The College Obsession Complete Series (Includes BONUS Sequel Novella)

by Daryl Banner

  What’s my first class again?

  I squish myself against the grimy brick wall between a set of glass doors and a bathroom that, I gather from the nauseating fumes, has a long-neglected plumbing issue. Fun fact: I have to pee.

  Really, I promise I wanted to enroll here at Klangburg. I really did. I saved up for two years working at the movie theater—at which I happen to be an expert in making killer batches of popcorn with the perfect balance of oil, seed, and salt. I was trying to scrounge enough money to buy myself a Yamaha keyboard, or at the very least a better laptop that can handle a decent music composition program. But alas, as always, it came down to a question of what I should put my money towards.

  I opted for college.

  This college. Klangburg University. School of broken bathrooms.

  And I really do have to pee right now.

  I can hold it. Don’t worry. I know you’re worried.

  After quickly checking the slip of paper upon which I scribbled a note or two on where my class is—and taking a deep breath—I brave the crowds once again.

  Five minutes later, I do not find myself in my classroom. Instead, I’m lost in a row of kiosks set up in front of the University Center where a number of fraternities and sororities and clubs are looking for new pledges and members. It’s not lost on me when a number of the girls running the booths seem to avoid all eye contact with me, suddenly finding something very important to discuss amongst themselves when I pass by. I know they took one look at my clothes and my disheveled hair and my thick black glasses and prayed that I wasn’t approaching their clipboard.

  It’s okay. Gamma Kappa Booba isn’t really my thing.

  Neither is Sigma Delta Vagina.

  Nor Omega Beta Twerka.

  The fact is, I’m very used to not fitting in anywhere. I don’t want to come off as a total weird-girl misfit cliché, but I’ve experienced this odd form of polite rejection as well as the downright rude form ever since I sat at tiny tables with classmates and cut out paper stars from colored construction paper all day. I was too weird to click with the pretty girls. I wasn’t weird enough to click with the rebels.

  So I passed through my childhood and my teenage years like a bit of debris in the river. Right down the middle. Floating somewhere very unspecific. Hanging with a crowd that had no name or identity.

  “Who are you, Samantha Hart?” the counselor had asked me my senior year. I was sitting in her office being counseled about college and my future and what I wanted to become.

  And I was eyeing a bagel that sat by her keyboard. An earthquake went through my belly, and then I answered, “Hungry. I’m hungry.”

  “Hungry?” the counselor encouraged, taking my answer to be a deep, philosophical response from which a countless store of feelings and experiences were about to cascade. “Hungry for what, Samantha?”

  “That bagel.” I pushed at my glasses. “I haven’t had breakfast.”

  After a flicker of reluctance, the counselor offered it to me. It had garlic cream cheese on it. I can taste it right now, standing amidst the sorority kiosks. I ate that bagel like it’d done something really wrong to me, and then told the counselor I wanted to be a composer someday.

  Suddenly, there’s a clipboard in my face accompanied by a sweet Asian girl with pink lips, black hair cropped at the shoulder, and a pen. “Hi! My name is Amy, and you are the perfect fit for Rho Kappa Lambda! What’s your name?”

  There are literally zero things physically in common with us other than we both have a vagina. Presumably. I’m immediately pummeled with twenty questions in my head of what, exactly, Amy sees in me.

  “Sam.”

  “Hi, Sam!” She giggles, showing me all her teeth, then pushes the clipboard at me again. “Are you thinking of pledging today?”

  “I’m late for class.”

  “Oh, we’d help you with that,” my new best friend Amy insists. “We have regular study groups. We tutor each other when any of our sisters are struggling. And we have Friday movie nights!”

  “Do you know where the creative writing building is?”

  “Sign right here,” Amy goes on, tapping a pen against the clipboard. “Name and number. Email is fine, too. Then, we can get ahold of you and start our Rho Kappa Lambda journey together! That’s RKL. It can also stand for Really Kool Ladies!” she adds with another giggle.

  “Cool is spelled with a C.”

