Louis liked the name: Prospect Cemetery. As if its prescient eighteenth-century builders had known that one day college boys would come there to look for one-night boyfriends.
Louis himself found no prospects in Prospect Cemetery. He tried but they didn’t find him pretty. He sat on the branch of an apple tree and relished the collective ruckus of their pleasure. They didn’t mind; he cleaned up after they left.
One day, he lingered on the trash of the boy he loved but couldn’t have. Gus Pitman, senior, kinesiology. He wanted to pocket Pitman’s condom, he longed to eat the leftovers of the pizza that Pitman had bitten into with his perfect teeth.
Pitman actually talked to Louis one night: he zipped his trousers up, clapped Louis on the back, and asked, “How’s it going?”
Louis replied that he hated winter nights.
“I guess I’ll see you around,” Pitman said as he stood there shirtless and smoothed his ginger stache down with his thumb.
Back in his dorm, Louis locked himself in the bathroom and cried. His tears, hot with delight, made him crave apples.
On winter nights when Prospect Cemetery was full of snow and empty of boys, Louis stayed in his bed and pictured framed photographs on his room’s bare walls. In those photos, he was married and had a husky by his side. Pitman’s favorite breed. Louis always threw the trash away: he never brought the condom home, he never ate the crust. Louis may have seemed ugly to the cemetery lover boys, but he believed in consent.