UI 101

by M. K. Claeys

  “Agitated friend?”

  “Something like that. More like needy old high school friend.”

  I shuddered. “Yeah. I can completely relate with wanting nothing to do with that.”

  “It’s not…never mind. Let’s watch the movie, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  So we made it through about ten more minutes of Winona Rider, and then Brad started kissing me. Oh yes. Ryn’s up-do certainly had been a great idea. Brad’s phone chirped, but only once, so it must have only been a text message. Like I cared; I was too busy thinking about how nice his hands felt up my shirt.

  And then his stupid phone chirped again. And then again. Until finally I was so annoyed that I told him to just answer the text message before it drove me insane. So he did: Can’t talk. Trying to study. Big exam soon. C U soon tho.

  “And what kind of exam might this be?” I asked, giggling. “I hope not a math one because if it is, I’m horribly behind.”

  He grinned lustily at me. “Nope. Definitely not math. I happen to know for a fact that this one will be an oral exam.”

  “Oh, really?” I asked, quirking an eyebrow. “Since when does Illington have oral exams?”

  “Since now. And it actually is an oral math exam, now that I’m thinking about it.”

  “How in the world can you have an oral math exam?” I teased.

  “Well…” He paused, reached his hand behind me, and unsnapped one of the hooks of my bra. “One hook undone—how many left, Rae?”

  “Um, one?” I answered, completely distracted as Brad slid his left hand up the front of my shirt and, with his right, finished unclasping my bra.

  “Are you sure?”

  God, I wasn’t sure of anything right now, other than how much I wanted to rip his clothes off. “Not really. But I’m sure you’ll let me know the answer once you figure it out. Mathematics is a team sport, after all, isn’t it?”

  “Right,” he breathed, taking my hand and leading me over to the ladder to get up into the loft.

  He was right behind me, and then his phone started ringing again.

  “Bradley Davis,” I cried exasperatedly from the top of the ladder, tossing the flower hair clip to the floor so it wouldn’t get smashed, “if you answer that, I’m going to see just how many appendages I have to rip off before you realize that the only place you need to be is in this bed right now. And I won’t be doing it in the spirit of modern arithmetic.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  He turned the ringer off, then jumped into the bed and proceeded to turn me on.

  Oh yes, college really was wonderful. Things went fantastically with just the two of us completely ravishing each other. Well, more so him ravishing me, but I wasn’t complaining. I was thoroughly enjoying myself and was just at the pinnacle of my enjoyment, when his phone vibrated on his desk. Using all the mental capabilities I had, I shut out the racket and just concentrated on everything that was Brad and how wonderful I felt being with him. It worked, but it didn’t stop the phone from vibrating onto the tile floor, where it made an even bigger racket.

  “Maybe you’d better answer that,” I sighed as he sat up and smiled at me with his familiar triumphant look of success. “Or high-maintenance high school friend won’t ever leave you alone.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I smiled lethargically. “Hey, I’m perfectly fine. You do what you gotta do.”

  So he returned the call and shot some of his clothes up to the loft for me to put on. Which was really very nice of him, considering that all my clothes were strewn about the room and I would have been super cold if I’d had to climb down to retrieve them all. Once I was dressed in basketball shorts and a weight lifting T-shirt that was essentially pointless on me, due to the armholes having been cut out, I joined Brad down at his desk. He talked on his cell, but I did my part in thoroughly distracting him. I kissed him, nibbled on his free ear, rubbed his chest, and showed him how pointless his shirt was in covering my own chest. The conversation somehow continued, although he kept getting shorter and shorter of breath. I sat on his lap, straddling him, and started nibbling on his neck.

  He hung up rather hastily, threw me over his shoulder, and carried me into the bathroom, where he proceeded to drop me in the shower with all my—his!—clothes on and turn on the water.

  “Brad!” I screeched, sputtering as I fumbled for the tap. He batted my hands away, and started turning the tap to cold.

