Fresh

by Margot Wood

  “What are you doing?” Micah dances up beside me.

  “Nothing, just dancing,” I say innocently.

  “You’re definitely up to something.”

  I dance Micah out of earshot from Lucy and tell him, “Okay fine, I met a guy I want to set Lucy up with and he’s supposed to meet me here any minute.”

  “Why don’t you just set her up with Brad? He’s good looking-ish and Lucy told me she likes him.”

  I stop dancing for a moment. “Are you seriously advocating for Brad the Bro to be Lucy’s first boy toy?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “Oh, come on,” I scoff. “You know how guys like Brad are.”

  “Well, Brad is straight and I’m gay, so no. I don’t know how guys like Brad are. But why are you being so quick to judge? You don’t even know Brad.”

  “You may not know how guys like Brad are, but I do, and I don’t want that for Lucy. She deserves someone better than I had for her first time.”

  Micah concedes to my logic and we start dancing again. “Okay then, where is this guy you’re determined to pimp out our Lucy to?”

  And just then, he emerges from the smoky depths of the hallway.

  “There he is!” I point him out to Micah and his jaw drops.

  “I take everything I said back. Well done, McHugh. Well done, indeed.” The boy catches my eye and trots over.

  “This is my friend Micah,” I say, introducing them.

  “Hey man, I’m Kenton,” the boy whose name I now know to be Kenton says. “Is this who you wanted me to meet?” he asks me.

  “Yes,” Micah says, looking Kenton up and down.

  “Paws off,” I say to Micah and shoo him away. “No, he was not who I wanted you to meet,” I address Kenton again. I take his hand and lead him into the mass of writhing bodies until I find Lucy and Sasha. Micah, finally getting with the program, does me a solid and runs interference with Sasha so Lucy is dancing alone. I get Lucy’s attention and introduce her. “Kenton, this is my exquisite roommate Lucy. Lucy, this is Kenton. He was a true gentleman earlier and helped me deal with a slightly annoying situation.” Lucy looks Kenton over and her face goes bright red, and I know she has tender chicken.5

  “It’s nice to meet you!” Kenton says and the way this guy is looking at Lucy right now—yeah, he’s hook, line, and sinker.6

  Twenty minutes later, Lucy and Kenton are grinding all up on each other on the dance floor, Micah is making out with the weed fairy on a couch, Sasha got one hundred new subscribers—and me? Well, I’m upstairs in the second-floor bathroom kissing a very cute girl, while I slip my fingers down her pants.

  * * *

  1 Red Sox hat, Patriots sweatshirt, baggy gray sweatpants.

  2 My anger right now can only be described in one word: asd;fkjasd;kfjads;kfjdslkfja;aljkshdfl

  3 My first great idea was to go double or nothing against Rose and that was obviously a huge oversight, but I’m older and wiser now. I have much more confidence in this next brilliant idea.

  4 Also known as the Elliot is in love with everyone and wants to make out stage.

  5 Symptoms of tender chicken include flushing, intense pressure in the groinal region, biting of the bottom lip, heavy breathing, and, in rare cases, extreme sweating.

  6 What? Did you think it was going to take me three chapters to convince this dude to be interested in a hot girl like Lucy? Reader, please. These are drunk, horny college kids here. Matchmaking in college is not that hard.

  CHAPTER 5

  An annoying buzzing sound wakes me the next morning, and it takes a second to rub the sleep from my dry eyes and realize the buzzing is coming from my phone. I have twenty-seven texts from Lucy and various other people from my floor wondering where the hell I am. And one text from drunk Brad thanking me for taking care of him last night.

  Last night?

  Oh, right. The party.

  I sit up in bed and it quickly dawns on me that I have no idea whose room I am in. I look over to my right and see the messy hair of a girl fast asleep. I lift the covers to take a peek and yep, I’m naked and so is she. It seems as though Five-Drink Elliot had a lot of fun last night. Self–high five! I reach for a half-empty bottle of water on her nightstand and catch a glimpse of her Emerson ID. Her name is Lottie and she’s a sophomore. Well, that’s good. At least I slept with a student and not someone random. I mean, someone more random than a random student. I slide out of bed as stealthily as fucking possible, find my rumpled clothes in a pile on the floor. I get dressed, grab my shit, and quietly leave Lottie’s room.

