Monophobia

by Aquaman

Chapter 2: Something I Can Say Is True

The most fascinating thing about college dorm rooms, I think, is that they’re not really meant for humans to be in them. You can put humans in them, obviously, and all the trappings of human-friendly construction are there: walls, a floor, a window, even blinds on that window that manage to shine sunlight straight into your eyes every morning no matter how you set them up the night before.

But then you look at the walls and realize they’re made of cinderblocks slopped with bargain-bin white paint, and you look at the window and see the little gap at the bottom where it wasn’t installed quite right, and you realize why it’s always cold in your room when you’d prefer it to be hot and hot when you’d rather it be cold. From there, you can’t help but notice that the tiles on the floor are the same ones from the hallway outside, and your “wardrobe” is a big free-standing box made of the same cheap wood and dented metal as your desk and bedframe, and what’s squeezed into that bedframe is a block of vinyl-wrapped foam that perfectly resembles a mattress without actually being one.

If this all just sounds like me complaining — it is! But also, it’s me pointing out how fake some parts of college are. There’s all this talk about developing young minds and all this money that supposedly goes into doing that, and then in reality you live in a concrete box and go to classes in decades-old buildings and, every so often, drink yourself so sick that you need someone you last meaningfully spoke with in seventh grade to drag you upstairs and let you sleep your bad choices off in their technically-not-a-bed.

Okay, fine. It’s mostly me complaining. But also I slept on the floor last night, so I think I have a right to be peeved.

And it’s on that floor that I wake up, stiff and groggy, with a sore indent in my cheek where the zipper on my backpack was pressing into it. Bit’s still asleep on the other side of the room, nose whistling with every soft snore. But it’s not those sounds that woke me up. I’m used to those. It’s the sounds I can hear from my own bed above me — the creaking of the metal bedframe and the rustling of the vinyl-wrapped mattress, and a soft feminine groan from the person moving on top of both.

I rub some of the crustiness out of my eyes and brain, and when I look up again, Sweetie Belle’s peering blearily down at me from the end of a pink-and-purple hair tunnel, the bottom half of her face hidden behind the edge of my bunched-up comforter.

“Did I shove you out?” she mumbles.

“Morning,” I mumble back, before parsing what she actually said. “What?”

“The bed.” She shifts — the bedframe creaks again — so her whole face is visible. “Did I shove you out of the bed?”

“Oh. No, I… I let you have it. Seemed like you needed it.”

She blinks and looks up, seeming to realize for the first time that she’s in unfamiliar territory. “This your room?”

“Mm-hmm. Couldn’t find yours last night, didn’t wanna just leave you in the hallway, so… yeah.”

She’s silent for a bit — eyes unfocused, deep in thought, trying to piece together what happened last night and how she got here and what she said to me. She probably doesn’t remember.

“You gave me your bed,” she finally murmurs. “After I puked everywhere and broke your JoyBox and… fuck.”

Or maybe she does. For some reason, that feels worse. “I mean, not everywhere,” I say. “Just one place, really.”

“Fuuuuck.”

Sweetie Belle rolls out of sight onto her back. I sit up — painfully, stretching as much as I can along the way — in time to see her hands flop down from her face and bounce off the mattress. She stares at the ceiling for a second, then turns to look at me.

“I’m so sorry,” Sweetie Belle croaks. “I was such a mess last night, and you… you should’ve left me in the hallway.”

“Well, I didn’t,” I tell her with a shrug. Is it a little bitter? Is it just the truth? Yes, to both. Sleeping on the floor sucks, no matter how chivalrous it is. “You feeling any better?”

She wets her lips, and grimaces, and hides her eyes behind her hands again. “I feel like I deserve to feel,” she grunts.

And despite everything, despite the pit in my gut that’s getting bigger and deeper with every word between us, I feel bad for Sweetie Belle. She isn’t just saying that. She looks miserable — maybe in more ways than just physical. Now that I think about it, I still don’t know what she was actually out doing last night. In the harsh light of the morning, I’m a lot more curious and a lot more nervous about what the real answer to that question might be.

“Do you want breakfast?” she says. She’s up on her elbows and looking at me again, still wincing but trying to fight past it. “Let me get you breakfast, at least.”

“It’s fine,” I blurt out, realizing the moment the words leave my mouth that there’s literally no reason for me not to go get breakfast with Sweetie Belle. “I’ve got a meal plan, I’ll just –”

“I’ll cover it, save you a swipe.” Her gaze shifts from pointed to plaintive. “Please?”

