There is a party

Everyone is there

Everyone will leave

At exactly the same time

-Talking Heads

Marla had been the queen of North Whitfield High. Literally crowned Homecoming Queen her senior year, when Peter was a pimply freshman still covered in a layer of baby fat. But she had been the acknowledged ruler of the school, and of the hearts of every red-blooded male who walked its halls, testosterone oozing from every pore as they tried to gain a moment of her favor, long before that. The hair, the legs, the studied nonchalance afforded by her family's money – she was everything Peter wanted. And now he had her.

Peter held up the poster against the wall. Miss Resaca Beach 1983. Marla Maples. Her smile was for him and him alone.

From the first level of the loft, Peter looked over his shoulder, down to the three dorks on the floor. "What do you think? This a good spot?" All three of them looked up, blinking like surprised owls in their oversized glasses. The Ewok kept whatever shitty opinion he had to himself, as usual, though he was clearly writing a fucking essay about it in his enormous head. Chewy stared at Marla's lean, tan body, but he said nothing. He licked his lips. Only R2-D2 spoke. "That's puerile," she said.

Fucking puerile. If you're jealous, say you're jealous. Don't make me break out the dictionary.

"I think it looks perfect," Peter said. "You know I knew her in high school?" Well, sort of. He didn't exactly know her, really. He knew about her – knew way more about her than she would have expected or appreciated, considering she probably couldn't have picked him out of a lineup. But Peter had always been good at finding out things about people, things that might prove useful later on.

"Peter." It was Chewy. Russell. "Do you want to play? The party could use a fighter." Russell was the least objectionable of the three. Peter, who fancied himself something of a dashing, Han Solo-esque rogue, had even briefly considered taking on the lumbering, hirsute Russell as a sidekick, when Franklin first brought him around to Wintertree 79. But then Russell was soon joined by his girlfriend Tara in her wheelchair, and the two of them proceeded to spend every goddamn waking moment of the semester so far in Peter's room, playing Dungeons & Dragons with Franklin. Peter had known he was taking a risk with the roommate lottery, but he hadn't realized he'd be getting three dorks for the price of one.

"No thanks, Ch..." Almost screwed up. "Russell." Peter hadn't yet uttered his private nicknames for them out loud. He figured Russell would take it in stride, and Franklin would just stew about it in his usual passive-aggressive way. Plus even Franklin couldn't deny that he looked exactly like a fucking Ewok: short and teddy-bear plump, his cherubic lips peeking out of a thicket of facial hair. What kept Peter's mouth shut was Tara. Even Peter Kirkland, who once took a shit in Carl French's locker because Carl laughed at him when he couldn't pronounce "Titania" when they read A Midsummer Night's Dream in English class – even Peter Kirkland had enough basic human decency to realize that calling a paraplegic girl "R2-D2" to her face could only end badly.

The thing was, Peter knew how to pronounce "Titania." He just wanted to say "tit" out loud in class. "Tit on ya." He wanted laughs, but he could tell that Carl was laughing at him.

Peter stepped down from the loft to his DUH-issue desk and bent to open the top drawer. He retrieved the box of thumbtacks inside, but the box was light and made a lonely sound when he shook it. There was only one tack left in the box.

"Yo, Franklin." The Ewok craned his neck up again. God, there weren't many things Peter liked more than standing on furniture, and this room gave him so many opportunities to do just that. "You got any thumbtacks?"

"No."

"What about nails?"

"It's against University Housing regulations to use nails in residents' rooms."

"Really." Peter swept his arm, like one of Barker's Beauties, toward the framed vinyl picture disc hanging above Franklin's desk: a shitty painting of a cosmic wizard, the work of someone or something named "Eloy." Peter was almost positive Franklin had never listened to it, whatever it was, and equally positive that it was the only record he owned. "So that isn't a nail holding up your wizard-rock album?"

Franklin dropped his Monster Manual and stood up in a huff. "Fine." He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a box of nails and tossed them up to Peter. Say this for the Ewok: he respected logic even more than he respected rules. "Do you need a hammer?"

"I've got a hammer. I could use some help with this."

"Fine." Peter had never seen Franklin refuse a direct request, no matter how odious he thought the task. Franklin hauled himself up the ladder to the loft's first level. Barely five feet up, he held on to one of the 4x4 posts for support. Peter figured an Ewok would have found the tree fort-esque loft much more comfortable.

Peter stepped back up onto the loft and grabbed his hammer from his toolbox. He handed one corner of the poster to Franklin. "Just hold this up." Franklin held the poster against the wall, and Peter adjusted it. Up close, he got a whiff of Franklin's cologne, which he wore every day. It was some drugstore brand, pungent and cloying. Peter could only guess at what Franklin was trying to cover up by wearing it. With the poster mostly level, Peter placed a nail in the top right corner. "Watch your fingers," he said, and he swung the hammer, driving the nail, his hand, the corner of the poster and the hammer straight through the drywall.

