Act 1, Chapter 2
You'd think that getting a magic coin able to change the minds of women would be the most memorable thing that happened to me in 1998, but you'd be wrong, because a few days after I got that coin, the Midwest was slaughtered by one of the biggest blizzards to hit the region in fifty years, and Iowa City got absolutely
demolished
by it. Nothing was really damaged but basically everyone was trapped in place for about a week, as everyone struggled to compensate. The whole campus was snowed in, and students were told classes wouldn't start back up for a week, and that they shouldn't struggle too hard to get back to campus if they had gone home for Thanksgiving.
The campus administrator reached out to all of us RAs and instructed us on how to reactivate the heat for our buildings, specifically so we didn't freeze to death. As other students came back onto campus, we were supposed to do everything we could to make them feel at home, but we were told that it wouldn't be all at once, and that we should expect a slow stagger. Many of the faculty were still around, so they would be opening up the mess hall at half-capacity starting Monday, because some students had already made it back as early as Thanksgiving night, and the blizzard had hit midday Saturday, so lots of people were midtravel back, stranded at motels and inns across the Midwest, unable to move anywhere.
All of this meant my trysts with Steph and Amy, well, I'm sorry to say I just don't remember them all that well, truth be told. I do remember that it felt a little like being a child in a shared custody divorce, with them being amicable to each other, but never pleased to see the other one. Steph liked to make sniping comments about Amy, and Amy seemed content just to enjoy spending time with me, although she would also occasionally let a catty comment slide.
But our time together was generally short, reserved to just the last couple of hours in any given evening, and the girls were hellbent on proving themselves sexually to me. Steph would ask about what I'd been up to with Amy, but she pretended like it didn't bother her any. Amy would mostly ask about how I was managing my own stress levels for the day, considering how maddening the campus was, running short handed in a borderline disaster.
The RAs had even been co-opted to help with snow removal, and with good reason. Some of the doors to some of the buildings across campus had been completely buried beneath snow drifts, and the longer we left them covered, the more risk the locks in the doors ran of freezing and breaking. Most of the external doors on campus opened outward, but a handful of them opened in, and one of the buildings had been opened to exposure for several hours, as a wall of snow had knocked the door in, letting the cold air flood the halls.
They were paying us both overtime and hazard pay, but it also meant that for ten hours a day for most of the week, I was engaged in physical labor, and when I wasn't doing heavy lifting, I was doing health and wellness checks for the students who'd made it back onto campus, many of whom were visibly shaken and nervous over the state of the town.
Shit, the
pizza delivery
guys were charging extra, or "combat pay," as they were calling it, just to bring pizzas to dorms on campus, and you
know
shit's gone sideways when pizza delivery drivers are afraid to go out.
All of this is to say that the seven days went by insanely fast, and while I'm sure there was a lot more going on than I was able to pay attention to, whatever was happening in the background, I wasn't picking up as much of it as I should have been, so you shouldn't make the same mistake, okay?
By the end of it, as hurried and haggard as I was, I knew the Steph and I were the worse fit. Her plan was to get into television journalism, but she didn't have any real interest in doing any of the reporting herself -- she just wanted to
read
the news to people, and to be paid extremely well for it. She also didn't really have any interest in getting out of the Midwest, whereas I was thinking about moving to London as soon as I finished college. Also, Steph seemed to think the best way to get me to do things was to order me to do them, and then get angry at me when I didn't immediately follow that order. She didn't seem to want a boyfriend so much as a manservant.
Steph also had an incredibly bleak outlook on life. I would say pessimist, but I think that's not dark enough. It wasn't just that she expected the worst to happen. She expected something even worse than she was capable of imagining to happen. As the week went on, I became less convinced she even wanted to win, just because of how little effort she was putting into the whole thing. Oh she made it clear she demanded my attention when she was around, but she didn't really seem to know what to
do
with it when she had it. She didn't like talking all that much, so mostly what we did was fuck and watch television, not that I was complaining all that much.
The other problem, however, was that I also knew Amy and I weren't a very good fit either, at least not in the long term. She was 18 and I was 21, and that meant in less than a couple of years, I would be leaving campus to make my way in the world, but she would still be right here. Her dream of being an archaeologist would take her to loads of exotic locations, but I wanted to be a filmmaker, and that was going to limit me to just a handful of places, or necessitate us being apart for long periods of time.
Amy was a stark contrast to Steph, with a positive sense of exuberance about everything all the time, and frankly, that was
exhausting
, having to deal with someone who was incredibly positive about everything. I mean, the girl saw every challenge as an opportunity, and when I was dealing with the frustration and exhaustion of having to spend full days shoveling snow out from around campus, she tried to cheer me up by pointing out how it was going to be difficult for the administration to overlook all the hard work the RAs were doing, and that there would be some kind of compensation for our dedication, beyond the excess cash. (I knew there wouldn't be, and there wasn't, but at the time, she refused to believe that the college would do us dirty like that. Like I said, she was a freshman. They're all full of an almost insufferable amount of optimism.)
I remember thinking about all of this on the Wednesday night before I had to decide which to keep in my life, and neither girl had come by for the night, to let me have some time to consider and fairly weigh my decision, although I remember also thinking that I shouldn't have to think about it too hard, since the decision was going to be compelled from me one way or another.
See, each time either of the girls had asked me "who is better" regarding anything, I'd found myself completely unable to lie to them. They never seemed to get angry at me over what I said, so I felt myself getting less protective and careful with what I said. When honest opinions aren't responded to with sharp and biting comebacks, it becomes much easier to have a conversation about, well, just about anything.
I had to watch myself around other people, because I was spending most of my free time with these two women and around them, I could say just about anything, but that wasn't true of the other RAs and the other students. In fact, one of the people on my floor had tried to give me guff about having a girl in my room, when the policy was that we were supposed to limit the number of times we had visitors staying in our dorm room. I nearly told him that I wasn't just having one girl in my room, but two. That seemed an unwise thing to say, so I'm lucky I gave half a second's pause before I answered. I pointed out to that student that I'd been lenient on him before, and if he wanted me to change that, all he needed to do was keep needling me.
He stopped after that.