I want to turn her down again. I don’t know why. This is exactly what I’ve wanted for years: to hang out with this exact girl in this exact way, and get an old friend back and maybe even more.
Maybe that’s why. Maybe I just don’t know what to do when things actually work out the way I want them to.

That’s kind of sad. But it’d be sadder to let that stop me from getting breakfast for free.

“Okay,” I make myself say, muscling the words past where my heart’s lodged itself in my throat. “You wanna go now?”

“I gotta find my shoes,” she replies. “And… can I borrow a sweatshirt?”

“Sure,” I say, nodding towards the wardrobe — and then I hear the creak of a bedframe behind me, and then a crunch. Sweetie Belle and I both slowly turn towards the noise. Bit’s awake and sitting up in bed, eating from a bag of chips, staring blankly back at us both.

“Are you guys, like… dating?” he asks, a couple errant crumbs bouncing off his bare, unshapely chest.

I look at Sweetie Belle, then back at Bit, then at the ceiling for just long enough to talk myself out of committing a felony. “No,” I tell him flatly. “She’s a friend.”

“Oh.”

And that’s all he has to say. I glance at Sweetie Belle again.

“You know what, let’s go now,” she suggests.

“Good idea.”

===

Technically, we still didn’t leave right away. Sweetie Belle spent a few minutes in the bathroom washing at least some of last night out of her face and hair, and while she was doing that I grabbed her shoes and my JoyBox — still in one piece, as far as I could tell — from downstairs, dropped the latter off in my room, and escaped after just a few more seconds of Bit completely fail to read that room again:

“Was she drunk last night?”

“Yes, Bit.”

“Aren’t we too young to have alcohol?”

“We’re too young for all of college, Bit, it’s fine.”

Once Sweetie and I made it out of the dorm, it was a short and quiet trip down the block to the nearest dining hall, which is one of two on campus. I’m told one got renovated last year, and now it has brand-new furniture, an espresso bar, and a made-to-order omelet station.

This was the other one. It had chairs that wobbled and tables that your elbows would stick to, and one coffee pod machine that worked between two that usually didn’t, and aluminum pans of scrambled eggs salted like they looked back at Sodom when God told them not to. It’s probably the single sketchiest place I’ve ever eaten in. I would die for it, and if I ever make the mistake of eating another hot dog from here, I very well might.

Sweetie Belle, on the other hand, looks like she might not ever eat anything again. She did drain a glass of ice water the moment the soda fountain spigot she filled it from switched off, but all she’s done with the cold plain bagel she grabbed with her cup is tear it into little bite-sized pieces that she’s been pushing around on top of a rumpled napkin. I offered her some of my eggs, but she didn’t want those either.

Maybe salt’s bad for hangovers. I don’t know. I’m learning everything I do know about hangovers from watching Sweetie Belle right now. So far, they don’t look super fun. In fact, they look like they suck enough to turn a girl who’s usually easy to talk to, hard to say no to, and impossible not to like into a sullen, sunken-eyed zombie that’s been suffocatingly silent since we left our dorm.

Or maybe that’s just because I’m here. It’s probably not. But it might be. I should say something and find out for sure.

“So…” I say, glancing up from my eggs as long as I can bear. “Was it a good party?”

Sweetie Belle blinks, surfacing from wherever she’s been for the past ten minutes. She’s wearing one of my sweatshirts — a black one with a cartoonish image of a joystick on the front, “WORK HARD” stenciled above it and “PLAY HARDER” below — with the hood up, just big enough in the chest to hide the shape of her torso and just long enough in her sleeves to cover her knuckles and thumbs.

I look like a giant dork in that sweatshirt, which I know because I wore it just about every day in high school. She looks… well, hungover in it, mainly, but also cute. Really cute. And now she’s looking up and blinking cutely at me, and I’ve just been sitting here shoveling eggs into my mouth and looking like a massive idiot and and God what do I think I’m doing –

“I’ve been to better ones,” she says through a gravelly chuckle. “Ones that ended better, I guess.”

My heart’s in my throat again. I swallow hard and try to keep my voice steady. “I guess no party’s worth getting sick over.”

She blinks again, and glances down at her bagel bits before replying. “Nope,” she mumbles as she pinches a piece of bagel between her finger and thumb, rolling it into a little ball before slotting it reluctantly past her lips. I look down what’s left of my own breakfast. Suddenly I’m not hungry anymore. In fact, the renewed silence between us is making me feel sick.

