Off Campus

by Amy Jo Cousins

  “My thesis is gonna be on why some people keep letting others walk all over them and put them in compromising positions, because they’re chickenshits and want to avoid confrontation.”

  Yeah, that was a definite glare blazing in his direction.

  No way did this girl qualify as simple. Whirlwind, maybe. Force of nature, sure.

  Simple?

  Not a chance.

  Maybe she’d leave before Reese remembered to introduce them.

  “Don’t be a bitch, Steph.” Reese leaned into the room, hanging on to the edge of his closet with one hand. “Tom, Steph. Steph, Tom. Be nice.”

  “I’m always nice.”

  “Ha!”

  Steph’s smile showed a whole lot of teeth.

  “I can’t believe you let me drink those three Red-Eyes. What were you thinking?” Reese called out with his head stuck in his closet.

  Steph slid off the desk and flopped down on Reese’s bed, snagging a book from his desk and paging through it, ignoring Tom. “I was thinking you told me, mind your own business, bitch, because you don’t need a mother.”

  “Yeah, well now I gotta pee like a racehorse.” Reese pulled a skinny, long-sleeve black T-shirt out of his closet and stripped off his stained white shirt, tossing it in his laundry basket before putting the clean shirt on. Steph kept her head down but Tom saw her eyes skitter back and forth between Reese and him, as if startled to see Reese change his shirt in front of him.

  “So go.”

  Reese stopped in front of his mirror and ran his fingers through his hair, settling it back in place after the quick change. Without turning from the mirror, he pointed behind him, directly at Steph.

  “Behave. He’s not like…” he waved the hand in a vague circle, “…He Who Shall Not Be Named.”

  Steph flipped him off, pretending to read the book in her lap.

  “Go pee, drama boy.”

  Reese left, stopping at the door to shoot one last glare at Steph, who acted as if she hadn’t seen anything at all. He left the door open behind him, reluctant maybe to confine the two of them in one small enclosed space.

  As soon as Reese was out of sight, Steph looked up at Tom.

  “That’s weird, you know. That he’s trying to protect you.”

  Tom shrugged. He didn’t know what was weird with Reese or not.

  She clapped the cover of the book shut with a bang. Sat up straight.

  “Okay, I’ll be fast. You do anything to hurt him and I’ll fuck you up. I can organize a protest rally faster than you can say Take Back the Night.”

  “Okay.” He tried not to smile, certain it wouldn’t do anything except piss her off.

  “Okay?” She was out-and-out frowning at him now, looking as if she’d like nothing better than to beat the shit out of him, if only he’d give her an excuse.

  Tom was just smart enough to avoid that.

  “He’s right. You are weird. Different.”

  Tom shrugged again. It was his default response these days when he didn’t know what to say next. He didn’t think her hard-ass pose was much more than that, a pose put on by a girl who was scared to death he’d further wound her damaged friend.

  Steph softened in the face of his lack of protest, her shoulders turning in and her back curving forward. “It’s just, he was fucked up pretty badly, you know.”

  “Still looks pretty fucked up to me most of the time.” He hadn’t meant to say anything, but it suddenly seemed important this girl know that if Reese was convincing her everything was okay, then he was putting on a total fucking song-and-dance routine with no basis in reality.

  But she was nodding. “I know, but this is total sanity compared to—listen, you know what happened, right?”

  “No.”

  “His—”

  He cut her off. “Wait. Are you sure he’d want you to tell me what you’re about to tell me?” There was nothing, nothing, he hated more than the idea of gossip going on behind someone’s back. This girl meant well, but if Reese wanted him to know something—

  “No, he would not,” snapped out the man himself as he re-entered the room. “Damn it, Steph. I told you to leave him alone.”

  She stuck her tongue out at Reese and got off the bed to hang on him like a monkey, arms looped around his neck while she smacked kisses on his cheek. In between smooches, she turned back to Tom.

