Zack

Zack enters the novel as Brendan Fletcher’s roommate and ready-made companion in college life: another suburban lacrosse type, at first almost a double of Brendan, who promises a year of drinking, weed, and parties. As their friendship grows less easy, Zack spends more time with Lexa and begins to reject the way he and Brendan have talked about women. That shift makes him more than a comic portrait of dorm-room excess; it exposes the gap between the boys’ old bond and the standards Zack is beginning to apply to himself.

Arrival at Einstein Hall

Zack is introduced in Brendan’s room on the seventh floor of Einstein Hall, where he and Brendan are already bonding when Brendan’s mother, Eve Fletcher, returns from the Visitors Lot. A broad-shouldered student from Boxborough, Zack wears a narrow, neatly trimmed beard that recalls Brendan’s own senior-year facial hair. Their outfits match almost exactly—flip-flops, baggy shorts, tank tops, and angled baseball caps—with Zack’s puka-shell necklace providing the main variation. Even their mini-fridges seem to complete the pairing: Zack proposes giving one over to beer and using the other for lunch meat and other non-beer food.

The resemblance disappoints Eve, who had hoped Brendan’s roommate would broaden his horizons rather than mirror his suburban background. For Brendan, however, Zack’s familiarity quickly becomes an asset. Walking together after Eve leaves, Zack puts an arm around him with the easy physicality of an established friend. Brendan compares the gesture to the jokingly affectionate behavior of his former friend Wade, but the comparison describes Brendan’s associations, not Zack’s intentions. Zack’s casual manner helps turn the new room into a place where Brendan can imagine belonging.

The promise of college camaraderie

Zack gives that imagined college life an exuberant, deliberately crude voice. He predicts that they will have “mad fun this year” and announces that alcohol will be consumed in Room 706; Brendan responds by adding weed and parties to their shared forecast. Zack then loudly adds, “Dicks will be sucked!” Two Asian girls walking ahead turn to look at them, registering how obnoxious the performance sounds to bystanders. The exchange establishes both the boys’ shared appetite for provocation and Zack’s willingness to make sexual bravado part of their public identity.

That intimacy is not only performative. When Brendan returns to the room for a Skype session with Becca, he asks Zack for privacy. Zack first says he can put on his headphones; Brendan then asks whether he could clear out for five or ten minutes instead. The small negotiation shows Brendan treating the room as shared space and Zack as someone he can ask directly, though the excerpt does not establish what Zack ultimately does. Their everyday closeness also makes the room’s later changes more noticeable: as Zack becomes less present, Brendan does not experience his absence as uncomplicated freedom.

Sexual bravado and shared space

One night, Brendan wakes at three in the morning to find Zack stumbling around drunk. Zack tells him that he tried to hook up with Less-Hot Kayla, who was not interested; he adds that he was not really interested either, while joking that Hot Kayla would have been a different matter. His account treats the failed encounter as comic material and sorts the women involved by attractiveness. The distinction echoes the casual, evaluative talk about women that Brendan later identifies as a strain in their friendship.

After getting into bed, Zack’s presence continues to intrude on the shared room. Brendan cannot return to sleep and realizes that Zack is masturbating nearby, apparently trying to be quiet; their beds are close together. The scene makes the physical limits of roommate life part of the story, setting private sexual behavior against the intimacy and awkwardness of a space they cannot easily separate. It also complicates Zack’s earlier loud sexual boasting: the performance of confidence gives way to a more private act that Brendan observes without either of them discussing it in the moment.

Zack also takes an active role in Brendan’s romantic decisions. In one exchange, after Brendan asks whether Zack is trying to set him up with someone, Zack insists that he is only asking a simple question. Annoyed that Brendan has already answered twice, he gets Brendan to agree to hook up with the woman if she is as great as Zack says. Zack nods as though Brendan has finally given the right answer. The scene presents him as a persuasive friend and an informal matchmaker, but also as someone who can push Brendan toward a response and treat compliance as the expected outcome.

Lexa, absence, and a changed standard

Zack’s relationship with Lexa reshapes the roommate friendship. Before Brendan’s visit home, Becca is expected to come for the weekend, and Zack agrees to “sexile himself” for a couple of days. At that point, the account describes his on-and-off relationship as being back on and refers to the girl as a mystery; Zack hardly sleeps in the room anymore. Brendan says the room often feels like a single, but the apparent convenience does not erase his feeling that he misses Zack. Even when Zack is around, Brendan finds him more distant, absorbed in incoming texts and less engaged in their old joking routine.

Later, Brendan describes Zack spending his time with Lexa, sleeping in her room and pushing her wheelchair around campus. When Brendan encounters him at the Student Center Chick-fil-A, he asks directly whether Zack is angry with him. Zack says he is not, but Brendan presses the deeper issue: he had expected Zack to tell him about Lexa because they were friends. Zack confirms the friendship, then explains why he has pulled back from their familiar way of talking: “The way we talk about girls? The shit we say? I didn’t want to do that to her. She deserves better.” The relationship that had once been an unnamed, intermittent romance is now identified with Lexa, and Zack’s explanation connects his absence to a specific refusal to expose her to their degrading talk.

Friendship and narrative significance

Zack’s trajectory is defined less by a dramatic break than by a change in what closeness requires. At first, being friends means matching Brendan’s energy: sharing the room, imagining parties, trading crude jokes, and treating sexual confidence as a performance. Later, Zack’s investment in Lexa makes that shared language feel unacceptable to him. He does not deny that he and Brendan are friends, but his answer makes clear that friendship no longer means participating in everything they once said together.

The shift is visible through Brendan’s experience of Zack’s absence. The room that once promised a ready-made partnership becomes a place where Brendan notices empty space, unanswered attention, and a companion’s changed priorities. Zack’s conduct does not make him a simple moral foil: he participates in the boys’ objectifying talk and sexual bravado before objecting to it. That continuity and change give his brief portrait its force. His choice to treat Lexa as someone who deserves better quietly challenges the terms on which Brendan has understood their camaraderie, even as Brendan remains hurt by the distance between them.