As the parade trailed off so did the security. We waited for the mass of crying children and almost crying parents to vacate the park before we attempted to leave.
By the time we reached the bar, Alice and Cinderella were already sipping cocktails, with some other fairytale characters in tow. They were all college students working summer jobs. We told them we were college students looking to get drunk.
Prince Charming didn’t show up that night but each one of us went to Wonderland. Alice was much more attractive than Rose back home and when we went back to the hotel, I found out she was also much better. I told her so the next morning when she was putting her clothes back on.
“That’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me,” she laughed, and then told me to go see her in the parade again that afternoon. On her way out the door she slipped the characteristic black headband on and blew me a kiss.
“Hey wait,” I yelled. “Is your name actually Alice?”
“For you it is,” and she shut the door.
Duncan barged into the room soon after my fairytale ended, ignoring the Do Not Disturb placard hung on the doorknob.
“They sent me to see if we could come in yet,” he said. “They were somewhat pissed about having to squeeze five guys in one room last night.”
“Five? Where are the other two?”
“Frank left with Cinderella and Mike took off with Jasmine.”
I screwed up my face in confusion but then couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Soon the other two guys that shared our room showed up and we all fell into hysterics as the previous night’s stories unraveled. The main point of comedy: not one of us knew the ladies’ real names.
“So Duncan, what castle did you end up storming?” I asked in the midst of recalling our conquests.
“Fuckin’ Mike,” he said sharply, in a different tone than the one we were all joking in. His thick brow suddenly furrowed on his round face and the lower edges of his thin lips curled downwards.
Everyone else stopped talking.
“I was about to take down Jasmine,” Duncan said. “But fuckin’ Mike jumped in and stole her. I did all the damn work and he got the benefits. Asshole.”
There was a tinge of cruelty in his voice I never noticed before.
He saw everyone staring at him, mouths agape due to his jealous outburst. Duncan didn’t react, like he was relishing the awkward attention.
In the silence my cell phone chirped. Thanking God for the interruption, I answered to hear a whooping Mike laughing and screaming about a “magic carpet” and various other lame movie references. He was on the bus back to the resort and wanted to know where to meet up.
After a quick discussion we decided to go to one of the parks when Mike got back, just not the one from the night before. We wanted to meet some new princesses.
I told him to meet us at our room.
As we all got ready the rest of our crew arrived at the room, except for Mike who was having trouble navigating the bus routes of Orlando. By the time he returned to his room, showered and changed the rest of us were all in my room waiting.
Mike called down to apologize for holding everyone up. We told him not to worry, to stick with the plan and meet us at the room. Then we’d go hop on a bus.
Someone suggested a few people go wait by the bus stop and call if ours showed up. Three of the guys went to execute the audible while the rest of us stayed in the room waiting for Mike.
I too was running late. Rose called the room phone to chat, postponing my shower. Alice from Wonderland called my cell phone at the same time to invite us all to something she called a, “cast after party” that night in an apartment downtown.
I had just jumped from the shower, dressed and was combing my hair when I heard Duncan’s voice elevate above the others’.
“Hey, when he comes down don’t answer the door, let him think we left without him,” Duncan suggested. He had been mostly silent since his outburst.
I ignored it, continued brushing my teeth until a loud knock at the door. Duncan jumped up and stood in front of it.
“Wait, let him think we left. Just for a sec, it’ll be funny,” he whispered.
The other guys didn’t know what to do; they didn’t know how to deal with Duncan. I was the only one who knew him well enough to tell him to shut up and I was in the bathroom with a mouth full of Colgate, barely comprehending the situation. The other guys kept their silence.
Mike knocked louder and yelled in for us. Duncan, his back leaning on the door, put his finger up to his twisted lips.
I came out of the bathroom to see my friends sitting quietly on the edge of the beds and Duncan standing like a pint-sized bouncer at the door. He waved at me before I could ask what was going on and when I heard Mike’s growing anger and banging knocks. I got the picture.
“Open the damn door, man, I know you’re all in there. You just called me. Stop messing around,” Mike yelled. His fuse was short, and lit. “I can hear you in there, someone just flushed the toilet. You guys aren’t funny!”
Duncan was snickering uncontrollably; the rest of us remained uncomfortably quiet. It had gone from Duncan’s stupid prank to a potentially violent situation. Duncan didn’t know Mike like we did. He flew off the handle for no reason, which made him a good teammate and great in a brawl. He didn’t know it was Duncan’s doing, he lumped us all in together, which meant none of us wanted to open the door. Or maybe Duncan did know Mike as well as we did?
“Uh, Duncan you should open the door,” I whispered. “He’s pissed.”
“Dude, he’ll kill all of us,” my friend replied. “He’s all wound up. Let’s sneak out the back sliding door.” He motioned to the small sliding glass door at the back of the room that opened onto a grass pathway around the opposite side of the resort.
The banging got louder and Duncan ignored the rest of us. He was genuinely amused at Mike’s anger.
“How’s Jasmine doing now, asshole,” he uttered under his breath.
