The Roommate Situation

THE ROOMMATE SITUATION

Zoe X. Rider

www.loose-id.com

Chapter One

When I try to get into my dorm room after classes, I’m thinking about foosball and showering and grabbing something to eat before I head to the student lounge to challenge Chuck to a rematch. But the door, instead of opening, bumps against something near the floor. Assuming my roommate’s dropped a sack of dirty laundry on the other side, I put my shoulder to the wood and shove, edging it a few inches wider.

The room’s murky, the blinds drawn against the gray September sky. Skip’s lamp burns tired and yellow from the side of the room I can’t see yet. I’m surprised it isn’t the whiter light of his computer screen. As far as I can tell, he only leaves the computer, flipping it over to the password login, when he has to piss, sleep, or pick up food delivery on Johnson’s front steps. If he weren’t sharing a room with another human being, he’d probably just keep a plastic jug by his foot, eliminate the whole get-up-to-piss thing completely, especially since it involves going up the hall to the shared bathrooms.

One thing Skip isn’t into, I’ve figured out in the past three weeks, is people.

“Skip?” I say through the crack in the door. “What the fuck? I’m trying to get in.”

I give it another shove. Whatever’s in the way, it’s too heavy to be laundry. My pushing moves it another few inches, and I squeeze through, hauling my textbooks in behind.

My sneaker slides in a slick spot. I catch the wall with my free hand and look down.

And see…Hershey’s syrup?

I track the puddle to an upturned hand, half-curled fingers smeared dark, the white of skin showing through in blotches.

I back my shoulders into the wall. My books slip sideways. I clamp down, holding them against my hip.

What I’d expected to see and what I’m actually seeing try to pull together into a single image that makes any sense.

Skip is covered in blood, and because of the way he’s lying, I can’t see his face, and I’m glad as fuck I can’t see his face. Seeing his ear poking through his uncombed hair is bad enough. It’s like it makes it real, that pink edge of ear.

“Skip?”

Skip doesn’t move.

“Skip?” How could I have thought it was Hershey’s syrup? The smell… Like iron, like something dug up from a swamp. I can’t get it out of my nostrils no matter how fast I breathe. “Skip.”

Clutching my books, I yank the door open. It thumps against his shoulder, nudging him another quarter inch.

“Help,” I call into the hall. “Help, someone? I need an RA!”

* * * *

My phone rings. I’m sitting on a bed in a small room—temporary housing while they scrub the blood out of mine. Skip had done it on the bed, the sheets soaked through, glistening. No matter how much I rub my eyes, I still see that. They’d be stripping those off, stripping the mattress off, leaving nothing but the bed frame. Like he’d never bothered showing up for his freshman year at all.

He’d done it on the bed; then he’d changed his mind and tried to get help, but he hadn’t made it to the door. I think about if I’d gotten there earlier, but I couldn’t have. I’d rushed back from class as it was, thinking about foosball. But I ran the fantasy through my head anyway, over and over, opening the door and walking in on him as rivers of blood ran into his dark blue sheets, his hand moving weakly. I’d have run out and gotten the RA. Saved him.

“Hi, honey.” My mother’s voice is warm. She has no idea. “I hope I’m not interrupting your studies.”

“No.” My laptop is open, my Econ 101 assignment staring me in the face. My bedding is still in a pile at the foot of the bed, waiting for me to do something with it, just like the economics assignment is waiting for me, the cursor blinking on the blank page.

And all I can think is, what’s the goddamned point? Somebody died today.

“How was your day?” she asks.

I put my forehead against my hand and close my eyes. “Okay.” I hope I just sound tired. I really—
really
—don’t want to get into it.

“Shane, are you all right?”

“I’m just tired.” I don’t want to relive it, I don’t want to explain it, and I don’t want to spend the next hour listening to her sage wisdom and how it wasn’t my fault. I know it wasn’t my fault. I just want to erase the whole afternoon from my fucking head.

“Are you coming down with something? Have you been eating enough fruit?”

“I had an apple at lunch and an orange juice this morning.”

“What about dinner?”

“I’m not hungry.” I rake my hand into my hair.

“You should have some soup, at least, and some more juice.” She’s making my stomach surge like a tide of sewage, and she keeps on going, oblivious: “You don’t want to fall ill and get behind. You have just the one class tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah.” The History of Rock.
Not
their favorite, but damn, I should get to pick at least one of my classes.

“Maybe you should skip it,” she says. “Get some rest. It’s not like you don’t know rock music.” She laughs as she says it. She has no idea. “How about your roommate?” she asks. “Is he not feeling well too?”

I grit my teeth. “No.” I have to force it out. It may be the shortest
no
I’ve ever said.

“You sound like you have a headache. Shane, honey, take care of yourself. Have some hot tea, and turn in early, all right?”

“Yeah,” I say. I can’t wait to get off the phone—and then I am, and that’s not any better, because now I’m alone.

* * * *

“So, do you have to stay in the suicide room?” Chuck asks. He’s peeling a banana like it’s a project.

“No, they’re moving me.”

“Too bad they already stuck me with a roommate. Otherwise we could room together.”

“I thought you liked Pete,” I say.

“Except for his farting,” Chuck says, which is ironic, because if anyone has a propensity for farting… “Are you staying in Johnson?”

“No opening in freshman housing. Just my luck to have to change rooms when
everyone
is changing rooms. They’re moving me to Quaid.”

“So no more dick jokes for you.”

