Two weeks at college, and Byron Delahanty was already on the verge of getting some strange. School ruled.

He and the girl he’d met at the cheesy little dorm mixer – Kourtney? Kasey? Kaitlin? Something like that – were sneaking now across the dark back forty of DSU, the territory of football and baseball practice fields. Neither one of them had any idea where they were going, having gotten completely turned around in the darkness and addled by some low-end grain punch somebody had whipped up in a trash can. Byron vaguely remembered taking two hits off somebody’s Louisville Slugger-sized spliff and becoming obsessed with Kourtney/Kasey/Kaitlin’s ass. Absurdly obsessed. Monks-writing-Bibles-by-hand obsessed.  

He had no idea how he’d managed to talk her out of the party; his specialty was statistics, and his usual mode of conversation was virtual, via IM and email and messageboard. But he dug deep, found a reservoir of game he didn’t know he possessed, and slathered her with waves of solid-gold bull, and next thing he knew, she was out here with him, leaning against the chain-link fence that surrounded an ink-black field.

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