42...

“I’m not really interested man,” Tommy said. He began rising from the park bench, but curiosity stayed him. “And how the hell do you know my name?”
“We know a lot about you,” Lester looked up at him, squinting his eyes against the late spring sun. He stood up from the bench quite easily. “C’mon. Let’s go get a drink.”
“What do you mean, ‘We’?” Tommy stammered. Lester was enjoying his shock on some level. Unfortunately for Lester, this would be one of the last times he would ever be able to shake Tommy’s cool. “And frankly, I gotta tell you man, I’m really not interested in working for a sign company.”
“It’s just the name of the place,” Lester sighed. “It’s not really a sign company. C’mon, let me buy you a drink. Nothing unsavory, I promise you.”
Lester took them to a small and empty bar a couple of blocks away. The place seemed just that much darker in comparison to the battering sunlight outside. Lester nursed a beer and told Tommy about how he had been watching him for weeks, about how his every move and conversation had been scoped, about how he had the right sort of morality that this group of his was looking for.
“And what sort of morality is that?” Tommy asked with a smirk.
“Ambiguous,” Lester answered as if he had answered the same question a hundred times.
“And how do you know that?”
Lester told him about the testing. Apparently the Pornography in Society class (or Dirty 230 as the students called it) was a set up, and the weekly tests given throughout were used to gauge students’ personalities against some shadow criteria.
“Seriously?” Tommy asked.
“C’mon, university credit for watching porn? We have the same sort of sexuality classes set up in a lot of other majors as well”
“So what about me fit your so called criteria?”
“Your anti-social, creative, you border on being a sociopath, you like blunt honesty… a lot of things Tommy. Frankly, we’ve gotten pretty good at spotting the right kind of people from a mile away.”
“What if I say no?”
“I drink this beer, pay the check and we never see each other again. But if you ever try to bring this conversation to the light of day, you will find your life in a mess you cannot even imagine. Well, maybe you can imagine.”
They sat and talked for another hour and a half. Tommy asked if he could think about it, and by that Friday afternoon he had walked off the university grounds, never to return.
To this day, he would be unable to graduate without both returning, and paying a hefty fine on, a copy of Lansing, Store Bought.