Zero to Hero
Harrington Price woke to the faintest hiss.
At first he thought it was part of a dream — something about a tea kettle, or maybe the radiator in his childhood bedroom. But then the smell hit him. Sharp. Chemical. Wrong.
He sat up in his narrow bunk, pushing his glasses up his nose with the back of his hand. The room was dim with the early-morning light barely touching the edges of the heavy curtains. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and froze.
Gas.
The realization jolted him fully awake. He stood — barefoot and pajama-clad and with his heart pounding. He hurried into the hallway of Delta Rho Sigma, the most exclusive fraternity on campus. The house was usually buzzing with noise, even at odd hours. Someone laughing. Someone bragging. Someone complaining about the quality of the catered brunch.
But now it was silent.
Too silent.
Harrington knocked on the first door. No answer. He pushed it open and found Preston Aldridge sprawled across his bed, unmoving. Harrington rushed to him, shook him, called his name. Preston didn’t stir.
The gas leak was worse than he thought.
He didn’t hesitate. Harrington hooked his arms under Preston’s and dragged him out into the hallway. Preston was taller, heavier, and built like someone who had never carried anything heavier than a lacrosse stick. Harrington strained, muscles trembling, but he got him to the front door and out onto the lawn.
One down.
He ran back inside.
Room after room, he found the same thing — unconscious young men in expensive pajamas, monogrammed robes, or rumpled T-shirts from charity galas they barely remembered attending. These were the same guys who mocked his thrift-store sweaters, who called him “Mother Teresa” when he volunteered at the campus food pantry, who treated him like a mascot rather than a brother.
But Harrington didn’t think about any of that now.
He just kept going.
He dragged them out one by one, his breath growing ragged, his arms shaking violently. Sweat mixed with the cold morning air each time he stumbled back onto the lawn. His feet were numb from running across tile and concrete. His vision blurred at the edges.
Still, he went back in.
On his seventh trip outside, one of the brothers stirred. Adrian Preble — red-haired, sharp-tongued, and usually the first to laugh at Harrington’s expense — blinked groggily at the sight around him.
Bodies. The entire fraternity sprawled across the grass like fallen dominoes. A dozen guys, some in pajamas, some in just their undies and Tshirts, some in just their briefs. lay stretched out upon the Delta Rho Sigma lawn. All were out cold and all were barefoot.
It was their limp and lifeless bare feet that unnerved Adrian.
His secret—this strange, embarrassing fixation he’d never understood and never dared to talk about—surged up like a wave he couldn’t outrun. He didn’t find the sight of their feet appealing; he found it overwhelming. Wrong. A sign, he feared, that something in him was fundamentally broken. Broken beyond merely being gay.
He froze right where he sat, pajamas damp with sweat, blue eyes wide in a way he couldn’t control.
Bare, limp feet were everywhere the redhead looked—splayed out in corpseposes as if they were awaiting toetags, some with toes pointed up towards the sky, some with their bare soles visible because their unconscious owner had been laid out on his stomach.
His brain was still doing that awful, involuntary zoom-lens thing—every unconscious guy on the lawn reduced to a pair of bare, slack feet his mind refused to ignore. The redhead hated that about himself. Hated the way panic and shame tangled together until he couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
Adrian’s chest tightened. His vision prickled at the edges. He felt heat crawl up his neck.
Not this. Not here. Not right out here in the open.
The handsome young men lying around him were all very much out cold. He had his choice to suck upon the toes of any of them—to wash any or all of their smooth soles with his tongue, He felt his penis spring to life beneath his pajamas…
Glancing around carefully, he scooted himself towards the unconscious form of a youth named Stuart Colby. He was clad only in a pair of blue and white boxer shorts. The young man’s body was slim and pink and toned. Beautiful fair skin that asked to be licked. Pink mannipples that decorated his chest. But it was his feet, of course, that were tormenting Adrian with their beauty. They mesmerized the redhead. Rather pink perfect feet they werecomplete with perfect toes that Adrian couldn’t resist smothering in gentle kisses.
The blond frat brother moaned drowsily but remained peacefully and helplessly asleep. His bare feet even twitched a bit as they were tenderly kissed. Adrian playfully tweaked his big toe … then he tweaked all of Stuart’s toes and both of his feet now. Then the redheaded youth proceeded to lift the unconscious lad’s foot to his face and sniffed between his toes … Adrian’s head spun with bliss. That smell did something to him. The something that he always feared would someday be discovered. And Stuart’s foot fragrance … it was the reason the redheaded youth spent the next five minutes kissing, licking and sniffing his frat brother’s heels and soles.
Even when Stuart began to stir a bit, Adrian continued sucking and kissing and licking every one of that beautiful blond young man’s equally beautiful toesprobing between them with his tongue like a man starved. He didn’t stop until Stuart’s bright blue eyes actually fluttered open. Adrian backed away, facing the opposite direction and trying to look completely innocent. After ac while he climbed to his feet and prepared to leave the scene. But he heard a voice,
“Adrian…?”
The redheaded youth turned and found a very conscious Stuart Colby looking at him, clearly confused He was propped weakly on his elbows, blond hair mussed, face pale from the gas, blinking at the chaos around him. He looked like someone who’d been dropped into the middle of a disaster movie without a script. His bare legs trembled as he tried to sit up straighter, and he winced as if the world itself hurt.
