Gender Neutral

A romance, sort of, but one in which there is an amicable parting of ways. If that offends your sensibility, well, you've been warned.

* * * * *

I was kind of disappointed. Somehow I'd always thought that college dorm rooms were more like suites, with a living room and separate bedrooms. But this was just a single tiny room, not even as big as you got in a motel. There were bunk beds and a sink along one wall, a desk in front of the window, another desk and two wardrobes along the other wall. It wasn't even as big as my bedroom at home.

And I had to share it with someone. It looked like he'd already started to move in. There was a cardboard box on the desk against the wall and some clothes piled in the second wardrobe. I tried not to let the twinge of disappointment dampen my excitement. Suite or garret, roommate or not, I was a college man now. I was on my own, starting in on my real life. I put my box on the desk by the window and went back down for another load.

When I got back, the door was open and there was someone in the room. A girl, dressed in jeans and a scruffy sweater, arranging some things in the further wardrobe.

"Hi," I said, wondering who she was. I motioned with my box and she moved to let me pass. I put it on my desk and turned back to her. She was not that bad looking. A little shorter than me, dark hair, pretty face. If she was a friend of my roommate's, I might be seeing her around. "I'm Hector," I told her, wanting to make a good impression.

"And whose is that?" she asked—a bit rudely, it seemed to me—nodding at the box I'd just put down.

"Mine."

"And so why are you bringing it in here?" Even more rudely. It seemed to me.

"This is my room."

She slowly shook her head. "'Fraid not. It's my room."

I double-checked my printout. Two fourteen. I showed it to her. Her printout was buried in a pile of stuff on the desk. She dug for it, getting more and more irritated until she finally found it. Two fourteen. Same as mine.

- - -

The RA at the check-in desk looked at our printouts and pecked away on his laptop. He must have been a grad student. He had thick black glasses and leaned in so close he practically touched his nose to the screen. "So you were both waitlisted for the room?"

We nodded.

"And you both said you were OK with gender neutral housing?"

"What?" asked the girl.

"There was a box on the application form," he said.

"I thought that just meant you weren't prejudiced against gay people."

"They give out the waitlist rooms on a first-come, first-serve basis," the RA explained, still peering at the screen. "It looks like there were three doubles available, so they took the top six people on the list. Three guys and three girls. They put two guys in one room, two girls in another, and the two of you in the third."

"But how could they do that?" demanded the girl.

"You both checked the box. That meant that you both were OK with sharing a room with someone of the opposite gender."

"What!?" the girl exploded.

"I thought gender neutral rooms were just like when a gay guy and a lesbian want to share a room so they don't have to live with someone of their own gender," I said.

"That's why they came up with them in the first place," said the RA. "But we're not allowed to discriminate against anyone based on sexual orientation. So the option is actually open to everybody, not just LGBTs."

"But surely we'd have to request it specifically," the girl insisted, trying to keep her rage under control. "You can't just put us together because we checked some box!"

The RA put his nose back to the screen. "Yeah, they probably should have double checked with you to make sure it was all right." He looked up at us. "But I guess they didn't."

"So what do we do?"

"Well, you don't have to take the room."

"Can you give it to one of us and move the other to a different room?" I asked.

"Not here in Zumwald, I'm afraid. We're full up. You can go talk to someone in the housing office, but I doubt if you'll have any better luck."

"So what do we do?"

"One of you will probably have to find a place off campus."

The girl was fit to be tied. I wasn't too happy either. It was my first semester in college. I'd been counting on living on campus. I wanted to focus on my studies, not apartments and housekeeping and traffic.

"Or you can just keep the room," the RA continued. "That way at least you'll both be able to stay on campus." He was trying to be helpful. There were people in line behind us. He gave us a look to say that there wasn't much more he could do.

- - -

"How am I going to live off campus?" the girl insisted. "I don't have a car. I need to be in the dorm." We were back in two fourteen, trying to sort things out. She was using that whiney voice that girls use when their argument boils down to the fact that they're a girl and so you should just do it their way. But I didn't buy it.

"Well, I don't have a car either," I said. "I want to be in the dorm too."

