The Crimson Circle 3, 4 and 5

By James Breitbart

jamesbreitbart@yahoo.com

Copyright 2025 by James Breitbart, all rights reserved

[6,189 words]

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This work is intended for ADULTS ONLY. It may contain depictions of sexual activity involving minors. If you are not of a legal age in your locality to view such material or if such material does not appeal to you, do not read further, and do not save this story.
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Chapter 3

Nolan Pierce

The first hurdle was navigating changing clothes with Noah. We had been pretty much sent to bed without being given a chance to go to the bathroom or wait for the other to get changed, which meant we had to do it in front of each other.

“I’ll look away if you want to get dressed,” I told Noah, framing it as an offer to him rather than a request for myself.

“Sure thing.”

I looked out the window until Noah told me he was done, and then he stared at the wall while I got dressed until I told him I was done. The task accomplished, we brushed our teeth in the shared sink and then turned out the lights.

That night I dreamed I was running behind Jamie, Noah, and Logan. We were all naked and our path was lined with Jas and my parents and people from Sissipahaw and Senator Robeson shouting at us that we were dirty fags and going to hell, but I didn’t care. I was too focused on their buttocks and feet as they ran ahead of me. It felt like I was chasing them and they kept running just out of my reach. My dick grew larger and larger until finally it exploded, shooting cum all over the path in front of me. And then I woke up.

To my immense mortification, I had had a wet dream, with Noah right there in the room with me. He didn’t seem to have woken up, but I still felt like a huge creep, and I knew that he would notice the stains on my pajamas the next morning unless I did something about it. I looked at the alarm clock. It was just past five in the morning. If I got up and took my shower now, I could be dressed and have the offending pajamas stowed away somewhere Noah wouldn’t notice them before he woke up. I would also be sure to have the shower to myself.

I got up as quietly as possible, without turning on a light, and retrieved a pair of shorts, clean underwear, and a t-shirt from my dresser. I took a folded towel and washcloth, along with my shower caddy, and crept out to the hallway, then walked to the bathroom with the towel strategically positioned to cover the wet spot. No one else seemed to be up, so I closed the main door to the bathroom and stripped in front of the shower room, leaving my pajamas on the floor and the towel on a hook within easy reach.

I turned on the water and began washing my hair, but to my chagrin I heard the door open and slam shut. I hoped that whoever it was just had to pee and would leave me alone, but my hopes were soon dashed. I heard the curtain open and then Jamie say.

“Morning.”

I’d never shared a communal shower before and didn’t know if it was considered gay or offensive to look at another guy. I did know that my face was going red, so I decided that I was better off not turning around.

“Morning.”

“You’re up early.”

“Figured I’d beat the rush.”

“There’s usually more of a rush during the week, because everybody gets up as late as they can to get to class.”

“I’ll bet.”

“A lot of guys like the social aspect of it. You can shoot the shit, check each other out…I don’t mind if you check me out.” Since I had been directly invited, I looked at Jamie. He had a nice physique, visible muscles but not so toned that he looked like a body builder, and a good-sized cock that was half erect. “How do I look?”

“Not bad,” I admitted.

“You’re not so bad yourself.” Jamie walked over to the shower head, and I noticed a tattoo on his left buttock of a red circle with some sort of text in the middle. I couldn’t read it without my glasses, and I suspected that it wasn’t in English anyway.

“Nice ink. Is that the Crimson Circle?”

“You’ve heard of it.”

“Finn was talking about it yesterday. What exactly do y’all do.”

“Oh, you know, we keep the metric system down, we made Steve Gutenberg a star.” I chuckled at the reference and felt more at ease. Clearly Jamie was used to being naked around other people and didn’t mind me looking at him. “Are you interested in being tapped?”

“Is that what they call joining?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have to do that Freshman 500 thing?”

“Yeah, but look at it this way. I’ve already seen you naked and you haven’t died of embarrassment.”

“Not yet anyway.”

“Everyone on this hall is going to end up seeing you naked, because you’re not going to be able to wake up earlier than everyone for the rest of the year, and you’re going to have to shower in gym class too.”

“Thanks for the heads up.”