  “So we spell it with a K. Kool with a K.” She bites her lip and lifts her eyebrows expectantly, tapping the clipboard again.

  I sign my name. Those two unassuming words. No, this isn’t the fateful signature that changes my life.

  That comes next.

  She clutches the clipboard to her chest, smiles, then says, “Creative writing building is that way.”

  And that way I go, past the University Center and through a grassy courtyard of cuddling couples and circles of students on their laptops, shadowed by the occasional birch tree. The sun beats on my neck and I have boob sweat. Like, more than usual. Lots of boob sweat. Too much.

  And when I reach a fork in the road, I stand there for one second too long before a bird shits on my shoulder. I turn around, thinking that someone had tapped me to get my attention, until I realize what the hell happened.

  A couple of guys eating lunch under a nearby tree saw it all, and they hide their faces to conceal what I presume to be laughter.

  Freshman year. First day. I’m feeling so lucky.

  I walk up to the dudely duo of gigglers. They regain composure at once and watch as I take the wrapper to one of their finished burgers, then use it to wipe off the bird’s little gift on my shoulder. Crumpling the wrapper back up, I set it delicately on the ground before them, murmur, “Thanks. I’m Sam. Bye,” before choosing a path and praying it’s the one that’ll get me to my class. No, I don’t wait for a reaction from them.

  I’m fourteen minutes late now, by the way.

  Worst day ever.

  When I finally arrive at my classroom, I push the door open to find a room full of thirty-odd sets of eyes staring at me, including the professor’s.

  My face is red in an instant—not that you’d notice from behind my huge thick-framed glasses. Or my hair. “Sorry,” I mumble, stumbling into the nearest open desk, which is right in the front, center. I bite my lip and stare ahead even as the professor continues whatever it is he’s saying, like my interruption never happened.

  I look down at my Poetry textbook. I figured I should take this class to help me with my music. I know it sounds a little strange, but when you’re a composer like me who is struggling to find her own artistic voice, what better way to coax it out of you than to dip a toe in the creative writing department? That’s my official excuse.

  The real reason is: I suck at lyrics.

  I suck so bad at lyrics.

  I handle words the way a cat handles a toothbrush.

  But give me music, and I’ll have you in tears before I hit the fifth measure. Put me before a piano, and I’ll tell a story using all twelve notes of every octave to bring a room to its weary knees, and not a word need be spoken.

  Well, at least someday I’ll write music like that.

  Is there still bird poop on my shoulder?

  Anyway, I guess that’s why I’m here at Klangburg—to learn the mighty ways of the composers of Klangburg past. I want to hone the fiber of talent my wicked father gave me before he took off to chase his dreams—his dreams that were called: tour bus, groupies, marijuana, booze, panties, sore throats, smoky backrooms with questionable activities, drunken laughter among friends, and last but not least, a leather jacket with spikes on the epaulets. And maybe if I can find that scrap of musical talent somewhere inside me and make something out of it, then I can someday call myself a proper composer.

  After my initial shock of entering the classroom wears off, I manage to let my neck unstiffen, twisting to get a view of the other faces in the room. Oddly, I’m comforted by how many of the other studen
ts look like me. There’s girls with bushy hair, short and jagged hair, cropped-at-the-ears hair, and even long tangled messes that disappear in the chair behind them. There’s guys that look like they’ve never touched a girl before—not in the gay way, but rather in the my-last-girlfriend-was-an-anime-character way.

  Yes, the professor’s been speaking this whole time. No, I haven’t heard a single word of it. I’m sure it’s all covered in chapter 1, which I’ll read later tonight in the comfort of my dorm with my roommate Kelli, who notices my existence about as much as you pay attention to a dust bunny clinging to the wall.

  “Yes, you. Go ahead. You have a question?” asks the professor to someone on the other side of the room.

  In a voice as smooth as silk, the student asks, “Are we going to be writing our own poems, though?”

  His voice. It melts me the second his words tickle my ears. Literally, a rush of goosebumps prickle down my neck and arms, as if a gentle hand just stroked the whole length of me.