  “Fine. So, you’re over twenty-one, right? I’ll give you twenty bucks to get me a six-pack of Rolling Rock from across the street.”

  The liquor store down the block still carded Tom every time he went in, which was admittedly not that frequently. He could imagine the tiny pixie of a girl with the blue hair and blue nails got the extra-special ID examination each time.

  Reese snaked out from under her arms and gave her a push toward the door. “Leave him alone. Jesus. He’s not gonna buy you beer.”

  Steph peered around him, hands on Reese’s hips as he walked her backwards toward the door, pushing against each step.

  “I’m not an alcoholic, you know. But four hundred pages of Proust on a Thursday night instead of the Living Dead concert? Deserves a beer.”

  “Let’s go. I’ll come study with you. I’m better than beer.”

  “Okay. You can crash on my couch again if you want. But don’t text anyone to come over. And no fucking!”

  “What? I never—”

  “Oh, please. Don’t lie to me, you slut. I totally saw you give that guy a hand job under the blanket when you were ‘snuggling’.” She made air quotes and Reese stuck his tongue out at her as she laughed.

  Tom spoke without thinking. “So it’s not just me who gets to watch.”

  Two heads turned slowly and stared at him, both with eyebrows lifted.

  He flushed, face running hot with the sudden awareness of what he’d let slip. Holy shit. What the fuck should he do now?

  Steph’s mouth opened, which seemed to wake Reese out of his paralysis. He clapped a hand over her mouth and shoved her out the door, leaning into it with his shoulder to close it behind her.

  “I’ll be out in a sec.”

  “You’re watching him fuck—?” Her shriek echoed down the hall.

  Tom winced. His neighbors heard that.

  Reese shuffled back into the room, ending up next to his desk, staring at the floor. The long sleeves of his black tee hung over the first knuckles of his hands, like a little boy in his older brother’s clothes. Tom didn’t get it, the shy thing, since the blush on his own face made it clear who was the asshole in the room.

  “Sorry.” Reese glanced up through his hair.

  “No way. Your friend is nice.” Tom was at a loss. That was a lie. He could do better. “Sort of. She’s looking out for you, you know? Not like Cash.”

  That got a snort and an eye roll.

  “Nah, it’s the same thing. But still.”

  “Yeah.”

  He knew what Reese meant. They’d both taken to hiding away in their room even more now that the semester was truly upon them. Somehow Reese’s late night boys didn’t count, but the loud, room-filling personalities of Cash and Steph crowded them in their space.

  “Kinda nice when it feels like no one knows how to find you.”

  Tom nodded. True that.

  “So maybe she can meet me next time. You know, at the library or something.”

  “If you want, man. But not because of me, okay?”

  “No worries. I just, you know, like it. When it’s just us.”

  Reese was pulling at a frayed edge on his cuff, splitting it further, but his eyes darted to Tom on his last words.

  What the hell. He’d already admitted in front of a near-total stranger, and to Reese’s face, that he’d been indulging in a little voyeurism, watching his roommate fuck random guys. Reese had brought three more people
back to their room in the past weeks, with Tom either listening or watching bodies move in the dark each time. His sense of being complicit in Reese’s weird sex habits was both a turn-on and hugely uncomfortable. The entire thing felt like a surreal dream in his waking hours. Admitting he actually liked Reese’s company when awake couldn’t be any more embarrassing than that.

  “Me too.”

  The kid’s face flushed pink and he looked down again. Tom could see his cheeks curve from smiling, just a little.

  The blast of noise from the hall when Reese left, Steph having transferred the blazing focus of her attention to whomever had stumbled upon her in the hall, was enough to make him wince. But Reese’s last look back at Tom, still stretched out on the bed with a book he wasn’t even pretending to read anymore, was like the slow, sensual drag of a feather across his skin. Reese waved, a hand opening and closing one time on his way out the door. Tom nodded back.

  The door closed.

