Why risk it? All I’m doing is eating.
He grabbed a table against the wall, under a photograph of students from the 1950s. Ethan wondered when men stopped wearing blazers all the time.
He dug into his salad and savored the tangy flavor of the chicken, watching the last bits of sun drift below the horizon. It was a relaxing end to a very eventful day.
Or so Ethan thought.
“Hey, is this seat taken?” Preston asked, fingers tapping against the chair right next to Ethan.
He nearly choked on his salad, but he forced his head to nod. Preston smiled with gratitude, and he couldn’t help notice what a benign and kind smile Preston had. He was a good guy. Not like Greg’s know-it-all smirk.
“Yeah. Go for it.” Ethan moved his water glass and brushed aside any stray crumbs, everything short of rolling out a red carpet.
Preston set down his tray and sat mere inches away. Ethan couldn’t believe his luck. He had to seize this opportunity.
“I lucked out. The stir-fry chef is here tonight. I always forget which day he’s here,” Preston said.
“Monday and Thursday.”
Preston mixed his vegetables with his rice. “Thank goodness it’s Thursday.”
Ethan nodded. And here’s where his mind went blank, as it always did. So many sharp opening lines, so many comments and conversation starters circled inside his head. But it was like they were spinning so fast that they all mushed together to form this indecipherable gray matter. Ethan did not lose the irony of his gray matter running around in his brain’s gray matter. At least he could entertain himself.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with dining hall food,” Preston said. He wiped the corners of his mouth after taking a huge bite. He wolfed down food with such class.
“Did you know that the company that provides the dining hall catering also services the Pennsylvania prison system?” Ethan didn’t know how he remembered that, but he’d pulled it out of some dusty drawer in his memory.
“Ha! That makes a lot of sense actually.” Preston laughed to himself as he took a drink of his water.
I made Preston laugh! Everything is happening!
Ethan tried to keep the momentum going.I’ll bet my parents would love knowing I eat as well as prisoners, he thought. But instead, it came out like, “I mean, it’s funny because prisoners are eating the same food as us, but we’re paying tuition.”
Are you serious? Get it together, brain!Ethan wanted to clamp his mouth shut. He wished he were a crumb that could be brushed off the table.
“No, no. I hear you.” Preston looked at Ethan with eyes that were as green as a forest. He wouldn’t mind camping out in them. “You know on Parent’s Weekend, they’ll bring out the five-star meals.”
Ethan shrugged. “Yeah.”
Yeah?That was all he had? He tried to think of something better, something that could carry along this conversation. Any drop of wit he thought he had had evaporated as soon as Preston sat down. He figured Greg would know what to say, even though he and Preston would probably never eat at the same table.
“I can’t believe fall is almost here,” Ethan said. Yes, he was resorting to weather talk. It was his last hope.
“My apartment doesn’t have air conditioning, so I’m looking forward to it.”
“Oh no!”
“It’s okay. The summer hasn’t been terrible.”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. Again.
Preston moved his food around the plate, further intermingling rice with stir-fry. He looked at Ethan, then back down at his food. Another awkward silence. Ethan wondered how long his malfunctioning conversational skills would last this time. A whopping two minutes?
“There’s a party tomorrow night,” Preston said. “It’s being thrown by the president of the LGBT group, at his house. Did you hear about it?”
Ethan nodded. He’d seen the invite online, but he’d never gone to an LGBT function. He was out to his friends. Browerton—or, at least, South Campus—was so liberal that nobody made a big deal of it. He just never had the courage to go to a public LGBT event alone. Jessica had offered to go with him a few times, but he never wanted to be one of those gays hiding behind his girl best friend.
“Are you going?” Preston asked, his eyes never wavering from Ethan’s.