He disregarded the obviously bad consequences in exchange for the instant pleasure he contrived from spite. He played on Mike’s temper, infuriating him over a nothing issue, guiding his unfounded rage toward everyone instead of just Duncan.
After ten minutes Mike stopped knocking. He called my cell phone, which was on vibrate mode on a pillow, rendering it silent. The knocking stopped and we heard Mike walk away, but in its place we heard rustling along the outside wall of our room. Mike was climbing through the bushes to get to the back pathway and the back sliding door.
“Shit,” Duncan said. He ran to the back door, dove on the floor and started slowly pulling the curtain shut, like a soldier camouflaging his bunker.
Mike tried to open the locked sliding door. This only pissed him off more.
“I saw you closing the curtain,” he yelled. “I saw you, Shaw. I know you guys are fucking with me, I’m not retarded.” He gave the glass a couple kicks. Duncan had gone back to the front door, snickering the whole way.
“Hey, c’mon lets go out the front now and go over to the bus stop. He’ll never know,” he said.
The other guys were out the door before Duncan even finished divulging his plan. I hesitated.
“Shaw, let’s go before he goes back around. He saw you, you’re the first one he’s gonna go after,” Duncan said with a twisted smile. He looked eerily like Jack Nicholson’s turn as the Joker, minus the white face paint.
Duncan was right. Personal safety kicked in and the two of us bolted out the door and hurried to the bus stop. The other guys were waiting on a bench, irked because in the twenty-minute interval we had missed three busses.
Duncan triumphantly detailed the scene, estimating that Mike was probably still standing at the back door banging and yelling at nobody like a fool. None of us laughed.
Within ten minutes Mike hulked around the corner. We had missed another bus waiting for him. He made straight for me, his eyes furious and wide open, wound up and landed a solid pu
nch on my left shoulder, followed by a heavy push to the chest and a, “What the fuck is your problem!”
The family of four waiting near us shifted down to the end of the benches.
“Hey, I’m sorry my phone was on vibrate I didn’t know you called,” I tried to play it off without actually lying.
“No, asshole, I know you guys were in the room that whole time, I saw you.” The situation was getting to the point where it could ruin the rest of the vacation. I had to quash this before it became something.
“I apologize. It wasn’t on purpose, it was just a misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding? Fuck you,” he said. Then his eyes shot at Duncan, who couldn’t help the sneering smirk splashed across his face. “Wait a minute, it was you, ya little fuckin’ rat. Sorry Shaw, my bad, now I’m going to kill your little rat friend.”
He pushed by me and lunged at Duncan, who darted away behind a trash barrel, the smirk instantly erased and replaced by sudden terror.
“Come here pussy, you better learn not to fuck with me!” Mike boomed. The family left for another bus stop. “Couldn’t close the deal with Jasmine, huh? Pissed off that I had to take over? Is that it? Yeah, she told me she wouldn’t have touched you with a ten foot pole, which is what I ended up giving her!”
Frank and a couple other guys jumped in and held Mike back. Duncan cowered behind the trashcan. Mike threw his hands up and stopped.
“Ah, whatever, not worth my energy.”
He turned around, slapped my back and said, “Sorry bro, but your friend is a douche.”
Mike took a seat on the bench. That eerie smirk crawled back across Duncan’s face like ants emerging from an anthill. His thin lips twisted and contorted. He muttered something under his breath, inaudible enough that nobody else could hear.
I sort of felt sorry for him—for Duncan, not Mike. I felt guilty for bringing him.
Chapter 20
I was the last of my friends to depart for our first years at college. In the few weeks after the Florida trip the group rarely gathered; too much preparation. Last goodbyes and final good-lucks kept us to our immediate loved-ones.
This included an intermittent communication hiatus with Duncan. He and I talked briefly about logistics but in the days leading up to college, Ben and I had done the majority of planning without Duncan’s input. Ben and I talked regularly, much more frequently than we ever did as high school classmates. Whose mini-fridge was biggest, who was bringing the microwave, which video game system was most appropriate—we discussed the kinds of pressing issues ranking at the pinnacle of every first-year college student’s to-do list.
I blinked and the residual high-school afterglow evaporated. Moving day blew in like a summer storm, stealthy, chaotic and wet. And I left for Providence.
As with most stressful family events, my father planned to a fault, forgetting every old saying about inevitability, doubting Murphy’s Law, ignoring the suggestions laid out clearly on the college website.
So we packed the car the night before. The pyramid of boxes, notebooks, clip-on reading lamps and microwaveable macaroni and cheese that had been looming high above the living room couches, crumbled feebly and neatly, packed away with furious precision into a sport utility vehicle.
Of course I packed the directions and move-in paperwork into a suitcase—a suitcase at the bottom of the packed vehicle. We unpacked then repacked with an exhausting fervor but not as much precision.
We scheduled an early departure. My father diagrammed the strategy with every detail in mind in order to avoid the move-in day bedlam and gridlock enjoyed by parents at colleges nationwide.
We arrived at the Providence College campus right about the same time as eight hundred other freshmen families.
My mother sobbed. My younger brother stared at the girls with dropped jaw and curious eyes. My father did too. He quickly forgot the embarrassment over a poorly planned and obviously mimicked departure strategy.