  I turn my head.

  This is the first time I see him, the one who changes everything.

  Someone I didn’t notice before—sitting across the room by the wall in the front row—lifts his chin at the professor as he awaits an answer. He has glasses like mine, thick-framed and dark. His hair is black as coal, short and laid in haphazard spikes halfway down his forehead. When he folds his arms on the desk and leans against them, I see cords of muscle playing in his smooth, unblemished forearms, which make me come to the instant and unexpected conclusion that he is strong. Maybe it’s because I’m suddenly imagining myself wrapped up in those arms. I could picture a tattoo there for some reason, if he was brave enough to get any. Maybe it’s the whole tough-guy thing.

  Wait. Me, imagining myself in some boy’s arms? Looking at him and dreaming about how strong he must be? Tattoos …?

  What in creative writing hell is happening to me?

  “You will be studying many of the greats,” the professor answers, “as well as analyzing what poetry even is.”

  “But we’ll write our own?” the hot guy with the hot arms—stop it, Sam—persists with a tilt of his head. “I thought we’d be, like, writing poetry. That’s what this class is, right? Poetry? I mean, I have ideas.”

  I have ideas too. Ideas of what I want to do to him alone in a room.

  Oh my God, Sam, you’re embarrassing yourself.

  “Of course,” the professor answers with a tightened smile. “You will write a number of pieces in this class, yes, yes. But we must first start by examining others’ poetry.”

  “When will we start sharing our own work?”

  His lips purse in a cutely superior way when he speaks. It isn’t lost on me how full they look, even from across the classroom. Sure, my vision may be questionable at best without these glasses, but I know a set of kissable lips when I see them. And I’m not the kind of girl who gushes. I make fun of gushers. I snorted and wondered all through high school what it is about certain boys that made girls so stupid.

  That. Right over there. Him. That’s what.

  I’m feeling so stupid right now. And I’m loving and hating every second of it.

  My face is as flushed as a bad girl’s bottom.

  Yep. Just compared my face to a girl’s spanked ass. That’s me.

  Samantha Hart, making a humiliating boy-crazed ass of herself on day one of her college career.

  “Let’s pose this very question to the class, shall we?” The professor lifts his bearded face and beady eyes to the rest of the class, folding his arms. “What is poetry? Take out a sheet of paper and write down a definition. I want your definition of what poetry is. No dictionaries or smart phones out. And no, you won’t be typing your definition.” He lifts an eyebrow at a slack-jawed girl in the front row. “If you don’t have paper, borrow from your neighbor. We’re writers in this class. We are romantics. We’re not typists and programmers.”

  I resist an urge to disagree with the professor, opting instead to turn my eyes towards the boy in the front corner of the class. He’s staring down at a sheet of paper like he’s just made a new enemy, tapping his pencil in a steady rhythm and bouncing his leg anxiously. He’s in a pair of grey-and-black checkered shorts that look torn off at the knee, and a pair of black-and-white Converse, which seem to complement his style perfectly.

  Instantly, I imagine what sort of music he listens to. He looks like a violinist. I’ve always loved the combination of a solo string with the supportive chords of a piano. I can see him embracing a violin to his chin, closing his pensive, tortured eyes, and letting the strings convey all his inner turmoil. I hear it right now.

  Then I lick my lips, staring at him. What is poetry? That’s what the professor asked. That’s what I need to answer. Poetry is a boy on the other side of the room. Poetry is a strained, sexy face and a bouncing leg. Poetry is the way he bites his sexy lip, and the music he inspires in me. Poetry …

  “Need a sheet of paper?”

  I jerk so hard out of my thoughts, my entire desk squeaks in protest and half the class looks my way. The professor is standing in front of me with pursed lips and lifted eyebrows, awaiting my answer.

  I only came with the textbook and my backpack, in which there is just my clunky laptop I’m not allowed to use and a squished sandwich in a bag I planned to have for lunch. No paper. Not even a pen, come to think of it.