"But I got here first. I got here before you did."

"Today you mean? Oh, come on. It's not first come first serve."

"He just said it was!"

"The wait list, not moving in. Look, I've got just as much right to be here as you do." I usually hate it when people start talking about their rights. But this time it was my rights, and somehow that made a big difference.

"So just because they made a mistake, I should be the one who has to find a place off campus?" she whined.

"As opposed to what? Me being the one?"

What she wanted was for me to be the gentleman and let her have the room. But she couldn't come out and say it because that went against the whole women-are-equal line. She was getting really frustrated.

"Well I'm not leaving." She put her hands on her hips, a wronged woman taking a defiant stand.

"Fine. Suit yourself." Her anger was a bit contagious, and it was all I could do to keep myself under control. I turned back to the desk and started to open one of my boxes.

"So get out!" she yelled.

I turned back to her. "Look. I've got just as much right to be here as you do. I'm not leaving either. If you don't like it you can leave yourself. But don't tell me what I have to do."

She just looked at me, aghast that I was taking such a hard stand. Aghast that I wasn't being a gentleman like I was supposed to. Well fuck that shit.

She seethed. She roiled. She didn't know what to do. She stomped out of the room in a blaze of fury, billowing clouds of bilious rage. Then she stomped back in, grabbed her backpack, and stomped back out again.

- - -

Getting to college had been a rather roundabout process for me. I'd had absolutely zero interest in higher education when I first got out of high school. But a stint working at a dead-end warehouse job had convinced me that that I'd be better off with a degree than without one. So I'd taken a few classes at the community college and had now finally been able to transfer here to State.

I'd kind of liked the CC. The classes had been grown-up and relevant. For once in my life I'd taken my studying seriously. I'd gotten grades that I was actually proud of. Now I was looking to major in engineering. I was relatively confident that I'd be able to handle anything that State would throw my way.

And so the first thing they were throwing was this roommate business. Not exactly the start I'd envisioned. Should I have been a gentleman and just given in? Hell no. I was just as entitled to the room as she was. It wasn't like I was some kid straight out of high school just coming to party. I needed a solid base, on campus, so I could concentrate on my studies.

But maybe she was a serious student too. Maybe her reasons for needing the room were just as valid as mine. There were buses. I could probably survive off campus if I had to.

Why did they have to promise the room to both of us when only one of us would be able to take it?

- - -

It was about an hour after dinner. I'd met some of the other kids in the Section, walked around campus a bit, gone to eat, and was now back in two fourteen arranging some of my stuff. Kind of tentatively, half afraid that I'd have to pack it all back up before long. The girl hadn't been back as far as I could tell. Her desk and wardrobe still held the same disorganized piles that she'd left when she stormed out. I figured she must be hunting for an alternative arrangement.

Everybody in the Section had their doors open, hanging out in the hallway, getting to know each other. It turned out there was a girl I knew from high school a few doors down. One of the guys across the hall was doing engineering, but he was a bit of a nerd, and we didn't really hit it off. I was kind of curious to see if there were any other gender-neutral situations, but there didn't seem to be. I didn't volunteer any information about my own particular situation.

I turned in before a lot of the others. Still no trace of the girl. She probably wasn't coming back that night. As far as I could tell she hadn't claimed either of the bunks, so I just chose the bottom one.

Sometime during the night I heard a fiddling with the lock. I pretended to be asleep. Whoever it was came in, closed the door, felt her way to the bed, stepped out of her shoes, felt around for footholds on the railing, climbed awkwardly up to the top bunk, and jangled the springs above me as she fiddled with clothes and blankets.

OK. So she'd come back. She probably hadn't been able to find another place yet. Where else was she going to go? This was her assigned room after all.

OK. So there was a girl sleeping in my upper bunk. But it wasn't like it was anything personal. No more personal than someone falling asleep in the seat beside you on an overnight flight. This was a gender-neutral room after all.

- - -

I'd set my phone for seven. On vibrate. The girl was still asleep in the top bunk. I quietly slipped into my clothes, grabbed my backpack, and headed out to my first day of college.