  “Looks like for once the guy isn’t the one that needs the cold shower. You, my little lady, are insatiable.”

  I looked up at him with cold water pouring over me and running into my eyes. Brad was standing there, nice and dry, laughing at me. I brushed the water out of my eyes and grabbed Brad by the boxers, dragging him into the shower with me. My first fantasy had come true—Brad dripping wet in a shower, with me already inside it, and no wrench necessary.

  “You’re damn straight I’m insatiable. Now what are you going to do about it?”

  Our clothes certainly didn’t stay on much longer, and the water got turned right back up to hot. In the end, I even got to use the clean towel from the laundry, and Brad didn’t give me any more ill-fitting clothing to sleep in. Because since we’d already been naked together in the shower, we didn’t really feel it necessary to keep up that silly little pretense.

  Let me tell you, sleeping naked with a very hot boy is one of the most delicious things in the world. I sincerely hope he plans on doing this more often.

  11

  Kathryn

  I was seriously considering calling my phone company and having them change the number on my cell. Rae had done that when she moved here so she could have an area code that didn’t come from no-man’s-land and because she was having problems accessing her voicemails. So I didn’t see why I couldn’t do it as well because I was sick of my phone ringing non-stop. It would ring during lectures, during study time, during meals, while I was sleeping, all the time. And I knew I could just turn it off, but then the dorm line would ring. And then Rae would have to answer it and make up excuses about why I wasn’t there and wasn’t answering my cell.

  Is it so wrong for me to want my boyfriend to not call me eleven times a day? If it weren’t for the unlimited plan, I would have been totally screwed in overage charges. Even so, my parents, who pay my bill, had started to wonder why Brian’s number was calling me that many times a day. My mom had even come and picked me up one afternoon when I didn’t have class to take me to her salon so we could get mani-pedis together, just for the purpose of asking me how things were going and “did I need to talk to her about anything?” Moms are so sweet but at times completely clueless. Don’t they realize that we do not want to share anything with them? Because the thought of telling my mother that Brian was always trying to come over when Rae was at class or Brad’s just so we could screw was not something on the top of my to-do list. My mother liked Brian. She thought it was wonderful that he was so supportive of me going to college “so far away.” She thought it was cute that he wrote songs about me.

  It’s a thirty-minute drive, for crying out loud, not a thirty-hour flight! And the fact that when he sings those songs, he totally eyes up all the girls in the crowd but me is cute too, right Mom?

  Why can’t I have a normal boyfriend? Brian was a little intense when it came to, well, almost everything. Since he lived back home, he sent me flowers and little gifts on a regular basis. First world problems, I know, but when the previous flowers were still looking pretty, why did I need new ones? I had actually given the most recent bouquet to a girl down the hall whose childhood dog had died. She’d thought it was a sweet gesture, but really I was just mad at Brian. I had seen a YouTube video of his band’s most recent gig, and he’d been totally feeling up one of the girls who had jumped onstage after he’d been eyeballing her.

  Why can’t I have a boyfriend who goes to Illington and wants nothing more to do with music than to jump in a mosh pit every once in a while and hit up me
ssage boards to find local shows? Just because I haven’t had sex with Brian in over ten days does not mean that our relationship has gone down the tube. Maybe I should just tell him that I’ve decided to abstain for the purpose of, um, modern punk feminism. But he would totally know I was lying, just due to the fact that I referenced something that was trending.

  My phone was ringing again, but this time it was my mother.

  “Hey, Mom. What’s up?”

  “Hi, honey. It’s almost Thanksgiving. Did you ask your friends to come home with you yet? They shouldn’t have to stay in the dorms. It’s too sad.”

  “No, not yet. But I will. I’ll call you tonight and let you know, okay?”

  “Sure. Let me know how many you’re bringing so I know how much to cook.”

  Shit. My other line was beeping. It was Brian, like I didn’t already know. I’d have to keep my mom on the line long enough for it to go to voice mail.

  “What are we having?”

