Chapter 4
Chapter Four
My dorm room door flies open and Ronnie comes in like a whirlwind, blond waves haloing her head and her signature perfume clinging to her clothes.
I drop my phone on the quilt next to me so she doesn’t see the picture of the hot cubers that I’ve been staring at.
I can’t get them out of my head, and I don’t know why.
No guy has ever had a hold on me like this before.
“Were you staring at your phone again?” Ronnie kicks her shoes off and climbs up onto my bed, bouncing up and down on the mattress in her socked feet.
“What is in that magic little box that is sucking up all your attention?” She gasps and claps her hands together.
“Is it a guy? Do you have a secret boyfriend you’re texting? ”
“What? No! Nothing like that,” I insist, then let out a groan when she pins me with a look that says she knows I’m keeping something from her. She’s caught me staring at my phone all week and has threatened to pry it out of my hand so she can see what has me so captivated.
“I’m going to get it out of you at some point. You might as well make it easy on yourself.” Ronnie drops to her knees and sits facing me. “Come on, talk to me about it. You’ve been more miserable than usual this week.”
“I haven’t been miserable.” I can’t make eye contact, instead pretending to be very interested in a loose thread on my bedspread.
“Clearly you are if other people are asking me if your mom died or something,” she argues.
“I haven’t been that bad.”
If I don’t give Ronnie something, she’s going to keep pestering until I confess that I’ve been staring at the photo of the Rubik’s Cube team on my phone, daydreaming about my article having been a hit, Carl sending me to cover Nationals, and them looking out into the audience and seeing me, their faces breaking into big grins as they wave from the stage, then leaping off the stage after they win and wrapping me up in a huge group hug before taking me up to their hotel room to ravish me.
And I am absolutely not going to tell her all of that, because it’s weird and pathetic, and I don’t even know why I keep doing it, so I lean over and grab my laptop off my desk.
“It’s not that big a deal,” I tell her. “It’s just my article from last weekend.” I pull up the story and hand the computer to Ronnie.
Ronnie tilts the screen so she can read it easier, nodding as her eyes scan the article.
“This is really good. It actually makes a Rubik’s Cube competition sound fun to watch, which is something I never in a million years thought I’d say.” She hands the laptop back to me. “What’s the problem?”
“My editor ripped it to shreds.” I open a browser window and tap out the address for the Tribune. The full URL for the final version of the cubing story auto-populates from my browsing history, and I hand the computer back to her. “This is the published version.”
Ronnie’s eyes widen as she reads the two sentences that made the cut. “Yikes.”
“I didn't even get a byline for it,” I groan, falling back against my pillow and flopping my arm over my eyes. I don’t even want to see my ceiling right now. I need darkness to wallow in my failure.
“Well, that’s not fair! You did all that work, suggesting the story and going out there and spending all day at the competition and interviewing all those people.
And your original article is good! They should be thanking you.
” Ronnie closes the laptop and slides it back onto my desk, her eyes dark with indignation.
“Welcome to the world of unpaid internships,” I mutter. “And the way it’s going right now, I’m not sure they’ll let me come back for a full reporting internship next year. Or even give me a good reference letter.”
Maybe I should start looking for a backup plan.
I just can’t see myself graduating in two years with a job offer from the Tribune like I’ve been imagining since I was accepted to the internship.
I’ve only just started my sophomore year, so there’s plenty of time for me to figure something else out, but still. I feel the pressure.
“Okay, first, your editor is an ass,” says Ronnie, holding up a finger.
“Carl is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist,” I counter.
“Doesn’t matter. Still an ass,” she says, shaking her head. She puts up another finger. “And second, we need to get you out of this funk. Get up.” She climbs off my bed and goes to her wardrobe, rifling through it and pulling out dresses and tops.
“No thanks,” I tell her. “I like where I am. It’s comfortable.”
“Nope, we’re going out to a party, and we’re going to have fun.
” Ronnie tosses an armload of clothes on my bed, then disappears back into the depths of her wardrobe.
“We’ll get you all un-funkified, and then we’re going to come up with an awesome plan for you to show your asshat of a boss that he’s a fool to keep using you as nothing but a coffee runner. ”
“A plan? Like what, hacking into the paper’s website and replacing the online version of the article with my original?”