  It’s 8 A.M. by the time I get back to my room, and I’m fumbling for the keys in my bag when the door flies open and I come face to face with a very pissed-off version of my roommate.

  “Top o’ the morning to you!” I say with a heavy Irish accent.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Lucy asks as she yanks me into our room.

  “I was with that babe from the party,” I say as I start stripping off my clothes again. I expect Lucy to be proud of me but she’s not. She looks furious.

  “Are you serious?! I was so worried about you! When we left last night we looked for you but you were nowhere to be found. I figured you’d gone home already. We’ve been texting you all night!”

  “Dude, I’m fine! I just got a little carried away with one shot too many and went home with a hot girl. Look, I feel fine! I’m not even hungover!” It’s true, somehow I feel totally fine. I have no idea how I got so lucky, because usually my hangovers are fucking brutal.

  “I’m glad you’re okay and you made it home safely, but seriously, please be more careful next time. At least text me where you’re going so I know that you’re okay. Will you please do that from now on?”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay, I promise I will. Sorry.” It’s funny. When my parents implemented that same rule in high school it made me feel caged, but coming from someone like Lucy, it just makes me feel loved. Lucy hugs me even though I definitely don’t deserve it; I hug her back and thank my lucky stars I have such a forgiving and concerned roommate.

  “Good, now here, eat up,” she says, tossing me a greasy brown paper bag. “Fresh from Ho Yuen in Chinatown.” I peek inside the bag and take a whiff of the doughy treats. They smell sweet and I immediately start stuffing my face with one, and holy shit, either this is the best thing I’ve ever tasted or hunger is the best sauce.

  Lucy pulls her tea cart to the center of our room and makes us coffee as I devour the red bean bun. Maybe it’s my adrenaline levels finally cooling off or my body reacting to the first food it’s had in over twelve hours, but suddenly it feels like someone cracked open my skull and took a dump inside.

  “Okay, I lied,” I say as I choke down the last bite. “I do have a hangover. It was just delayed.”

  “I knew it,” Lucy singsongs.

  I reach over the side of my bed and grab my hoodie off the floor and put it on, pulling the strings on the hood to make it as tight as possible around my exploding face. I rest my head against the wall and pray for a swift death. Lucy, looking well-rested and showered, hands me a floral-printed mug filled with coffee, and joins me on my bed.

  “How are you not hungover right now?” I grumble.

  “I got up at six this morning and went for a run to Chinatown, plus I didn’t drink last night, remember?”

  “Wait a second.” I look at her skeptically. “You run? Like, on purpose?”

  “Every morning since I was in seventh grade.” She beams, making me wince. I want to judge her healthy lifestyle so hard right now but I’m too tired to do anything but exist at the moment, and Lucy doesn’t seem to mind because she keeps talking at me. “Kenton runs too. We’re going to go on a run together tomorrow. I was worried I wouldn’t have time to date someone, but we have so much in common that I think this could really work out!”

  “Are you going to eat any of this?” I hold out the bag full of Chinese goodies to her.

  “No, thanks.” She waves me
off. “I already had an egg-white omelet this morning.” I would roll my eyes at her but they currently feel like they’re covered in sand, so instead I just eat more fried dough. While I’m shoving carbs in my mouth, Lucy proceeds to tell me, again, everything there is to know about Kenton. I’m too hangry to write it out in complete sentences so I’ll just give you the highlights:

  THINGS LUCY KNOWS ABOUT KENTON PARKER

  • He’s from New York.1

  • He runs (on purpose) too.2

  • He’s a film major.

  • He has four tattoos that he designed himself.

  • He’s an only child.

  • His favorite book of all time is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.3

  • He has strong opinions about music.4

  • Some other stuff I don’t remember.