White dust coated Peter's arm as he extricated it from the volleyball-size hole he just smashed in the wall, and Franklin's beard had a good dusting as well. The top corner of the poster was now wrinkled and torn, though at least Marla remained intact. But through the hole, Peter could just make out four walls, a ceiling and a floor: a secret room, hidden behind the wall.

The room in the wall was all Peter could think about for the next 24 hours. The initial exploratory phase didn't take long. The day after the discovery, he skipped Microeconomics so he could have 79 to himself for once. He cranked "Immigrant Song" to the max to mask the noise – the RAs in Wintertree were like fucking traffic cops at the end of the month, desperate to hit their quotas. One of them had busted Peter in the first week of the semester for being on a girls' hall, like, five minutes after ten. Pissed off, Peter had done a little digging and found out that the Residence Life Coordinator, the guy in charge of the RAs, was indeed giving the RAs write-up quotas, and was just generally acting like a corrupt small-town sheriff. Ron Marston. What a shitbag. Peter had also found out some kind of personal shit about Marston – shit that he just put in his pocket, figuring it would come in handy later.

With Zeppelin roaring full-blast, Peter hammered out an opening in the drywall big enough for him to squeeze through. The room was windowless, like 79 itself, buffered from the outside world by at least four walls on all sides. The only light came through the irregular hole in the wall. Peter took dimensions with a tape measure: 17' by 12', the same as 79. The ceiling was eight feet high, well below 79's absurd 25 feet and just under DUH regulation height. The floor was covered in the same institutional carpet as the rest of Wintertree's rooms, manufactured in the very mill in Dalton where Peter's father had worked for twenty years, and where Peter himself would most assuredly end up if he flunked out of UNWG. The room in the wall was in every respect a normal residence-hall room, except for the fact that it didn't have a door. Not yet, at least.

Peter skipped American Lit Before 1865 to take a bus to the hardware store to buy a hacksaw and a box of thumbtacks. He skipped Biology to expand the hammered hole into a rectangle just smaller than the Miss Resaca Beach poster. He tacked Marla up over the new door. His tape of personal favorite Zeppelin tracks hit "Stairway to Heaven" just as he stepped back to admire his handiwork. The illusion was flawless. There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold. Peter stared at Marla, at the smile of a girl for whom gold was not a treasure but an assumed right. He had always thought that if he could get close enough to that smile, he would discover a new world behind it. A better world. Now he knew it was true. His left hand reached for the small hard nipple protruding from his right pectoral, sculpted in daily visits to the gym over the last three years. He had made himself better, in preparation. His right hand slid under the waistband of his jeans.

When he was finished he felt emptied out. He walked to Weston to find something to fill himself back up. None of the choices appealed, so he settled on cereal: a bowl of Froot Loops and a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. As he crossed the service area to the milk dispenser he saw a familiar, shaggy shape: Chewy.

Peter tried to reverse course to avoid him, but it was too late. Russell turned from the dispenser and immediately saw him. "Peter," he said. "We've got a table over by the window, if you'd care to join us." Russell was always so nice, so fucking polite. Peter didn't believe him. He saw right through him.

"Thanks, but I'm meeting some friends," Peter lied. Russell shrugged and continued on to his table. Peter squeezed milk from the dispenser's pink plastic udder onto his cereal, hating the pleasure he took in the action.

Peter found an unoccupied table half-obscured by a potted plant, as far away from the big window on the north side of Weston as possible. Through the spiky fronds of the plant, he could see Russell, Franklin and Tara, laughing. Talking about him, most likely. Making fun of him for not taking calculus or whatever like they did. He didn't need to take fucking calculus or pretend to be a fucking elf to prove how smart he was.

"Goddamn RAs are like the fucking Gestapo."

"The what?"

"The fucking... Hitler's secret police. The fucking Nazis."

"Then just say the Nazis, dude."

Two guys at the table behind Peter were talking. Peter had to agree: the RAs were like the fucking Nazis.

"They busted Eugene's party on Saturday."

"That was a party?"

"Exactly. And the Gest – the fucking Nazis still busted it. Eugene might get expelled."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Nowhere is safe, dude. Not in Wintertree."

Every once in a while, an idea will appear, fully formed, like a gift from the gods. Gravity, E=MC2, the fucking Declaration of Independence or whatever – Peter hadn't exactly done the research, but he knew that when someone was lucky enough to receive such a gift, he should not squander it. He should drop whatever useless shit he was doing, and throw his full energy into making his perfect, divine idea a reality.

Peter didn't bother finishing his cereal or busing his tray. He ran back to Wintertree, found some paper and a marker, and executed his vision.

When the three dorks returned to 79 for their nightly make-believe session, Peter was waiting. He pointed out his handiwork to them. "I've had an idea," he said. He'd tacked a sheet of white notebook paper to the wall, underneath the poster of Marla Maples. On the paper he'd written the word "HEAVEN" in bold black letters, with an arrow pointing up, into the inverted V made by Marla's legs. That's where Peter would make his heaven on earth, one way or another.

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So this Interlude turned out to be even longer than I anticipated, so I decided to just post the rest of it in a new chapter - which you can read by clicking the "Continue Reading" button that is probably just below!