  Oh, good job, Ryn. Bring up the most traditional American dinner ever known to man and ask what is on the menu. Well done. I am such an idiot sometimes.

  But it worked. It kept my mom on the line for another ten minutes, going on in exquisite detail about what would be on our table that specific Thursday and which relatives would also be coming. Ryn Triumphant: that was me. But it wouldn’t be long before my phone rang again. I’d have to pre-meditate another excuse. I checked the clock. My psychology lecture with Rae would begin in a half hour. It took me ten minutes to walk there, and Rae always came from her other lecture, so she usually showed up early. If I were to enter a lecture hall, I was supposed to turn off my phone out of courtesy for the professor, even though no professor showed up twenty minutes early to his own lecture when he could instead be sitting in his office drinking mocha lattes. And then I could talk to Rae about Thanksgiving before lecture and possibly compare my notes to hers to see what I had missed while I was texting Paul during the last lecture.

  He needed to know a synonym for the word unstable and didn’t have a thesaurus app on his phone. I told him precarious and wobbly and left it at that because Rae had been giving me “the look.” She had been making more frequent comments about my lack of studying, but I kept brushing her off. I mean, if I wasn’t worried about my grades, why should she be?

  “How did your paper turn out, Ryn?” asked Mitzy on Friday as she knocked and stuck her head in our open door. “Weren’t you having it returned to you this afternoon?”

  I groaned. Leave it to Mitzy to bring up the sorest subject first thing. Although I suppose for her, academics is never a sore subject, seeing as she’s getting straight As and has her entire life.

  “Not good, Mitz. I really thought I had it this time. My arguments were sound, my grammar was spectacular, and I even changed the title.”

  “You did?” interjected Rae. “But you were so set on ‘Vote That Idiot Out of Office.’ What made you change?”

  “I found a better title,” I answered simply, trying to ignore the skeptical look on Mitzy’s face.

  “So you decided to go with ‘The Problematic Tendencies in Today’s Government and How Society Can Solve Them’?” Rae asked.

  “Um, nooo, not exactly.” I was squirming in my desk chair. Honestly, was it going to take me stripping my clothes off and running around the room stark naked for them to drop this?

  “So what did you decide?” asked Mitzy, folding her arms across her chest and looking so uncannily like my mother—only tall, blonde, and not Asian—that I couldn’t bring myself to lie to her.

  “I just…found a better word, that’s all.”

  “So you replaced idiot, didn’t you?” asked Rae, grinning.

  “Yessss…”

  “And that word would happen to have been?” pressed Mitzy, tapping her gorilla-slippered foot on the tile in our entryway.

  “Jackass,” I mumbled into my can of soda, hoping my reply wouldn’t be intelligible and they wouldn’t ask me to repeat it. It was a sad hope. They jumped on it right away.

  “Ryn!” Mitzy shrieked, scandalized. “You didn’t!”

  “I did,” I said stoutly, my stubbornness beginning to get the better of me.

  Mitzy turned to Rae in a silent plea for help, but Rae just shrugged. I turned back to my computer and typed the last closing statements on my new paper. I was proud of it, and the topic actually interested me to the point where I’d started working on it in advance. That, and it was nearly Thanksgiving weekend. I didn’t want to work on boring old English papers when I could be eating leftover turkey and mashed potatoes in front of the television while I watched SLC Punk!

  Mitzy seemed to admit defeat on the whole jackass issue and plopped down on the futon, waiting for us to finish our work. Rae was going over the chapter assigned for next week in our psychology class, typing up notes on her laptop, and she finished long before I was satisfied with my closing arguments. Last, but not least, I picked the title. The topic was to write a proposal on something we would like to see change about today’s world. My paper was an essay supporting the brilliantly taboo topic of legalizing marijuana for private use, with some fantastic quotes—anonymous, of course—from my toking suitemate. I pondered for a few moments while Rae and Mitzy played Othello on the floor. Soon enough, the perfect title came to me.