A Campus Security guard in a white truck guided us to Guzman Hall. The green lights blazing atop his vehicle were a feeble attempt at first-impression intimidation.
We pulled up as close to the main door as possible. In obedience with a makeshift sign jammed into the ground, my parents and I unloaded all my belongings onto the sidewalk grass in front of the dorm building. Apparently Campus Security wouldn’t allow any vehicles to idle for too long. It was unload and go, to keep the traffic deluge flowing.
While my parents searched for the parking lot and picked their way back across campus, Ben pulled up with his mother and father. They dumped his material belongings and followed the familiar park and walk procedure.
As Ben and I stood chatting, waiting for our parents or some sort of direction, I was suddenly bombarded from behind by flailing arms and joyous squeals. Lindsey jumped on my back and yelled, “We’re here!” She danced around like a cocaine-addled chipmunk.
“Ben, this is my friend Lindsey,” I introduced, hardly able to speak because I was laughing so much.
“Excited to be at college?” Ben said sarcastically and stuck out his hand in her direction.
Lindsey shook it vigorously.
“Nice to meet you Ben,” she said. “And yes, absolutely am I excited to be here. If you couldn’t tell already.”
“Never would’ve guessed!” he said.
“My parents just left. I’m so glad they’re gone,” Lindsey said. “My mom cried the whole time we were moving in. It was really embarrassing.”
“Yeah, I have a feeling my mom’s going to do the same thing,” Ben said.
While Ben and Lindsey commiserated about their blubbering parents, I scanned the area for someone who looked like they knew what they were doing. A tall, skinny guy wearing a faded white blazer and black tie was walking towards us.
He introduced himself as Timothy, a senior on the Orientation Committee and pledged to help us find our rooms.
“Just leave the big stuff here, nobody will touch it. We’ll go find your room and then hold an elevator,” Timothy instructed.
“My parents are parking the car, shouldn’t we wait for them?” I asked.
“Yeah, mine too, they don’t know where they are,” Ben added.
“I’ll wait here, I’ll bring them up to your room. I’m sure I can find it,” Lindsey said. “I know your parents, Shaw. And I’ll just stand with your stuff, Ben. The first two people I see that ask me what I’m doing with their son’s underwear will be, I’m guessing, your mom and dad.”
Guzman Hall was a typical dormitory building. A large rectangular box, five floors with one main hallway, twenty rooms lining each side. Timothy took us to room 204, pulled a strip of paper from his clipboard and pointed to the circular keypad right above the door handle.
“Just punch in your room combo, turn the lock and open the door,” he said, insinuating the ease of the process. It took Ben and I five attempts to successfully unlock the door.
When we did, we stepped inside the door and were welcomed by a barren, sterile void. The walls were cinderblock, painted a cream color that really just looked like dirty white. Black and white speckled linoleum floors connected to the same flooring in the hallway. Straight ahead, along the back wall of the room, three horizontal windows looked out onto a small hill that flowed down from the President’s House, ending in a brick wall about five feet high. Opposite the windows, immediately to our left, were three closets in a row along the wall abutting the hallway.
There were three student set-ups. They were bunk beds, with no bottom bunk. Instead, a desk and dresser was tucked underneath. On the right side of the room two of these lofted set-ups ran along the wall, end to end. The other, lone set-up was directly across, running parallel with the left wall. We entered the room, eyed the large empty space between the set-ups and started mentally rearranging the furniture. We never ended up moving anything.
Ben spoke first once we got inside the room.
“So, who gets that bed?” he said, pointing t
o the lone set-up on the left side.
“I don’t care, doesn’t matter to me,” I said.
“Yeah, me either.”
“This happens to everyone,” Timothy interrupted. “Which is why I always bring quarters when I let guys into their room for the first time. You call it in the air,” he said to Ben.
“Heads.”
The coin flipped high into the air, rotating like a sideways revolving door. In that instant I thought about Duncan and whether or not we should worry about what bed he wanted. The thought was brief.
“Tails, it’s all you kid,” Timothy said, handing me the slip of paper with the combination and the quarter.
“What’s the quarter for?”
“I’m also your RA. We’re having a little, um, unofficial first night gathering in the hallway later on. Your room will need the quarter, make sure to bring it. Nine o’clock, right outside your door.”
He left us in the room and I could hear him say, “they’re right down there on the right,” from the end of the hallway. A few moments later Lindsey, followed by four nervous parents, arrived at our humble abode.
For most of the day we moved in, carrying all the clothes, linens, towels, lamps and computer accessories necessary for a fruitful freshman year. Lindsey made the process much more enjoyable, helping both Ben and I carry the unexpectedly massive amount of stuff we had in our possession.
Ben had an old love seat we set up in the empty space, giving us a sitting area. I brought the television and we set up an impressive array of video game systems and electronic devices between just the two of us.
Underneath my lofted bed I set up my computer on the desk and put my printer on the dresser. With my set up I would have my back to the other two beds, decreasing distractions while I worked. Ben did the same on the opposite side.
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