“So how much worse is it for a bunch of upperclassmen you don’t know to see you naked.”

“Well, that’s kind of a good point,” I admitted.

“There are a lot of advantages to joining a society. In school and after.”

“It is a cool tattoo,” I responded, “what’s the writing say?”

“Causa latet, vis est notissima - The cause is hidden, but the result is well known.”

“That’s a good motto for a secret society.”

“I think so.”

We finished washing and toweled off. Jamie threw his towel over his shoulder and started walking nonchalantly back to his room. A little less bold, I picked up my towel and wrapped it around my waist, carrying my clothes back. When I got back to my room, I discovered that Noah was already awake, so I shoved the whole wad of clothing behind my pillow and changed into another pair of shorts and t-shirt while Noah was in the shower. When he got back, I went down to breakfast with some of the other guys on the hall – Finn, Dylan, Owen, and his roommate Henry Langston. The cafeteria had a waffle maker, which to my mind somewhat made up for the lack of privacy that seemed to be a hallmark of the Wilson experience.

We had to eat quickly, because we were required to be back in the common room at 8:15 for a walk over to the library, where we got an orientation to the school’s technology resources and were assigned our personal laptops.

After that, I had some free time in my schedule. The kids going out for sports teams had tryouts from 10:00-11:30, so the rest of us were left to our own devices until 12:30, when we were supposed to get our pictures taken for our ID cards.

I browsed the shelves and picked out a copy of The Sun Also Rises, then headed back to the dorm. Not thinking anything of it, I turned my key in the lock and opened the door to reveal Noah lying back on his bed, totally naked, dick in hand. I stood there staring for a split second and then realized that I was in deep shit and the longer I stood there looking like a creep the deeper it was going to be.

“Sorry!” I shouted and then slammed the door shut. Not knowing what else to do, I went into the common room and sat down silently. Logan Hayes, a skateboarder from Maine, and Jamie were watching MTV, and neither said anything to me.

A few minutes later Noah came into the room, wearing shorts and a t-shirt and looking flushed.

“Sorry about that, I guess we should have arranged a signal.”

Jamie looked at the two of us and realized immediately what the issue was. “It’s traditional to put a sock on the door, although you could always just jerk off in front of each other. You’ll probably be hard by the end of the freshman 500 anyway.”

“Really?” Noah asked, “what if I’m straight?”

“A, you probably aren’t as straight as you think you are, B, there are going to be girls doing it, and C, boners are contagious – like yawns.”

“How do you know he’s not straight?” Logan asked.

“Like 90 percent of people are some degree of bisexual,” Jamie answered, “they’ve done studies, five percent are totally straight, and five percent are totally gay.”

It was just my luck to be in the five percent.





Chapter 4

Dylan Reed

Move-in day at Wilson was pretty hectic, and I didn’t get any time alone with my roommate Finn until the prefect Jamie sent us all to bed. We were stuck in our room, unable to go to the bathroom to change, which presented a problem because I didn’t know how modest Finn was. I decided the only thing to do was ask him directly.

“Are you okay with us getting changed in front of each other?”

“Yeah…actually…”

“What is it?”

“At home I usually sleep naked. I mean, I’m totally fine with wearing pajamas if you’re more comfortable that way…”

“Don’t worry about it. I always went to soccer camp during the summer. They had group showers and shit got pretty wild when it was supposed to be lights out.” The counselors hadn’t gotten paid enough to do any more work keeping us in line than they absolutely had to.

“I bet you’ve got some cool stories.” Finn stood up and stripped naked. I noticed that he didn’t have any tan lines, which meant he probably did more than sleep naked. He was also uncircumcised, but that didn’t interest me as much. I’d seen and even jerked off with uncut guys before.

“I’d get in trouble if I told most of them.”

“That makes them even cooler.” Finn lay down in his bed and watched me change. “So, did you guys check each other out in the shower?”

“More than that,” I admitted.

“My brother Conor says guys check each other out here, too. He’s gay, though.”

“Are you?” I figured that since he had brought the subject up, it wasn’t weird of me to ask.

“Bi. You?”

“Maybe a little bi.”