All in all I had mixed feelings. In the CC my classes had mostly been in the evening, and they'd included people of all different ages and life situations. Everyone who'd been there had been there because they'd really wanted to learn something. Here it was almost all kids my own age, and a lot of them seemed to be just going through the motions. File into class, try to stay awake, file out again. Just like high school. The teachers seemed to take things seriously though, and the textbooks were pretty hard core. Half the equations in my physics book were calculus. It made me realize I'd have to be on my toes.

I came back to the room in the late afternoon. The girl wasn't there, but her piles still were. I did a little studying, went to dinner, hung out a bit in the Section. I went to bed early again. This time I didn't hear her come in, but when I got up the next morning there she was, back asleep in the top bunk.

This same pattern repeated itself over the next couple days. She'd be asleep, or pretending to be, when I got up in the morning, and I'd be asleep, or pretending to be, when she came in at night. We never did actually intersect each other face to face. But over the course of the week her wardrobe became a little more organized, and the pile on her desk became a bit more tidied up. I began to think she'd decided to stay.

- - -

One of the people down the hall was a friendly, outgoing blonde girl named Ivy who always had a nice word for me. We were chatting one day, and she asked me how I liked my room situation.

"I mean it would be weird having to share a room with somebody of the opposite gender," she said, "but I guess you'd get used to it."

I blushed. I hadn't thought that anyone knew.

"Paula says it's pretty inconvenient," she continued. "She says she has to lie in bed sometimes until you leave. I told her she was being silly. I mean, if you're going to be sharing a room with someone you might as well figure out how to make it work."

This was a rather eye-opening conversation for me. For one thing, I learned that my roommate's name was Paula. For another, that she sometimes was only pretending to be asleep when I got up and got dressed in the morning. But the biggest revelation was that she and Ivy had talked about all this.

"I mean, if I had to share a room with a guy, I can see that there'd be issues. We'd have to get used to seeing each other in our underwear and all that. But it just doesn't seem like it would be that big of a problem."

She spoke with the conviction of someone who'd never actually been in the situation herself. But still, I was kind of surprised by the openness of her attitude. To me the idea of having to share a room with a random girl still seemed somewhat indecent and shameful. But Ivy didn't seem to think of it that way at all.

- - -

It was just a day later that I happened to come back to the room right before lunch. Paula was there, lying up on her bunk. It was the first time we'd actually encountered each other since move-in day.

"So I take it you're staying," I said.

"As if I had a choice," she replied, with a wronged-er-than-thou sneer.

I put my binder on my desk and headed out to lunch.

OK. So there really was going to be another person living in my room. That was to be expected when you lived in the dorm. I just hadn't thought it would be a misanthropic feminist with a chip on her shoulder.

OK. So I was going to have to share the room with a misanthropic feminist. I could handle it. I had a desk, I had a bed, I had a place to keep my stuff. That's all I basically needed. It was only going to be another nine months. I could hold my breath that long.

- - -

On Saturday night they had a big kegger up on the third floor. It was loud enough that you could hear it two or three dorms away. I wandered by to check it out. There were so many people in the hallway that it was hard to get through. I noticed Paula in one of the rooms laughing and having a great old time.

I came back later when the party was winding down. The hallway was not so crowded. Paula was still there. A guy had her kind of pinned against the wall. She was pretty drunk. She seemed to be having trouble just standing up. The guy was standing real close.

It wasn't really any of my business, but the guy seemed like a sleazeball. I walked up to them.

"Hey, Paula. How's it going?"

She rolled her head in a drunken way and seemed to recognize me. The guy was irritated that I was muscling in.

"You about ready to go?" I asked Paula.

She clutched hold of my shoulder as if it were a safe refuge.

The guy was half drunk himself. While he was trying to figure out how to respond, I put my arm around Paula and started walking away with her. She was rather wobbly. She seemed so coarse and sluttish. Maybe I should have just left her there to her own demise.