“Guess not.” The Johnson jokes had stopped being funny about a week ago anyway.

He chomps three inches off the top of the banana before saying around it, “Must have been freaky as shit walking in on a dead body.”

I don’t have anything to say to that. “Freaky as shit” doesn’t describe it. Neither does “crazy,” though that’s the word I’d used when the school counselor asked how it felt to discover my roommate had taken his own life. “Crazy” and “I wish he’d done it somewhere else.” I wasn’t lying. Anywhere but there would have been better.

I wish they’d put me in with someone else to begin with, because clearly I’d been in over my head with Skip. Clearly Skip was in over his head too.

Maybe if Skip’d had a different roommate, he’d still be alive, like if a butterfly flaps its wings in China, how it could change the course of the future. If he’d had a roommate who was around more or who was into the same shit he was into or who offered to go halves on a pizza with him every now and then. Instead of me. I’d given up even saying hi to the guy, or “I’ll be back later,” because all I got for it was stone silence. So fuck it, I’d thought. He doesn’t want to talk; we don’t have to talk.

I
thought
I was being accommodating.

I was just being an asshole.

“Well,” says Chuck, “if you need help moving out—”

“Thanks,” I say.

“—Pete’s probably available.”

“No, really, thanks.”

* * * *

“Spiffy,” Pete says as we walk up my new hallway. I’m lugging a laundry basket crammed full of dirty clothes, my iHome perched on top. Pete’s got one of my duffel bags, stuffed with clean clothes I’d never bothered folding. My rolled-up Black Angels poster is tucked under his arm, Blu-Tack still stuck to the back of one corner. Chuck’s lagging behind us, loaded down with a desk lamp, his excuse being that somebody had to get the doors.

He says, “Are you still gonna hang out with us when you become friends with the upperclassmen?”

“No.” I stop at room 217 and set down the basket so I can get my ID out to unlock the door—hoping they actually changed this in the computer so I don’t have to go tracking down the RA. The lock snicks, and the light turns green. Now I’m hoping there’s nothing heavy leaning on the door when I push it open. For an eighth of a beat, as I turn the handle, I panic that there’s something heavy against it, but it opens freely.

Peeking around its edge, I say, “Hello?” before pushing it wider.

The faded glow of daylight creeps over a makeshift curtain that’s been hung between two wall lockers, one jutting out from either wall. The line of lockers and curtain effectively cut the space in half. Aside from the daylight coming over the jerry-rigged transom, the room is dark. I flip on the overhead light.

The single bed on this side has no bedding, which makes it mine, I figure. Its headboard has been pushed against the back of one of the lockers. The other locker faces the front of the room, its doors ajar, teasing at an emptiness within. I drop the laundry basket on the bed while Pete sets his load on the empty desk.

Chuck, with my lamp still clutched in his fist, walks past both of us. As he fingers the curtain that divides the room, I say his name to call him back, but he peels the curtain open and peers into my new roommate’s domain.

“Doesn’t seem fair he gets all the windows,” he says.

I put on my best imitation of my father’s voice to tell him, “I didn’t come to college to look out windows. I came to look at books.”

“And Professor Rivera’s ass.” He flashes a grin toward us as the curtain flaps back into place. Its movement stirs up the smell of leather. It’s a good smell. Better than the heavy stink of iron. I wonder what it’s going to be like living with an upperclassman.

Hell, I wonder what it’s going to be like living with someone who’s, hopefully, not suicidally depressed. I have the suicide hotline programmed into my phone now, though, just in case.

Chuck holds up the lamp. “Where do you want this?” I lift an eyebrow until he says, “Probably over here on the desk, huh?”

As we head out, Chuck says, “How many more trips, do you think?”

“I guess that depends on how much you’re going to carry.” Really, it’s only another trip’s worth, even if Chuck just carries his ball sac. I didn’t bring that much with me—no stereo, no guitar, no clutter except the Black Angels poster. I didn’t come to college to have fun, after all! My dad didn’t say exactly that, but between the lines it’s what he meant. Time to grow up and get serious. This Is the Rest of Your Life.

Chuck claps a hand on my shoulder as we head back down the hallway. “Your roommate,” he says, “is both weird and a dick.”

“Why?” For an instant, I have a flash of mannequins and baby-doll body parts across the other half of the room. Pee-wee Herman posters. A tinkertoy city made out of gnarled chicken legs.

Just please, whatever: don’t let the guy be depressed.

The stairwell door pops open, and a guy in a leather jacket comes through, his head down, his attention on an envelope he’s slicing open with a pocketknife.

Chuck says, “He’s a dick for hogging all the windows. You’re probably going to get vitamin D deficiency living there, get all bowlegged and shit.”

The guy looks out of place. It’s not so much the long sideburns or the biker boots. Maybe it’s the lines around his mouth, the hollows under his eyes when he glances up for half a beat. He looks like what my mother would call “the other side of the tracks.” This is not a top-flight school—my parents should be so lucky—so it shouldn’t be strange, but the general look at this place leans more toward hippie and hipster than outlaw biker.

A toothpick juts from the corner of his mouth. When his gaze darts up, his teeth clamp down on the pick. I push my hands into my pockets and look at the floor. But I can feel his energy as we pass in the hall, like static against the side of my arm, lifting the hairs.

Chuck is saying, “And he’s weird because his desk is basically a workbench with, like, pointy awls and torture clamps on it,” just as we pass the guy.