Lorenzo was not Lorenzo's real name. I could tell because he didn't look the least bit Italian. He looked American, with a classic Anglo-Saxon bearing and anachronous poise which disturbs and arouses the resentment of all who don't have it. He had light brown hair which gathered thickly down to his ears and neck, swooping up into gravity-defying flourishes at the ends. His bangs were always swept to the right, leaving uncovered a strong pale forehead.
One time I found out that Lorenzo's real last name was something like Laurent or Lawrence, but to this day I never learned his first name. When I pressed him on this, he said it was Ralph, which I instantly knew was false. "My dad had a great sense of humor," he said. "I was conceived while he was wearing a Polo Ralph Lauren button-up. Thus I became Ralph Lorenzo — a dad joke from the moment of my birth."
It's more likely that he took the name Lorenzo because he liked the character in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. He had a stint in theater in high school, which he said was all-too-brief and ended catastrophically. No one (besides the actress playing Jessica he asserts) took kindly to his tendency to improvise kisses, to extend them far more than the script called for.
So he never became a "theater kid" apparently. My read is he started to treat life as theater instead—he was fond of making dramatic pronouncements, witty remarks, antagonistic conversational thrusts. This irritated most, but was interesting to me. Somehow, there was always truth in what he said, even if it appeared a pose. That was what really irritated people. I think they would've accepted his theatricality if he identified as gay. Even though we were at one of the most historically conservative Christian schools in the nation, our cultural mores were largely downstream from the fetid sewage dump of Netflix shows and TikTok clips. Here, like all other universities in America, being gay or modeling all your mannerisms off of f——s is how you signal nonthreateningness; it is impossible for intelligent people to rise far in social ranking or even gain friends if they don't abase themselves in this way. Lorenzo did not abase himself. That much was clear from when I first saw him at the book club, and was drawn to him as of under some mystic enchantment I hadn't felt since boyhood, and didn't know was possible to feel again.
