Chapter II: A Cold October
I approached my room from down the hall, still coming to terms with the unexpected magic that had just unfolded, fingers crossed that my roommate, Tom, would be sleeping or even better out for the night so that I could sit down at my desk and get every last detail of that earth-shattering encounter down onto paper.
Unfortunately my door, shaking from an earth-shattering bass, dispelled any hopes of writing at once. Tom and his friend, Jake, were side by side on his twin bed, demolishing beers, blasting some shitty dance song about the summer, and playing what I assumed was “Call of Duty.”
"Big Dick Vick!” Tom said sophomorically. “Where the hell have you been?”
"I went to get a slice of pizza,” I said.
"In this weather?”
"I had a hunger.”
"We got wings delivered while you were gone. You should’ve said you were going to get food. You could’ve went in with us. You just got up and left.”
"It’s alright,” I said. “I despise buffalo sauce, and I prefer the breast.”
"Pick up any bitches while you were out?” Jake asked, taking an illegal sip from the can of Bud Light that rested casually beside him on the bed. He lived four doors down at the end of the hallway but was basically our third roommate because his was a “League of Legends loser” who never left the room. Jake could usually be found in this very spot next to Tom, babbling about the prestige such gameplay afforded him, or outside on the quad smoking the newest, invariably superlative strain of Mary Jane. The both of them hit the weights more than they hit the books, and they didn’t hit the weights much.
"A lady, yes.” I said.
Tom looked up. “Really?”
"Yeah, I bought her a slice of pizza.”
"Dude, good for you!” Tom jumped up, swallowing me in a drunken embrace. I could smell the hops on his breath. “About fucking time!”
"Did you plow?” Jake asked.
"No, I lost her to the night.”
"But you’re going to plow, right?” Tom asked, extending his hand for a fist bump.
"That metaphor is inadequate for what I intend to do,” I said, refusing to reduce her to an object in front of these two wannabe frat bros who would rather receive head than give it.
“Hell yeah, bro. You’re a freak.” Tom said, opening the fridge. “Let’s celebrate and figure out how you can seal the deal. When are you texting her? What are you texting her?”
My mind took flight at the mere suggestion of composing something to her: the “good morning” greeting with a grinning Emoji, the lunchtime affirmation that would get her through the day, the late night “I can’t sleep” dripping with a barely latent lust, each message to her more lyrical and layered than the last—a campaign waged by the written word so passionately and painstakingly crafted she would have no choice but to succumb.
“I don’t have her number.” I confessed, trying not to feel shamed by the judgment of these pigs, and failing.
“What?” Tom exclaimed, putting down the controller and giving me his full attention. “How?”
“It was raining—and the storm. I didn’t get a chance—”
“So you just bought her pizza and she dipped?”
“It was more than that.”
“That’s sad, bro.” Jake said. “That’s a lay up for a Snapchat at least.”
“No, it’s all good, dude.” Tom said. “It’s not the ideal but not the end of the world, either. You’ll obviously bump into her around campus and when you do, the groundwork is already laid. So let’s drink to it.”
He reached into the back of the fridge, characteristically fishing for the coldest can. Tom was from coastal New Hampshire and a finance major at our university's “acclaimed” business school, believing its diploma to be the only prerequisite for a purposeful, prosperous life. He spent most nights blasting uninspired EDM tracks and raging on Xbox into the early hours of the morning. Many an evening I was forced to pack up my things and trek to the library because between him puffing clouds of weed out of the window and screaming about “fucking snipers” I couldn’t get a single word down on the page.
His hand emerged from the fridge, a grin across his face. He wasn’t holding a Bud Light in his hand—he was holding a bottle.
“Fireball?” I asked.
“What else? It’s a special occasion.”
“I just—cool.” I stuttered. My first and only taste of alcohol had been that summer—the first day of it actually—a Mike’s Hard knocked back in my friend’s kitchen while his parents were at work. I knew the evolution to light domestics was inevitable—it was college after all—and something told me that getting to know Cassie might require a few of them. But whiskey?
Tom pulled three shot glasses from his desk drawer and poured the liquor; cinnamon assailed my nostrils as he handed me the glass emblazoned with a red B. I stared into the liquid, an orange abyss.
“Oh yeah,” Tom said, remembering, “you’ve never taken a shot before!”
“Only with my camera,” I said.
“Don’t think about it,” Jake said. “Just throw it back.”
“It’s hard not to think about it,” I said.
“Then let’s do it right now,” Tom said, and he raised his glass. “To good booze, hot bitches, and late night pizza.” What he lacked in eloquence he made up for in enthusiasm.
We clinked our glasses together and I tipped my head back, tossing the shot into my mouth. The spicy liquid coated my tongue and I almost had to expel it, but feeling their judgmental gazes I gathered the whiskey at the back of my throat and forced it down to cheers. A warm wave washed down my throat and settled in my chest. I didn’t mind the burn.
