Cleaning Up

Welcome to another series of tales based on the consequences of a single, 'What if?' question. For new readers of mine, please don't expect realistic scenarios. I lean to the plausibly ridiculous.

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A REPUTATION 1: CLEANING UP

"Well, that was epic, Will," my roommate Mitch observed drily.

"Yeah," I sighed. It had been a bad five minutes. Bad.

Mitch and I had entered the line for the dining hall to get some 'food' for dinner, when things went wrong. I should not diss the chow in my dorm. Both La Floridita Dorm and its attached dining hall are among the most newly renovated on campus and boast an experimental new dining format. It basically means that there is more variety of mediocre options than in most other dorms. That, and on Thursdays they inexplicably do Italian food pretty well.

Mitch and I had both somehow gotten ahead on our homework, and were looking forward to streaming an older superhero movie we had both somehow never seen after we were done with dinner. (Before more homework.) We were in a good mood, and that unfortunately set me up.

The line was actually a little crowded that evening, so we would be waiting for a while in it. As soon as I realized this, I also noticed that standing right in front of us, one person ahead, were Jessica and her roommate. Jessica is a very nicely put together girl who lives in the next 'house' over in La Floridita from my own. With light, sandy-brown hair and a pretty face, combined with a much more than adequate figure, I had been keeping an eye on her over the month and half since school began this year. I had only talked to her twice, and then only in passing, but at least I knew her (first) name and she always seemed to recognize me when we passed on the road to the dorm or in the dining hall.

She never seemed terribly interested, but hey, she wasn't snubbing me either. It seemed in that moment that a dining hall line was a good place to ask a girl out for the first time. We were sort of stuck in place, and I'd have time to speak to her for a bit before asking her out... to a movie, probably. And... noting ventured, nothing gained, right?

"Hey Jessica," I said, as we reached a turn in the line. Mitch raised an eyebrow at my sudden attention to someone else, but did the right thing and shut up while trying to be invisible.

She turned to me and said, "Oh, hi... Will, right?"

It was a measure of how poorly things had been going for me on the dating front that I took this as an auspicious reply. Rather than stick with my plan to chat her up through most of the time in line, I went for it after but a sentence or two. "Hey, I was wondering, are you interested in going to see the new Fast and Furious with me Friday?" I asked as cooly as I could.

Her face barely twitched. "No... I don't think so," she said in a soft voice that nevertheless thundered with finality. There was no, 'I'm busy Friday.' There was no, 'I've got someone else I'm dating.' There was no, 'I'm seeing it with my roommate.' And there was no, 'I hate Vin Diesel.'

There was only an unmistakably polite but devastating, 'I don't want to go out with you... Will, was it?'

At this moment, as she turned to her roommate to resume their conversation (mercifully with no titters at my expense), I realized that my ideas about the brilliance of asking her out while in line had not taken into account the consequences of a hard No.

Now I had to stand here, one person away from the girl who had just rejected me, for another five minutes. My appetite abated significantly.

Fortunately, the room was loud with fifty chattering kids, waiting for food, ordering food, complaining about food, and eating food. Unfortunately, that meant that Mitch and I could converse about what happened.

"Well, that was epic, Will," my roommate Mitch observed drily.

"Yeah," I sighed.

"And so the dry spell continues," Mitch gently, almost sympathetically, ribbed me. I glared at him mildly.

"Dry spell?" I replied softly, not wanting this conversation to drift past the single person in line between us and Jessica. "We are sophomores, and I still have had a grand total of one date while in college! And that girl didn't even go to this school!"

"Don't forget that she was a psycho,"Mitch added, oh so helpfully.

"She was indeed," I snorted at the memory.

"Still, you should have nailed her before you bailed," he said, not for the first time. "At least she was kinda hot."

"Never wet your wick in crazy," I intoned wisely. Then I added more honestly, "And besides, she wasn't the right kind of psycho for that to happen."

"You always said you could have had her," Mitch accused, genuinely surprised.

"Yeah, well, I wanted to keep some dignity over the whole mess," I confessed, "but since I am already currently utterly humiliated, it seems like a good time to confess that piece of information as well."

