The system was near-perfect. Parties were announced via coded for-sale notices on the Wintertree Free Speech Kiosk: "MINI-FRIDGE FOR SALE, GOOD WORKING ORDER THO NEEDS A LITTLE TLC" indicated the party was scheduled for a Friday; "BROWN COUCH, BARELY USED, UNIDENTIFIABLE STAIN ON CUSHION" meant Saturday. People would begin arriving at 8:00 in groups of no more than three, each guest carrying a thick Norton Anthology. One of them would stammer out the password – "We're here for the study group" – and Peter would let them in.

They would open their Nortons for Peter's inspection. Confirming that each hollowed-out anthology did indeed contain a flask of liquor, he would allow them to climb up the rope ladder to the first level of the loft, lift up the poster of Marla, and enter Heaven. They would add the contents of those flasks to a Gatorade cooler that Peter had filled halfway with grape Kool-Aid. The resulting potent, pungent brew became known as Nectar of the Gods, and the kids in Heaven got closer to God with each sip as they writhed in the hidden humid box of a room, Ron Marston's squad of RAs searching the halls in vain for the source of the thumping bass that seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere. Wintertree's residents needed a place to congregate, to commingle, to conjugate, free of DUH's draconian restrictions. Peter gave them Heaven.

The weak link in the system, as Peter had identified on day one, was the Ewok. Franklin had to be cultivated. Peter needed him to be an ally, however reluctant, and not an enemy. It started when Peter showed him the rope ladder that would allow attendees easy access to the loft and thence to Heaven. "The Stairway to Heaven," he announced.

"It's a ladder," said Franklin. "You should call it Jacob's Ladder."

"That doesn't make sense. My name's not Jacob."

"It makes as much sense as calling it a stairway."

Peter didn't have time to argue over the fucking ladder. For one thing, any reasonable person would agree that it should be called Stairway to Heaven. Like, get real. For another thing, Peter wanted to open Heaven as soon as possible, to get a better class of people moving through the room and his life. "Here's the thing," Peter said. "I know you're big on the rules. You gotta obey the law. But which laws are more important? The laws of DUH, or the laws of men?" That got Franklin listening. In exchange for a 12-pack of Mountain Dew before every party, and Peter's assurances that visitors to Heaven would not interfere with the D&D campaign, neither Franklin nor Russell nor Tara would be snitches, lest they receive stitches.

The first party went better than Peter could have ever imagined. Though he'd developed the kiosk-code system and even printed up prototype flyers, he obviously couldn't rely on secret codes for the first event. He haunted Weston for a few nights until he found the two guys who had inspired him with their talk of Ron Marston's Gestapo. He told them the good news about Heaven. They took the word and spread it among the people. By 8:30 that Friday night, the secret room was a solid mass of sweating, drunk freshmen and sophomores, and Peter had been inevitably, indelibly dubbed "St. Peter." The doorman at the gates of Heaven. He made a mental note to wear a robe next time.

For the next two months, it only got better. A freshman named Matt Green offered to take over DJ duties, and he even brought in his own turntable and hi-fi system to replace Peter's boombox. Peter strung up Christmas lights to give the room some atmosphere, and he started passing around a collection plate, which brought in enough money in dollars and quarters to pay for the Kool-Aid, the Mountain Dew, cleaning supplies for the morning after, and even sometimes breakfast. With so many people trying to get into Heaven every weekend, another enterprising resident offered up his own room as Purgatory, where prospective fun-seekers could quietly get a start on the night's drinking while waiting for the phone to ring to announce that a spot had opened up in Heaven. Peter even heard that there was a Hell, somewhere in the bowels of Hayes, where the hardest of the hardcore could go once denied entry to Heaven, but no one would actually confirm its existence.

And everywhere that Peter went, whether the Delmonico Box or Thorn Hall or West Campus or downtown, the Heavenly regulars – the Angels, as Peter thought of them - nodded in respect or shot him finger-guns or even just straight-up high-fived him. Football players made room for him at their table at Weston. Girls came to the parties, beautiful girls, and they complimented him and laughed at his jokes – though none of them had what Marla had. They were not the prize, though he could feel it getting closer. He could feel himself becoming a man she could desire. And every once in a while, Peter would find his RA, Simon, eyeing him like the federales must have eyed Pancho Villa.