Ronnie spins around and points at me with both hands. “Yes! That! Do that!”
I pull the pillow over my face to hide from my roommate and her criminal intents. “Absolutely not. Even if I knew how, it’s probably a felony.”
I hear her deflate. “Yeah. Probably.” She bounces back almost immediately, though.
“But there’s got to be something you can do to show him what he’s missing.
Get up and let’s find you something to wear, and then we’ll go to the party, and we’ll let our good friend White Claw help us figure something out. ”
“It’s not like I’m going to get a second chance on the article,” I insist. “And he’s definitely not going to let me go to any other events to represent the paper.
In his mind, he didn’t even sanction me going to this event.
Apparently when he said ‘fine, whatever,’ he didn’t mean ‘fine, whatever, you can cover it if you want,’ he meant ‘okay, I heard you, stop talking.’”
“Well, we’ll just have to find you something else to write about,” says Ronnie, yanking the pillow off my face.
“Anything he’s going to like is already being assigned to the staff reporters,” I argue. “That’s why I suggested this one, and why he hated it. Said Rubik’s Cube competitions aren’t interesting and nobody cares.” I reach for the pillow, but she’s keeping it just out of reach.
“Okay, enough shop talk. You need to shake all of the woe-is-me off and I know exactly what will do it.” She crosses to my dresser and starts shuffling through drawers.
I watch her, assuming she’s looking for something skimpy and sexy she can force me into, although I don’t know why she thinks she’ll find anything like that in my stuff. She knows me better than that.
Ugh. I really don’t love the idea of going out.
I want to keep wallowing. And not wearing lip gloss or whatever Ronnie will slather all over my face.
And daydreaming about the hot cubing team being glad to see me again and …
I don’t even know what comes next. I’ve only ever dated one guy, in high school, and all we did was kiss a couple times.
I mean, I understand how sex works, I’ve watched porn a couple times and it’s not like I’ve never touched myself.
But when it comes to this fantasy, the part where we go up to their room for “I just won a cubing competition” sex is fuzzy.
Would it be all four of them, or just one?
Which one would I want it to be? If it’s all of them, is it all at once or one at a time?
I’m out of my depth here, so things always just sort of fade to black once they take my hands and lead me into their hotel room.
“Aha!” Ronnie reaches into the back of my sock drawer and whips out a folded piece of pink paper. “I knew you’d kept this!”
My stomach sinks and I fly off the bed, grabbing for the paper, but she holds it out of my reach. “Ronnie, give it back.”
“I saw it in there when I borrowed your fuzzy socks the other week and knew exactly what it was. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen you write on pink paper.”
“I don’t even know why I have it still, just throw it away.”
She points a finger at me with the hand that isn’t holding the paper high above her head. “You want to complete this list, don’t you, you little minx. Why else would you have kept it?”
“I forgot about it.”
“You brought it with you when you moved home over the summer, and then brought it back when you moved into this dorm. There’s no way you’d have done that if you’d forgotten about it.”
She’s right, but I refuse to admit that the list of sexual acts we thought we should attempt before we graduated that we’d written up at the beginning of freshman year is not only a thing I kept on purpose, but a thing I take out and read over at least once a month, wishing I knew how to go about checking any of the items off.
I’m interested in sex, but not enough to break my no-dating rule, and I don’t want to randomly hook up with guys I meet at parties and never see again like Ronnie and her friends have done.
I don’t feel comfortable giving that degree of power to some drunk idiot I just met.
What I really need is a fuck buddy, someone I trust enough to not hurt or embarrass me, but who understands that the sex does not mean we’re in a relationship.
But where the hell would I even begin to find someone to fill that role? I don’t get out enough for that.
“Let’s go to this party tonight, and we’ll find you a cute guy, and you can do a couple of these things and take your mind off that loser boss of yours.
” She scans down the list. “It doesn’t even have to be anything too major.
Look, you’ve got ‘make out’ on here, and ‘dry humping,’ you could do both of those with some random nice-looking guy tonight and check the boxes and never have to think about him again. ”
“I don’t want to dry hump some random drunk boy at a party tonight. Or any night.”