one
Shea
A water dropletplops onto the crown of my head.
That’s…weird. Why is it raining in my living room?
Pausing my fifth re-watch ofSecretarythis week,I frown up at the ceiling.
“Uh oh.” A dark spot is gathering directly above my head. “Emma,” I call to my roommate, who is in the kitchen making ramen. “I think there’s a leak.”
“Huh?” She slogs into view in her pink bunny slippers and a spoon in her hand, peering up at the ceiling. “Oh shit. That doesn’t look good.”
“Should we call the landlord?” I get off the couch, so I’m no longer sitting directly below the drip. “Or maybe go knock on the door of the guy upstairs?”
“Both of those options suck. They’re both creeps.”
“I know, right?” I murmur, chewing my lip.
Emma groans, retrieving her phone from the pocket of her robe. “I’ll call my dad.”
“All the way back in Seattle? What is he going to do from there?”
My roommate shakes her head. “You’re thinking of my stepdad. My real dad only lives in the next town.”
I absorb that new information, flinching farther away from the leak when the ceiling starts to form a giant bubble. I’m no scientist, but I know bubbles eventually burst and this one already looks on the verge of doing exactly that.
“Hey, Dad…” Emma says into her phone. “We have a bit of a problem.”
Yes, we do. And as two college freshmen living off campus, we are totally ill-equipped to deal with it. We couldn’t even rack up the courage to kill the spider we saw in the bathroom. He’s still in there somewhere, living footloose and fancy free. Now a leak? I have a paper to complete tonight about color fundamentals in modern design—and I haven’t even started it yet, thanks to my weird fascination with the movieSecretary.
A loud crash in the back of our apartment interrupts my train of thought.
After trading a wide-eyed look with Emma, I jog down the hallway toward the rear bedrooms, gaping at the water pouring in through the ceiling onto the IKEA bed I spent six hours assembling only a month ago. “Oh my God.” I look up at the ceiling of the hallway and notice a dark spot spreading directly overhead. “Emma, the apartment above us must be flooded. We need to get out of here. Like,now.”
We barely make it out the front door when the living room ceiling caves in.
“Uh, Dad?” Emma gulps into her phone. “Remember how you said I could come stay with you any time I want? I might be taking you up on that sooner than later.”
It turns out, our neighbor upstairs died. While running a bath.
I mean, I never liked the lecherous old dude, but I can’t shake my sense of melancholy during our Uber ride to Emma’s father’s house. “Imagine. One second, you’re drawing a nice bubble bath and then, bam, sayonara.” I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders, given to us by one of the police officers who arrived on the scene back at our apartment building. “The grim reaper wouldn’t even let him take one final bubble bath.”
“Bro, who cares about that old pervert? What about ourstuff?”
My roommate, Emma, is a stone-cold bitch. We’ve only been living together for a month, but I really like her. A ton. We’re just very different personality types.
I have no idea how we matched on Roommate Finder, but there must have been some special sauce in the algorithm that day, because I adore her, despite our differences. She’s mean, street smart and loves to party, which has opened me up to a lot of new experiences. Or…shewillopen me up to new experiences.
Someday.
Once I take her up on a single one of her generous offers to go out.
To drink, to dance, to potentially hook up with boys.
Gulp.
Some of the stories she’s told me have caused my introverted nerves to shrivel up into prunes. I’m fun. I’m adventurous. Just in more of a lets-try-the-seasonal-coffee-flavor kind of way. But Iamcurious about what goes on at those dorm parties. Do people just have sex out in the open? How does one request analcoholic beverage?Yo, beer me!Something like that? When the time comes, I’m going to be so lost.