All the while, Franklin, Russell and Tara kept playing their game on the floor, ensconced in their own world. Peter had made it clear to the Angels from the beginning that Chewy, R2-D2 and the Ewok were off-limits, though he had made the mistake of referring to them as such, trying to show off how clever he was, and soon the Star Wars nicknames were part of the common lingo in Heaven. Sooner or later someone was bound to slip.

On the ninth week, the party fell on a Saturday night. Peter delivered the Mountain Dew to the dorks a little later than usual. Their game had already started. "The floor of the tomb is covered in an oily black substance," Franklin intoned, in a goofy deep voice. "As you make your way in, your feet have difficulty finding purchase on the slippery stone. Malkazor, roll on dexterity."

Russell rolled a die, one with so many sides it almost looked like a ball. "Oh shit. That's a one."

Franklin smiled. Peter couldn't recall ever seeing him look so happy. "With your next step, your foot flies out from under you. You pinwheel your arms, trying to regain your balance, but your efforts only bring you closer to the Crypt of Lord Stellan at the center of the room. But you can see now that the lid of the crypt has been pushed aside, and inside there is no body at all – just a hole. With one final flailing step, you tumble over the side and fall in."

"Oh god. Did you just kill me?" Russell was gripping the sides of his head, twisting his hair into knots. Tara reached over and took his hand, to reassure him.

"After a short fall, you hit a smooth stone floor. It is damp, but not as slippery as the floor of the tomb. You stand up, checking to see if anything's broken. You are in pain, but you are intact. You look around you. There are walls five feet to either side of you, but the room extends into darkness ahead of you and behind you."

Peter cleared his throat. Franklin looked up at him, the smile gone. "What?"

"Here's your Mountain Dew."

"I saw. Thank you. I thought part of our deal was that our game was not to be interrupted?"

Ungrateful little shit. Russell looked up at Peter, like he was going to say something, but didn't.

Franklin was done with Peter. He settled his gaze back on Russell. "You are in a tunnel," he said.

The party that night was the best one yet. Matt Green had added some party lights to his hi-fi setup, and their swirling shapes and colors combined with the Christmas lights for a pleasantly disorienting effect. The Angels had really started to get into the spirit, and nearly everyone was in angelic costume – which in practice meant everyone was in their underwear, some with cardboard wings strapped to their backs. After about five minutes in the hot crush of Heaven, the wings came off. Flesh bumped and prodded and slid against flesh, all lubricated by Nectar and sweat. Peter allowed himself to be pulled into the tangled scrum of bodies, freely feeling each curve and angle that thrust his way. He had gone so long without contact, he would take all he could get. Maybe he could forget about Marla for one night. Maybe there was more than one way to reach Heaven.

A shaft of hard fluorescent light fell across the crowd, breaking the spell of Heaven for a moment with sobering reality. Someone had entered the room, even though they were at capacity. Peter pushed through the crowd to the door and found the interloper, conspicuous and awkward. It was Russell.

Maybe it was the lights, or the Nectar, or the unfamiliar sensation of human bodies making contact with his, but in that moment, Peter was filled with an expansive, overwhelming love. "Chewy!" he said, and he threw his arms around Russell. "You made it!"

Peter could feel Russell's body tense up. "Chewy?"

Peter knew he had made a mistake. He let Russell go and looked up into his eyes, magnified slightly by his perfectly round glasses. Those eyes had never known hate, or shown it. They were the eyes of a good person, which Peter could recognize, though he was not one himself. Russell, more than anyone, belonged in Heaven.

Peter turned back to the crowd and threw an arm around Russell's shoulders. Josh and Jarrod, two sophomores from Tier 4, were stomping along in their tighty-whities to "Rock Box." Josh had an air guitar slung up high over his enormous pale stomach, head tilted back in ecstasy as he pretended to shred.

"Guys, check it out," Peter said. "Russell made it. He's my co-pilot. Like Chewbacca."

