The Roommate Situation (3 page)

Derek pushes his fingers through his hair, raking back the stray lock that tends to drop toward his eyes. He says, “When isn’t there a party?”

“Come on. Five bucks gets you in. There’s a keg.”

“And you’re all of, what, eighteen?”

“They don’t care.” My jeans—the same ones I’d worn to class—sit in a pile in my desk chair. I turn my back and slip my chill pants down. Just like a locker room, right? No big deal.

My spine prickles, like goose bumps skimming along it. I’m suddenly superconscious of the fact that I’m not wearing underwear under my chill pants. They’re shoved under my jeans, on the chair. I dig them out without straightening and step into them.

As I’m doing that, Derek says, “Fine,” and his footsteps move back to his side of the room. I pull my briefs up, then get my jeans on, wondering if he’d enjoyed that. Wondering if he left because he got wood over it, or if he left because he didn’t give a shit, seeing me changing.

I wonder what I’d have done if he’d stayed there the whole time and I’d caught him checking me out. How would I have felt? Good because he found me worth watching, or creeped out because he was a guy?

I kind of felt both at the same time—I mean, at the idea of catching him looking at me.

“It’s only half a mile,” I say, buttoning my jeans. “I was gonna walk it.” I’ve decided to go with assuming he didn’t perv on me when I pulled my pants down.

“Okay,” he says through the locker. I hear the keys on his laptop going.

I stuff my wallet in my pocket and reach for the phone, then remember my parents. “I’ve gotta make a call first. I’ll meet you out front.” I tapped their contact card on my way to the stairwell.

“Were you in a class when I called?” is the first thing my mother says when she answers the phone. “I didn’t think you had a class that late in the afternoon on Fridays.”

“I was eating. I left my phone in the room.”

“How are things going?”

“You know. It’s school.” I slide my hand along the banister as I round the landing. “I had an economics test today.”

“How did that go?”

“I won’t know till we get them back.”

“Listen, honey, the reason I called. Your father and I were thinking we might drive up to see you tomorrow.”

I wince. It isn’t that I mind my parents so much, just that I’d been looking forward to a weekend without obligations, other than working on a talk for Public Speaking.

“It’s such a pretty drive,” she’s saying. “And we could go to that restaurant we ate at when we brought you up there. I have some of your winter clothes packed up I could bring. Is it getting chilly there yet?”

“A little in the mornings, but it warms up.”

“Does it stay warm enough in your room?”

“Yeah. What time are you going to be here?” I could at least plan my day
around
it.

“We were thinking a little before noon.”

That means eleven thirty. I’ll need to set an alarm.

“Is that all right?” she asks, as if it matters. If I say,
No, could you make it one o’clock?
she’ll have a half dozen Very Good Reasons why it would be better if they came at noon. So I say, “Sure. How long are you thinking of staying? I mean, I have this project I need to get done before Monday.”

“Oh, not long. Just lunch and maybe a walk around campus.”

“Okay.”

“What are you up to tonight, honey? Do they have something fun organized in the student lounge?”

“I’m just gonna hang out with the guys.”

“Well, have fun.”

“Yep.” I hang up and tip my head back. I’d made it out to the patch of lawn in front of Quaid during the conversation.

Maybe they’ll bring a care package along with the winter clothes, with gummi bears and some of my other favorites. The box of snacks they left with me when they moved me here is already cleaned out.

Derek isn’t out of the building yet.

I thumb my phone screen and send a text to the others, telling them I’ll just meet them there. I’m slipping the phone into my pocket when Derek pushes through the doors, looking like he just walked off the set of
The Wild Angels
: black jeans, black jacket, black T-shirt, black boots—and that dark lock of hair falling over his forehead. I smile a little. I loved that movie, actually, and
The Wild One
. And just about any old biker movie except the
Beach Blanket Bingo
ones. Those my mother likes, where the bikers are complete doofs.

When I was fourteen, I begged for a dirt bike. You don’t need a license to ride one of those off-road. But that had been a big no-go. I swore I’d get a motorcycle once I had a license and a job, but when that rolled around, after gas, insurance, and a few fast-food meals a week, I didn’t have the money left to put toward one. By then, I was more interested in guitars anyway. My need for excitement and coolness was sated by the semihollow electric my parents gave me for Christmas a few months before I got my license.

