Tim's mother pulled the Crown Vic up to the entrance of the parking lot and popped the trunk, not even bothering to put it in park. Tim opened his door, unclicked his seatbelt. "Well," he said.

"I suppose this is it," his mother said. She reached one arm to his neck for a stiff hug. When it was over Tim got out and collected his one bag. She was already driving away as he closed the trunk, and it would be four months before he spoke to her again.

Thus liberated, Tim stepped into the lobby of Wintertree Hall for the first time. The room vibrated with semi-organized chaos, as children strained for the freedom that was almost within their grasp, and parents pulled the leashes tight for the last few minutes they were able. Here and there returning sophomores slouched against rails and chairbacks in familiar clumps, smugly chuckling in recognition of the excitement they were now too wise to feel. A banner strung between two columns announced "WELCOME TO WINTERTREE FALL 1997." Underneath it a tall, granite-faced RA spoke with a thick Slavic accent into a sheet of construction paper rolled into a crude megaphone: "If your name is starting with A through L, please to table one." He and the other RAs manning the tables all wore grey T-shirts silkscreened with the slogan "DUH" in purple block letters.

Tim stepped up to table one, manned by a DUH-shirted redhead, her hair and smile both unrestrained, almost overwhelming. "Department of University Housing" was printed in smaller letters underneath the DUH on her shirt. "Welcome to Wintertree!" she said. "I'm Holly!"

"Tim Levitt," he said, and she gave him paperwork to sign, and in exchange for that a room key, a mailbox key and a Student Handbook. The Handbook was a small book bound in purple cloth, with the motto "LIFE MEANS NOTHING TO THE DEAD" stamped in gold foil on the inch-thick spine. On the cover, underneath the University of Northwest Georgia seal, was his name: TIMOTHY JAMES LEVITT. Tim ran his fingers across the embossed foil. His name shimmered and breathed as it caught light from the flickering institutional fluorescents.

"You're on Tier 3, Inner Arm 5, Room 79A," Holly said. "Awesome!"

"What does that mean?"

"Follow the signs! Thanks, Tim!"

She pointed to a glass security door at the east end of the lobby. Tim dragged his suitcase across the lobby and consulted the map posted next to the propped-open door.

Aside from the large open white rectangle of the lobby, marked YOU ARE HERE, the halls on the map looked to Tim like the curves and folds of a cube-shaped brain. After a minute he found 79A on the map, tucked away somewhere near the center, but it looked like it would take most of the day to get there.

"Use the Handbook," one of the sophomores said, a tall Indian guy with a thick south Georgia accent. He leaned against the Dutch door of the mail room across from the map, taking in the moving-day spectacle with a wry smile. Inside the mail room, a hugely fat guy with bristly muttonchops unwrapped a Honey Bun. "Maps're no good. They're just there for plausible deniability in case some freshman pulls a Milo. Check your Handbook—it'll get you where you're going."

The sophomore nodded to someone waving across the lobby and walked away. Tim opened his Handbook; in size it reminded Tim of the pocket-sized Gideon New Testament he had as a child, and accordingly the pages were Bible-thin, the text near small enough to warrant a magnifying glass. There was no table of contents, just an "Introduction, Argument & Words of Welcome" from someone named Anthony Delmonico. Tim turned to the back and found an index. No entries for "maps," nor for "Wintertree Hall." On a hunch, he looked up "Milo."

A persistent campus legend holds that in 1967, the year Wintertree Hall opened its doors, a freshman named Milo Kirby got lost trying to find his room in the spiraling halls and dead ends of Wintertree, and never emerged. His prospective roommate, one Warren Pullman, was discreetly paid a large sum to keep Kirby's disappearance quiet, and Kirby's parents were told he died at sea during a maritime commencement ceremony.

Different strands of the legend posit different conclusions to the story: some say Kirby, now middle-aged, lives in a doorless, windowless room in the center of Wintertree and every year recruits two new residents to join his secret society, The Nine Dead Men; others, that Kirby's ghost haunts the stairways of Tier 4. A common element of all versions, however, is that Kirby wrote the very Student Handbook you are now reading.

This is, of course, a complete fiction, as the Handbook was in fact written by the school's first president, Anthony Delmonico, and amended over the years by his successors. Still, however fictional Milo Kirby remains, it would not do for you to follow in his alleged footsteps. Finding room 79A is a simple matter, if you follow but three easily remembered guidelines:

1. Go up only when there are no other options.

2. Stay to the left at every fork.

3. Always answer "yes."

Two flights of stairs and four left turns later, Tim found himself before a waist-high gate and a small desk manned by a sullen, bored-looking RA in another DUH T-shirt. "I'm Tim Levitt—"

The RA raised a finger: Don't care. Be quiet. He opened a thick three-ring binder, also imprinted with DUH on the cover, and consulted what looked to Tim like a very involved spreadsheet.

The RA raised his heavy-lidded eyes to Tim. "Is there a path under the garden?" he asked.

Tim had no idea. But guidelines 1 and 2 had worked so far."Yes," he said. The gatekeeper heaved himself off his chair, unlatched the gate and let Tim through.

A few doors beyond the gate, Tim found room 79. He called back to the RA: "Is 79 the same as 79A?" Without turning around, the RA just shrugged.

Tim tried his key in the lock: no luck. He knocked.

"What," said the guy who opened the door. He was shorter than Tim, broad-shouldered and thick-necked, his black hair buzzed to the scalp. He breathed audibly through his lips, which remained parted over clenched teeth.

"I'm Tim. I'm supposed to be in 79A?"

