, on his way home from a piano lesson, he'd walked around a corner outside the student union and nearly run into her.
To this day, he could only hope his nervous laughter at the near miss hadn't sounded as nervous to her as it had to him. Whether it had or not, though, Polly had shown no sign of caring. She'd grinned at him and cooed, "Ah, bonjour, Frankie!"
From that day to this, Nick had been utterly smitten. The fact that his name wasn't Frankie had never made a dime's worth of difference to him, nor had the rumors -- since proven true -- that she was going steady with Ronnie. He probably didn't know Nick's name either, but of course Nick knew his name. Joe College himself from the moment he'd set foot on campus, confidence itself on and off the football field...even the squares who loved to hate football knew who Ronnie was.
Naturally, in Nick's imagination as he hammered the piano, Ronnie was eating his heart out somewhere back in the audience. So, for the moment, was Polly just across the piano. Her big, dark eyes and her lush, curly, even darker hair shone in the dim light as she drank in the animal masculinity that oozed from Nick's performance. Though he had to focus on playing his song, Nick wished Polly would stand up and give him a better look at her cat costume. Remembering that it was his imagination and he could make her stand up, he did just that. Somehow he didn't miss a note as he admired Polly in her black leotard and tights, swaying hard and fast to the music and applauding lustily as he finished and their eyes met.
Back in reality, he played hard and fast as ever as he imagined Polly welcoming him into her room, which of course he'd never seen but he was certain it was a wonderland of chintz and lace. "Nice place," he heard himself saying in an agreeable baritone. "Hope you don't mind me invading your feminine sanctum."
"You're not invading it if I invited you in!" he heard Polly saying. "And it's not all I'm inviting you into, you silly boy. Come here!" He saw her guiding his hands as they pulled her leotard straps down, then welcoming his caresses on her lush, creamy breasts while she kissed him lustily. He didn't see just what happened to her tights, but presently she was without them and lying spreadeagled on her bed, her jet-black pubic hair glistening in the candle shine, beckoning for his gentle touch, which somehow he just knew would be perfect -- not too gentle, not too hard at first, though another part of him was in fact very hard right then.
"Bring that over here, Nicholas." He could hear her cooing it as if she were in the room with him. As he went on attacking the piano lustily, he imagined he would burst any moment now.
Just as Polly was guiding him inside her, he did burst. Feeling the spurt in his jeans. Nick snapped back to the pale light of the otherwise-empty practice room, hit one last bad chord, and stopped. "Crud, not again," he muttered under his breath.
"You finished, Wendover?" came his buddy George's voice from the hall. Before Nick could do or say anything, the door opened. Nick pressed his legs together, doing his best to ignore the wetness between them and just what it meant, and turned to see not just George but the whole gang -- Stan, Miles and Mary -- waiting for him.
"Not yet," Nick said. "Still haven't quite nailed it. Maybe by Halloween?"