“Sorry. I’ll stop talking about it,” I gather my plate and utensils up so I can drop them at the dish return before I go lock myself in my room for the rest of the semester. “Thanks for breakfast. I’ll, uh –”

“No, wait!”

Sweetie Belle’s hand shoots out and grabs my wrist. A wave of goosebumps rolls over my shoulders and down my spine, radiating out from where I can feel the warmth of her fingertips against my bare skin. That’s probably pathetic. I’m sure I don’t care right now.

“I’m sorry, I’m being… I feel like shit right now. It’s not you,” she tells me, eyes wide beneath my sweatshirt’s hood. A second later, she smiles — and tugs gently on my arm. “Please stay? Just for a bit?”

Okay, it’d definitely be pathetic to answer her with what I’m thinking, which is, “I will stay or go or do anything you want me to, if it means you want to keep talking to me.” So instead, I just nod and settle back into my seat, and bite back a sigh when she lets go of my arm and rests both of her own on the table, hands met over her deconstructed bagel.

“You can go in a minute if you have somewhere to be,” she says, surely knowing as well as I do that I absolutely fucking don’t. “But before you go, I just need to say…” She looks me straight in the eyes, bracing herself with a quiet sigh that just about bowls me over. “Thank you. Seriously. You didn’t have to do any of what you did for me last night.”

“It was nothing,” I lie to her, which it turns out is way easier than being honest with her or looking her in the eyes. “Anybody would’ve –”

“Button, a lot of guys wouldn’t have,” she interrupts. “A lot of people wouldn’t have. So thank you. I owe you… more than just breakfast, put it that way.”

I get the sense she’s not going to let me leave until I accept her compliment. So, as best as I can, I do. “Then… you’re welcome. Any time.” Her eyebrows shoot up. “I mean, ideally not every time you go to a party. It seemed like it sucked for everybody last time.”

She giggles, and I laugh as well so I have something to do with the air she just squeezed out of my lungs. “Yeah, next time you have my permission to leave me in the hallway,” she cracks. “Just throw a blanket over me or something.”

“Or just give you a bucket,” I thoughtlessly reply, and I chew on my lip to stop from cringing as my dumb, pointlessly mean joke echoes inside my head. But she laughs again anyway, so I guess it wasn’t that bad. Still, playing with fire here, brain. Zip it next time.

So I do zip it, and pick at my eggs, and wait for Sweetie Belle to continue the conversation if she wants to — which, it seems, she does. “I can’t believe this is the first time we’ve hung out in college,” she says, more to herself than me. “What have you been up to? What have I missed?”

“Not that much,” I admit. “Going to classes, staying up way too late. Kinda just like high school, just with less… structure, I guess.”

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Sweetie Belle agrees. “It’s like, ‘Here’s where you sleep, best of luck with the whole rest of keeping yourself alive!’”

“Figured out the food part, at least,” I say with a glance towards my plate. She smiles again.

“A very important part of staying alive. A-plus for both of us.” She clunks her empty cup against mine, then dribbles a few droplets of melted ice into her mouth. “Still figuring out the rest of it, clearly.”

“Well, I guess part of that is what figuring out what not to do.”

Up go her eyebrows again. “Are you implying I have a drinking problem?”

“More that drinking seems to have a problem with you.”

She doesn’t just laugh this time. She snorts, clapping her hand to her mouth a moment too late to keep the goofy sound from sneaking out. A flavor of pride I almost don’t recognize — the id-level masculine satisfaction of having told a pretty girl a good joke — blooms in my chest:. Okay, brain, you’re forgiven for that one. Still got my eye on you.

“No shit,” she says after a heavy sigh. “I’d say you’re missing out, but…”

“Who says I am?”

And just like that, we’re right back to square one. What the fuck, brain? She’s not that… okay, she is that pretty, but still!

“Wait, did you go out last night?” she asks, leaning forward in her seat. “Where were you?”

“Not last night,” I reply, coolly twiddling my fork between my fingers as I try to coolly lie myself out of the corner I’ve painted myself into. “Few times last semester, but y’know… no invites this time around.”

She grins. “Oh yeah, they’re super exclusive events. I just barely got on the guest list for mine,” she says jokingly — which, I realize a moment later, means she thought I was joking too. Do college parties not have invitations? Oh, fuck you, brain, what did you just make me imply? And what else can I do now but to try to keep that implication going?

“How did you manage that?” I ask Sweetie Belle.

“Mostly by showing up and being female,” she shoots back, chuckling for a second before clarifying. “My roommate knew some guy in KNZ, they were doing a pre-rush thing, the trash can punch was a little too good. And… you know the rest.”