Finn smiled wickedly. “Soccer camp?”

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“So, we’ll both enjoy the showers. We need to check out Jamie.”

“Why?”

“So we can tell if he’s cool. If he’s in a secret society, he’ll have the emblem tattooed on his ass.”

“I didn’t know they got tattoos. That’s sick!”

“Yeah, I remember when Conor came back the summer after his freshman year, he couldn’t stop showing his off. God, I can’t wait to get mine.”

“So how do you join a secret society anyway?”

“They keep an eye on everyone the first few weeks and decide who to tap based on if you seem cool. Each society picks 15 members from the freshman class, and they knock on your door when they initiate you.”

“So, what if more than one picks you?”

“They work out the lists together, so each freshman only gets one tap. You have to accept or reject on the spot and then they take you away to the initiation.”

By this point I had changed into my pajamas and climbed into bed. We talked for a while about our home lives – Finn’s dad was the Governor of Washington, which was pretty cool even though he seemed modest about it – until we got sleepy.

The alarm clock woke us up at 7:00 the next morning. Finn stretched and stood up.

“You want to hit the shower before breakfast.”

“Might as well.” I stood up and stripped off, planning to walk to and from the shower in nothing but a towel and get dressed in my room. Finn, who didn’t need to take anything off, waited patiently.

There were two guys in the shower when we got there – Henry Langston, a swimmer from Florida, and Owen Fitzgerald, so far, the only openly gay kid on our hall. Owen looked straight at us when we walked in, as if daring us to make a homophobic remark.

“’sup,” I nodded.

“’sup,” Owen returned the greeting and raked me over with his eyes. I looked him over in return. He had a small tattoo of two interlocking male symbols on his hip.

“Nice ink,” I remarked, “where’d you get it?”

“A friend gave it to me.” Owen told the story of an older kid in his theater class in New York who’d decided to pursue a career as a tattoo artist and offered to tattoo Owen for practice. We all listened to the story and checked him out as he told it, making it clear without directly saying anything that we were cool with him being gay and we were all cool with being checked out by the others.

We all finished in the shower at the same time and walked back to our rooms with our towels wrapped around our waists to get dressed, then went down to breakfast with Nolan Pierce while his roommate Noah was in the shower. Nolan wasn’t the most talkative, but what he did say was usually funny, and he had a buttery southern accent. I thought he sounded sort of gay, but he hadn’t said anything. Owen certainly seemed interested in him.

After breakfast, we had more orientation activities – a tour of the library and computer lab, and then soccer tryouts. We’d been told to bring gear, a change of clothes, and soap for the showers. There were about 20 guys trying out.

For the first half-hour, we were basically running drills that I’d done a thousand times before at camps and my travel league. Then, the coach blew his whistle and brought some of the returning players onto the field. We were going to play against them – current players shirts, freshmen skins. We all left our shirts by the side of the field and went at it. Of course, we lost, but I managed a pair of assists, so I felt pretty good about my chances.

The coach blew the whistle and sent us all off to the showers, supervised by the team captain, Connor Hayes. It was the first time we got to really interact with the older players, and there was a lot of goofing off and towel snapping which Connor didn’t do much to stop. Most of it was directed against us by the upperclassmen, but some of them were nice. One of them took the showerhead next to me and struck up a conversation.

“You play midfield?”

“Yeah.”

“Good, we’ve got a lot of midfielders graduating next year.” That made me feel better about my chances. “My name’s Seb, by the way, Seb Morales.”

“Dylan.” I shook his hand and, in the process, noticed that he had a small tattoo of a black ring on his ass, to match the actual ring he wore on his finger. “Nice ink.”

“Thanks, it’s for the Sable Order.”

“Is that one of the secret societies?”

“Yeah, you’ve heard of them?”

“Not much. My roommate’s brother is in the Crimson Circle.”

“Oh, yeah? People say they’re a little fancier than us, but I think we have more fun. They take all the student government go-getter types and we have more athletes.”

We were interrupted a moment later by a shout from the locker area.

“Where the fuck did my clothes go?”

