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The kind of friends you told everything to because they were the fixed points in your ever-changing universe and who told you everything because you were the fixed point in theirs.
Milton had a seemingly endless supply of stories about adventures he’d had with his theater friends from high school. Nights they had to stay at school until two in the morning to finish painting the scenery for opening night the next day. Nights they told their parents they were at the theater but actually went out to bars and clubs. Times he snuck away to mess around with guys in the lighting booth or the sound booth or the catwalks (Milton had a bit of a thing for techies).
Milton’s roommate, Robbie, seemed to be the one person immune to Milton’s charms. He was quiet and kept to himself, leaving the room whenever we were hanging out in there even though Milton always made an effort to include him in the conversation. Milton said at first he’d worried that Robbie was freaked out by having a gay roommate, but he’d realized he was just pretty solitary.
Gretchen’s roommate, on the other hand, was the opposite. She was aggressively cheerful and always wanted to talk to anyone that Gretchen brought to their room. She had frizzy red hair that she straightened religiously, but she always missed a spot in the back, like she was waging an epic, unwinnable battle against a part of herself.
Within the first month of school, she had already joined something like ten clubs and was always encouraging Gretchen to come to this meeting or that event with her. Gretchen was basically a saint, but even she couldn’t keep her cool with Megan all the time. Thomas started calling her Megan-with-no-H because he said she was like the inverse of Meghan from Felicity. Then, so she wouldn’t know we were talking about her, we shortened it to No-H.
Sometimes, No-H would launch into cheery, interminable monologues and Gretchen would silently gather up her study materials and slink into the common room. If it was occupied, she’d come to my room, sink to the floor next to my bed—Gretchen loved sitting on the floor and had the kind of excellent posture that made it look like she sat on a throne even when wearing sweats on our dorm carpet—take deep, centering breaths in an attempt to cleanse herself of the static of No-H, and then work in total silence for hours, seemingly undistracted by either my sighs at my work or Charles’ clumsy entrances, exits, and muttering at his computer.
After I’d gotten the job at Mug Shots, Gretchen had started coming and doing her work there when No-H was driving her particularly up the wall, and I’d slip her coffees that people sent back or that went unclaimed at the counter.
Gretchen was from just outside Ithaca and was really close with her huge extended family, so she’d had a lot of experience blocking out noise and chaos. That No-H was able to get to her even though that was a true testament to her level of irritation. Gretchen had tons of stories featuring a zillion different cousins, aunts, uncles, and second-somethings-twice-removed that sounded idyllic and chaotic, like scenes from a movie.
Family reunions in parks where picnic tables full of food got eaten by dogs or doused in flash floods. Christmas Eves when all of the siblings and cousins slept jumbled together in living rooms, attics, and basements of various houses and opened metric tons of presents all at once. Birthday parties shared with three other people that sprawled over backyard fields and lasted late into the night.
Thomas’ stories were rambling and often featured his twin brother, Andy. They sounded inseparable. Thomas even narrated in the first person plural. They had only gone to different colleges because, after a guidance counselor told their parents she thought they were overly dependent on one another, their parents had said they’d only pay for school if they went along with it. Neither Thomas nor Andy had really spoken to their parents since then. They chatted and texted constantly throughout the day and played video games online together at night with a group of friends they’d been playing with for years.
Charles didn’t really tell stories so much as give disquisitions on various topics that sometimes included how he’d learned about them. So, I found out that he knew so much about computers because he built one as part of a school project, taken under the wing of a particularly zealous teacher, scavenging the parts from a computer lab graveyard of tech going back to the seventies in the basement of the school. (This was also the moment when I started to think that maybe when Charles said he went to “a good high school” that he actually meant some kind of super-genius school for science and technology.)