“KNZ, that’s…”

“Kappa Nu Zeta. They just got off probation, and they’re trying to make up for it. Decent enough guys, though.”

Guys, and Greek letters. So it’s a fraternity. And if she’s going out to fraternity parties, that means…

“How about you? Think you might rush anywhere?”

… that she’s going to ask me that exact question, with just the right tinge of earnestness to let me know she’s not going to be impressed by the truth, which is that there’s not a single fraternity across the whole history of human society that would want a sexless geek like me in it. So I don’t tell her that, and I don’t quite lie either.

“I dunno,” I say with an aimless shrug. “Kinda thinking about it, haven’t decided.”

“You should!” she brightly replies, leaning forward again. “You’d do good. Party animal.” She smirks as she emphasizes the last two words. I think it’s supposed to be friendly. I know it feels like a threat, like she’s staring straight through me and thinking: You’re full of shit. Prove me wrong or you can kiss us being friends goodbye.

And I can’t prove her wrong, because she’s right. I am full of shit. I don’t go to parties, or even know any partying people besides her.

But then again, she seems to like the full-of-shit version of me, much more than she’s ever liked the real version. I don’t want to keep lying to her — and technically, I don’t have to. I just have to keep not telling her the whole truth.

“Like I said, thinking about it,” I say. “I’ll keep you posted.”

She’s still smirking — friendly and deadly all at once. “And how are you gonna do that?”

On second thought, maybe it’s mostly deadly. “Uh…”

She lays her hand palm-up on the table, then beckons with fingers poking out from under my sweatshirt’s sleeves. “Phone,” she says, in a tone that suggests “order” more than “request.”

Once I dig my phone out of my pants pocket, unlock it, and pass it over, she holds it upright in front of her so I can’t see the screen and starts typing something. A second after she finishes and slides my phone back across the table, she pulls out her own phone, glances at the screen as it vibrates once, then puts it away again.

“What just happened?” I ask.

“You’re adorable,” she replies with a smile, before yawning and standing up with a pained grunt. “And I’m not at the moment, so I’m gonna go shower and then lie facedown in a dark room for a few weeks.” As she passes me, she nudges her fist against my shoulder. “Thanks for breakfast, party animal. Lemme know when you want your sweatshirt back.”

And then she’s gone, taking my sweatshirt with her and leaving a mess like an Arctic oil spill inside my head. God help me, I was either just ditched by a childhood friend or flirted with by the same, and I can’t begin to decide which possibility is more terrifying.

I pick up my phone and unlock the screen, and it flashes right back to what Sweetie was doing a minute ago — to the text message she sent to a number with the same area code as mine:

Hi! This is Button Mash, the guy who saved your life last night and is being a GIANT dork about it, and I’m going to text you every time I go out this semester so we can be party animals together. <3

And as I’m reading it, heart sinking and stomach churning, another message pops up below it:

Hi, Button! This is Sweetie Belle, and I’m going to hold you to that forever! ;)

“Fuck you, brain,” I mutter under my breath. Then I click my phone off, pile the dishes on the table together, and head for the plate return window. I have some thinking to do, I guess. And/or some research into the Witness Protection Program.

===

Okay, it turns out getting into Witness Protection is really hard, especially if you don’t have any friends who like committing federal crimes. Yes, I did actually look it up. I like to keep my options open.

As for the thinking about party-animal-ing, I don’t make much progress for the rest of the day, and I’m still distracted by it the next day when I bundle up in a couple long-sleeve T-shirts — because I’m missing my one good sweatshirt and it’s not cold enough for a real coat — and trudge across campus to my first class of the week. It’s Intro to English Lit up first this semester, at nine in the morning every Monday and Wednesday, because I had to do it at some point for gen-ed requirements and “Masochism 101” was full.

On the bright side, college English classes are a good place to be alone with your thoughts, because there are forty other people in the class with you, and on any given day at least two of them will be compelled to share their hot takes on classic literature so you don’t have to yourself. Today, it’s a guy on the right side of the room rocking shorts and running shoes in January, and another guy in the front row wearing a pastel blue long-sleeve shirt with a graphic on it I can’t quite make out from my spot in the back.

“I just don’t get what the point was,” says Shorts, printer-paper copy of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” pinched in his gesturing hand. “Like, her dad dies, she tries to kill herself, the doctor saves her, and then they’re just like… in love? Or not in love?”