Curious, I walked out of the shower to find that someone had picked the lock and stolen my clothes from my locker. In short order all the freshmen trying out discovered the same thing, and there was a din of accusations and shouting.

“What are we going to do?”

“I left my phone in there.”

“Where are all the towels.”

Hayes, the captain, stepped into the middle of the room. “Everybody shut up!” The room went silent. “We decided that since you freshmen think you’re such hot shit, the rest of the school can decide how hot you are. Your clothes and personal items have been removed from your lockers and will be returned to your dorm rooms. It’s up to you to figure out how to get back to your dorm rooms.”

Seb and the other upperclassmen put on their clothes and left us standing naked and wet in the locker room. The other guys immediately started arguing about what to do.

“They can’t do this to us! We should call the coach!”

“No one has a phone, dipshit.”

I realized that this was probably a test for the secret societies. They were either trying to figure out who was clever enough to figure out a way to get back to their dorms without exposing themselves, or who was bold enough to just go for it. I wasn’t clever enough to figure out a way to get back, so I decided that boldness was my best bet.

“Guys, I think we’re just going to have to go for it.” I mustered up as much confidence as I could and walked out the door wearing only my shower shoes. Only one kid followed me, another midfielder named Caleb Thomas. We had a very long walk to get back to the freshman quad, past a number of sports fields, all of which were occupied by teams trying out. I tried to make it a little less awkward by making small talk.

“So, where you from?”

“Nowhere in particular,” Caleb answered, “my Dad’s in the Navy so we move around a lot. Our last posting was in Hawaii.”

“Sweet.”

“Yeah, it was awesome, but then he got transferred to Gulfport Mississippi. That’s when I decided to go to boarding school.”

We were passing the track, and getting wolf whistles from the runners.

“Nice tan lines!” one of them shouted. I didn’t want to betray my nervousness, so I smiled and waved back.

We kept walking past another field where the tryout for club ultimate frisbee was just breaking up. Finn jogged over to us.

“Shit, I must be a bad influence.”

“Hazing,” I explained. By this point we were getting closer to the main part of campus, and passing more people. Pretty much all of them, boys and girls, checked me out, and some whistled or high-fived me. No one seemed angry or offended, and we didn’t run into any teachers, which came as a relief.

In fact, I was kind of enjoying the attention, which created another problem. I started to get turned on, and by the time we got past the tennis courts, I was fully hard. The problem seemed to be contagious. Caleb’s dick jutted out from his body, and Finn’s was swelling in his shorts.

“Jesus, how big are you?” Caleb asked.

“Just shy of eight and a quarter.”

“Fuck!” Caleb’s was much shorter than me, if I had to guess I would say somewhere between 3 ½ and four inches.

“Damn, you’ve got some size on me,” Finn remarked, “I’m sitting just over 5 ½. But I guess we’re still growing, right?”

“I hope so,” Caleb said.

We passed the final playing field and walked past a dorm that was sort of tucked into the back of campus. “Do you think anyone’s moved in there?” I asked.

“It’s an all girls dorm,” Finn answered, and just as he did a bunch of girls came running out with cameras pointed at us. Mindful that some of them were probably in the secret societies, I smiled and waved – with more than just my hand.

We finally made it to the freshman quad and split off – Caleb to Brewer and Finn and I to Beattie. “You want me to walk ahead of you in case Hodes is around?” Finn asked.

“Thanks.” I followed him up the stairs and into the common room. Jamie, Noah, Nolan, and Logan Hayes were talking about something, but they all fell silent when I walked in the room. Nolan’s eyes bugged out like a wolf in one of those old cartoons.

“Forget something?” Jamie asked.

From his tone I wasn’t quite sure if he was joking around or if I was actually in trouble. I decided to provide an answer that would make it obvious that I wasn’t naked by my own choice without sounding whiny or like a tattle-tale. “Somebody’s going to come by with my clothes. Can you point them to my room?”

I was starting to get blue balls, and I grabbed the bottle of lotion that I used for lube as soon as I got to my room.

“Mind if I join in?” Finn asked.

“Not at all.”

He stripped off his shirt, shorts, shoes, and socks as I squirted some of the lotion on my dick, and we began masturbating at exactly the same time. I checked him out, using the sight of his naked body as additional fuel, and then our eyes met. We both came, shooting our loads onto the floor.