“What kind of bike do you have?” I ask Derek as I fall in step with him.

“Yamaha Virago.”

As much as I’ve wanted a bike, I’m not familiar with anything but the basic categories: Harleys, rice rockets, choppers. I don’t know even which category a Virago fits into, outside of “not Harley.” I say, “I’ll have to check it out sometime.”

“Sure.” He slides his toothpick under the cellophane wrapper of a pack of Marlboros. “You mind?”

“Nah.”

He lights up as soon as his front foot lands officially off our smoke-free campus. “So whose party is this?”

“Some guy Chuck met.”

“You know those guys from back home?”

“Chuck and Pete? Nah. We just sort of gravitated together the first week.”

“Cool.”

“My parents are coming tomorrow,” I say, as much for something to say as to remind myself of this fact.

“You need me to clean up or anything?”

“I don’t think they’ll look on your side of the room. They’re just gonna drop some stuff off and grab lunch at Tito’s.”

“Cool.”

Chuck and Pete are waiting at the bottom of the porch of a brick duplex. It’s got some scraggly brown grass out front. A couple of mailboxes hang precariously on the wall next to the door. I introduce Derek, and Chuck doesn’t say anything embarrassing—he has his eye on a trio of girls climbing the steps. I don’t think they so much as notice us.

“Shall we?” Chuck says, pulling his gaze away to grin at us.

We head inside, where we pay our five bucks each and get red plastic Solo cups with rage comic stickers stuck to their bottoms in exchange. Then it’s just a matter of finding the keg in the crowd of bodies.

“Don’t let me get wasted,” I say to Pete.

“Why not?”

“Parents are coming. I can’t deal with them and a hangover.”

“You have my condolences.”

Chuck breaks off to hit the bathroom. I look around a few minutes later and see we’ve lost Derek too, though I don’t see where to. When I look back at Pete, it’s just in time to watch him bump a girl, splashing beer over the front of her shirt.

“I am so sorry,” he says, mortified. Pete’s nothing if not a nice guy. He makes a good contrast to Chuck. To the girl, he says, “I can get that cleaned for you. I mean, I
will
get that cleaned for you.”

The girl passes her cup to Pete, telling him to try not to spill that on her too. She unbuttons the shirt—she has at least one tank top on underneath; I can see it through the fabric, where the beer’s soaked through. As she peels out of the shirt, there’s a butterfly tattoo on her collarbone. She trades the shirt for her cup, saying, “It’s not a souvenir. I expect to get it back.”

“Right, right. Just let me know where to send it. I’m Pete, by the way.”

But instead of answering, she holds up her phone with her number on the screen.

Chuck bumps me from the other side.

“I should be picking up tips from him,” he says over the rim of his beer. “In the space of ten seconds, he’s got her taking off her clothes and giving him her number.”

I smile, imagining Chuck going through the party:
Whoops. Sorry about that. Take it off, and I’ll get it cleaned for you. Whoops. Sorry about that. Here, let me help you out of it.

Music blares, mostly hip-hop, but underneath there’s an acoustic guitar playing somewhere. I leave Chuck slapping Pete’s back, to wander through the rooms, half following the sound, sipping off my beer. Watching the crowd. The guitar’s in a bedroom, played by a guy who leans more hippie than hipster. He’s sitting on the corner of the bed with a couple of girls at his side. People are talking, grouped together at the middle of the room. A few—including one of the girls—glance over as I wander in. I don’t register as anyone they know, and they go back to what they were doing.

The guitar—the guitar is a battered piece of work, scarred and duct-taped, its metal insignia peeling up from the headstock. Its sunburned tiger striping is dark with age.

It is gorgeous.

“What kind of guitar is that?” I ask. I can’t read the insignia.

“An old Silvertone,” the guy says. “They sold ’em at Sears. Picked her up at a yard sale for thirty bucks.”

“Sweet.”

He bends over to reach for the Solo cup by his foot. “You play?” he says as he straightens.

“Some.”

“Here, give it a try. It’s got some seriously sweet action.”

It’s warm in my hands. I slip the strap—a threadbare embroidered thing—over my head and pluck at the strings, listening over Kanye’s “I Am a God” for the tuning. I tweak a peg before fretting a cord and giving it a strum.

I really like the feel of this.

