"Focus, Chloe, focus."
Scribbling madly with a black pen at the back of the classroom, Chloe was about five paragraphs of the way through her (suitably well-argued) essay on Thackeray, Dickens, and Gaskell, when she recalled having seen a post on social media about a party that Alex De Soto planned to be hosting at his off-campus co-op, and she started to wonder if ... she should go. Which was weird, because she hated parties.
Not only that, but she started to wonder if ... she should show up to the party ... wearing Stephanie's red vinyl jeans.
What the fuck? Absolutely not! Where did such a colossally stupid idea even come from?
Well, on the
other
hand ... Stephanie's circle and Alex's circle didn't really overlap much at all. It was entirely possible that
not a single person there
would have known who Stephanie was, or had even seen her wearing those PVC jeans. Besides, the party would be
way on the other side of campus
... and, you know, it was a pretty big campus ...
"Chloe, you're really losing it," she thought. "Nope, nope, and double nope." Wearing them in her bedroom was one thing, but out in
public
? Stephanie would probably hear about it one way or another, and then the shit would hit the
fan
. Or maybe ... Stephanie would never even know?
"OK, that's great," Chloe said to herself, "but what about finishing this fucking essay first, and then entertaining spectacularly moronic ideas about Stephanie's wardrobe later?" Chloe pushed the thought away through sheer force of will, and tried to focus on the three-part question she needed to at least attempt to
try
to answer.
An hour later, she burst into her apartment, chucked her backpack onto the floor, and took another look at Alex's post. No way in hell -- out of the question. The mere thought of it made her blush. Everyone would just make fun of her and laugh at her for wearing something so abnormal and out-of-character.
Besides, what if she put them on again, and started floating around the room like she did the other night? Ha, could you imagine? How exactly would
that
go down? Yet somehow, in her gut, Chloe sensed that, if she
did
wear them to the party, the "magic" would take on a more subdued, less visibly bizarre quality this time -- if it even factored in at all.
She got up off the couch, quietly slipped into Stephanie's room, glanced at the red trousers that were resting on the dresser, then walked back to the couch.
Her mind began filling with visions of strutting into that party, her legs covered in that shockingly red fabric, the vinyl on her thighs audibly catching against itself with every step, her butt cheeks glistening in the swirling light, the eyes of every boy in the room (and maybe even a few girls?) staring directly at
her
. She suddenly saw crystal clear images of herself flirting with cute guys, and letting guys rub her pants, unzip her pants,
slide
their hands into her ...
You know what? She just needed to de-stress, that was all. She'd undergone a whole week of cramming, she'd finished her finals, and it was time to find something else to distract her mind with for a couple of days. No Alex's party, no messing around with Stephanie's clothes, no crazy bullshit of any kind whatsoever, all right? Feeling like she'd settled the issue once and for all, Chloe sat on the couch and pressed "play" on another episode of
The Crown
.
*****
"Hey Marco what's up?"
Marco waved hello as he entered the front door of the spacious co-op, the warmth in the front room contrasting invitingly with the chilly December air outside.
"Hey Sara." Parties usually weren't his thing, but oddly, he was really looking forward to this one.
"Not sure I expected to see you here."
"Not sure I expected to see
you
here either," he replied as he hung up his jacket. "How do you know Alex?"
"I
don't
, but I know another guy who lives here, he told me to come. And now I don't see him anywhere! Fuck it, though, at least I know
you
, right? I wonder who else is going to show up."
"Good question."
"I heard there were going to be some wild goings-on tonight."
"Oh you think so?" Was that a hint of sarcasm he detected in her delivery?
Marco knew Sara from the freshman dorms, but they had never really been close friends. Mostly he remembered the time she got extremely drunk and threw up in his roommate's car. She had long black hair and a nice figure, but he never found her especially attractive. Her eyebrows were unnervingly thin, and her teeth were on the crooked side, but sometimes she would flirt with him a bit, so hey, that was nice. Tonight she was wearing a white long-sleeve button-up blouse over a pair of blue jeans, with her ponytail poking out from underneath a baseball cap. Not quite what he was looking for, but better than nothing.
For reasons that eluded him, Marco had shown up to Alex's party feeling unusually eager to soak in at least one or two hot girls. He wasn't typically the horny, aggressive, objectifying type, but maybe it was that comment he'd received from Jon's girlfriend Jessica a week earlier that had given him some extra confidence.
They'd been hanging out in Jon's room, and Marco has started singing along to the stereo, doing his best rock star imitation, and Jessica, who was super confident and sexy, flat-out said, "Marco, you're a catch! Why are you single? You need to meet someone who will play with your penis." He blushed at her statement, but had ultimately found it encouraging.
He certainly wasn't like his buddy and fellow newspaper staffer Eric, a nominal "virgin" who had done just about everything else you could do with a girl and yet was constantly obsessing over losing his virginity to that "special someone." Eric would openly talk about which girls were "fuckable" and which girls were "babes" and he constantly had sex on his mind every waking minute. But that night at Alex's party, Marco suddenly found himself, for once in his life, in "Eric mode."
Did he honestly expect to make anything "happen"? Naw. He just wanted to generate at least a little bit of fantasy material that he could use later on while jerking off. But which other girls were going to show up?
Probably Liz was going to be there, the sports editor. He didn't really have a "crush" on Liz, but she could be sexy at times. He loved that one outfit he'd seen her wear, the denim summer dress with the long-sleeve white top underneath -- sort of a "Rachel from
Friends
" look. He'd thought about that outfit a couple of times when he'd stroked himself. But Liz didn't quite approach that level of "hotness" he was looking for this evening.