Half the swim team had an orgy in a South Campus elevator, and it’s all anyone can talk about for weeks, if you don’t count regular conversations about food or class or politics or where to score weed or whether Drew needs to stop playing goddamn Zelda so people can watch the Simpsons hour. Other than that, though, hoo we, it’s all orgy rumors, all the time. This is the most entertaining bit of gossip since the orgy that was supposed to have taken place in a South Campus lounge last year; that one probably didn’t happen but the elevator one definitely did. (It’s always South Campus, South Campus is where the stoners and the poly kids live; North Campus is all first years, runners, and people who would be Republicans at other schools. There are sure enough multiple-partner hookups on North Campus, they’re just more drunken, ad hoc affairs you couldn’t call proper orgies, just three or four people fumbling at each other in a fourth floor hallway before crawling into a dorm room to fuck. South Campus plans its debaucheries.)

It’s a fun story, because half the people involved in it were free and clear and just there for a good time, and the other half, uh, had people they were still dating from back home and who they had to call and apologize to the next morning. Nobody apparently locked it into their word hoard, a dark, pleasurable secret they’d carry to their grave or at least until winter break, they all wanted to do the ethical thing and hash it out, and more power to them for it. Most of those conversations ended with a breakup, unsurprisingly and probably for the best; carrying a high school relationship into college is a fool’s errand, anyway. Not all of them, though — one swimmer’s partner was calling to confess their own orgy that same weekend and last I heard that couple is still together even now almost twenty years later.