  The professor, taking my silence for an answer, turns to grab a sheet of paper off his desk. After setting it on mine, he stares at me for another handful of humiliating seconds before then swiping a pencil from his desk and extending it to me. My effort in reaching for it causes my chair to squeak once again.

  “Thank you,” I try to say, but it comes out in a strangled hiss.

  With a glance over my shoulder, I realize no one’s looking at me anymore; they’ve all returned their attention to their own scribbled definitions of “poetry”.

  And the boy in the front corner isn’t looking at me, either. I wonder if he ever was.

  The thought saddens me somehow.

  We’re asked to sign our definitions—no, this isn’t the fateful signature either—and then the professor collects them, insisting that he’ll do a little fun experiment with us and see how our definitions change over the course of the semester. Then he talks about the nature of poetry and why we find things to be poetic at all.

  And I’m wondering what makes me find that boy over there so … poetic. His face is pale in contrast to his dark hair—Is it dyed?—but I notice a subtle blush in his cheeks that draws me in.

  I flinch and turn away. Stop it, Sam.

  I’m such a creep, staring at him.

  But then I can’t help it. I keep sneaking glances, as if expecting to catch him looking my way.

  Who am I kidding? I’m the least noticeable person in this room. I might as well be the paint on a wall for all the attention I draw.

  Before I realize it, half an hour’s gone by. “This may be a bit old-fashioned,” the professor states, clutching a clipboard, “but I prefer to eyeball my attendance, and I am old-fashioned. If they allowed an open flame, we’d be writing by candlelight every single class. Here’s a seating chart,” he says, slapping the clipboard down on that boy’s desk in the front corner. “Jot your name in the spot you’re sitting in and pass the chart along. This is where you’ll be for the rest of the semester. Make friends with that desk.”

  The boy takes up his pen and, with the intensity of a technician, writes down his name. He’s left-handed. I watch as the muscles in his forearm move and dance with his writing. Why do I find that so erotic? Then he hands the clipboard off, and on and on it goes.

  And on and on the professor drones, but all I’m doing is watching my new obsession as he picks at the corner of his desk, like he’s mentally peeling potatoes. The professor said to make friends with it, I think to myself, staring. Not whittle away at it.

  Something pokes at my back. It’s the clipboard. I accept it from a tir
ed-eyed girl behind me and find the empty spot where my name is supposed to go.

  My eyes shift to the front corner of the chart.

  Dmitri Katz.

  That’s his name.

  And right behind him, the spot’s empty.

  I drop my jaw. There’s no one sitting behind him? I fidget with the chart, well aware that the person to my side is expecting me to just put down my name and pass it on like everyone else has, but I’m struck with a sudden wish and a quick decision to make.

  This is it. This is the moment in which two totally unscary words change everything. It all starts now.

  Two words.

  But I am blissfully unaware of the significance of this moment. My heart racing, the two words spill out from my fingers as quickly as they ever have before. Samantha Hart. I scribble it right into the blank spot behind Dmitri’s desk.

  Then I pass the clipboard, and the moment is passed.

  What did I just do? My face is flushed. My breath is short, escaping me with every tiny inhale. My fingers tingle with a bizarre, unfamiliar excitement, like I’d just done something super rebellious and I could get in trouble for it. Call the Seating Chart Police.

  Not a minute after that, everyone is getting out of their seats and heading for the door. Did the professor just dismiss class?

  And then everything moves in slow motion as Dmitri walks by.

  This is science at work, kids. Excitement plus stuff happening equals slow motion. Did you know that adrenaline actually makes your brain process more events per second? It’s like the natural frame rate of your eyeballs triples when adrenaline surges through your body and, essentially, does render your world in slow motion.

  And Dmitri, I could watch him like this, walking through invisible molasses, for hours.

  And he is a major, necessary cause for adrenaline.

  Someone like him activates my fight or flight response instantly. Should I flee? Should I tackle him to the floor? I’m warring with a hundred sudden and inappropriate desires here. It’s very confusing.

  And I’m going to be sitting behind that sexy, tortured individual for the rest of the semester.