Friday, October 8
The crisp October air coupled with the persistent midwestern wind hastened Charlotte's steps down the sidewalk on a Friday evening. She pulled her phone back out to check that she was on the right path for about the third time in the past minute -- It was 6:40 PM with 7 more minutes of walking left. She had been hoping to arrive before sunset so she wouldn't have to walk in the dark and was hoping she could catch a ride home with Kim. She pulled her red, white, and black plaid scarf up, sinking her chin below shoulder level just as her button nose began to resemble a strawberry in both color and shape.
* * *
"C'mon, you reaaalllyy need to get out of your shell, Lottie..." Kim had implored her best friend, holding both of her hands and making puppy-dog eyes at Charlotte, and was the only one who could get away with calling her "Lottie".
"Fine... but I need to know you're not gonna abandon me at this brick house for some boy. Promise me you'll stay with me?"
"Wouldn't dream of abandoning you. I want you to have fun!" Kim said, in complete earnest, her espresso eyes sparkling, emphatically. "Just wait for me if I disappear up to the love shack for a little bit."
"Okay, but don't be surprised if I just end up sitting on the couch and petting their dog."
* * *
Charlotte's pale, slender fingers gripped each hand's opposite shoulder, feeling some comfort in the soft, gray fabric of her blouse as she approached "the brick house", as it was known. A house that had a reputation of being a just-off-campus party house every year, regardless of who happened to be renting it at the time. She walked up the front steps, hearing some folksy indie music through the walls she wasn't particularly a fan of.
"Hey, you must be Charlotte!" A cookie-cutter-frat-faced guy in a horrendous combination of a mint-button down and salmon shorts said from the stoop of the house, upon her approach.
"How did you know?" She asked, moving her auburn hair out of her eyes, and looking up at the first guy who had addressed her in weeks, her heart skipping a beat.
"Kim showed me a picture. That gorgeous hair isn't something you forget."
"O-kayyy, big boy," Kim said, out of nowhere, her hand moving the flirtatious doorman out of the way from inside, her dark brown hair in a meticulously-messy bun. God, she looked cute tonight. She pulled Charlotte inside and whispered "Trust me, he's dumber than a box of rocks and not worth your time. There's a reason he's on door duty." The two had known each other since freshman orientation, and Kim's mild Korean accent still endeared her to Charlotte.
Charlotte was thankful for her lifeline, and more than a tad embarrassed that box-of-rocks-boy had gotten her heart rate up. Her lack of attention from guys wasn't because she was unattractive, by any means. Her petite frame, innocent pixie-like face, and unique, pale-green, almost gray eyes got her plenty of undue attention, for better or worse. Rather, it was that she'd holed herself up in her dorm for midterms, subsisting on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and caffeine for much longer than a newly 21-year-old girl should. Kim, on the other hand, was a social butterfly, and despite being slightly chubby, carried her weight mostly in her thighs. She had an adorable rounded face and was always experimenting with the newest makeup and fashion trends as a skilled artist. Charlotte liked to jokingly clarify to friends that she was a pickup artist, capable of pulling anyone she felt would be good company for the night. Some referred to her as loud or even boisterous, but Kim referred to it as a "zest for life", and Charlotte always affectionately agreed.
She was studying graphic design -- a more "useful" form of art, she said, than her beautiful charcoal drawings, which was how they'd actually met. At one of those forced-freshman-meet-and-greets, Kim had been manning the visual arts club booth, and somehow convinced her to sit still and let her draw a 5-minute charcoal portrait of her. She'd kept it on her corkboard for a couple of months, then framed it once the two had become attached at the hip, something that seemed to always make the normally-confident Kim bashful.
The party turned out, much to her shock, to be nothing like the college ragers she'd always seen in movies. As much as Charlotte didn't want to admit it, it was actually kind of enjoyable. It was mostly full of Kim's friends from the graphic design school -- a colorful bunch, and not as sleazy as she was dreading. 45 minutes after arriving, Kim and Charlotte were sitting in a small room in the basement around a somewhat cold can of beer with cards fanned out in a circle around it."Your turn to draw," Derek said, snapping her out of her introspective trance. She pulled a 9 of clubs and carefully inserted it under the tab of the can, without cracking open the seal, despite Kim's attempts to mess her up by making dumb faces from across the circle.