Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,18
I have to say, you’re exactly like I pictured him, right down to both your chest hairs. The vice president is invited to the grand premiere, right? ’Cause if said vice president hadn’t saved you from being locked out, why, we would have proceeded down a completely different causal line. Butterfly effect, you know.”
“I could’ve ended up as Wendy.”
He tapped his temple a couple times, to indicate he’d thought of everything.
Just then the bathroom door swung open, and Nigel stepped through.
Nigel glanced from me to Zach to me.
I realized with horror that I had a raging erection poking at one of the yellow polka dots decorating my towel. My stomach compressed into a single dense point—a black hole, an infinitely dense polka dot of sexual frustration.
Nigel looked at my face, then at my towel.
I looked at his face, then at my towel.
“Yo brosefs, there’s some fun been going on up in here!” he said, clapping us both on our shoulders. “Somebody’s for real gonna need a new towel soon.” He threw himself into a stall, and proceeded to narrate his history of irritable bowel syndrome, but we weren’t listening.
“Come to dorm tea this Thursday?” Zach asked me, but didn’t wait for my response.
He’d pushed through the exit, gone, and I was left thinking about Earl Grey versus English breakfast.
“Yo, brosef,” Nigel said from his stall. “Hand me some toilet paper? I’m out over here, man, and these here are about to be some desperate times. I can feel it in my bowels.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
It was Zach.
Get there early. Sofa spots limited. ;]
I spent the next day and a half thinking about that winky face.
I had never met someone who used a bracket in lieu of a parenthesis.
Who knew Thursday Tea nights in Clover were the place to be? Faces sipping from mugs crowded the multipurpose room. I’d arrived early enough to guarantee myself a coveted sofa spot, thanks to Zach.
“I would’ve defunded them, too,” a wiry blond-haired guy named Matt said of F.L.Y.’s op-ed in the Westinger, in which F.L.Y. advocated students rushing the main gate. The editorial came out this Monday. By today, the student council had defunded F.L.Y. and threatened to do the same to the Westinger if the editorial board didn’t resign.
“We didn’t have a choice,” Zach said, rubbing at his eye. “The administration would’ve replaced the whole student council if we hadn’t yes-sirred along with it.”
“That’s some workers-of-the-world-unite shit they were on about,” a guy in a beanie said, radiating the scent of weed. Zach smiled at him encouragingly, so he went on, “which is fucked up, right? But if we don’t have free speech, then what’s the admin hiding, know what I mean? When I called my parents on the home hotline”—this prompted groans from all around. Nobody wanted to admit they believed in secret hotlines that connected youths in recovery directly to their parents—“I did, okay?” the guy in the beanie insisted. “And they told me—”
“They loved you?” someone suggested.
“That the hope of hearing your voice again was their only reason for living?” another piped in.
“Hey. Fuck you guys. Matt’s voice is my reason for living,” said a third.
Laughter.
“Guys, don’t be cruel,” Zach said, leaning forward slightly, so his elbows rested on his knees. He averted his eyes. People shifted uncomfortably, tried to stifle their grins. “Matt’s a nice kid, and has excellent taste in tea.”
“All I’m saying,” Matt said, gesticulating wildly, ignoring Zach’s kindness, “is maybe I don’t want to be a lab rat with my last memories downloaded on a chip that some fat-ass gets to pop in his fat head so he can whack off to my girlfriend while they dissect my body for the benefit of science so some rich dude’s Pomeranian can have my spleen and live to a hundred seventy-three doggie years. I mean, Jesus holy-in-heaven Christ. Free speech, man. My parents are fucking taxpayers.”
Everyone laughed, then promptly forgot Matt and his beanie had ever existed, except me, because Zach had called Matt a kid.
I was supposed to be Zach’s kid.
“You should’ve resigned instead of going along with it,” a girl with blue highlights said, her eyes boring into Zach.
“Instead of being the admin’s bitches,” Matt said, and I wanted to punch him.
Zach paled a bit, then smiled. I was about to come to his defense when he said, “As the vice president, I advised the president to do just that. I said it would make a strong statement. He accused me of ulterior motives.