  Chapter Seven

  The first time the landline rang in their room, Tom almost jumped out of his skin. The ring was shrill and loud and an actual telephone ring. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard a phone ring, as opposed to sing out some pop song or robotic beep sequence. His own phone played the Dropkick Murphys’ “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” when he got a call, which was never.

  He’d heard the song while watching The Departed at a movie theater on the Common that he’d snuck into, feeling like a teenager, but not willing to blow fifteen dollars on a movie ticket. He’d just wanted to check out for a few hours. Sit in the dark and be taken out of himself by a story that might not have a happy ending, but at least had an ending period, which had all kinds of appeal to him with this brutal slog to the finish of his degree. The song had vibrated as angry background noise while Leonardo DiCaprio was processed into prison and Tom had walked out of the theater with that angry punk sound ringing in his bones, twitchy and ready to start a fight.

  He’d spent the wasteful buck it had cost him to download the ringtone, only to realize days later he’d never hear it. After everything had gone to shit with his dad, after the arrest but before his suicide attempt, Tom had changed his phone number, making himself essentially invisible to his friends, if you could call them that. Most had vanished along with his pride and his money.

  After he cut his electronic tether to that whole crowd, his phone had stopped ringing. Most of his calls were from dispatch at the taxi service or one of the bouncers he’d befriended in his gypsy cab hours. The only other person who called him was his father’s lawyer, who kept him updated on the appeals process. But he’d told that gray, lipless man that if the attorney gave Tom’s new telephone number to his dad, Tom would change it again and forget to share it with anyone. He didn’t want to talk to his dad. Ever. He’d keep up to date on the details of the trials, but he was done with conversation.

  If Tom could find a way to get through this last year and a half at school without talking, that would rank right up there with carving The Thinker as far as great ideas were concerned.

  So when the phone rang, actually rang, in their room as Tom was stretched out on his bed, the loud peal jerked him right out of his doze. He was theoretically reading a text on whether microfinance effectively improved the living standards of the poor or whether it was simply another predatory lending practice that made donors feel good about their charity. Mostly, though, he was resting his eyes and wondering if he could afford to squeeze in a nap before getting to work on the paper he had to finish by Friday. That way he could revise it in his cab over the weekend and turn it in on Monday by nine a.m.

  For a moment, he picked up his phone and looked at it. Reese was out, as usual, and in Tom’s sleepy brain, if something was ringing, it had to be his phone. But the screen was black and the shrill ring still echoed in their small room.

  Once he spotted the handset on Reese’s desk, he didn’t know how he’d missed it before now. It stood right on the corner by the end of Reese’s bed, within easy grabbing distance.

  The phone rang again. And again.

  He waited for it to click over to voicemail.

  Still ringing.

  After two minutes, it was answer the phone or throw the damn thing across the room. Whoever was calling wasn’t hanging up anytime soon.

  “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath as he got off his bed. With his luck, Reese would stroll in as soon as he picked up the phone and he’d be caught standing there with his roommate’s property in his hands, trying to explain why he hadn’t left it alone.

  Ring.

  Ring.

  Technically, this is my phone line too.

  He hovered over the phone for a moment, thinking maybe it would magically stop ringing as he reached for it. The call couldn’t be for him. He didn’t even know their extension. Certainly hadn’t given it out to anyone. He held his hand an inch over the black plastic handset standing upright in its base.

  Ring.

  No such luck.

  He picked up the phone and hit Talk.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello? Who’s this?”

  “Tom.”

  “Tom.” A man’s voice, repeating his name as if testing to see if he liked the taste of it but didn’t expect to. “You’d be Reese’s last-minute roommate, then?”

  Obviously someone who knew Reese well, since the kid didn’t seem any more likely to share details of his private life than Tom was.

  “That’s right.”

  “This is Mr. Anders, Tom. Reese’s dad.”

  Tom had grown up talking to adults, friends’ parents, his father’s business contacts. It took some effort, but he could dredge up a memory of how to charm strangers into liking him. This was a good time to dig deep.

