Preface

            You know, for college often being the time in one’s life that you change the most, find yourself, make lifelong friends, and learn to become an educated, independent adult, nobody really talks that deeply about it or even warns you, as an incoming freshman, of what the experience might be like. They tell you schoolwork is hard and you have to learn to study effectively, they tell you you’ll probably have some really (really really) weird roommates, and they tell you not to party too hard and that probably all boys ever will try to get in your pants. They joke about avoiding the RA and only living off of ramen, M&Ms and cheap beer and say you’ll probably remember this time for the rest of your life.

            Even with all those little tidbits the grown-ups were telling me stowed in my back pocket, I discovered upon my arrival at college that I was overwhelmingly unprepared.

            Martha was my roommate. She was cute and sweet with short, curly brown hair and ornate glasses, and she liked to wear big earrings and swishy skirts and a hint of blue eyeliner. She also really liked to smoke weed, which had been a habit of hers since she was fourteen, and she also really liked to have sex with her 24-year-old boyfriend who worked at Burger King.

            “So I was thinking that rather than putting a sock on the doorknob, like they do in the movies, maybe we can just use a little hair tie, because if we use a sock then everyone on our floor will know that Ricky and I are having some alone time,” Martha said one afternoon as she poked some snail food into the aquarium on her desk.

            “Great,” I said with false cheeriness as I clicked to the next episode of Doctor Who on Netflix.

            The first time I came home to find a hair tie on the doorknob, I just went and sat in the lounge down the hall from my room until I got hungry enough to make my way to the dining hall alone. The third time it happened that week, I went upstairs to the fourth floor to the room of the only person I sort-of knew. Carmen answered the door in a cut-up t-shirt bearing a hand-painted stalk of corn, and exercise leggings.

            “I’ve just been sex-iled again,” I said helplessly, and she burst out laughing.

            Carmen and I could relate to each other, we found. In fact, for the first three quarters of college, we had at least one class together. She also was having roommate problems—Reba, it turned out, also had a lot of gross sex with her boyfriend when he visited from Seattle, but on top of that, played video games loudly until around four in the morning—which lead us to spend a majority of our time in each other’s presence. I got drunk for the first time with her; the two of us shared a bottle of Kraken which I hated (that we acquired from a very odd guy who was a friend of a friend in high school, and he swore it was his favorite) but she mixed it with enough soda that I eventually was too tipsy and juiced up on sugar to care anymore. One time we tried to go to a party that Martha and Ricky had been invited to, but we found little social success there. It wasn’t a large group, we knew absolutely no one else there, and everyone was either high or wasted as we quietly sipped our Mike’s Hard Lemonade. As we sat quietly together on a slightly smelly couch, Carmen leaned over and said, “I’m realizing now that you make friends in high school based on proximity and convenience. In college you have to actually go out of your way to connect to people.”

            “Except us,” I pointed out. “We are definitely friends because of proximity and convenience.”

            “Whatever. The point is, you can’t just sit with someone at lunch every day to become their friend. You have to like, go to coffee with them or have them over to your house and shit.”

            “But somehow you have to know them well enough for inviting them over to not be weird. How do you do that?”

            “I have no idea. Because I feel pretty weird right now.”

            Meanwhile, in the corner opposite us, some girl was talking very loudly about how many times she had been arrested this year and that she might have to go to prison later.

            “So this is kind of my last hurrah,” she yelled. “I have to go to court on Tuesday. Fuck, what if they do a drug test!?” She handed the joint she was smoking to her friend, looking disgusted.

            “We need to go,” I said, and Carmen nodded vigorously in agreement.

            We found that we were much better suited to sitting in the dorm lounge for hours, blazing through entire series’ of really bad television shows at record speed. By the beginning of spring quarter we had made it through all five seasons of Merlin, four seasons of Secret Diary of a Call Girl, both seasons of Misfits (which wasn’t actually terrible), and many others that weren’t even worth naming, when—to our surprise—one of our neighbors down the hall poked his head out one day and invited us to watch Game of Thrones.

            His name was Tobias, and though he had gone to my high school, he was a year ahead of me and we had never been friends. He was a towering six-foot-six, at the time had wavy brown hair that covered his forehead and stuck out awkwardly behind his ears, and didn’t like to wear shoes. His roommate Sean, close friend Dane, and girlfriend Nicole were all extremely different from one another but equally quirky. Sean was tall but skinny, intensely obsessed with his linguistic studies, but mostly enjoyed complaining about Russian culture and/or discussing LGBT issues. Dane was quiet but smart and wicked with his humor, and he took an enormous amount of pride in his personal and family’s wealth. Nicole loved new friends and was pretty sure she was probably the best RA our dorm community had ever seen, but she was also “the coolest RA, because I really don’t give a shit what my residents get up to. Don’t worry, you’ll never get in trouble with me. Wanna have a beer later?”

            “Oh shit,” Carmen whispered in my ear one evening as we settled down in Dane’s lavishly furnished room to begin season three of Game of Thrones, and Tobias chucked several pieces of popcorn in our direction, “I think we found our friends.”

            “Stop talking and watch the damn show!” Tobias barked. I smiled.