“Come on, tell me.”
“I’m a Gemini.”
“Sign of the twins. I wonder if your other twin likes bacon?”
“What?” Kia questions the ridiculous turn this conversation has turned.
“It’s an inside I joke,” I try explaining. “I told him I didn’t like bacon and now he thinks I’m the antichrist.”
“I tried to tell you that most southerners eat pork and don’t understand people who don’t,” Kia says.
I scrunch my face up quizzically, then look to see if my roommate’s nose is growing like Pinnochio because she’s lying through her teeth. Sure, she’s from South Carolina, but she and I have never had any such conversation about what southerners eat.
I surmise her whole performance is for Freak’s benefit. She’s trying to find any common ground she can with him, and I’m supposed to just roll with it.
Her behavior reminds me of yet another scene in Sex and The City. It never fails that one of the characters in any given episode was bound to say something ridiculous. But if I’m the Carrie Bradshaw character, then Kia has always been more like my Miranda, and Miranda would never throw Carrie under the bus like this.
“Where are you from, Teach?” Freak asks me.
Freak’s question makes me realize that during our previous conversations, we’ve mostly discussed things in the moment like a new television episode I just watched or something happening in sports news. We never talked about the boring basics, like the facts you would see on someone’s LinkedIn biography. I suppose its time we do.
“New York.”
“The city?”
“Long Island.”
“But you don’t really have an accent,” he says, sounding almost disappointed.
“Not all of us have the stereotypical New York accent you hear on television.”
“You know one of the NFL scouts coming to see me play is from The New York Nighthawks. New York is a big football market and a lot of legends have played for that team like Saint Stevenson.”
“Oh, he’s my brother’s favorite player,” Kia says.
“Yeah? Well, my coach thinks I might be a good fit there. He thinks I could be as good as Stevenson, maybe even better. That’d be crazy, right? I might end up living in your city one day. You could show me around.”
“I could totally see you in Nighthawks black and gold,” Kia gushes.
“Yeah?”
“Definitely.”
“Not if you don’t pass this writing class,” I interject. “Speaking of which, our session isn’t for another thirty minutes and I thought we were meeting in the library? Why’d you come all the way across campus to my dorm?”
“Good thing I did. You weren’t even awake.”
“I had a long night.”
His eyebrows scrunch together.
“Doing what?”
“Studying for a test. We have a lot of them in nursing. Let me take a quick shower and I’ll meet you over at the library in like twenty minutes, okay?”
“Yeah, about that. The library is not really a sanctuary for me.”
“What do you mean? It’s the freaking library and pretty much a sanctuary for every human being.”