Mitch nudged me gently with his elbow. "Ah, don't worry. College is a great time for sex. You will get yours."

I looked at Mitch skeptically. My roommate was not exactly overwhelmed by his own social calendar. In fact, I'd never seen him shot down, because I'd never seen him try. Since we'd become friends, he'd dated one girl, for a month, back in Spring of our freshman year, before we were roommates.

Unfortunately, that made the cocksucker the Voice of Experience when it came to college sex, compared to me.

"You know, you failed so hard because of the bad Karma," Mitch went on slyly.

"Bad Karma?"

"Yeah, you asked her out with her roommate right there, and me right here. You couldn't have gone for the double date?" Mitch asked in a mocking voice. "You deserved your failure."

"Oh?" I asked. "You wanted to be riding in the rear seat when I got shot down just now?"

*

I rolled back into my dorm after a particularly long and boring episode of Russian 201. I hated the class, but I had a language requirement, and I had too much time invested in Russian to drop it now and start over with French, or Spanish, or some other easier language that might actually be useful. RUS 101 and 102 had been okay, but 201 was the worst. I simply did not have a great aptitude for the language to begin with, and this year, the situation was worse, because of the distractions.

First off, the instructor this time round was a young adjunct named Svetlana. She was a native Russian, but that did little to help her teaching prowess. Aside from taking great glee in teaching us lots of profanity, she otherwise made the class truly impossible to concentrate in. Let us say that she was not a natural born teacher. She had no talent for engaging her students. Her accent was hard to understand when she spoke in English, and her voice droned at a way too fast pace when she spoke in Russian.

Worse, she was hot in that Russian mail-order bride kind of way. Her shoulder-length blonde hair framed big doe eyes set in a face that was simultaneously rounded and angular somehow. She was medium height, but so silky in her movements, she looked like a tall fashion model. Nice tits, too. It says something that a woman this hot could be so profoundly boring that it was impossible to hang on her every word, but she pulled it off. Whenever I could manage to pay attention to her, it was in all the wrong ways.

Still, a very junior, non-career teacher who is a walking wet-dream should not be the worst situation, right? Unfortunately, she was quite definitely not the sort of teacher who hunted for sex among her students--probably because that would have been interesting, and she didn't do interesting. And if she had been the sort to play with students, I suspected that there was a better than even chance that she and I would be interested in the same partners...

And Ms. Godinova was not the only distraction from trying to learn Russian's miserable alphabet and spelling. (Really, it is the worst. Only half the letters are familiar, and several of those have completely different sounds.) Elaine Waters took up a good portion of my attention during class as well. She was cute, and blonde, and stacked, and I put as much effort into considering where to sit in relation to her as I did into conjugating irregular verbs. I started off the year sitting behind her, but the chairs in that classroom hid her backside, and I found that very frustrating. Then I sat right in front of her, to keep her out of my vision entirely, but I kept finding myself turning around during class, which is kind of a hard way to stare at a girl unobtrusively.

I ended up usually sitting in the same row as her, across the center aisle. This had the advantage of giving me a great view of her impressive profile, but had the distinct disadvantage of giving me a great view of her impressive profile.

I had suggested that we partner up to study a few times, and she hadn't outright rejected me, but her dorm was all the way on the opposite side of campus from La Floridita, and it had never worked out. But she hadn't outright rejected the idea, so I of course fixated on her.

All this left me in my usual blue-balled, post-Russian condition as I trundled through the common room of my house, only to find the soap opera crowd breaking up. Yes, they were exactly what I called them: a non-trivial number of students who scheduled their classes around a soap opera (maybe General Hospital?), then watched it together religiously. Who says appointment viewing is dead?

It was an odd assortment of students who made up La Floridita's soapwatch cadre--guys as well as girls, from all sorts of majors... even ones that took some real work. All of them made sure they could grab lunch and sit in that room to watch a bunch of semi-talented actors who were all hot, or once were, perform a meandering, ridiculous story.

I had briefly been sucked into the soapwatch crew in my freshman dorm toward the end of Fall semester, but had been saved by the mid-day schedule of a mandatory class in the Spring.

Eh, the girl I was interested in who was part of that group had already become an item with another guy anyway.

