1.

Facebook makes me feel like I am looking down on the earth from a space station and I am seeing all these people ‘taking action’ and experiencing things while I am just writing, “I am up in my space station feeling sad and tired; here is a link to some comics I like,” with no discernable facial expression because I am wearing a space helmet with the visor down even though my space station is entirely oxygenated.

I close the browser and put my iTunes on random. Blew by Nirvana starts playing.

I think about Kurt Cobain. I think about grunge music. I wasn’t quite two years old when this album came out. I used to wear short sleeve shirts over long sleeve shirts with holes in them. I used to wear dirty bandanas. I wouldn’t wash my hair for weeks at a time. I don’t think it was because I was trying to be ‘grunge’ though; I was just never any good at being a girl.

I would get sunburns and let the skin peel as it wanted.

“Do you think Kurt Cobain washed his clothes regularly?”

“No. It was part of his image. He had to keep up the appearances of his genre. He was a role model to tragically smelly teenagers everywhere”

“I think grunge may have been the first aesthetic that spent significant time making itself appear physically like it didn’t care how it appeared physically.”

“What about punk? They tried to look like they didn’t give a shit back in the 80’s.”

“Yeah but it was pretty apparent they spent a lot of time looking like garbage. Look at all those studs and spikes and patches on their jackets. That takes time to prepare, let alone find. God knows they had no money.”

“That seems prejudice and ill-informed.”

“Did you know any punks in the 80’s?”

“No, we weren’t alive then.”

“So shut up. I’ll make all the assumptions I want.”

The dialogue goes on like this for some time before I realize I am having a fully realized conversation with an imaginary voice in my head. The voice sounds like my older sister Marsha. Marsha was grunge for a while back in the 90’s.

One time she bought a brand new pair of jeans from the mall with the intention of sanding a hole in the knee. She used dad’s power sander and almost lost two of her fingers when she lost her grip, sanding them nearly down to the bone.

She ruined the jeans beyond wearing, even for someone who was ‘grunge.’ When she got home from the hospital she took the pants outside and shot at it with a potato launcher because we didn’t have any real guns. She was more upset about the wasted money than the permanent chunks of flesh ground off her fingers for the rest of her life. My dad spent the rest of that summer teaching her how to use all of his power tools.

I get up off the bed and go back to my computer. Skype is flashing. It’s Steph, my suite mate.

“these damn walls wont shut up”

“i try to tune it out.”

“i cant. its impossible. i punched the one between our rooms a while ago and i hurt my hand”

‘we are drinking tonight. drink it off”

“drink it off,” Steph repeats. She signs off of Skype. The wall groans and I can hear her throw something. The wall shudders a little.

2.

I leave my laptop open and go sit out in the suite. The window is open and it is cold. The light in my room is still on.

Sydney is sitting on the other couch, drinking a Magic Hat and watching a Red Sox game. She looks at me over the top of her bottle and kind of raises her eyebrows a bit and takes a drink and goes back to watching the television. She has no shoes on.

I get up and go to my fridge and get a beer and sit back on the couch and take a drink, bending the cap in half. It makes me feel powerful even though it’s very easy to do if you twist it while bending it. I learned this trick from my grandfather who was worried I would get picked on for being short. Nobody ever really picks on me for anything though. Grampa was pretty short. I think shortness is only directly ‘bad’ for men. Sometimes the shoes I want don’t come in my size though, so that kind of sucks. I bounce the cap off the table and it rolls somewhere.

Me and Sydney drink beer together and watch the Red Sox and Syd yells at the television a few times, at the players.

It is nearly 8pm.

Vlad comes in to the suite and says “The scheduled power outage is in an hour. Let’s get wasted!” The logic is absolute.

Syd says “We are already working on it,” in a too-calm way like it was stupid to assume we wouldn’t have been.

“Oh, cool. Where is everyone else?”

“In their rooms,” I say, “or in the MET lab doing homework. They’ll be back any time now I think.”

Sydney nods vaguely and coughs a little.

“Oh, cool,” Vlad says again. He takes off his backpack and sets it on the ground. It clinks as he pulls out more beer.

‘There is so much beer in this suite,’ I think to myself. “There is so much beer in this suite,” I say out loud. “There are like five 30 racks between the nine of us. Why do we have so much beer tonight? ” They laugh and keep drinking.

Syd looks over at Steph’s door nervously.

Carrie comes in and starts drinking. She yells “Baseball!” at the TV.

Steph kicks open her door swinging an open bottle of Jägermeister and screams something about her boyfriend. The wall groans loudly and she throws the bottle at it but it doesn’t break.

“What the fuck, calm down kid.” Carrie goes back to drinking. Steph picks up her bottle and drinks it taking alternate sips of Jäger and orange soda and swishing it in her mouth. Vlad comments on how disgusting it is.

After a while the power cuts out. I realize my computer was plugged in to the wall and the battery was out, so it probably got fucked up.