  “I can’t believe you got all that out of him in one night. Your butt must be magic,” I tell Lucy when she’s finally run out of Jeopardy facts on her new crush.

  “After we danced, we went outside for some air and we just started chatting and then we just didn’t stop for the rest of the night!”

  Part of me wants to remind Lucy to take it easy, she only met this guy last night, but then again A) this is what she said she wanted and B) I just woke up in some rando’s bed so I am a little unqualified to be doling out relationship advice. So I just keep my trap shut and instead say, “Aww, Luce, I am so happy for you!” Her smile is so big it even starts to counteract my hangover a little.

  “What about you? Are you going to see that girl again?”

  I tilt my head in confusion. “Who? What? Which girl?”

  “That girl you whose dorm room you just came from?”

  “Oh, right, Lottie.”

  “Are you going to see her again?” Lucy wiggles her eyebrows up and down.

  “She was a babe, but nah.” I take a sip of coffee.

  “What? Why not?”

  “She’s just the girl you hook up with when you’re drunk at a party, she’s not the kind of girl you bring home to meet your roommate.”

  Lucy’s pout morphs into pity. “Oh, that’s too bad. But don’t worry, you’ll find someone.”

  I tip my mug and drink the last of that sweet bean water. “That’s sweet, but I’m not worried. I just like to have fun. There are plenty of someones to find here and I intend to find them all.” I brace for impact. It’s the kind of sexual philosophy that usually warrants lengthy follow-up arguments from people like Lucy who never quite understand that when I say I just want to have fun that it means exactly that and nothing more. Lucy takes a deep breath, preparing to launch into a monologue, but I am saved when her phone alarm goes off. She hops off my bed and starts putting on a pair of lace-up boots.

  “Come on, get dressed!” she commands me.

  “What? Why?” I pull my hood down even farther, covering my face.

  “We have to get to the bookstore to get our course materials and then we have an orientation presentation at the Majestic Theatre where we’re going to take that test on The Iliad and then we break out into meetings with our department heads.” I get up and start swapping one comfy outfit in exchange for a different comfy outfit when something Lucy said makes me stop.

  “Wait . . . what test?”

  “The one on The Iliad.” She keeps looking at me like I should know what she’s talking about. “Didn’t you get a copy of it in the mail this summer? They sent it to everyone.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t read it!”

  “Seriously? The letter it came with said we’d have a test on it during orientation week.”

  “WHAT?!?” I start to panic. “A test during our first week of school, before the school part even starts?! Who does that?!?”

  “Emerson does that!”

  Lucy and I finish changing, then she drags me downstairs to the bookstore next to the Little Building, where in exchange for hundreds of dollars, we’re given stacks of textbooks that’ll be worth nothing at the end of the semester when we try to sell them back. We drop the books back in our room and then walk a block away to the Majestic Theatre, Emerson’s decadent and lightly haunted theater built in 1903.5 We sit through a one-hour improv show about Emerson’s history put on by a bunch of comedy majors, and then those blue test booklets I swear I thought I’d never have to see again are handed out and we take our test on The Iliad.

  A large screen drops down in the center of the stage and five essay questions are projected onto it along with a clock counting down from forty-five minutes. I look at the screen and read the first question. I read it again. I understand four of the words and none of them are the important ones. I look around and everyone is furiously writing and flipping pages in their little books. Suddenly, I feel hot and sick and sweaty. I clear my throat and wipe my clammy palms on the velvet cushioned seat. I read through the question a few more times before I start writing whatever nonsense I can come up with and by the time I’ve finished what I hope is a coherent answer, people around me are getting up to turn their books in. I look up at the clock and I have only three minutes left. Three minutes to answer four more essay questions.

  So, that’s super cool. Less than a week into college life and I’ve already fucked up. Cool. Awesome. Great. Super. Wonderful.

  * * *

  1 Technically Hoboken, New Jersey, but whatever, who am to judge? I’m from a state east coast people refer to as a “flyover state.”