On the landing of the stairwell she threw up. A big mess all down the front of her shirt, all over the floor. She wanted to sit down right there, but I coaxed her on. I had to practically hold her up as we shuffled down the rest of the stairs. I took her to the men's bathroom. I held the stall door open. She knelt down and puked into the bowl. Then she puked again. Then she slumped back.

"All done?" She didn't reply. Guys were coming in and out, paying only marginal attention. I put my hands under her armpits and helped her hoist herself up. I walked her over to the sink. "Why don't you wash up a bit?" She didn't, though. I'm not sure she even saw herself in the mirror.

I walked her back to the room. There was no way I was going to get her up onto the top bunk. So I sat her down on the bottom one. She tried to lay down, but her clothes were still wet and foul smelling. Christ!

"OK, come on," I said. Her shirt buttons were cold and slimy, but I undid them and then worried her shirt off. She didn't do a thing to help. Her bra and her chest were all wet with puke too. I wasn't sure about the propriety of taking her bra off, but it seemed too gross to let her sleep in it. So I fumbled with the strap until I got it unhitched, and then I eased it off. She raised her head and half opened her eyes in a vague realization that something was going on.

I grabbed her pillow from the top bunk and switched it with mine, then let her lay back. I went and got a washcloth and wet it with warm water from the sink. I wiped her face and then her chest, the way I figured a nurse would do it. That meant wiping her breasts too. They weren't super large. You could tell she was a girl, but her breasts seemed kind of tom-boy, as if she hadn't really gotten around to that type of thing yet. I got a towel and gently wiped her off.

I took off her shoes and socks. Her jeans weren't too bad, puke-wise, but there were a couple of spots. I debated just letting her keep them on, but I kind of hate sleeping in jeans myself, and I'd always heard her take her pants off when she was getting ready for bed. Besides, she was sleeping in my bunk now, and I really didn't want her pukey jeans all over my sheets.

So I undid her belt and zipper. The jeans were kind of tight. I tugged on one side, then on the other. Her panties wanted to slide down too, so I had to pull them back in place each time. It didn't help that her butt and her legs were just dead weight. Finally I got the waist of her jeans down over her hips with her panties still in place, and I was able to tug them off the rest of the way.

She looked awful vulnerable, lying there in nothing but her panties. I kept telling myself just to get on with it. She was my roommate, she'd passed out, I was putting her to bed. I worked the blanket and sheet out from under her and covered her up.

I folded her jeans and put them on the floor beside her. I put her shirt and bra in the sink and ran some water over them. The mess in the stairwell kept weighing on my mind. Finally I took the washcloth and towel and went up and tried to clean up the worst of it.

When I got back, she was snoring lightly. She'd feel like shit in the morning. It would serve her right. She was probably used to it, anyway. I climbed up into the top bunk, trying to ignore the fact that I'd have to sleep in her used bedclothes. But what else was I going to do?

- - -

When I woke up the next morning I debated a plan of action. What was she going to think, waking up in my bunk practically naked with no recollection of how she'd gotten there? She'd be pissed. But it was her own damn fault, getting herself so wasted. Plus she'd have a hell of a hangover. Again, her own damn fault.

Finally I got tired of just laying there. She was still asleep. I climbed down and grabbed my backpack. She could take care of herself. I had an engineering problem set to do.

It was a lifestyle I was getting used to—leaving the room early, spending my time at the library or the engineering building, staying away from Zumwald as long as I could. I finally came back after dinner. No Paula. The sink was empty, her dirty clothes nowhere to be seen. The pillows were switched back on the right bunks.

I hesitantly sat down on my bed to read. I sniffed, but there was no detectable foulness.

Paula came in quite a bit later. She slung her backpack on her desk, both of us ignoring each other like we usually did. She ruffled around in her wardrobe. But somehow she sensed that I was looking at her.

"'D'ja get off?" she sneered, not looking up from her ruffling.

"Huh?" I replied.

"Feeling me up," she clarified.

"But you . . . But I . . ."

She turned and glared at me with a withering stare that brooked no criticism of any wrong doing on her part. She climbed up to her bunk and bounced around fiercely as she got herself ready for bed. Then not another peep. That's the way we discussed things in those days.