“Well?” Jake asked.
“It feels good,” I stated.
“Welcome to college, homie,” Tom said, slapping me on the back, and looking back to the screen, where his character, clutching a cherry-blossomed shotgun, spawned onto a yacht. On the right side of the screen was Jake, wielding some type of glass barrier.
The fire in my chest gave way to a good will in my head: Tom and Jake looked less objectionable than usual and even the barbaric game at which they spent so many formative hours shouting seemed to have a dash of appeal, if only for the glistening ocean that surrounded the deadly arena on which their characters killed. I felt this inexplicable sense that the world I was living in was somehow right. If this elixir had been in my veins when I first met Cassie, no doubt would I have secured her number and maybe even a kiss.
I walked over to my bed and plopped down on the end of it, peeling off my soaked socks and leaning back against the bare brick wall. I closed my eyes and tried to replay the scene in my mind: her thick brown locks tumbling down without a curl out of place, her pearl white pants with their gravitational pull; the way she dropped the slice into her mouth along with the raindrops and didn’t care at all. The goodbye I needed to contemplate most of all, but before I could make it to that fateful moment in my memory I drifted off into a deep sleep, half-consciously hoping that she’d be there in my dreams, awaiting me in a satin slip. But all I dreamt of was my hometown, that old Toyota Camry with a cracked windshield and a big back seat.
I thought I saw her everywhere that first week. Hustling through the wind tunnel by the library with her jacket pulled up to her chin, carefully chewing a salad in the corner booth of the dining common, laying in the quad with her friends, feet swaying in the autumn air. I even worked up the courage to go to the gym in the hopes that I might see her there—she worked out, that was undeniable—but left in a panic after I attempted a bench press and had to have the bar pulled off my throat. Thankfully, she wasn’t there.
We checked Facebook, too. Tom was convinced that searching her first name plus our school would yield results, and it did: dozens and dozens of Cassies enrolled at the school, many of them captivating, but none of them her. Her year, her major, her maiden name—it was all a mystery to me. The only thing I did know was that she wouldn’t be wandering the halls of Bartlett, the dim, dank English department building where I took most of my courses. She wasn’t a literary soul, that much I could tell. With looks like that she didn’t need to be.
My best bet was a gen-ed course, when I would travel to less familiar turf on the north side of campus where the science and nursing buildings sat clustered together. Astronomy 101, which I detested for its talk of the inconsequential neutrino and insignificant quasar, and attended only for its metaphorical value, thus overnight acquired a monumental significance. This was where I would make her acquaintance once again—I was sure of it. She was studying to be a wildlife biologist because she loved animals, or a nurse because of her ailing grandmother, and one day after leaving class I would find her sitting there by the campus pond: headphones in, an iced coffee beside her, textbook opened across her knees.
Yet that day did not come, and each day left me instead with a fresh paralysis. Unable to envision the future, I could no longer examine the past. I tried to sit down at my desk and write honestly about that tragic summer, how I’d left Sarah crying there in the Target parking lot, but my brain was vacant. How could I possibly write about that first love with this new flame unresolved? The link was inextricable.
Three weeks into this Sisyphean game, on the verge of depression or something darker, I decided to make one more pilgrimage to the pizza shop. Maybe she’d be out on the town with her friends, drunk and hungry again. Or maybe she’d be there leaning against the brick because she, too, had been thinking of me.
Before I left I texted Tom to ask if he had any of that Fireball I could take with me on the journey. He told me he would be back in thirty and then we could drink it together and try to find a party. I told him I needed to fly solo tonight; I was looking for someone. “You do you,” he texted, and told me to check his desk. His bottom drawer was filled to the brim with Fireball nips. I put one back to take off the edge and slipped another into my pocket.
I headed out a bit before closing time in case she was 21 or pretending to be, and I took the long way into downtown. The air was crisp and clear—the beauty of the night betrayed only by the biting wind. It was quiet except for the occasional siren or scream. I passed a house with a skeleton banging off its front door, and turned onto Pleasant Street, the main road running through downtown.
My view of the pizza shop across the street was blocked by a bus loading up with students. It was going to Brandywine, some upperclassmen apartment complex I’d never been to. I thought of Extreme Home Makeover. The bus would move and behind it my new life would be waiting for me, a single slice folded in her hand.
The bus idled for a minute longer and then finally pulled away from the curb, revealing that same strip of sidewalk that just three weeks ago had held so much promise: all that hid behind it was a glowing sign, a crowd of hammered students, and a trash can overstuffed with pizza boxes. She wasn’t waiting for me—of course she wasn’t.
I took a long look at the neon and then I pulled the second nip from my pocket and downed it in a single gulp. I turned back to campus, feeling hopelessly naive, determined now to forget her forever. She was a fantasy, a fever dream, a figment of my imagination—a fairytale princess I was never meant to find.