  2 WHY.

  3 Acceptable, but only because it’s better than On the Road as far as favorite dude books go.

  4 I stopped paying attention during this part.

  5 The legend goes that one of Boston’s mayors died while watching a performance back in the day and now he haunts the place.

  CHAPTER 6

  It’s taken me until mid-October, about six weeks, but I think I finally have a handle on this whole freshman thing. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

  • Don’t tell Micah about people you hook up with unless you enjoy having your business broadcasted via his Third-Floor Report.

  • You’ll be asked to help film about 9,000 student films, TikToks, or YouTube videos and 8,999 of those requests will be from Sasha.

  • If you’re stealthy about it, bring Tupperware with you to the dining center and load it up with snacks for when you get hungry in the middle of the night.

  • The classes here may have clickbait-y names, but they are actually way harder than I thought they would be. Even my Love and Eroticism class is hard. It involves zero porn and our entire grade rests on a twenty-page essay that’s due at the end of the semester.

  • THERE IS SO MUCH WAITING. There is always a line for the shower, the elevators, the stairwell, the laundry room, the dining halls.

  In addition to all that, it turns out—and I don’t know if this is common knowledge—college kids are super fucking busy! We may live together, but I don’t see very much of Lucy now that we have fully acclimated to our new routines. Lucy leads a very structured life—she has to. She’s double-majoring, has a new boyfriend, works part-time soliciting donations from rich alumni at the Emerson Fund, and she still goes home every Sunday for family dinner. I am only guaranteed an audience with her on Saturday mornings for breakfast, which brings us to the next scene:

  “Ahh fuck, I regret this,” I say as soon as Lucy and I see the line for the waffle machine on a Saturday morning. I fidget in line, crossing and uncrossing my arms, bouncing on my feet, assessing every person ahead of me in order to estimate how long I’m going to have to wait until my hunger is satiated, when I realize one of those people happens to be Rose. “Fuck it, I’ll just get cereal.”

  “Oh, come on,” Lucy says, wrapping her arms around me to keep me still. “There’s only five people in front of us now. It won’t take that long.” The dude at the front of the line has finally finished and now it’s down to four, four people between me and my waffles and Rose is up next.

  “So I wanted to ask you something,” Lucy says.
>
  “Mm-hmm?” I reply but I’m not really paying attention. I shimmy free from Lucy’s embrace and stand on my toes to see what’s going on. There’s a lot of commotion at the front of the line. What the fuck is Rose doing?

  “It’s about Kenton,” Lucy says.

  “Sorry, Luce, there’s a waffle emergency. I’ll make us a waffle, why don’t you grab us coffees and I’ll meet you in the back.” Lucy agrees to the plan and I step out of line and make my way to the front. Rose, dressed in a very poufy polka dot dress and her signature combat boots, is fretting over the iron and wiping batter off the floor. “Do you need help?” I ask her.

  “Yeah, thanks,” she says. “I don’t know what happened.” I look at the machine and the batter is sputtering out the sides in mini-explosions and the whole machine is starting to smoke. I pop open the iron and assess the damage. She put so much batter in, there are barely any pockets visible; the whole thing looks more like a bumpy pancake.

  “Holy crap, this is way too much batter!” I grab a plate from the stack and the tongs and try to pry it loose from the cast iron but the whole thing is stuck and it’s breaking off into little pieces. “Didn’t you spray this down before you drowned it in batter?” I ask her as she finishes mopping up the floor with a napkin.

  “Oh shit, I forgot to do that!” She says and she looks like she’s about to panic. I shake my head and keep trying to get the waffle free with the tongs but it’s not working. I reach around and unplug the whole damn machine and roll up my sleeves.

  “We’re gonna need a scalpel,” I tell her. “I have to surgically remove your waffle.” She dashes over to the cutlery station, gracefully weaving in and out of people like a dancer. She bounds back and hands me a butter knife. It takes concentration and it isn’t pretty, but thanks to the many years of fucking up in the kitchen at home, I am able to excise her waffle out of the iron mostly intact. It flops on the plate and I hand it to her.