"Did you see that play?" Mia asked Troy, gesturing wildly at the TV with her arms fully extended. Her face was flushed and her eyes shone with excitement.
"Oh yeah, babe! Another touchdown for Malkovitch!" Troy licked his finger and made an imaginary mark in the air. Idiot.
Abby sat on the left end of the couch, watching the small plasma TV alongside Mia and Troy. The happy couple were fully engaged in the game on the screen, but she wasn't even sure who was playing. On this particular night, it appeared to be blue versus white. An epic battle, judging by their excited chatter.
She massaged her temples with the tips of her fingers, willing her headache to go away, unsure if it had come on naturally or if was brought on by her wasting yet another night of her college life watching Monday Night Football with her roommate and her boyfriend.
It wasn't that she disliked them. They were both nice people... if a little dumb, in Abby's opinion. They just didn't share many common interests. Reality TV. Video games. Monday Night Football. She doubted that either one of them had book outside of their assigned curriculum since they got to this place.
The second month of her first semester at college was nearly over, and nothing notable had happened in that time. Her expectation had been that college would be non-stop parties and fraternizing - but so far, the actual experience had fallen short.
Of course, she had to shoulder much of the blame for her own lack of social life. She had always been shy – not to a crippling degree, but enough to turn down an invitation and then spend the rest of the night regretting it. She was particularly shy around boys - or more specifically, around boys who appeared to be available and whom she found attractive. Her shyness, combined with not knowing anyone at her new school, had resulted in many nights like the one she was currently experiencing.
To top it all off, she had been having trouble sleeping recently due to frequent headaches. Normally a very sound sleeper, she would sometimes wake up several times in the night with her head pounding. She had missed so much sleep over the past couple of days that she often found herself drifting off without warning - especially when she was lying down or relaxing.
She looked over at Mia and Troy, both of them oblivious to anything except the game. She had gotten to know Mia a bit over the past couple of months, and she was starting to get used to Troy as well, since he stayed over at their place so often. Mia was studying to be a nurse, and had once told Abby that she was the disgrace of her family because she chose nursing instead of doctoring.
Mia was a tiny little Korean girl – she couldn't have been more than five feet tall – who had long black hair that hung down past her butt and large, dark, eyes. Abby was jealous of her straight, glossy hair that was always perfectly parted in the middle and her disproportionately large breasts. Abby was a good six inches taller than Mia, but her own modest chest could easily be mistaken for a boy's when she was wearing a sports bra.
Abby suspected, with some guilt over the stereotyping, that Mia had worked in a nail salon at some point in her past, because her nails were always perfectly manicured and looked great, which seemed at odds with her football watching, video game playing, beer guzzling, tomboyish ways.
In contrast to Mia's admirable career path, Troy was majoring in communications - which unofficially meant that his professors graded him based on attendance while on his track athletic scholarship. Despite his intellectual shortcomings, she could see why Mia was attracted to him. Troy was over six feet tall and Abby had once gotten a glimpse of him without a shirt. He had a slim but muscular athletic build, and his lean, coffee brown arms and six-pack abs made her bathing suit area get a little squishy.
Regardless of her underwhelming cup size, Abby considered herself attractive, at least on most days. She had dark blue eyes and Auburn hair that confirmed her Irish and German heritage, and a well-toned body from years of riding horses and doing chores on her parent's ranch in Montana. No one had ever called her ugly. Maybe cold, or sexually repressed. Despite the attention she got from the boys in high school, she had only dated few times, and never very seriously. The one time she had let her defenses fully down, the experience had been brief and messy - he had barely gotten it in before pulling out again and spurting his warm, sticky load all over her stomach. It had been enough to take her virginity, but it hadn't left her wanting more.
Her life had become a romance novel cliché – she hadn't felt a real connection with any of the guys she had dated, so she was reluctant to give anything away, especially herself. She had hoped that coming to a college in a new place, far from her old friends and acquaintances, would allow her to cut loose and enjoy herself, but she was starting to realize that the problem wasn't with where she was, it was who she was. It was a humbling and rather depressing thought.
Mia and Troy suddenly started shouting, and Abby glanced back at the screen. It seemed that Blue was making a comeback in the fourth time-based division of the game, and her fellow football fans had been hoping for White to continue winning.
"C'mon, ref! Are you blind? That was totally a foul there!" Mia shouted at the TV. Abby counted the number of empty beer cans scattered around the couch, and wondered how many of them were Mia's.
"We got robbed!" Troy agreed, and looked over to Abby, as if expecting her to make a comment.
"Yeah, totally robbed... Go White!" Abby said, trying to put some feeling into it and failing.
There was a brief but awkward pause as Mia and Troy looked at Abby with surprised expressions, then back to each other as they doubled over with laughter.
"Thanks for trying, Abby," Mia said, gasping for breath as she laughed at Abby's expense.
Abby's face flushed, and she folded her arms over her chest, resigned to watching the rest of the match in silence. Somewhere in the dying minutes of the game, she drifted off to sleep on the couch.
Abby awoke slowly, keeping her eyes closed in the hopes that she could fall back asleep immediately. Her head throbbed a little - not as bad as it had been the past few nights, but she could feel little points of pressure on her forehead and temples. She could tell that some time had passed because she couldn't hear the TV any more. In the silence, she could hear a whispered conversation between Troy and Mia, who were still on the couch.
"I'm telling you baby, when she falls asleep, she's totally out of it. I don't think a nuclear bomb would wake her up."
"I don't know about this, Mia. What if she wakes up and starts freaking out?
"I've already done a bunch of stuff, and she didn't wake up for that." Mia's words were slightly slurred.
A bunch of stuff? Abby's heart began to beat faster. What had Mia been doing? It was true that she was a heavy sleeper – her parents had used to joke that they needed to use a baseball bat for her alarm clock.
"You mean, like sexy stuff?"
"Hmmm... yeah."
"Damn, baby, like what?"