Finn took a washcloth from his dresser that we used to clean it up, we hung out in our room, still naked, until I heard a knock on the door. I opened it just a little bit so as not to flash whoever it was, but it turned out to be Seb. He had changed into jeans and a t-shirt, but he was barefoot.

“Here’s your clothes,” he announced. I opened the door all the way to take them from him. “I see you’re getting used to it.”

“Yeah,” I admitted, “once you get over the initial embarrassment it’s not that bad.”

“Good, you’d be surprised at how much time you spend naked at this school.”





Chapter 5

Nolan Pierce

Just as Jamie had warned me, it proved impossible to keep getting up early enough to shower before everyone else. Thursday morning, we had placement testing from 7:30 to 12:30, which meant that we had to be up, dressed, and fed by 7:15, and I needed to get a solid eight hours to do well on the test. I set my alarm for 6:00, which of course woke Noah up as well, and we walked to the shower together, only to find it already occupied by Owen, Henry, Finn, Dylan, and Theo Alvarez, who had the misfortune to be Jas’ roommate. It was a slightly rowdy crowd, and apparently word had gotten around about Dylan’s massive dick.

“Dude,” Owen pleaded, “come on and show us.”

“Ok, fine.” Dylan began stroking his dick, and I couldn’t help but watch. What Jamie had said about hard-ons being contagious was true, and I got hard. At first, I was embarrassed, but when I looked around, I realized that everyone else was hard too, and unselfconsciously looking at each other, so I indulged myself, taking in the erect penises of various sizes and firm buttocks as I washed myself. Neither Henry nor Finn had any tan lines, which was interesting.

We were all kind of staring without doing anything when Jamie walked in. “You guys comparing?”

“I heard about Dylan and had to see for myself,” Owen said.

“Well, you don’t want to be distracted during your placement tests,” I hadn’t thought of that, as aroused as I was now I was sure to have blue balls by the end of the five-hour testing session if I didn’t take care of myself, and I didn’t really have time to go back to my room and take care of myself. “You guys probably ought to go ahead and take care of yourselves.”

We all looked around sheepishly. Even though the other guys were more daring than I was, this was clearly farther than they had planned to go, but Jamie took the lead. He stood under the spray of the shower and soaped up his dick, then started stroking himself. The other guys gradually followed and finally I joined in. No one could criticize me if everyone else was doing it.

For a while, the room was silent except for the sounds of fapping and grunting and the spray of the showers. Then we all came in quick succession.

“Now, I’m ready for the placement test,” Finn joked, which broke the tension. We finished showering and went back to our dorm rooms to dress before breakfast. I fueled up on protein for the tests, selecting coffee, boiled eggs, and toast.

They had converted the oldest gym on campus, officially the Theodore Roosevelt ’76 Athletic Center, into a testing center by dragging rows of desks onto the floors. We were all given an assigned seat and timed tests – starting with a half hour of multiple choice and synonym questions, which I breezed through in 15 minutes.

After that we had a two-hour-long math test, followed by another hour of our chosen language. Those turned out to be the hardest for me. I’d never been good at math, and I thought I’d been good at Spanish in middle school, but it was clear that Wilson assumed that students placing into upper-level Spanish would be way more fluent than I was. I had no idea what some of the questions were even asking and had to guess blindly. It turned out to be a good thing that I’d masturbated in the shower. The kid in front of me had worn flip-flops that he took off under his desk, and if I weren’t in my refractory period I definitely would have gotten distracted.

After the math test, we had a series of reading passages with multiple choice questions, and then a longer essay prompt, and the test finished up with short sections of general science and social studies knowledge. Finally, the proctor called out time, and we handed in our tests before being released to lunch.

To my misfortune, Jas caught up with me outside the gym. I realized that he hadn’t showered that morning, or possibly since he got to Wilson.

“I thought that was pretty easy. How did you do?”

“Some of the math was pretty tricky,” I admitted.

