Eighteen-year-old college freshman Mitchell Romini slowly proceeded down Massachusetts Avenue, strolling through the city's main street in the wet, foggy first Friday night of September. It was the end of his first full week, at Harvard College to be precise, and he damn well needed some relaxation. The first week had been a whirlwind tour of the myriad possibilities offered by the College to its elect freshmen, majors and careers beyond most of the world's ken. As Mitchell plodded slowly down the avenue looking for somewhere to grab a drink, he pondered the circumstances that had brought him here. He had spent his teenage years striving upward and onward, powered by a burning ambition. Problem was, he never figured out: a burning ambition to do what? He could never remember. He knew there was something to remember, but never remembered what.
His burning ambition for nothing in particular had brought him to Harvard College, where the first week had given a strong indication that everyone else in the freshman class had exactly the same problem as him. Eh, it would work out fine: the institution functioned as an efficient factory, converting the raw material of vaguely ambitious but indefinite young men and women into the world's latest batch of well-placed, well-connected workaholics.
In short, Mitch Romini was looking at a nasty future and needed a drink. Luckily, the Middle East, the most reputable-looking club in Cambridge to not enforce underage drinking laws, stood ready to provide. He ran his hand through his straight chestnut hair as he walked in, and went to go order a damn Scotch.
Then he caught the eye of a girl from across the bar, and it looked like his night might get a little better.
Sarah Yasmina Yarif did not like where she was. She was in the nightclub her friends had dragged her to, the Middle East in Central Square. They had dragged her there wearing a low-cut, V-neck maroon shirt (from Shannon), tight black jeans (from Jane), and a pleated red miniskirt (from Teagan, her roommate). Oh, and high-damn-heeled sandals.
In the sole blessing of the night, she had managed to cajole Teagan into buying her the one non-alcoholic drink available in the damn place, a "Long Island Iced Tea." And perhaps it was admissible that the band playing was actually decent.
Still, all in all, Sarah couldn't damn believe it. This was how people had fun?
Hey, though, that young man across the bar was looking at her. And at least she'd managed to keep her own hairstyle, even though it was naked for all the world to see.
In the basement floor of a nightclub, an odd couple found themselves dancing to a Celtic punk song. Both were Harvard freshmen, but they had little else in common. He had entered with a declared Civil Engineering major, thinking he might as well get something reliable to take back home to Jersey. She hadn't declared anything in particular yet, because she knew she'd never need it. He looked just about average in height, she came up a couple of inches short on that you accounted for her shoes. He had come in fairly ordinary clothes, while she'd been dressed by her friends. He had straight, short chestnut hair, where she wore gleaming dark half-curls down to her shoulders. She had her hand on his shoulder, while he curled his hands around her hips. She didn't know quite why she felt rather more flow-y than usual, while he knew what drinking felt like.
In short, he was a boy, and she was a girl. There was a nice slow beat curling through the room in apparent homage to the death of the Celtic Tiger, and they'd each had a substantial amount to drink. For a short, rare time, the various forces at work in the human world conspired to bring together these two utterly different youths in a very close dance.
Mitch was holding on for dear life as he and his dance partner dodged, weaved and swayed through the crowd to the beat. She seemed like a lovely girl, she was plainly tipsy, albeit prone to swearing, she was dancing with him, and he didn't want to fuck this up. He kept his right hand at the girl's waist and his left at her hip as they ground and jolted up, down and to the right. The beat throbbed through them in time, pulsing out bars of melody as Mitch and Sarah (at least, she had introduced herself as Sarah) began jumping up and down to the chorus, hands in the air like they just didn't care (which, at this point, neither of them did).
As the music sloshed him and his dance partner through a wave of humanity, Mitch tried to focus well enough for a good look at her. You wouldn't think it was hard to look a girl up and down while in direct contact with her, but it was. You only got a part of her in your field of vision at any given second. Still, within a couple of jumps Mitch could make her out: smooth tanned skin given a greenish hue by the artificial lighting, reddish shirt plainly showing off every bounce and jiggle of her cleavage as she jumped, black denim capri-jeans tantalizingly wrapping her legs while protecting what would otherwise be revealed when her red pleated cheerleader's miniskirt billowed on her way down through the air. The other thing that billowed was her hair, a gleaming black made up in waving half-curls down to her shoulder, with two corkscrews in front framing a soft round face on which her constant look of semi-resentment never quite seemed at home.
But as the song changed, Mitch's attempt to switch from the jump-up-and-down into the Cotton-Eyed Joe brought his foot sliding under him on the slippery floor, and the rest of him tumbling down, tripping Sarah over him. Each of them felt their limbs and bones report in their varying levels of dulled but definite pain; they groaned a little at each other.
"I think it's time to go home," Sarah muttered into Mitch's ear.
"Before anyone asks us our age," he growled.
"Hey!" she answered, "In most of the world a 19-year-old can be here!"
Staggering 15 short minutes along the sidewalk brought Sarah and her new friend Mitch back to the apartment building where she was living this year. She kept a tight grip on Mitch the whole way over, never sure which of them she was trying to steady. She felt fairly sure Teagan had poured some alcohol into her tea when she wasn't looking, and bringing a boy home on the first Friday night sounded, in Sarah's head, like an excellent revenge. Let the bitch resent her, she thought, because that had practically been criminal drugging. And let her father resent it, too, keeping her cooped up in the women's wing of the house all those years!
Sarah's father had only given her so much money for housing, and she could have had a single small room to herself or shared an apartment with one other girl. She had chosen the apartment for the better location, the top floor of a brick building that looked out onto Mount Auburn Street, and the room within it for its window, letting the morning sun wake her every day.
"Okay," she said, "We'll be able to sleep here and get ourselves better in the morning. Then I gonna kill damned Taageen." Finally home, Sarah reached back and unbuckled her bra, ripping it off through the low-cut top of her shirt to shed the itchy, cutting fabric and let herself hang just a little more free.
