The Big Bad Wolf

TWO PEOPLE VERY MUCH IN LOVE. Often a beautiful thing to watch. But not in this case, not on this starry night in the hills of central Massachusetts. The devoted lovers' names were Vince Petrillo and Francis Deegan, and they were juniors at Holy Cross College in Worcester, where they had been inseparable since their first week as freshmen. They'd met in the Mulledy dorm on Easy Street and had rarely been apart since. They'd even worked at the same fish restaurant the past two summers in Provincetown. When they graduated, they planned to be married, then do the grand tour through Europe. Holy Cross was a Jesuit school that, justly or unjustly, had some reputation for being homophobic. Offending students could be suspended or even expelled under the Breach of Peace rule, which forbade "conduct which is lewd or indecent." The Catholic Church did not actually condemn "temptation" toward members of the same sex, but homosexual acts were often considered "intrinsically perverted" and seen as constituting a "grave moral disorder." Because the Jesuits could be hard on homosexual relationships, among the students, anyway, Vince and Francis kept theirs as private and secret as they could. In recent months, though, they had started to figure their relationship probably wasn't a very big deal, especially given the scandals among the Catholic clergy. The Campus Arboretum at Holy Cross had long been a hangout for students who wanted to be alone and those who had romantic intentions. The garden area boasted over a hundred different kinds of trees and shrubs, and overlooked downtown Worcester, "Wormtown," as it was sometimes called by students. That night Vince and Francis, dressed in athletic shorts, T-shirts, and matching purple-and-white baseball caps, strolled down Easy Street to a brick patio and lawn area known as Wheeler Beach. It was crowded, so they continued on to find a quiet spot in the arboretum. There, they lay on a blanket under a nearly full moon and a sky studded with stars. They held hands and talked about the poetry of W. B. Yeats, whom Francis adored and Vince, a pre-med student, tolerated as best he could. The two men were an unusual couple physically. Vince was just over fivefoot- seven and weighed one eighty. Most of it was solid, due to his obsessive weight lifting at the gym, but it was obvious he had to work hard at it. He had curly black hair that framed a soft, almost angelic face that wasn't too much different from his baby pictures, one of which his lover carried in his wallet. Francis could make either sex drool, and that was Vince's private joke when they were among coeds, "Drool, fools!" Francis was six-foot-one, without an ounce of fat. His whiteblond hair was cut in the same style he had adopted as a sophomore at Christian Brothers Academy in New Jersey. He adored Vince with all his heart, and Vince worshiped him. They came for Francis, of course. He had been scouted, and purchased.