"What's up, Russell?" Jarrod offered up his fist, but Russell had no idea what to do with it.

Josh put down his air guitar for a second. "So, what, that makes you Han Solo?"

"Obviously."

"Fucking get real, dude."

"Well at least I'm not Jabba the fucking Hutt, you fat fuck." For a moment Josh stared at him, and Peter was sure he was going to get punched. But then Josh just laughed and resumed shredding.

"Peter," Russell said. "I... I wanted to see if I could request a song. It's Tara's and my anniversary, and I—"

Peter waved toward the hi-fi, where Matt was flipping through records in a crate. "Yeah, go ask Matt."

Peter spent the rest of the night hiding behind a speaker, letting the bass be his armor. The love he felt left as quickly as it had arrived. Now he just felt longing and loathing in equal measure. Sometimes he was sure they were the same thing.

When the cooler of Nectar was empty and the Angels were losing their energy, Matt pulled a record out of the crate and held it up for Peter's inspection: Prince. Purple Rain. "For Chewbacca," he said. He put the record on the turntable and dropped the needle. First it was just a guitar, clean and spacious. Then cavernous drums. Matt adjusted the lights, and purple dots swirled around the walls and ceiling. "I never meant to cause you any sorrow."

Peter got up and walked to the door. He didn't have to touch anyone. The crowd was thinner now. They were pairing off, their sticky bodies draped against each other, swaying to keep from falling. Peter lifted up a corner of the Miss Resaca Beach poster and peeked out.

Down on the floor, Russell was dancing with Tara. He held Tara's hand and twirled around her chair, surprisingly graceful. After one revolution, he leaned in and kissed her, and then she spun the chair around in a tight circle, one hand on the joystick and one still entwined with Russell's.

Franklin was watching them dance, his dice and books spread out in front of him. He sipped from a green can of Mountain Dew, whatever pleasures it offered not reaching his face. Behind Peter, Prince's guitar erupted, and the lights shifted from soft purple to vivid bright white. Peter felt the change more than saw it, the way the citizens of Pompeii felt Vesuvius. He lingered there on the threshold between devotion and naked burning desire. He offered neither, inspired neither.

Franklin looked up at Peter, and they understood each other.

No one was quite sure how he did it. Everyone had a different theory. Josh said he heard that one of Chewy's experiments exploded and threw him across the chemistry lab. Jarrod said that Chewy botched a Superfly Splash off the top of the statue in front of the Wheeler Science Building; he was pretty sure he heard Russell talking with some football players in Heaven last week about a wrestling video they wanted to shoot. Matt was convinced that Chewy deliberately broke his own ankles as a misguided show of solidarity with Tara, or possibly as part of some perverted sex thing.

However it happened, two days after he visited Heaven for the first time, Russell showed up at 79 in a wheelchair of his own, with casts on both feet. The presence of two wheelchair-bound geeks in the room was more than most of the Angels could take. They had so far maintained a modicum of respect for Franklin, the roommate, as a sort of gnomish gatekeeper on whose good side they needed to stay. But that bubble of respect had a limited radius, and Russell and Tara slipped closer to the edge with every clank of their leg rests as Russell tried to maneuver his chair closer to hers.

Heaven had a brittle, anxious energy that night. The Angels spent more time debating the Russell situation than dancing. They took turns at the door, peeking out from behind the poster, observing Russell and Tara like fucking National Geographic. Even Peter thought they were taking it too far. He had hated these dorks way before any of them showed up. He invented hating these dorks. After a while you just had to accept them.

Matt was the last to leave that night, as usual. Peter had started giving him a cut of the weekly offering, and as he counted out Matt's share of the crumpled, moist bills, he could tell that Matt was far drunker than normal. He could almost see little cartoon stink lines coming off him. He handed Matt his ten bucks. Matt saluted him and nearly fell climbing out of the door to the loft, and then nearly fell again climbing down the rope ladder. Having reached the safety of the floor, Matt steadied himself against the post of the loft. Peter climbed out of Heaven to the loft. "Don't throw up in here," he said.

