September
I’D HAD the same roommate my first two years of college. We weren’t friends, exactly, but he was good-natured and friendly, easy to get along with. He was straight but unfazed that I was gay. He was a little bit of a neat freak but didn’t mind when I got busy and let my mess accumulate. So I liked having him as a roommate, plus I’d heard so many horror stories about terrible roommate situations that I decided to hang on to him sophomore year. He’d readily agreed.
We were all set to room together junior year, but then he called me in July to inform me he was actually transferring to a school in Boston with a better program for his major, and that left me roommate-less well after the housing change deadline had come and gone. When I called the housing office with the hope I’d just lucked into a single, the woman I talked to said they always had a few kids in my situation, and due to their perpetual housing shortage, they’d find another roommate for me. Unfortunately the form I got in the mail in August had left my roommate’s name blank.
Thus I drove into the parking lot behind North Quad four days before the start of the new school year, knowing only that I’d been assigned an unknown roommate. I’d be in the same room in Bishop House that I had been in the previous two years, but with someone else occupying the other bed. I was nervous. I hated the unknown, and given that I was an artsy gay kid who practiced my violin more than I did anything else, there were a lot of variables here. What if my roommate hated music? What if he was loud or messy? What if he was a homophobic asshole?
The last thing I expected when I walked into my room was to see Peter Bennett hanging a poster over the bed on my side of the room.
He looked just as handsome as ever, goddamn him.
“Hi!” he said brightly before turning around. “I was wondering when you’d get here, I’m—oh.” When he finally recognized me, he frowned. “Ah, the surly smoker. Of course.”
I bristled. “Are you… this is….”
“Fraid so.” He stepped away from the bed. “Look, this wasn’t my first choice either, but my old roommate got a place off campus and Housing gave my room away to a couple of freshmen, so here we are.” He glanced up at the poster—it advertised a Rolling Stones concert he wasn’t old enough to have attended—and then at me again. “Logan, right?”
“Yeah.” I wheeled my suitcases over to the other bed and slid my violin case straps down my shoulders. “I gotta get the rest of my stuff from my car.”
“Need a hand?”
I couldn’t keep from looking at his arms; he looked strong enough to carry my whole car up the stairs. “No, I got it. I don’t have a lot of stuff.”
When I came back, he was pulling orange-and-purple striped sheets over the mattress on what was now his bed. I was suddenly thankful for the basement in the Fine Arts Center, where all the music practice rooms were. Being concertmaster gave me certain privileges, including access to a particularly swanky and exclusive practice room pretty much whenever I wanted. I could see myself spending a lot of time there.
“Where did you drive here from?” Peter lifted one of his suitcases to the freshly made bed. I spared a thought for how much dirt was probably caught in the suitcase’s wheels that would now be on his clean bedspread, but whatever. If he wanted to live in filth, that was his affair.
Also small talk. Christ. “Springfield. Not far.”
He nodded. “I’m from Brookline. My parents just left, like, a half hour ago. This is my third year, so you’d think my mother could leave without turning into a weepy mess, but apparently we’re not quite there yet.”
My mother had made eggs for breakfast, which was a little unusual, but my parents had otherwise not done anything to commemorate my moving back to school. She might have waved when I got in my car to drive up to campus. I’d been eager to leave. I’d been kind of at loose ends all summer, playing in a community orchestra to give myself something to do and working a few days a week at a men’s clothing store in the Holyoke Mall. Most of my high school friends also had jobs and no one’s schedules were compatible, so I’d spent a lot of the summer bored out of my skull and hoping for school to start again.
Now I was back on campus and rooming with goddamn Peter Bennett, King of the Tech Crew and Prince of Annoying.
He started unpacking a vast collection of T-shirts, most of them solid-colored but a few advertising sports teams that could have been the fake ones a lot of mall stores put on their novelty tees, for all I knew. There was an actual football wedged into a corner of the suitcase, too, which surprised me for some reason. But, of course, if one were to get involved with theater, tech was the perfect place for an athletic guy who liked throwing things around.
I really had nothing in common with this guy. This year was going to suck out loud.
Still, I decided for my sanity to give him the benefit of the doubt. I opened my own suitcase—on the floor, even though the mattress on my bed was still bare—and started to unpack my clothes, which were mostly fancier fare than jeans and T-shirts. As I hunted around for the bag I’d shoved a bunch of hangers in, I became conscious of Peter watching me.
“You’re kind of fussy, aren’t you?”
“What makes you say that?” I unfurled a button-down shirt and slid it onto a hanger.
“No wire hangers.” He mimed Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and then laughed. He pointed to the plastic and fabric-covered hangers now scattered across my bare mattress.
“Cheap hangers put those little points in the shoulders of your shirts. The shirts lie better on the plastic ones.”
“See? Fussy.”
“Oh, whatever.” I wasn’t going to justify my sartorial choices to this meathead.
“Hey, dude, do what you want. It just surprised me, given you’re a smoker. Which, by the way, I’d prefer you didn’t do in the room.”
“Not that I could.” I gestured toward the smoke detector. “But I mostly quit over the summer.” I promised myself I’d only smoke at parties, which had been few and far between, so I’d essentially given it up. I didn’t even have a pack on me. I was tempted to take it up again, though, just to annoy him.
“Good,” he said.
When I looked up at him, he was grinning. I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I settled for scowling, which made him grin wider. Then I remembered I meant to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Do you have an issue if I practice my violin in the room? I usually go to the FAC to practice, but sometimes when I’m trying to learn a new piece, I need the extra practice time.”
“Yeah, that’s fine. As long as it’s not, like, the wee hours of the morning.”
“No.”
Peter pointed at the violin case. “That your major? Music?”
“Yes. And I’m the orchestra concertmaster.”
Peter held up his hands. “Oh, well. Of course.”
What a jackass. “What’s your major?” I wondered if he earned credits for antagonizing roommates.
“Accounting,” he said breathily. I couldn’t read what his tone meant, but he seemed… displeased. Accounting sounded like a perfectly terrible major, so no wonder. He stepped back toward his bed and put the now-empty suitcase on the floor. “I’m involved in a few campus activities too, so I don’t know how much we’ll even see each other.”
That seemed like good news. I almost asked what activities, but I didn’t think I wanted to know. Probably intramural sports. The sort of things I couldn’t relate to at all. I bet myself he was one of those guys who ran around the quad playing ultimate Frisbee on nice days. I generally avoided those guys like the plague.
I realized that I was as guilty of stereotyping him as he probably was of me, so I pushed all that aside and went back to unpacking.
“I know this situation isn’t ideal,” he said, “but for what it’s worth, I don’t snore and I’m pretty clean.”
“Same, although I get kind of scatterbrained right before a concert when we’re having rehearsals every day.”
“Don’t we all?”
I turned around again and he was smiling.
“We’ll get along fine,” he said.
I doubted this, but I nodded.