The guy grunted, opened the door wider and let Tim in. Tim craned his neck back as he entered - though the room's floorplan was as cramped as Tim had expected from a freshman dorm, the ceiling was 25 feet above him. A great wooden loft, with multiple levels and landings, rose the entire height of the room.

"I had no idea," said Tim. "Are all the rooms like this?"

"No," said the guy. "Especially yours."

"I'm in 79A. This is 79, right?"

"This is 79. That's 79A." He waved in the direction of the wall to his right. There, halfway up, was a 5'x3' opening, next to a small platform jutting from the loft. A rope ladder hung from the platform.

"That's my room?" said Tim.

The guy gave an aggressive shrug, his face pinched in annoyance. "Yes. It's your room. What do you not understand. God."

Tim looked at the apparently useless key in his hand. Room 79A appeared to have no door that required locking. "Is this supposed to open the door?"

"No idea."

"Can we make a copy of your key so I can get in and out?"

The guy climbed up to the first level of the loft with simian ease and flopped on a loveseat perched there. "Don't know. Maybe."

"I'm Tim."

The boy flipped on the TV next to the loveseat. "I heard."

"What's your name?"

"Dick." Dick turned up the volume on the TV. That was that.

Tim hoisted his bag over his shoulder and clambered up the rope ladder to his porch. He squeezed through the hole in the wall and surveyed his room. The floorplan appeared roughly the same as 79's, but the ceiling was no more than eight feet off the floor. Two wooden dressers, two desks and chairs, and two beds furnished the room. One bed had a plain metal frame supporting a thin, stained mattress that recalled for Tim the two hellish weeks he spent at Methodist summer camp; the other's frame was of carved oak, with a box spring and a thick pillow-top mattress. A stuffed camping backpack and a laundry basket full of towels sat on that bed, and it was surrounded by a few boxes, a TV and some unassembled shelving. Tim found the Handbook entry for Your room, beds therein:

Each room in the Residence Halls contains two beds of varying quality—one a hard, soiled mattress, the kind one would expect to find in a second-rate prison, the other a feather bed of such quality as to make the Pope or even a cinema star jealous - so as to encourage healthy competition between roommates.

"Sorry, I took the good bed," said a voice behind him. Tim closed the Handbook, turned and found himself face-to-face with a young man so fit and tan his entire body, not just his close-cropped hair, seemed to be blond. He grabbed Tim's hand with such surprising force that Tim whimpered a bit, stared Tim in the eye, and said:

"I'm Drew. You must be Tim. Did you read about the bed thing in the Handbook? Crazy, right? Listen, if you want the good one just say so." Tim did want the good bed, but so powerful was the good nature evident in Drew's fluorescent smile and wide blue eyes that Tim could offer nothing but a weak "No, man, you take it."

Drew heaved a green duffel bag on the good bed, where it landed without a creak or groan. "Thanks, man," he said. "I owe you one. You hungry?"

Drew claimed reliable information from alumni friends that Weston was the best dining hall on campus. The campus map that folded out of Tim's Handbook showed Weston located about an eighth of a mile from Wintertree along Hollister Drive, one of nine streets that shot out from the Wintertree quad (aka, according to the map, the "Delmonico Box") at the center of campus like rays of light from a star.

Drew and Tim set out along Hollister, following the gradually intensifying odor of frying oil. Along the way Tim learned about Drew's father (prostate cancer, dead), his mother (breast cancer, beating it), sister (high school, flag corps) and brother (estranged, probably in Colorado), his goals (BA in religion, BS in sports medicine) and dream (team chaplain for the Atlanta Falcons).

"What about you?" said Drew when he was done with this litany.

"What about me?"

"Where you from?"

"Resaca." A small town not far from the University, best-known (if at all) for a minor Civil War battle.

"What are you going to major in?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe English."

Drew exhaled a dismissive sigh. "My dad majored in English."

They stopped at an intersection to let a campus Blue Line bus pass. There was a girl near the back of the bus, the only passenger, with short blond hair and the broad shoulders of a swimmer or volleyball player. The bus's interior lights were off, but the day's fading sunlight caught her hair and turned it golden against the purple and orange sunset framed by the window: a painting, trundling through the intersection. Though the girl was sitting down, to Tim she looked almost impossibly tall. For a moment their eyes met, and later Tim would recall that it almost looked like she mouthed his name.

For the first time, but not the last, Tim felt a calling from the book in his pocket: a certainty that it had the answer to the most important question he had ever had. He turned to the index of the Handbook and found:

That girl,

the one at the security desk...137

the one in your bio class....246

the one on the bus...149

the one wearing the R.E.M. T-shirt...68, 318

the one who looks like your sister...293

the one you will love...188-203

Tim turned to page 149. There he read:

Her name is Joanie.

**********************************************************

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this first chapter. Going forward, music plays a fairly significant role in the story. Here's a playlist of relevant music and other stuff that may enhance the reading experience. I'll be adding new videos to it as new chapters get posted:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO7zCtFzyExWJzFPUFtpYCEEoWeN0NJwh

A note about content: this is a book about college students in the 90s who frequently make bad decisions. There'll be some sexy stuff, some violence, some drinking and drug use (of a made-up drug that doesn't exist, but still), but it should all remain in the vicinity of PG-13 or at most a soft R. There will however be a good amount of foul language.

If you enjoy what you're reading, a vote or a comment is always much appreciated. Even if you don't enjoy it, feel free to leave a comment to let me know what's not working for you.

And don't worry, you won't be hearing from me nearly this much in future chapters. On to part two, as we meet Dick's roommate Chet...