1. Encounter
She was so glad to be back at college. The grey walls of her small dorm room were bare, indicating that it was the beginning of the semester, but she looked on them with more fondness than she'd ever looked on the walls of her room at her parents' house. This tiny room was more of a home to her than that whole house; she knew the campus, with its tall vine covered buildings and unexpected benches tucked away in dim corners, better than the painfully suburban town where she had spent her entire adolescence.
The summer had been a long and hot one, one she'd spent mostly locked up in her room, pouring over the textbooks she had already gotten for the fall semester and re-reading the old books she had shoved on her dusty shelves. She hadn't had any old high school friends to get reacquainted with, to gossip with about the things she had done while at school. She hadn't had any newfound college friends to stay in touch with, to meet up with and complain about how boring being back at "home" was. All she'd had were her boxes of belongings from her old dorm room that she hadn't even bothered to unpack and a calendar that she kept over the head of her bed.
Every night, before falling asleep, she would take out her red permanent marker and make a big X across the box for that day. She would listen to the squeaking of the felt tip against the glossy page and say to herself, "One less day." The solitariness of her summer existence had stretched out before her, taunting her, making her realize just how quiet the house really was, just how seldom the phone rang. She would turn on her television in order to fill up the emptiness of her room just so that it didn't feel so hollow with only her sitting in it.
Now she lay in her narrow bed, glad to finally be back to the structured messiness of college life. She wasn't any less alone here, but she didn't have the gaping emptiness of a silent house surrounding her. Instead she had other twenty-year-old girls running around, unpacking their belongings, dabbing on eye shadow, and sneaking beer into the dorms in preparation for their first night back on campus. They weren't freshmen anymore, so they weren't daunted by the prospect of living away from home, and they weren't sophomores either, so they could get all the usual things they thought were necessary to have a good time past the admittedly lax campus security without a hitch.
She stared up at her ceiling, listening to the pop music and loud squeals of the girls who would be her neighbors for the next nine or so months through the thin walls of the dorm. They must have had friends over, because the rooms in this dorm were what the housing department called, "single rooms," which meant that she didn't have a roommate, and neither did the girl next door. She had specifically put in a request for one of these rooms. She wanted to be alone, didn't want to go through the unnecessary awkwardness of living with someone she didn't know.
She had already unpacked everything, from her piles of books to the string of Christmas lights that she hung over the window. She turned her head to look at her alarm clock: 9 p.m. Twelve hours until her first class. She closed her eyes. She wasn't tired. She strained her ears to try to listen to the conversation her neighbors were having. Something about rabbit ears, the biggest orgasm someone had ever had, and the dumping of a boyfriend. She shook her head. This was pathetic.
She got up from her bed, running her hands through her short hair. She had to do something tonight. After the three plus months of self imposed solitary confinement that she had just suffered through, she had to go somewhere she could be around a lot of people. She slipped on her shoes and headed outside, not knowing exactly what it was she wanted.
It was already dark out and she could see the lights in the rooms of each floor of the buildings she passed. She walked by late comers dragging their suitcases of belongings out of their cars, dodged the random stray cats that roamed the campus at night, and watched as freshmen girls walked in tight groups, teetering on their high heels and giggling as they made their way to their first ever college party. She made her way towards the outskirts of the campus, where she knew the frat houses were. That's where the best parties would be: they would be loud and crowded, full of drunken people that had no interest in talking to her. Sure enough, as she rounded the corner she heard the first signs of what was sure to be a bash that would be broken up by disgruntled police by two in the morning.
She wandered onto the front lawn of the house closest to her. It was swarming with people grasping red plastic cups, laughing raucously, rubbing up against each other indiscreetly, hoping that it would result in something a little more satisfying. She sidestepped a couple that looked as though they were trying to eat each others' faces and climbed the steps into the house. It was even more crowded inside. People were crammed up against walls, making out with each other in various stages of undress, rap and dance music was blaring out of two large speakers that were jammed up against the kitchen wall, and there was a group of boys cheering on a girl that was stripping off her clothes while she danced on top of a table.
Was this what she had come here for? To watch guys and girls participate in a laughably skewered mating ritual just because they had nothing better to do?
Well, she didn't have anything better to do, either, now did she?
She pushed her way through the ring of admiring ring of boys, eliciting boos and jeers for momentarily blocking their view, and tripped into the kitchen. She spotted a counter that was covered in plastic cups overflowing with foamy beer. She grabbed two and gulped them down, one after the other, then seized another one and inched over toward the staircase. She stumbled up the stairs, holding her drink high above her head so that she wouldn't drop it, stepped over discarded clothes and the cigarette butts and cups that littered the floor. The frat boys were going to have one hell of a time cleaning all that shit up.
Finally she reached the top floor. It was quieter up here. She could still hear the pounding of the music and the murmuring buzz the voices of all the people made, but they were hushed, as if there was a layer of cotton separating her from them. There were no lights on up on this floor; the hallway was completely dark as she peered down it, with pale, slightly eerie moonlight bathing the wooden floor out of open doorways. She brought her cup to her lips, sipping the beer this time, letting the bitter cold taste of it slide down her throat and spread through her stomach. She nodded her head in appreciation: cheap beer was just what she needed right then to calm her down.
She walked into one of the rooms, curious to see what she would find. It was a bedroom. Squinting to see better, she was able to make out that the bed was large, taking up most of the space, that the walls were covered with posters of bikini clad girls draping themselves over cars and motorcycles, and that the floor was scattered with clothes and magazines. She walked over to the window and leaned out of it, looking down on the people milling about the front lawn. She shook her head. There was nothing for her here. She turned around, ready to return to the seclusion of her dorm room.