“SHIT YES,” Vlad says.

I pick up a large bottle of hard cider and loudly proclaim I am going to drink outside, which is against campus rules, and I don’t care what security says because I am a rebel.

Five seconds later I meet the residence hall director in the stair well.

“Where are you going?”

“Outside.”

“Is that a beer in your hand?”

“No, it’s apple cider.” Shit-eating grin.

“Is it hard cider?”

“Uhm… yeah.”

“You know you can’t have that out here.”

“Oh. I forgot.” I turn around and Vlad is hiding his beer behind his back. We return our alcohol to the suite and say “shit” a few times with various facial expressions, then leave. The backup generator hums and emergency stairwell lights glow dim.

Outside, I light up a cigarette and give one to Syd. We stand around in the darkness not saying anything and enjoy the calm.

You can see the stars.

Someone says, “Guys, we’re like pioneers.”

Someone else says, “Our phones still work, idiot,” and three cell phones flash on. Faces all looking down at screens or up at stars.

I say, “I’m going to go lay down.”

“Inside?”

“Parking lot.”

I walk out about fifty feet and get on my back, working my cigarette to my mouth, trying not to get ash in my eyes. Three more people come lay down next to me. One of them is Steph and something clinks when she sits.

“You got your bottle.”

“Yeah.”

“Can I have some?”

“Yeah.”

Steph’s boyfriend shows up and lies with us and we all just look up.

Someone says, “It is silent as a motherfucker.”

“A motherfucker?”

“Like twelve motherfuckers,” I say.

“I feel like a motherfucker would not be silent. Twelve of them would be deafening.”

“My grandmother calls her neighbor a motherfucker because he mows his lawn at night. I think that means motherfuckers are loud.”

“So being a motherfucker has nothing to do with fucking? Or mothers?”

“It feels really good out right now.”

“My phone says 58 degrees,” I say.

“I feel good as a motherfucker.”

“Hey, it’s Andrew.”

Andrew stumbles towards us with his jacket on inside out, yelling from across the parking lot. “When I woke up I thought I died!”

“What?”

“I passed out puking in the bathroom when the power went out. I woke up and it was dark and I thought I was dead,” he said.

“That’s funny.”

“How do you wake up dead?”

“I’ll bet David Blaine could do it.”

I am on my third cigarette at this point. I give Syd another one.

The electricity is back on but we lie in the parking lot for another twenty minutes talking about nothing. Steph’s Jäger is all gone and we throw the bottle into the giant ditch at the back of the lot and it shatters on something, echoing for a few seconds. Andrew rubs up against me and elbows my breasts lightly, on accident I think, and puts his finger through my belt loop for a second before pulling it away. This is okay. This is normal. I touch him lightly on the small of his back and he shivers slightly with an unfocussed facial expression.

We walk back towards the building but I stop on the side walk to have another cigarette with Andrew.

“So are you feeling better now?” I ask.

“Yes, I think so. It’s weird thinking you’re dead.”

“You are incredibly drunk.”

“No I’m not. Wait. Wait, wait, I can be sober, watch.” Andrew straightens his back and looks at me with the sort of exaggerated, unwavering composure only the helplessly inebriated could hope to achieve. “See? I am sober.”

“Try walking. Try sitting.”

Andrew nods slightly and crossed one leg behind the other in an attempt to lower himself to the ground but loses his footing and falls backwards onto his wrist in the gravel.

“Ow. Shit, ow. Fucking…”

“See what lying to your friends does?”

Andrew mumbles, “Yeah, you’ll see what okay help me up please okay please,” and promptly throws up in his mouth a little. “Ow. That hurt.”

I drag him to his feet and he drinks some water and spits and says he feels better. He surreptitiously glances at my body in the elevator. I pretend not to notice.

On our floor he starts to say good night but I grab his arm and pull him back to my room.

I am tugging at his shirt.

He is breathing on my neck.

I am locking the door and turning off the light.

He is pulling me down with his eyes.

I am giving into the college mantra that you only live once and goddamn if that means I’ll pass up a chance for something I would have otherwise decided was just another ‘bad idea.’ A bad idea to whom? Nirvana’s Blew flashes through my brain and I briefly wonder if I am just doing this as an conscious display of appearing as though I don’t care, but the wall sighs and convulses into the bed frame so violently that it makes cracking sounds and we slide across the sheets.

I am grinding into his body and my head is down and my mouth is open and I vaguely feel concern that my breath smells bad but a subtle, rhythmic swelling in my abdomen reprioritizes these thoughts as I roll off Andrew onto the floor like a damp paper towel.

I am in the bathroom, ringing myself dry. Andrew is kisses me on the forehead, says good night, and leaves for his own suite.

On the way to my door I realize Vlad has been trying to sleep on the couch since we all came in. He doesn’t care. He’ll want to eat out somewhere tomorrow morning.

Steph opens her door and says, “Are you two done? I’m tired as a motherfucker.”