“Yeah, but that is the point, though,” Pastel replies, turning in his seat so he can face his squinting ideological opponent. “She’s not sure if it’s real, and even if it is, that means she’s locked into staying with him. She’s just as trapped as she was before.”

“How is she trapped? She just seems crazy to me.”

Even from all the way in the back row, I can feel the room get a little colder as just about every girl in it inhales, thinks about butting in, and grimly chooses not to. Honestly, I didn’t really get the story either, but I’m pretty sure I got closer to getting it than Shorts did. Pastel, meanwhile, is unfazed, smiling in a way that says, “I’d be happy to explain this to you” to Shorts and tactfully implies, “you fucking idiot” to everyone looking on.

“So there’s a line about halfway through…” He glances down at the book on his desk, a pristine new edition of a D.H. Lawrence short story compilation. “‘She would always hold the keys of her own situation.’ That’s how she’s thought of everything in her life up to that point. Even though it wasn’t perfect, she felt like she had at least some control, because there was money, there was a role to play, all that. And once her father dies, that illusion’s gone. She’s just a woman in a society that’s not going to give her any real choices about what she does next, and even falling in love with the doctor locks her into being his wife, rather than herself.”

Huh. That makes a lot more sense than my guess about what the story was about. I was just gonna make something up about depression and hope that’d be enough for a B on the midterm essay question.

“Okay, well, why didn’t the author just say that, then?” Shorts shoots back. “Like, why does he have to be all vague about it?”

“It’s just his style, I think. Setting up a scene and all the emotions running through it, and letting the reader figure out what’s going on behind it.” Pastel’s shrug has a double meaning just like his smile — sympathetic to his baffled debate opponent, bemused and filled with victorious pride to anyone actually paying attention.

Which, I guess, I am. Guy’s making some good points. And now that I’m really looking, I can almost make out what’s actually on the back of his shirt: a fighter jet with beer kegs strapped under its wings, and a military-style insignia above it with block letters spelling out…

“Hey, don’t worry about it, man. This stuff’s confusing,” Pastel says — his closest statement, garnished with a grin that this time is a hundred percent sincere. “But it makes sense if you sit with it a little bit, figure out what stuff feels like rather than what it looks like. It’s a muscle, really, in the brain. Just gotta stretch a bit.”

KNZ. That’s what his shirt says. And below that: “BUZZED IN THE TOWER.” And below that: “SPRING RUSH 2023.”

Of course. No wonder he’s so confident, and so eloquent, and talks so easily in front of a room of forty people all staring at him at once. That’s the kind of guy girls want to go to parties with — that Sweetie Belle thinks I am. And while he’s been explaining his probably-perfect interpretation of a story I didn’t understand at all, I’ve been sitting totally silent in the back of the room, hiding from the world.

And I’m still hiding now — have been since yesterday, “thinking” about doing something I have no intention of even trying once, all because it might make a girl I have a schoolyard crush on think I’m somebody I’m not. All because she likes a version of me that doesn’t fucking exist. A word Pastel used earlier echoes inside my head, drowning out the professor as she steers discussion towards the next story from our assigned reading: trapped, trapped, TRAPPED.

And then, as class continues around and without me, as I stare at the beer-laden fighter jet and the little red-faced pilot hanging out of it, some more words float through my brain: the keys of my own situation… setting up a scene… what stuff feels like rather than what it looks like.

I’m not a party animal. I’m not who Sweetie Belle thinks I am. But what if I don’t have to be? What if I just fake it for a bit, keep the implication going, keep being interesting long enough for her to be genuinely interested? Maybe it would work. Maybe it’d make everything infinitely worse. But my chances of getting anywhere by just being myself are zero, and the chances of this working are somewhere above that.

I spend the rest of class thinking, but in a different way than I was before — crystallizing towards a decision, rather than looking for any excuse not to make one. By the time the professor lets us go, I’ve made up my mind. It’s rush week, right? That’s what Sweetie Belle said, and what Pastel’s shirt probably confirms. And the Kappa Nu Zeta guys are apparently “decent enough,” and at least one of them knows his way around a Socratic discussion. There’s a path forward here. I just have to stretch a bit and take it.

I catch up to Pastel at the lecture hall’s entrance, where he’s checking his phone as he shrugs on a jacket sporting KNZ letters to match his shirt. He looks up as I approach, seeming to sense I’m trying to talk to him. Well, that’s step one down the path. Time for all the scarier ones that come after.

“H-Hey,” I say, pausing for a second as I realize I don’t know his name and it’s probably too late to ask. “I, uh… just wanted to say that was good. I mean, you were good, how you explained that story, I… I didn’t really get it before that. Makes a lot more sense now.”