“Adrian…?” he croaked again, squinting at the redhead. “Why’re you… running off? And what—what happened? I feel like I got hit by a truck.”
Adrian swallowed hard. His throat felt tight, his pulse too loud. He relazed upon realizing that the blond youth hadn’t been aware that his frat brother hand been shamelessly worshipping his bare feet while he’d been unconscious. He forced his gaze upward—face, hair, shoulders, anywhere but the lawn full of limp soles and sprawled toes.
“You shouldn’t be moving yet,” The redhead managed, voice steadier than he felt. “There was a gas leak. Someone—someone got us all out.”
Stuart’s brow furrowed. “Someone? Who?”
“I don’t know,” Adrian lied automatically. He wasn’t ready to talk about the shadowy figure he vaguely remembered dragging bodies through haze. He wasn’t ready to talk about anything, really.
Stuart tried to push himself to his knees, wobbled, and nearly toppled. Adrian instinctively stepped forward to steady him—then froze again when his eyes flicked downward and
caught sight of the blond youth’s bare feet in the grass.
No. No no no. Not now.
He jerked his gaze back up so fast his neck twinged.
Stuart didn’t seem to notice his frat brother’s fluster; he was too busy trying to make sense of the scene. “Everyone’s out cold,” he murmured. “I don’t… I don’t remember getting outside.”
“Yeah,” Adrian said, hugging himself. “That’s the gas. Just… breathe slow. You’ll be okay.”
Stuart looked at him then—really looked—and his expression softened with concern. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”
“I’m fine,” Adrian said too quickly.
“You’re shaking.”
“I said I’m fine.”
A beat of silence stretched between them, broken only by the faint groans of other frat brothers beginning to stir.
Stuart’s voice dropped, gentler. “Adrian … don’t go. Please. I don’t wanna wake up alone in all this.”
That hit the redheaded youth in a place he wasn’t prepared for.
Not dramatic. Just human.
Adrian exhaled shakily and nodded once.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll stay. Just… don’t stand up yet. And don’t ask me why I look like I’m about to bolt. I don’t have a good answer.”
Stuart gave a weak, lopsided smile. “Fair enough.”
Adrian lowered himself to sit beside the handsome blond—careful, deliberate, eyes fixed firmly on the horizon and nowhere near the lawn full of unconscious, barefoot frat boys.
He could handle this. He just had to keep breathing.
Still, every time he looked around, his eyes would catch sight of a pair of helpless bare feet and his penis become that much harder. The redhead could hear his fellow first brothers now: the low murmur of moans emanating from the passed out young men. Some were slowly regaining consciousness and murmuring in utter drowsy confusion.
He tried to will his rockhard penis back into softness, pounding his crotch, wishing he could disappear, wishing he’d never let himself be talked into rushing a first in the first place. Adrian Preble kept trying to clear his head of the lust before any of his fallen frat brothers fully awoke and witnessed his shame.
Then he spotted Harrington Price — small, bespectacled Harrington Price — dragging another unconscious, barefooted brother down the Delta Rho Sigma steps.
Adrian tried to stand, but his legs buckled. He could only watch, helpless, as Harrington staggered back toward the house again. He’d been the mysterious figure who’d rescued him and the other frat brothers
“Harrington,” Adrian croaked, barely audible. “Stop. You’ve done enough.”
But Harrington didn’t hear him.
Two brothers were still unaccounted for. He had to be sure.
He pushed through the front door again, the smell of gas now overwhelming. His head swam. His knees buckled. He grabbed the railing, forced himself upright, and kept moving.
He checked the last two rooms.
Empty.
He turned toward the hallway — and that was when the world flashed white.
The explosion was loud enough to rattle windows across the quad. A bloom of fire and debris burst outward, and the fraternity brothers on the lawn jolted awake in confusion and terror.
Adrian shielded his face from the blast, coughing as dust and smoke rained down. When he looked up, the front of the house was gone.
And Harrington was nowhere in sight.
Hours later, wrapped in blankets and surrounded by paramedics, the brothers learned the truth.
The two missing members had been out on dates. They hadn’t been in the house at all.
Harrington had gone back inside for no one.
He’d gone back because he refused to leave anyone behind — even the people who had never treated him the way he deserved.
Adrian was the one who told the others what he’d seen. His voice shook, not from the cold but from something deeper — guilt, grief, and a dawning understanding of the kind of man Harrington had been.
“He saved us,” Adrian said quietly. “All of us. He didn’t even think twice.”
The brothers — privileged, polished, and usually so sure of themselves — fell silent. Some cried openly. Some stared at the ground. Some whispered apologies that would never reach the person who deserved them.
In the weeks that followed, they pooled their money — not from their parents’ accounts, but from their own. They commissioned a memorial on the campus green: a simple stone bench engraved with Harrington’s name and a line chosen by Adrian himself.
“He lived the brotherhood we only talked about.”
Students sat there often — especially those who felt out of place, overlooked, or underestimated. The bench became a quiet refuge, a reminder that heroism doesn’t always look like the movies.
Sometimes it looks like a nerdy young man in pajamas, barefoot and afraid, choosing compassion anyway.