When I use to be an RA I would sit up at the big front desk and watch the
freshman girls go out to the bars. They had on those hip hugger jeans that were so tight
that their love handles spilled out ungracefully over the side. They would walk out with
their girlfriends laughing- while applying watermelon lip-gloss with one hand; the other
tightly gripping their cell phone, waiting for that boy I’m sure to call. And the sad thing is
he probably would, and worse yet, she would regret him calling the next day, but instead
would laugh about it in her girlfriends dorm room next store. It’s easier that way.
So I would laugh as I watched them go, because they didn’t even realize how they looked to
the rest of us, who had more college soaked into our skin and the aftermaths of drunken
nights in our memories. But sometimes I think now they did know, at least partly, and
they just didn’t care. I have to give a person credit for that. There are only certain parts of
your life you can come so close to being that carefree even if alcohol and drugs are the
ticket to get there.
My shifts were long enough that I would get to see the girls come back
at the end of the night. At this point I had read the same magazine twelve times and caved
in and ordered pizza-with pepperoni- with the other RA. The girl would come swaying in
like a delicate kite on a spring day that gets stuck in a tree, its fringes swaying ripped and
torn in the branches too high to reach. She would wobble in with a boy on her side, his
arm wrapped around her waist firmly, keeping her afloat. The boys, or guys if you dare,
they were all the same, button up Abercrombie shirt, dark jeans, and strong cologne. Her
mascara caked under her eyelids like a sad raccoon and I thought about how carefully just
a few hours before she applied it. Her face pressed soveryclosely to the mirror blinking
quietly as her fingers probed her eyelashes thickly with Cover Girl. But the boy didn’t
care what she looked like really. And the thing is whether she was too buzzed to care that
her hair was frizzed falling flapping all over her head & her face looked like a
watercolor left out in the rain, didn’t matter. Because all that mattered is that there was a
warm arm around her. Dark sheets don’t see imperfections. She’d trip going up the three
small steps on her way to the elevator.
I would sit there and watch girl after girl come in with the boy, without last names. As he touched every inch of her body with tainted hands and hallow eyes, she foregoes herself.
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