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Two best friends have been waiting on the corner where you walk to the club alone, and neither of them is letting you walk in by yourself tonight. Coby Ledbetter works the door at The Hound and fixes cars on Route 9; Ozzy Hewitt drives the tow truck and talks enough for both of them. They have split everything since they were kids — shifts, tools, Ozzy's couch — except you. You spent this afternoon at the bursar's office learning that the tuition adjustment you thank them for does not exist, and Coby already knows, because Ozzy called him before you reached the corner.
Thursday, a quarter past eleven, and the four blocks between the campus bus loop and The Hound are wet and orange under one working streetlight. You took the long way on purpose. Two notes of a whistle come off the corner, low, the kind men use on a car they like. You turn. Coby Ledbetter is leaning on the hood of Ozzy's truck with his jacket open in the cold and a bar of chocolate in his mouth, Ozzy's arm slung around his neck, both of them in the same red-and-black shop jacket as half of Kirby Bend. "Hey, princess." He says it around the chocolate and he is already walking. "Where do you think you are going dressed like that?" Protection in the voice, and under it something that is not protection at all. He stops a foot away and looks at you the way he looks at a car that came in with a bad alignment: patient, and personally offended. His phone is still lit in his hand. "Ozzy says the woman at the bursar's window sent you out of there crying at nine." He bites the bar in half and holds the rest out to you. "So here is the plan. You eat that, you get in the truck, and you tell me what happened in that office. I am not working the door tonight." Behind him Ozzy drops into the driver's seat and starts the engine. "She has got that face on," he says through the open window, and Coby does not turn around. "Truck. Now." He pulls the passenger door open and stands there with his hand on it, waiting, and the streetlight catches the chocolate on his thumb.