He let me out in front of the Alpha Tau house at Longwood University in Farmville, dazed, confused, glad to be alive, and angry—all of those. When I'd closed the truck door, I turned to ask him through the window who he was and how I could get hold of him again, but he pulled away from me, gone, looking straight ahead through the windshield.
I don't know why I tried getting his number. I must have been in shock—or unguarded and being honest. I sometimes wonder what he would have said, and done, if he'd heard what I asked.
The guys were still heavy into their pledge hazing party. All of the lights in the house were on and I could see them cavorting inside through the windows like banshees. Probably all drunk as skunks. They probably thought I'd been too, but I wasn't.
They'd stripped me down to shorts, tied my hands behind my back, put a burlap sack over my head, and drove me in the trunk of Chaz's Impala.
"Where you leaving me?" I'd asked when they hauled me out of the trunk after what seemed like a half hour of driving over rough roads.
"That's for you to find out," Dennis said, giving me an ugly grin and getting back in the car, where three of the other brothers were laughing and catcalling.
And then I was alone. It was the end of the road, stopping by a big lake of some sort. I was just in my briefs, bare-footed. After deciding they weren't coming back for me, I began to walk away from the water, on the grassy verge of the gravel road to protect my feet.
I stepped off to the side as headlights approached. A Ford pickup, not new by any means, coasted passed me, slowing down but continuing toward the lake. Then it did a U-turn and came back to me.