“It’s not so bad, you just have to know how to guess effectively,” Jas proceeded to rattle off advice on test-taking that anyone who attended public school had had drilled into their heads continuously since third grade. I couldn’t manage to shake him off, and he followed me to lunch.

The big event of the afternoon was the activities fair. Every student was required to participate in at least one extracurricular activity or sport each semester, and it was advised to do at least three if you wanted to get into a good college. Jas had told me he was going to do debate, so I passed it and found the one club I knew Jas would never go near – the Young Democrats. Finn was hanging out at the table, and introduced me to his brother Conor, who turned out to be the club president.

“So, what exactly do y’all do?” I asked Conor.

“A mix of volunteering and invited speakers,” Conor answered, “this year there are state elections in Virginia and New Jersey, so we’ll be doing a lot of phone banking this semester. I do have to tell you that you can’t use a partisan club as your required extracurricular.

I signed up anyway and we went looking for additional clubs. We passed by a booth for something called the Gilded Talon, which billed itself as the school’s ‘secret society.’

“I thought the secret societies were supposed to be, you know, secret,” I remarked.

“Yeah, the Gilded Talon’s a fake secret society,” Finn explained.

“How does that work?”

“So, there was this reforming headmaster back in the ‘50s who wanted to outlaw the secret societies because he thought they were elitist. Of course, the board of trustees is made up of all society members, so they didn’t let him. The compromise was that he could set up the Gilded Talon, which lets anybody join but calls itself secret because they have this hokey initiation ritual where you have to pledge allegiance to the school and promise to be a fine upstanding young citizen.”

“Sounds like bullshit.”

“It is, but some members of actual secret societies join. What they actually do is organize a bunch of charity activities, so it looks good on your college applications.”

Finn wanted to check out the ski club, which I had zero interest in, so I wandered around by myself until I found Theo Alvarez wearing a Young Republicans button in front of the table for the school newspaper, the Wilson Chronicle, which was run by a senior from Charleston, South Carolina named Carrie Prescott.

“We don’t just publish press releases for the principal,” Carrie said, “we do actual investigative reporting. Last year we FOIAed the police department.”

“Wow.”

Theo and I both signed up, and then I passed by the table for the literary magazine. It turned out that its meetings were at the same time as the newspaper, but I decided that I would submit a story.

Inspired, I went back to my room and started writing. Noah came in a few minutes later and cleared his throat.

“So, about this morning…”

“Yeah.” I stopped typing, suddenly nervous that Noah had figured out that I was gay from the way I’d looked at him while we were masturbating together.

“I don’t think we need to worry as much about walking in on each other, since we’ve already seen each other.”

“I guess that’s a good point.”

“I mean, knock if you’re with girls or something, but if it’s just you I don’t think we need to worry about it.”

I thought about what Noah had said as I lay in bed before going to sleep that night. Once we’d already seen each other naked and masturbating, there was no real reason for modesty – except, of course, that Noah still didn’t seem to realize I was gay. Everyone else at Wilson, except Jas of course, seemed much more comfortable with public nudity than I was. None of the other guys had batted an eyelash at showering together, and Dylan had even walked back to the dorm naked from practice – the rumor was that the upperclassmen on the soccer team had stolen all the freshmen’s clothes as part of a hazing ritual.

Maybe I was just overly self-conscious about my sexual orientation, since no one, not even Jas, had said anything mean about Owen, or maybe it was just because I was from a backwards small town and I needed to get over my prudishness if I was going to become the sophisticated cosmopolitan I wanted to be. Either way, I was starting to rethink the Freshman 500. Maybe it was time for me to get out of my comfort zone and get with the program.

Or maybe I had it all wrong and Jasper was right the whole time. Maybe this was all some elaborate prank by the secret societies to trick the fags into embarrassing themselves. Or maybe Jamie meant well but he had miscalculated the administration’s tolerance for streaking traditions, and I was going to be the kid who got ‘made an example of’ and kicked out of school when we all got caught.

It took me a long time to get to sleep, and when I finally did, I had that same erotic dream about chasing Jamie and the others nude – only this time I knew what they looked like naked. The alarm woke me up before I had a wet dream this time, but I was rock hard. So was Noah, so at least I didn’t have to be embarrassed about that.

