My father's ghost follows me across the state several months later to Camden University, located in chilly Vermont, the same college that he'd smugly graduated from with honors when he was my age.

Even now, with my belongings crammed into cardboard boxes in the backseat of the tiny Benz purchased for a random birthday nearly a decade ago, I felt set up for a cruel prank. This had to be one of the old man's stupid jokes, threatening to sweep the rug out from under his only son's feet if he refused to go along with his absurd wishes. 

I think back to the conversation that we'd had at the dinner table in the weeks before he died. At the time, he'd asked me when I was planning on finding a nice wife to settle down with and have children like the rest of my graduating class.

"Who was that girl you liked in high school again, Dante?" My father had questioned in his deep, gravelly voice, "She was a lovely one. Why don't you call her and see what she's been up to?"

He'd been insinuating that I call Patrica Bogart, whom I'd slept with in a horse stable behind her house, and discovered that she was, undoubtedly, a freak in the sheets—er, stables. To this day, I couldn't even look at a riding crop without breaking into a nervous sweat. 

Patrica aside, I hadn't had love on my mind for a while now. I wanted to be a writer or a poet, and that was basically like asking to be castrated and tossed out into the cold. Nobody wanted to marry a poet, all they were known for was drinking, dying, and tragic backstories. 

A hungry growl escapes my stomach as I pull into the town of Allonby, a place that looked like it should have been on a postcard in a gift shop, which it probably had been. In the autumn, the trees would turn from green to vibrant reds and oranges. And like a silent signal cast into the atmosphere, the mom-and-pop shops around would fill their windows with scarecrows and pumpkins. 

I only knew these things because Dad had dragged us here on more than one occasion to relieve the fiery flames of his youth.

I park my Benz on the edge of a string of tiny gift stores and restaurants and get out to start looking for a decent place to eat that wouldn't send me sprinting to the nearest toilet. I hadn't taken my antacid this morning, and my stomach was in a snarl of disarray as usual.

Cheerful tourists come down with shopping bags and big hats as we pass by each other, then catch sight of me and frown. Some of them even visibly stepped aside to avoid me, though I didn't think I looked that intimidating with my choppy bangs and glasses thicker than a glass Coke bottle due to my quickly deteriorating eyesight.

There's a place called Handy's at the corner where I mercifully stop to grab a tuna sandwich and some chips, but while I wait at the checkerboard counter for the cashier to throw my hoagie into a paper bag, the bells over the door jingle and a couple of guys around my age step inside, pushing and shoving each other and laughing.

The cafe immediately falls under a quiet spell.

 As soon as the boys arrive at the counter in their fancy clothing and caps, they pique everyone's interest, including mine. We're all witnesses to something glorious in those short few minutes, clad in matching navy blue jackets with a short Latin phrase embroidered on the back.

“Levavi Oculos” 

One of the guys turns as if sensing my gaze, broad-shouldered with shaggy hair around the front and longer in the back and around his slightly too big ears. He points at me with one finger, then brings it up to his eyes, which were a rich, warm brown and completely unsettling.

They were bedroom eyes.

Eyes that were not for mortal men like me to see.

"Hey, kid!" The cashier grunts and slaps a soggy paper bag on the counter. "Order's up!"

I grab my sandwich, drop a ten dollar tip in the jar, and dash back outside. But not before catching sight of the boy watching me, a half-smirk forming on his face as I sprint away.