He flashes a smile — all teeth, no gums, completely cordial. “Hey, appreciate it, man,” he replies. “I felt like I kinda rambled a bit. Glad it made sense to someone besides me.”

“No, yeah, it made total sense. It was interesting,” I say. I’ve run out of conversational steam already — the last of it fogs in front of my mouth, misting in the cold air wafting through the hall’s open entrance. I’ve broken the ice as much as I’m going to. I fight past the frozen shards poking into my chest and get to why I really came over.

“Uh, so… rush. You guys are doing rush this week, right? For… KNZ?” I ask, using the acronym I heard Sweetie Belle mention. It can’t hurt to sound even vaguely on top of things, right? It doesn’t seem so. Pastel’s grin widens as he nods.

“Yeah, dude! First event’s tonight, at the house over on Jefferson. You thinkin’ about coming out?”

Fuck, this is harder than I was expecting. Pastel’s got the kind of personality where it’s intimidating how nice and genuine he seems — like it has to be fake, even though you know it’s not. Even though that’s exactly what I’m being right now.

Whatever. Too late to hide now. Time to commit.

“Um… y-yeah,” I manage to reply. “If that’s… is that cool?”

Pastel nods again, chuckling. “That’s very cool. And also how rush works. Kickoff’s at nine, don’t BYOB, wear something nice, and uh… the house on Jefferson. With the big ‘KNZ’ letters on it.” He chucks me on the shoulder. “Sound good?”

“Yeah!” The word spurts out of me before I can stop it. I can’t help it — suddenly this impossibly hard thing seems like it became easy. “Hell yeah. I’ll check it out.” And as he turns to leave, I remember what I forgot to ask: “Oh, and… what’s your name?”

“Oh, I’m Source,” he replies, sticking out a hand for me to shake. “You?”

“Button,” I tell him as I press my hand to his. “Button Mash.”

“Good to meet ya, Button,” he says, nodding my way as our hands come apart and he ambles backwards towards the exit. “See you tonight, yeah?”

“Yep,” I answer, forcing a grin and a thumbs-up. “See you tonight.”

He turns and vanishes into the throng of students switching classes outside, and I stand staring after him, fake confidence draining from my face with every second that passes. This was such a bad idea. I am such an idiot. I’m not a party animal, I’m certainly not a frat guy, and every person within a mile of that house will know that the second I show up tonight, if I’m enough of a fucking moron to show up at all.

But Source knows my name now, and I know his, and maybe chickening out now would be even dumber. I don’t know. All I do know is that there’s a KNZ rush event tonight, that fake-me did enough to get real-me invited to it, and that D.H. Lawrence and his stupid horse-dealer’s daughter can go absolutely fuck themselves.

In the meantime, I guess I need to figure out what you’re supposed to wear to a frat party. Maybe Sweetie Belle will give me my sweatshirt back for it.

Author's Note:

Comments

[Posh]

I’m torn between my interest in Wet Lad’s writing and the visceral dislike I have toward Button Mash on a basic, conceptual level.

...Yeah, I’ll give it a shot.

[Lia Springs]

Oooooh, Button and Belle are cute together! Really love when they talk with each other.

[bahatumay]

“I mean, not everywhere,” I say. “Just one place, really.”

Button Mash, master of comforting words.

[Botched Lobotomy]

This is scratching a deep-seated introvert itch I thought I'd gotten rid of by now. Very fun.

The most fascinating thing about college dorm rooms, I think, is that they’re not really meant for humans to be in them.

Alienation of inhuman spaces, love it. Same vibes as benches designed so it's as uncomfortable as possible to actually sit in them.

+10 for the DH Lawrence story!

[Miller Minus]

oh no i'm relating to the gamer

[Perfectly Insane]

Ah, yes, another example to point to to prove my theory that Aquaman has the midas touch of writing.

[Tayman]

Well, goddamn, Aquaman is still around. I'm gonna have to check this out.

And yes, college dorms are garbage tier and the two semesters I spent in them were some of the worst times of my life.

[Thought Prism]

It's going to be a very bumpy, awkward road before either of them realize they don't need to conform to what society expects of college kids. But I am so here for the ride.

[Thought Prism]

Also, Button's plan totally would have worked if he'd been living in an engineering dorm like I did. There were literally so many nerds running around that I could host Magic booster drafts just with people in the building. Dozens of people showed up for weekly Legend of Korra watch parties.