We both stripped naked before putting on our towels and walking to the shower. The same group was in there as yesterday and they were already starting to play with their cocks, so Noah and I joined in.

“So, when does all this Freshman 500 shit start?” Owen asked.

“Lights out is 10:30,” Jamie answered, “meet in the common room at 10:45, and be naked. That means no shoes or socks either. Jewelry’s fine as long as it doesn’t cover your junk or get in the way of running, and Nolan you can wear your glasses.” Jamie had mentioned me by name, which meant that he was obviously expecting me to be there, but I was too close to cumming to respond. I thought about us all being barefoot, and that brought me over the edge.

I was the first to cum, but I provoked a chain reaction and pretty soon all of us had shot off loads of semen that disappeared down the drain. We finished washing ourselves and began walking back to our respective rooms. Jamie, Finn, Dylan, Henry, and Theo didn’t bother to cover up with their towels.

“Tell your friends and roommates,” Jamie said as he opened the door to his room.

“Where is your roommate?” Finn asked Theo.

Theo rolled his eyes. “Probably still asleep. I don’t think he’s taken a shower since he got here.”

“Ew.”

I worried about the Freshman 500 all day. We had to go to the main administration building to get the results of our placement tests and then sign up for classes based on our scores. I had excellent scores on the reading and writing portions, but not so great in math, so I ended up in Geometry. The good news was that I was in a section with Owen and Logan from my hall.

The upperclassmen who weren’t on sports teams or prefects were moving in and the campus was busier than I had yet seen it. I realized for the first time just how many people would be watching us if it was really as big a deal as Jamie and Finn made it out to be. By the end of dinner, I had half talked myself out of it.

Ironically, it was Jas who changed my mind. Theo was telling Asher Montgomery when to meet in the common room just before lights out, when Jas overheard them.

“You’re not actually doing that ridiculous thing? It’s disgusting and you’re bound to get in trouble.”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” Theo retorted. Asher gave Jas a dirty look, and he retreated to his room. I realized that if I didn’t participate, the other guys on the hall would think I was the same as Jas. It was obvious that he was well on his way to becoming a social outcast and I didn’t want to share the same fate.

When Jamie came through and announced lights out, I went back to my room. Instead of changing into my pajamas, I stripped completely naked. Noah did the same thing.

“I bet this is going to be fun,” he remarked.

“Mm-hmm.” I gritted my teeth, and when the clock said 9:44, we both left the door unlocked and walked to the common room. It was crowded with naked boys, some of whom I had yet to see naked – Asher, Logan, Ashton Cole. But I was too nervous to be turned on.

Jamie walked into the room, as naked as the rest of us, and every head turned to him.

“Alright, I want you guys to follow me. We can’t wake up Hodes, so we need to walk quietly until we get out of the building and then we’re going to take it at a run. Got it?”

We all nodded. Jamie walked down the staircase and we followed him, our bare feet padding noiselessly on the steps. He opened the front door to the building and we walked out into the warm night air. Across the quadrangle, another group of freshman girls was coming out of Norcott.

Jamie paused until everyone was out of the building and then ran across the quadrangle. We ran after him, and somehow, I started out at the front of the pack. We turned right coming out of the quad and ran past empty classroom buildings. Then we got to the upperclassmen dormitories. Kids were lining the path on either side, just like in my dream, but instead of shouting abuse at us, they were shouting encouragement. Some of the girls flashed us as we passed, which didn’t do anything for me but elicited cheers from some of the boys behind me.

I let myself fall back to the middle of the pack. Dylan and Henry, the most athletic of our hall, were the first to pass me, followed by Finn and Owen. Feeling as though the hard part was behind me, I allowed myself to ogle them. I figured that the hard part was over.

We passed the upperclassman dormitories and looped around the athletic fields. It was actually a pretty strenuous run, and by the time we got back to the dorm, I was straggling at the back of the pack and out of breath. Jamie turned around and shushed everyone at the entrance, and we tiptoed back up the staircase to the common room, where we were in for one more surprise.

The common room was full of naked upperclassmen, and they all had tattoos.




   
   
   
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