Franklin, Russell and Tara were still playing D&D, oblivious. "You come to a fork in the tunnel," Franklin said. "There are three branches: left, right and center."

Tara thought for a second. "Can I see anything that might tell me which way Malkazor went? Like a footprint or something?"

"Um... Roll a d6."

Tara picked an ordinary die, like you'd play Monopoly with, out of a pile in her lap. She tossed it down to the ground, where it bounced and spun before landing with one pip up. "Fuck," she said.

"You don't see anything," Franklin said.

"Of course I don't."

Matt had been watching this whole exchange with a growing smile on his face. He staggered over to Tara and bent down, holding himself up with the handle of her wheelchair. She recoiled from his rotten-sweet Nectar breath. "I suggest a new strategy, Artoo," he said, in a fey British accent. "Let the Wookiee win."

Franklin moved faster than Peter thought possible. He shoved Matt backwards to the door and threw him out into the hall. Matt landed on his ass. "What the fuck?" Matt screamed, but Franklin just slammed the door in his face.

Franklin didn't say anything to Peter. He picked up Tara's die, handed it back to her, and resumed the game.

Peter thought that was the end of Heaven. He tried to talk to Matt, but he avoided Peter whenever he saw him and didn't return his calls. Peter was sure Franklin considered their deal terminated, but on Wednesday he asked Peter if he should expect the Mountain Dew on Friday or Saturday. Peter immediately grabbed a "BROWN COUCH" flyer and ran downstairs to the lobby to post it.

That week's party started out subdued. Peter still had Matt's hi-fi system but none of his records, so he had to make do with his own short stack of Zeppelin, AC/DC and Springsteen. Peter went after the Nectar hard, to force himself to have a good time.

By 9:00 he was having the best time he had ever had. The Nectar had given his brain a full wash 'n wax. He felt immortal. His heart was pumping so fast, he could feel the blood coursing through him, delivering the Nectar's life-giving energy to every cell in his body. The Christmas lights and the swirling party lights all merged into one smear of color that breathed and danced on its own. "Dancing in the Dark" played on the hi-fi, and Peter rolled up the sleeves of his T-shirt and danced around the room, snapping his fingers, not caring how dorky he looked. He was Bruce Springsteen, the Han Solo of New Jersey, and when he looked into the crowd he would see Marla there, and he would pull her up on stage, and then she would belong to him.

But he didn't see Marla. Instead he saw a man, even fatter than Josh, sweating in a corner of the room. The man didn't seem to know where he was, or how he got there. He had a moustache and dressed like Ben Franklin. He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief, and then he looked across the room, right at Peter.

The Springsteen stopped. Something else started playing. Some kind of prog bullshit. It sounded like someone's shitty idea of the future. But there was malevolence in its failed grandeur, and in the German enunciation of the singer, and as the fat man stared at him from across the room, Peter felt a fear enter him, through a door in the back of his head. It walked right in, uninvited, and took up residence. Everyone in the room turned and looked at Peter. They stared at him just like the fat man. All these Angels who pretended to be his friends, who high-fived him and laughed with him – they weren't angels at all. They were devils, and he had let them into his house, and they were going to kill him and take it from him.

Peter felt a weight in his right hand. He looked down and he was holding a sword. It glowed purple, here in this false Heaven with its cold pinpricks of light dancing on the walls. Peter swung the sword in front of him and screamed in defiance. The devils just laughed and rushed at him. Peter dropped the sword and fled, but something caught his foot and he fell, into a blinding light, and then he hit bottom.

When he came to, all the Angels were scrambling out of Heaven, tearing at their clothes and gabbling incoherently. They all poured out of the room, but there was someone standing still, right in front of Peter. Peter realized that he was naked from the waist down. When everyone else finally left the room, Peter looked up and into the face of Simon, his RA. "Well," said Simon. "I guess we found party central."

Peter had to go see Ron Marston the next morning. Marston made a lot of threatening noises about expelling Peter from UNWG, but Peter was prepared for this. He let Marston know that he possessed Certain Information about the RLC's activities and proclivities, and that put a stop to any talk of expulsion. Marston moved Peter to a basement room in Hayes instead. A single.