After breakfast, the poets and I walk down to Monmouth to inspect the basement wall while Homer ambles off to borrow a sledgehammer from the groundskeeper.

"I'm supposed to have class this afternoon. Instead, I'm going to be tearing a wall down with all of you in a dirty basement!" John tells Virgil rather excitedly, "Imagine the amount of mold spores and fungi growing in the dark down there! We could be walking into a giant death trap and not even know it until years from now!"

"Oh, that's lovely," Virgil says as he flips through a ring of keys to open the front door. "I'm wondering if I should be overly concerned by your fascination with mold and death, John."

"That's nothing," Beatrice tells him as she waits on the steps, hands in her pockets. "He took a sample of saliva from my mouth after our first kiss so he could compare interactions between bacteria from two different hosts. He's lucky I didn't outright bolt running that night."

"It was supposed to be romantic!" John exclaims, "I still have our petri dish, too. We made a bacterial baby together. Most women would be falling over themselves at this point."

"Falling over themselves to get away from you, I'm sure." Beatrice lifts an elegant eyebrow. 

"You should have dated that adorable football player last year," Lucan tells her from behind his book. "I warned you about pretty boys who wear gold earrings and recite Tagore. Now you have a man who grows fungi in his dorm room for fun."

John looks mildly offended.

"Just ignore them, Dante." Virgil smiles over at me as he pushes open the door to the old building. "The cold has everyone at each other's throats like rabid wolves for the first few days, but it's hardly anything serious."

"Really?" I reply, leaning against the wall as I wait for us to go inside, "I think rabid wolves are pretty serious."

I think of John and Beatrice's argument earlier and how close they seemed to ending their relationship after John's antics this morning with me at the window. But maybe I wasn't the best at judging people's characters or their relationships. 

I had grown up lonely, and not just lonely in the way that called for more social events or joining sports in high school, but lonely as in I had resigned myself to this fate since birth. My mother hadn't had an easy pregnancy, and labor had nearly ripped her apart like a bear exiting her womb tooth and nail, leaving her permanently scarred. So I hadn't had a sibling to share our mansion in Boston with, and I'd often wandered the marble halls playing with tiny toy cars and action figures until a nanny came to scoop me up for bedtime.

I assumed that because I lacked social indicators as a toddler, I couldn't tell whether the Poets wanted me there or were just being polite for the sake of Virgil toying with his newest plaything.

Virgil opens the door just as Homer comes up the walkway carrying a sledgehammer, his cheeks flushed red with exertion. 

"Oh, Homer!" Virgil turns to look at him, his expression brightening. "You got the hammer?"

"Yeah, of course. Do you know how hard it was to get the old man to let me borrow this thing?" Homer asks, somewhat miffed, "I traded him my favorite Rolex, but he damn near acted like I was going to kill someone. We better hurry this up before half the faculty comes pounding on our door."

"Christ," Virgil sighs and shoves open the door, "Let's get this done, men--"

Beatrice shoots Virgil a narrow-eyed look, and he immediately backtracks.

"And woman."

We enter Monmouth once more with all the courage of a team looking to explore a deep cavern. Poets, rich students with their pockets lined with money, including myself, but maybe not exactly like our fathers in the way that we were doing this purely to entertain ourselves and not profit off of what we found. There was an air of frivolous excitement about it because whatever we found would be our secret to keep down there in the darkness.

The tigers, exotic birds, and weasels were still there in their glass tanks when we passed by, untouched after last night. Only now, I could see the layer of dust caking everything and how gray the floor was with dirt and footprints. 

"Someone should really take a mop to this floor," John comments, and he lifts his shoe to inspect something wet and sticky, like muddy leaves stuck to the bottom of it. "This is getting ridiculous."

"We don't touch this floor," Virgil reminds him. "If someone wanders in, we can't have them thinking someone's been coming and going at all hours of the night."

"Oh, right," John says, rolling his eyes.

We reach the basement a few moments later, and I'm right behind Homer when there's a sudden scream that echoes down the hallway and the slap of footsteps heading toward us. 

"Oh, Wayneeee! If you want a piece of this ass, you'll have to work for it, darling!" Ovid screams from somewhere in the distance. 

"Heh-heh, don't mind if I do!" Wayne walks out of one of the rooms, his jeans unbuttoned, and then notices us standing there, staring at him like startled deer.

"Oh," he drawls, and proceeds to light up a ciggaret. "It's the Scooby Gang."

A second later, Ovid joins him in staring, butt-naked as the day he was born, minus a pair of pink socks on his feet.