  “Ganja: Not Just for Gangsters Anymore”

  Pretty catchy, I thought, if not completely original. After a few more moments and a surreptitious glance at Mitzy, I decided to add another statement in smaller print directly underneath the title.

  “An Essay Supporting the Legalization of Marijuana”

  I saved the file, turned off my computer, and watched as Mitzy pummeled Rae in their game. Now don’t get me wrong, I love Rae dearly, but the girl cannot play Othello to save her life. And it doesn’t help that Mitzy is a mathematical genius.

  And that’s not even mentioning other things she’s done, too. Like a few weeks ago, Rae brought home a Rubik’s Cube that she was using for extra credit in math, and Mitzy solved it in about five minutes flat. Keep in mind, this was after Rae and Brad had spent three hours on it using a website with move-by-move instructions! Of course, I knew that Rae was using it for extra credit, but she didn’t tell Mitzy because she knew that if she had, Mitzy would have just made her and Brad sit down and do it themselves while she coached them. Instead, they’d just pretended like they had a bet that no one could solve it, and Mitzy jumped right up to the challenge. Seriously. For how smart she was, I was surprised she hadn’t seen right through that little charade. But I guess she just tried to find the best in everyone and hoped they wouldn’t take advantage of her.

  Ooh, if anyone ever did take advantage of her in a cruel way, not a Rubik’s-Cube way, I would totally kick their ass.

  We went down to dinner, and Rae finally convinced Mitzy that it was okay for her to wear her slippers to the caf’, something eighty percent of the rest of the population did on a regular basis.

  Paul met us in the lobby on the way and happily joined us for dinner with Jamaal, whom he had met up with on the way home from class.

  “Oh, don’t look now, Rae, but your boyfriend’s here,” teased Paul, as he pointedly stared at Creepy Cafeteria Boy, who was, as per usual, loading up his tray with spam patties.

  Rae shuddered. “Seriously. Just watching that guy eat that crap is enough to make a girl want to go vegetarian. I mean, how processed does a meat have to be in order to retain a can-like shape?”

  “I don’t know, Rae. Why don’t we ask Creepy Cafeteria Boy?” I teased.

  “No way am I talking to him!” she shrieked as we headed over to the buffet line. “He would probably give us all a thirty-minute lecture on the nutrients spam has to offer and how it helps him calm his spastic colon or something!”

  “Yeah,” agreed Paul, jumping on the conversation train. “I bet after that he’d tell us all about his irritable bowel syndrome.”

  “And then he’d talk about how every ni
ght he has to take milk of magnesia to poop,” added Jamaal as he handed each of us a tray.

  “Jay, not you too!” Mitzy moaned.

  “What?” he asked, looking perplexed. “I thought it was funny.”

  “It was, Jamaal,” I reassured him, patting his arm. “Mitzy just doesn’t appreciate our table humor.”

  Mitzy muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “toilet humor,” but we let it slide as we loaded up our trays with the conspicuous absence of anything spam-related and headed over to our usual table by the window, where its last occupant had left a copy of the student newspaper, the Illington Industrial.

  “Whoa!” commented Rae on reading the front-page headline. “Looks like someone reamed President Allerson a new asshole in this issue.”

  “Seriously?” I shrieked. “No way. Let me see!”

  Our president had been a passionate subject with us lately, especially me. I can’t stand the woman and think that she should be fired. She doesn’t do anything to benefit the university. For example, she just spent all our alumni donations on a marble statue of Bucky the mascot—complete with fountain—as well as renovating and refurbishing the admissions office, which had just been renovated during the last president’s term less than five years ago!

  That money should have gone to building a new science lecture hall so the biomedical students don’t have to attend class in a building with one bathroom, no air conditioning, and a broken steam-heat system.

  “Yeah, it says right here that a student described the university president as—and I quote—‘a self-absorbed ignoramus with no concept of the university’s more pressing needs, and she must have a brain power rivaling that of an intellectually deficient Neanderthal if she can’t see where funding could be used more appropriately.’”