The university policy stipulated that all students must live on campus for their freshman and sophomore years, at least, a policy that Dan felt was a little overbearing. Despite it, there was really nothing he could do. His roommate from last year, Alex, was transferring to a different, much better school on the east coast. They had gotten along fine, although Alex’s incessant techno music and his mattress, which he’d accidentally soaked in milk the first semester, gave their room an eerie baby smell for the remainder of the school year that made Dan hesitate before bringing anyone by.
When Dan arrived back on campus, and after giving his father an awkward hug following their unloading of a few boxes of clothes, books, and a few posters that he knew he would forget to hang, he made his bed and sat on it. There were signs the new roommate he had been there already. On the bed was a pillow in a blue pillowcase, and on the desk, a notebook with a pen sheathed in the spiral binding.
Dan decided to lie down despite all the noise and clanging coming from the hallway as the rest of his dorm mates assembled cheap furniture, unpacked computers and stereos, and tried to shoo away their parents. He turned to face the brick wall, a comfort about the cramped quarters at school he’d missed over the summer, and let his eyelids close.
Dan kicked awake—a knock at the door. He sat up dumbly and briefly forgot where he was before he flung his legs over the extra-long twin and opened the already-open door a little wider.
“Hey,” said a girl with long, shimmering blonde hair. “Can I come in?” She strolled past him in sandals that clacked against the bottoms of her feet before he answered. She sat on the bed opposite Dan’s and put her chin on her fist.
“Don’t I know you?” Dan asked.
“Oh, probably. Are you a sophomore? I am.”
“Me too. I can’t believe I’m back here. Last year was probably the worst of my life,” Dan said, surprising himself. Was it really true? He decided it probably was.
“Well,” the girl said, straightening herself and twisting a jumble of bracelets around her wrist with her opposite hand, “I just came by for Jenny, really.”
“For Jenny?”
“Yes, Jenny.”
“How is Jenny?” Dan said, delivering his line in as monotone a voice as possible, even though his heart was roiling like an angry sea under his ribs.
The girl studied him for a long moment.
“She’s fine, I guess. I mean, I saw her for, like, five minutes today and that was all. Do you two know each other well?”
Dan suppressed a laugh. He knew Jenny so well. Well enough not to be surprised at her sending someone else on this errand. He shook his head and started to look for the box with her sweater in it. She had requested that he bring it back in the last email she wrote him. It was her favorite, she said, and while he’d sent her a nonchalant reply saying he’d see if he still had it, of course he did. He kept it in a drawer all summer and sometimes, when he brushed against it while reaching for a pair of clean socks, he’d remember the way it clung to her shoulders as he held them in the dark of his car, parked somewhere by the Multnomah bridge, listening to something sweetly painful, and the memory would remain wedged in his mind all day.
“I have what she wants, but I just got here, so you need to give me a minute.” Dan knew he sounded too surly to seem cool and disinterested.
The girl gave her eyes a little roll and started to weave her mane into a side braid as she stared out the window, which looked out onto the ravine where people went to fuck and smoke pot on the weekends.
Dan had a hard time believing that Jenny wanted her sweater this bad. It was the day before classes started and still 85 degrees and sticky humid outside. She was so abrupt about their split, though, breaking it to him the week before finals, that he decided this was just another symptom of her impatience. She would never even wait in line at a club or for a table at a restaurant. She was so beautiful and assured that she could talk her way past almost anyone else, eclipsing all the pathetic people in life who had to wait for things and were expected to do so. When they were together, Dan had trailed along sheepishly any time she talked her way to the front, knowing he was destined to return to the end of every line once she decided she was done with him.
Across the room, the girl let out a sigh. Dan turned back to see her, still twirling her hair between her fingers.
“I could always come back in a bit,” she offered, clearly wary that Dan would be able to produce anything from the pile of boxes he was slowly unpacking.
“It’s fine. If she wants it this bad, I can find it.”
Aha. Dan dug his hand deep to the bottom of the box full of the leftover things he needed to bring to campus but that didn’t fit into a clear categories like: books, clothes, computer stuff. He recognized the haphazard weave of the thing and it’s soft-at-first, scratchy-later exterior. And as he pulled it up from the depths, he caught a whiff of the faint smell of her, always an inexplicable mix of flowers and maple syrup. He turned triumphantly, waving the sweater in a crumpled mass in his fist before lobbing it softly at the girl across the room.
The girl let the sweater land in her lap and looked at it like a stranger’s baby she didn’t ask to hold.
“What is this?”
“It’s Jenny’s sweater. The one she asked me for.”
“Oh. I think there’s a mix up. I don’t know anything about any sweater.”
“What do you mean? This is Jenny’s sweater. Jenny. Jenny Harmon.”
“Yeah, Jenny’s my roommate, but this isn’t why I’m here.”
“Well then why are you here?”
“For…the other thing she asked you for?”
“Which is?”
The girl looked uselessly around the empty room and let her voice sink down a level.
“Come on. You know. X.”
“X?”
“X. Ecstasy. Which I have the money for right here,” she said, retrieving and waving a wrinkled envelope in front of her face.
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“Okay. Well this is weird, and actually kind of awkward now that I think about it,” she said, standing and letting the sweater fall to the floor in a heap before grabbing it and stuffing it in her purse.
“You can tell Jenny Dan said to go fuck herself.”
“Dan? Who’s Dan?”
“Me. I’m Dan. I am Dan!”
“Shit. I guess that makes sense then. I was looking for Jacob.”
“Jacob?”
“Yeah, Jacob Sweeney? In 4D? Which is this room?”
Jacob Sweeney. The name sounded familiar to Dan, and maybe like it belonged to the guy with dreadlocks from his economics class last semester.
“Well, Jacob must be my roommate this year. Stellar. Awesome. Amazing.”
The girl started to walk backward toward the door, slowly, as if Dan was wielding a knife.
“I’m really sorry for the mix up,” she said, gripping the doorknob loosely. “But actually, can I leave you with my phone number? You know, so Jacob can give us a call when he’s back?”
Dan looked at the girl and the braid that was now half-unraveling on the side of her head. He’d been wrong about her looks. She wasn’t pretty at all.
“Sure,” he said, handing her a pen from his pocket and standing dumbly as she tore off a corner of the envelope and wrote some digits in it in a loopy scrawl.
“Thanks. And I’m seriously really sorry,” she said, stubbing the toe of one sandal into the gray carpeting.
“It’s okay,” he said, ushering her out the door and shutting it the remaining few inches with a forceful slam. He looked at the number and memorized it before walking to the window and throwing it out, letting it make its slow descent to the bottom of the ravine, where he hoped it would be lost forever.