  “Hello, sir. It’s nice to meet you.”

  Reese’s dad harrumphed. “We’ll see. Reese is at class now, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  If his dad knew Reese’s schedule down to the hour, then why was he calling when his son was sure to be out?

  “I wanted to talk to you, son. Introduce myself.”

  Ah ha.

  “I’ll be coming up to campus one of these weekends. I’m looking forward to meeting you. Happy to take you boys out to dinner when I’m there, get to know you. I check in on Reese pretty regularly.”

  If you get my meaning, punk.

  The purpose of the call wasn’t hard to figure out. Reese’s dad kept his voice light and friendly, but he was warning Tom in words about as subtle as a javelin to the skull that he’d be keeping an eye on Tom and his boy and any irregularities would be dealt with immediately.

  Tom sighed and rubbed his free hand over his scratchy, dry eyes.

  This was nothing new. Another person who’d made his mind up about Tom without ever speaking to him. He was months and miles past giving a rat’s ass about being disliked.

  “Sounds great, sir. I’m not here most weekends, though.”

  Mr. Anders was ever cheerful. And vaguely threatening.

  “Then I’ll have to come up on a Thursday. Know that’s like a Friday night for you party kids.”

  “Sure.” He couldn’t remember the last time he went to a party, never mind what day of the week it had been. The idea of standing in a room full of people whose barely there verbal filters had been washed away by a river of cheap beer made him want to vomit. “I hope I get a chance to meet you. Did you want me to leave a message for Reese?”

  Since you and I both know there’s apparently no voicemail on this phone. And if you actually wanted to reach him, you’d have called his cell.

  “Nope. I’ll call him later tonight.” When I’ll tell him that if his new roommate so much as farts in his general direction, he should call me and I’ll come up to campus and kick your ass. Subtext, not a mystery. “Nice talking to you, Tom.”
<
br />   “You too, sir. Bye.”

  He hung up and stood at Reese’s desk with the phone dangling in his hand. Angled tightly into the edge of Reese’s monitor was a framed photo, wedged in behind a stack of library books in their indestructible cellophane covers. He snagged the edge of the frame with two fingers and lifted it up into sight.

  Good guess.

  Reese and what could only be his dad, leaning shoulder to shoulder, sitting cross-legged on a scatter of dead leaves in dark woods, the glare of a campfire whiting out the lower right corner of the photo. A younger Reese, with shorter hair and startlingly non-black jeans and a fleece, was angling a crooked branch at his dad, offering him a blackened blob that might have been a marshmallow at some point. Mr. Anders, short and wiry with a small round potbelly barely visible under his windbreaker, was warding him off with two crossed index fingers and grinning brightly at his boy. They’d obviously been tight at some point. Still were apparently, despite Reese dressing like the kind of kid who refused to acknowledge his parents due to their lack of coolness.

  Tom tightened his grip on the frame for a moment. Mrs. Anders wasn’t in the picture, had not been mentioned by Reese’s dad. But Reese didn’t have that angry edge Tom associated with kids who’d grown up without their moms. He knew plenty of those—he was one of those kids—and it was like they were missing a limb or something, always hobbled and a little unsteady without that bedrock that came from growing up with the mythical mom love that anchored most people. He’d spent countless hours when he was little imagining what it would have been like to grow up with a mom, if his own hadn’t died so long ago he didn’t even remember her. Maybe she would have smoothed over the rough edges between his dad and him. Made their house more like the homes Tom had been in when visiting friends sometimes, as opposed to his own house. Large enough for him and his father to avoid each other for days if they felt like it and operated more as a training ground for Tom’s future than a home base where you could feel safe.

  The rattle of a key in the door lock shook him out of his daydreams. He shoved the picture behind the monitor and dropped back onto his bed, sprawled out across the wrinkled sheets by the time Reese made his way into the room.