Flash Fiction

DORM LIFE - THE AWKWARD FRESHMAN

It was a stark and dormy night. I cursed dog-eared pages, as streaks of yellow highlighter and ink stained doodles mocked me—laughing back at my twisted face. I tried to ignore them, staring through impolite graffiti, squinting my eyes harder, as if somehow that would will complex formulas off the paper and into the spongy gray matter of a preoccupied Freshman. It didn’t. Shit, I was going to fail, and my mother was going to kill me.

Distracted, I was unable to understand the work before me, certain the room reeked of my desperation as I struggled to study for finals. I hated my life, I hated my studies, and I especially hated the streetlight glaring through my unadorned dorm window—something I fought for with my roommate. 

“The view of the mountains is great! Why hang curtains and block it?” I said, watching her drag her bed away, to the furthest wall. Now, I hated that streetlight, I hated myself, and I hated my weak roommate, for not standing up to her convictions of a curtained window.

My fuzzy mind was elsewhere, floating somewhere between last night’s music, still pounding in my head and…him. I tried to focus, but the bouquet of leftover pizza and stale beer didn’t help my cause, tapping my cellular memory on the shoulder, sucking me right back into last night. How interesting—a scent, being able to transport me back in time, I was fixated on this, not on why the logarithm in base 2 of the number 32 was 5. Huh?

Instead, I daydreamed of yesterday, and the moment he entered the room, in his plaid shirt, carrying a six pack of whatever a college student could afford. The party had been a snooze-fest up until then. I mean, other people were having a good time, playing quarters, shooting cheap beer—puking in our tiny bathroom.

“It’s not a party until someone pukes!” That’s what our RA would say, and then he’d pocket the bribe money we all scrounged together, and pretend to never hear a thing. 

Anyway, the air in the room, was suddenly electric when plaid-shirt-guy walked in, causing my arm hairs to salute his presence. He was flanked by two others I could not see—they were smudged, like when you’re watching a program and suddenly someone’s face is blurred because they didn’t sign the release forms. All I could see was him.

“Sup,” he said, as he walked past.

Gah! What? Did he just say hello? Heat radiated to my face, I could feel prickly pink splotches travel from my neck to my cheeks. I knew I looked hideous, and turned before he could see my embarrassment.

Instead, I sat, watching him all night, an introverted voyeur, hidden in the shadowed corner of the room—away from that fucking streetlight, unable to expel a single word from my dusty throat. 

Now, I can’t study—mocked by marks, reading the same sentence over again, failing to retain anything but a memory. I didn’t even learn his name.