Among the kids getting up from the couches in the common room and gathering their backpacks was Shawn Maccan, our third-floor RA. Our fearless Canadian leader was just slightly taller than me, with long legs, and a beautiful round butt that were virtually always showcased in pale blue jeans that were never tight, but always perfectly fitted. Further north, she had proportional breasts, and blazing red hair with tons of freckles. I waved at her with a smile. She waved back and stepped toward me. "Hey Will! How's the vehicle?"

I'm an engineering major, and my current Mechanical Engineering class was engaged in a furious competition to craft toy cars that did various tasks, powered only by a rubber band. It was always nice that Shawn knew me well enough to keep track of my interests. She clearly liked me. This did not make me unhappy.

Of course, she was an RA, I reminded myself, as I often needed to. She was literally contractually obligated to like me.

"My partner and I broke our model yesterday," I sighed. "It wasn't working out anyway. That hill we have to climb is pretty steep for the one rubber band."

"Will you be okay?" she asked, her green eyes honestly inquiring about my project's prospects.

"I think so. It is probably good in the long run that it broke and we have to take the time to start from scratch. I don't think that original design was ever going to win, no matter how much we had tweaked it."

"How is your competition?" Shawn asked. It was the right question to cheer me up, actually.

"Just as bad," I laughed. "Half the vehicles can't even get started up the hill, and those that do either can't follow the turn or turn too much. One team's has gone over the rail and smashed twice. The other tasks are mostly just a hard for most teams."

She laughed with me. "Remind me when the competition happens. I want to come watch. If you think you have a chance to win, we'll get a group from the dorm and go cheer for you," she said generously. Sadly, I realized that she wasn't that interested in how I did, as much as she was in the chance to provide some group activity for the house. "You know how hard it is to come up with good ideas for house activities that don't involve tequila," she added, confirming my glum assessment.

"I'll do my best to be in contention for your benefit," I grinned wryly.

She slapped me on the shoulder. "I'll come watch, regardless. I think competitions like that are fun," she said. "Even if I have left such real-world calculations behind," she added airily, brandishing the text book she was carrying off toward her next class. She was an actual Mathematics major, and I am genuinely not sure that I could understand the title of her textbook, much less its contents.We said our goodbyes, and I may have watched her go, shouldering her backpack as she went, for longer than was strictly necessary.

"You should ask her out, man," Mitch had pestered me more than once when I let myself comment on Shawn.

The last time, just the prior week, I had snapped back, "Come on! She's a senior, and more to the point, an

RA

!" I did not add that I felt she was out of my league.

"So?"Mitch laughed. "Will, it is not like she's a teacher, or a priest or something. She's a student just like us who gets a free dorm room for breaking up fights between chick roommates and making sure the rest of us don't burn down the place in a drunken stupor. Moreover, you know that she doesn't have a boyfriend."

I just shook my head. Yes, Shawn liked me. But she liked everybody. She even tolerated Freddy Townsend down the hall, and he was a pustule on humanity.

*

Saturday, my project partner and I had spent the morning crafting and assembling our revamped design. We had settled on a new joining method that let us build the car around two central trusses that saved weight and added strength. The results had been promising, and we had broken up at lunch time, ready to start testing the new design Sunday.

I grabbed lunch at the campus Chick-Fil-A, indulging myself at the expense of a few Flex-Dollars. The sandwich hit the spot, and I was in a good mood when I returned to my dorm. My mechanical prowess was looking good, and I had avoided Grey Meat Product burgers for lunch.

As I approached my room, I saw that a door was open across the hall and a few yards closer than my own. Since that door belonged to Rachel, one of the better-looking sophomores in our house, I leaned in. She was sitting on her bed, cross-legged. She wore a loose white teeshirt and black track pants, a typical weekend outfit for her. It showed off her nicely tanned legs and narrow waist, but the blousy tee gave no real view of what I knew from other outfits were some nice, if modestly-sized breasts. She smiled in casually friendly fashion when she saw me.

I don't want the start of this story to sound as if my college is an un-ending stream of hot chicks. It is not. Not at all, alas. But it's a big school, so there are standouts to be found. Sadly, those standouts are in demand.