I play a piece of a Dylan song I’d never thought sounded that great on my electric. It comes out like honey on this thing. It’s fucking
gorgeous
. I fool around with a little of something else. The guy’s right about the action. The whole goddamned thing is seriously sweet. I could play it all night. And right now I’m missing my guitar—which is pretty sweet in its own way—like crazy. Reluctantly I stop playing.

“What was that?” he asks as the chord fades out.

“Nothing, really.” I slip my head out of the strap.

“Something you wrote?”

“Yeah.” I hand the guitar back. “It’s not really… I don’t know.”

“I know a band that’s looking for a guitarist. You ought to hook up with them.”

“Thanks, but my guitar’s back home.”

“So have your folks ship it. They’ve got this thing called UPS. It’s pretty groovy.”

I laugh.

“Seriously. Here’s Jason’s number. Shoot him a text. Tell him Craig told you they had an opening. See if you get along.”

I pull out my phone and type in the number Craig’s showing me, though I doubt I’ll use it. Some things aren’t as easy as “have your parents ship it.” If they were, my guitar would have been in the car with me when we drove out here.

I run into Chuck a few minutes later, leaning against a doorway, watching the crowd. He says, “Pete’s getting numbers from chicks, and you’re getting numbers from guys. I think we had it backwards.”

“It’s not like that.” I tell him about the guitar position, to which he has the same response as Craig: just have the parental units ship the motherfucker.

For a few minutes, I indulge myself in the fantasy of getting up early enough to call and ask them to bring it along. Then I dump the last of my beer down my throat and wend my way through the crowd for a refill.

* * * *

“I didn’t know you played guitar,” Derek says as we head back to Quaid. I’d found him sitting on the front steps, enjoying a smoke.

I hadn’t mentioned the band offer, so he must have caught me playing too. Amazing how many people had noticed despite the hip-hop blaring.

I say, “Yeah, I left it back home.”

“Not enough room in the car?”

I draw a deep breath before saying, “My dad said I should probably wait and see how much free time I had at college before I brought it, college being a lot harder than high school.”

“Is it?” he asks.

“Only the part involving schoolwork.”

He laughs.

“What are you majoring in?” I ask.

“Chemistry.”

I hadn’t expected that. I don’t know what I had expected. Auto mechanics? Did they offer that here? “Seriously?” I say.

He shrugs. “I like it. I can probably get a decent job with it. And I won’t have to deal with the public a lot, just sit in a lab all day.” After a few seconds, he says, “I’m planning on going into forensic chemistry. You know, analyzing evidence from crime scenes.”

“That sounds way more cool than economics.”

“Is that what you’re going for?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s probably cool economics stuff.”

“Let me know if you hear of any.”

“So,” he says, “why don’t you just tell them you have someone who wants to buy your guitar?” He slows to drop a cigarette butt on the sidewalk and grind it out with the toe of his boot.

“It was a Christmas present,” I say.

“But they’d rather have you studying economics.”

I walk a bit with my hands in my pockets. “What would I say when I still had the guitar next time they visit?”

“Do they go through your locker?”

I started to say that you could never tell—my mother’s been known to start reorganizing my stuff as she chatters away—but Derek cuts me off. “Tell them the guy never came up with the cash, so you took it back. Then you look smart—you didn’t let yourself get screwed in the deal.” He swipes his ID to unlock the entrance.

As we climb the stairwell, I’m enjoying this. Chuck’s fun, and Pete’s a guy you can count on, but it feels kind of special having Derek hang out with me—even if he didn’t do a lot of hanging out while we were at the party. Our footsteps echo in the closed-in space. His jacket rustles as he gets out his cigarettes so he can tease the toothpick out from under the cellophane.

“How’d you get into making things with leather anyway?”

“I got a leathercraft kit when I was a kid.” He pushes the stairwell door open. “My grandma Penny was always giving me stuff you could make things with. This kit had stuff for key chains, a wristband, some round pieces that to this day I don’t know what they were supposed to be for. She used them as coasters, which, you can imagine, is not a great idea.” He flashes a smile at me, the toothpick back in his mouth. “Anyway, the next birthday, figuring I must have liked it since I made all this stuff and gave it to her, she bought me the next kit up. Wallet, coin pouch, more key fobs, more circles. It became a thing. She liked to shop flea markets and yard sales too. She’d bring me old belts, stuff I could take the fittings off of and reuse.”