“Nope, we’re going out to a party, and we’re going to have fun.” Ronnie tosses an armload of clothes on my bed, then disappears back into the depths of her wardrobe. “We’ll get you all un-funkified, and then we’re going to come up with anawesome plan for you to show your asshat of a boss that he’s a fool to keep using you as nothing but a coffee runner.”
“A plan? Like what, hacking into the paper’s website and replacing the online version of the article with my original?”
Ronnie spins around and points at me with both hands. “Yes! That! Do that!”
I pull the pillow over my face to hide from my roommate and her criminal intents. “Absolutely not. Even if I knew how, it’s probably a felony.”
I hear her deflate. “Yeah. Probably.” She bounces back almost immediately, though. “But there’s got to be something you can do to show him what he’s missing. Get up and let’s find you something to wear, and then we’ll go to the party, and we’ll let our good friend White Claw help us figure something out.”
“It’s not like I’m going to get a second chance on the article,” I insist. “And he’s definitely not going to let me go to any other events to represent the paper. In his mind, he didn’t even sanction me going to this event. Apparently when he said ‘fine, whatever,’ he didn’t mean ‘fine, whatever, you can cover it if you want,’ he meant ‘okay, I heard you, stop talking.’”
“Well, we’ll just have to find you something else to write about,” says Ronnie, yanking the pillow off my face.
“Anything he’s going to like is already being assigned to the staff reporters,” I argue. “That’s why I suggested this one, and why he hated it. Said Rubik’s Cube competitions aren’t interesting and nobody cares.” I reach for the pillow, but she’s keeping it just out of reach.
“Okay, enough shop talk. You need to shake all of the woe-is-me off and I know exactly what will do it.” She crosses to my dresser and starts shuffling through drawers. I watch her, assuming she’s looking for something skimpy and sexy she can force me into, although I don’t know why she thinks she’ll find anything like that in my stuff. She knows me better than that.
Ugh. I really don’t love the idea of going out. I want to keep wallowing. And not wearing lip gloss or whatever Ronnie will slather all over my face. And daydreaming about the hot cubing team being glad to see me again and … I don’t even know what comes next. I’ve only ever dated one guy, in high school, and all we did was kiss a couple times. I mean, I understand how sex works, I’ve watched porn a couple times and it’s not like I’ve never touched myself. But when it comes to this fantasy, the part where we go up to their room for “I just won a cubing competition” sex is fuzzy. Would it be all four of them, or just one? Which one would I want it to be? If it’s all of them, is it all at once or one at a time? I’m out of my depth here, so things always just sort of fade to black once they take my hands and lead me into their hotel room.
“Aha!” Ronnie reaches into the back of my sock drawer and whips out a folded piece of pink paper. “I knew you’d kept this!”
My stomach sinks and I fly off the bed, grabbing for the paper, but she holds it out of my reach. “Ronnie, give it back.”
“I saw it in there when I borrowed your fuzzy socks the other week and knew exactly what it was. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen you write on pink paper.”
“I don’t even know why I have it still, just throw it away.”
She points a finger at me with the hand that isn’t holding the paper high above her head. “You want to complete this list, don’t you, you little minx. Why else would you have kept it?”
“I forgot about it.”
“You brought it with you when you moved home over the summer, and then brought it back when you moved into this dorm. There’s no way you’d have done that if you’d forgotten about it.”
She’s right, but I refuse to admit that the list of sexual acts we thought we should attempt before we graduated that we’d written up at the beginning of freshman year is not only a thingI kept on purpose, but a thing I take out and read over at least once a month, wishing I knew how to go about checking any of the items off. I’m interested in sex, but not enough to break my no-dating rule, and I don’t want to randomly hook up with guys I meet at parties and never see again like Ronnie and her friends have done. I don’t feel comfortable giving that degree of power to some drunk idiot I just met. What I really need is a fuck buddy, someone I trust enough to not hurt or embarrass me, but who understands that the sex does not mean we’re in a relationship. But where the hell would I even begin to find someone to fill that role? I don’t get out enough for that.
“Let’s go to this party tonight, and we’ll find you a cute guy, and you can do a couple of these things and take your mind off that loser boss of yours.” She scans down the list. “It doesn’t even have to be anything too major. Look, you’ve got ‘make out’ on here, and ‘dry humping,’ you could do both of those with some random nice-looking guy tonight and check the boxes and never have to think about him again.”
“I don’t want to dry hump some random drunk boy at a party tonight. Or any night.”
“Well, you’re not sitting here feeling sorry for yourself.” She folds the list again and tucks it into my purse. “You’re coming to this party with me, and you’re bringing the list just in case you meet someone who’s worth dry humping, and if you don’t then you don’t. No big deal.”
I hate that I’m actually considering her suggestion.
“Come on, Becks,” wheedles Ronnie when I say nothing. “Please?”
I can feel myself being pulled into this. If I keep fighting it, it’ll only be worse when I do eventually cave. I sigh and shake my head in acquiescence. “Where’s the party?”
Her eyes light up. She knows she’s got me. “Over near MIT. Those girls down the hall, Callie and Reyna, are going too andsaid we can catch a lift with them, but they’re so annoying. You have to come. Even if you completely ignore the list and don’t talk to a single guy, you can’t leave me alone with them.”
My ears perk up when she says “MIT.” That's where the cubing guys said they go to college. They didn't seem like the type to go out to parties, and even if they were, there are probably a lot of parties at MIT on a Saturday night. But what if …?
Also, I know Ronnie isn’t going to let up. Sometimes she does, if she has other friends to go with, but if she thinks the girls she’s going with are annoying, she’s going to push until I give in. May as well not drag it out any longer.
“Okay, fine. Let's go to a party, I guess,” I tell her. “But you do not get to try to find me someone to make out with. That is not why I’m agreeing to this.”
“Yay!” Ronnie jumps up, clapping, and dances back over to our wardrobes. “Now we just need to find you something awesome to wear.”
“Can’t I just wear this?” If Ronnie dresses me, I’m going to be tottering around in heels and a miniskirt, completely miserable. If I have to go to this party, I don’t want to spend all evening tugging on my clothes and trying not to break an ankle.