This was the case with Rachel, alas. When I arrived in her room, I found her chatting with Chad Daniels. This was a not uncommon circumstance, and a not welcome one either. Clearly, both of us found Rachel attractive, but she seemed oblivious to our interest, possibly intentionally oblivious. I had never gotten a signal that I might succeed if I asked her out.

At least I had the satisfaction that Chad was equally stuck in the Waiting Room. We both waited there, unsure if the next door, should either of us even get through it at all, led to a date or two, or to the dreaded Friend Zone. In the mean time, we were in a bit of limbo.

The two of us eyed each other in that friendly/unfriendly way guys do when in the company of an attractive, unattached girl. "Hey Rachel! Hey Chad," I said as I leaned against the doorframe. Rachel had a single dorm room, and it was small. Had I entered, I'd have had to invade someone's space.

"Will," Rachel said happily, "you are just the guy. Settle this for us, will you?"

"What?" I asked, intrigued. I got more intrigued when I saw Chad looking sour at my being included.

"The original Star Wars was shot in Tunisia, right?" he said heavily.

"No, it was Algeria," insisted Rachel.

Fuck. I had to side with goddamned Chad. "The Tatooine stuff was shot in Tunisia," I said wryly to Rachel.

"Shit," she grumbled. Chad gave me a fist to bump. Victory was victory, after all. "You are both such nerds," Rachel grumped, though the Hermione Granger poster on her wall established her own credentials in that department.

Much to Chad's displeasure, I hung around, rather than depart after giving him his victory. We all chatted for a bit, until Rachel threw her arms out wide to illustrate a point.

"Oh geez!" I groaned and turned away toward the hallway, unable to look at her. "Don't do that!"

"Do what?" both of them asked, puzzled.

I looked back at Rachel cautiously. She had lowered her arms. "Do that... with your arms," I said, still upset and grossed out. "Your elbows bent backward! They shouldn't do that," I said.

Rachel laughed. "Mine do. You mean like this?" She stretched out an arm and I watched as her elbow bent backward. Way backward. I'd seen people who could do that before, and it always grossed me out. But Rachel could evidently do it way further than anyone I'd ever seen before. She just stuck out her arm beside her body, palm up. Then she slid the forearm back and the elbow just bent backward... like 20 degrees!

I stared, bug-eyed for a second, then flinched away. "Stop that!" I almost shrieked, and looked away again, a shiver of creepy nastiness running through me.

Okay.

I am aware that I am coming off as some kind of freaked out wienie. In my defense, I was acting like a freaked out wienie. There is a good reason for this. I was in fact, a freaked out... you get the picture. It was a visceral thing. It didn't make Rachel any less of an attractive girl... as long as she didn't do that shit with her arms.

Chad and Rachel, especially Rachel, were laughing. After a moment, I was laughing too. A little. I was clearly being ridiculous, and I was genuinely finding my own antics just a bit funny. But I also was laughing to make sure Rachel didn't think I was a freak. The more I over-reacted, I realized, the less pathetic, and more humorous, I looked.

I bent over in laughter, looked up at Rachel, and winked. It helped that her arms were on her hips, and bending the way God intended them to.

I dropped my head down and shook it. And I paused. I turned my head and sniffed.

Thank

God

I had been freaked out. I stank, and hadn't noticed. I had played beer pong the night before until the wee hours, and then gotten up early to work on the vehicle. I hadn't showered.

If Chad hadn't been there, I'd have gone and sat next to Rachel. She would have been polite, but spent the whole time I was there thinking associating me with B.O.

Unfortunately, Chad was there, and noticed my sniff. "Smell something rank, Will?" the bastard laughed.

Own it. Always own it.

"Yeah. Me," I said brazenly. "A morning doing brilliant engineering in the sun has made me fit company for no one. I'm going to have a shower." I looked at Rachel. "You hang out and keep your hands clasped in front of you so your elbows bend the right way."

"You mean like this?" she said holding her hands together, palms up so both elbows bent that unnatural direction again.

"Stop that," I groaned, and bailed.

Okay, that was humiliating. But at least the whole thing was good humored. I kept my head up, avoided stinking up Rachel's room, and got out without having to look at those elbows any more.

And I didn't puke on Rachel's floor.