Mary Kate squints, then looks at me. “What does Professor Thomas even look like?”
Stella answers before I can. “He’s, like, thirty-five? Really tall. Kind of a James Bond vibe, but more ‘read you poetry and then spank you’ than ‘martini and a gun.’”
I snort. “He dresses well and calls her ‘Ms. McCall’ even when he’s literally holding her ass in his hand.”
There’s a moment of jealous, breathless silence. I can feel it settle over the room, a mixture of shock and longing. None of us are exactly innocent, but there’s something about Simone’s audacity that takes our breath away. I mean, this girl is our age, and she’s living on the edge. Meanwhile, despite everything, none of the rest of us have ever done anything nearly as reckless or glamorous.
The tension breaks with Kayleigh, as always. “Okay, I think I know why Simone’s obsessed,” she says, wagging her phone. “Aren’t there rumors going around that Professor Thomas has a giant dick?”
This derails all pretensions of sophistication. Stella chokes on her nail polish fumes. Mary Kate bursts out laughing. I raise both hands and surrender. “That’s what my roomie says. I think her exact words were, ‘it’s so big it makes my pussy cry.’”
Kayleigh cackles. “What if he’s, like, a porn star under the suit?”
Stella gasps, then covers her mouth. “Ew. Why am I turned on right now?”
Mary Kate leans up on her elbows, blue eyes gleaming. “We should Google him. See if there’s, like, a RateMyProfessor for his penis.”
Kayleigh grabs my laptop and slaps it open with a vengeance. “OMG, OMG. But what even constitutes as big these days?” she asks, punching the keyboard furiously. “I’m looking up ‘whitezilla’ for reference.”
I want to protest, but curiosity gnaws at me. As Kayleigh types “whitezilla” into the search bar, I brace myself for the inevitable. She hits enter, and a tsunami of porn thumbnails engulfs the screen.
“Holy shit,” Mary Kate breathes, eyes wide as dinner plates.
Kayleigh scrolls with the focus of an Olympic athlete. “Do you think—” she starts, but then she clicks on a video and it auto-plays, loud enough that if Simone were anywhere in the building she’d come running.
For a second, none of us speak. The camera zooms in on the most anatomically impossible penis I’ve ever seen. The girl in the video looks like she’s trying to swallow a baguette whole, her eyes tearing and her lips stretched so painfully thin that they look like rubber bands.
Stella makes a noise like a dying mouse. “That’s not real.”
I bite my lip. “You think Simone’s getting…that?”
Kayleigh laughs so hard she has to clutch her stomach. “If she is, she’s a fucking hero.”
Mary Kate’s still watching, rapt. “Is that even safe? I mean, seriously, could this woman die?”
Stella flings her pillow at the screen. “Turn it off! I can’t—my brain is melting!”
I should feel grossed out, but instead I just feel curious and turned on. Like there’s a wasp buzzing in my ribcage and nothing is ever going to satisfy it. The room is electric with the kind of laughter that always, always teeters on the edge of something more primal.
When Kayleigh finally slams the laptop shut, her face is pink and her voice wobbles. “I’ll never look at a penis the same way.”
Stella rolls onto her back, dazed. “I thought my ex was big but he’s nothing in comparison.”
Mary Kate sighs. “We’re all so doomed.”
We’re all looking at each other now, a little sheepish, a little giddy, like we’ve just streaked across the quad and no one caught us. For a second, nobody wants to break the spell. I’m the one who finally does.
I dig my toes into the Cheeto-crusted comforter and say, “Honestly? I kind of want to know what huge size is like.”
There’s a tiny silence, and then Stella says, in a very small voice, “Me too.”
And just like that, the whole world shifts. We all start giggling, then laughing, then shrieking until an RA bangs on the door and threatens to write us up for “disturbing the peace.”
When he finally goes away, we’re still breathless and sticky with sugar and secret shame. If anyone had asked what we were doing in here, not one of us could’ve told the truth.
But I think, just maybe, we all wish we were Simone McCall, even if only for one night.
After the laptopis banished and the echoes of our “whitezilla” shrieking finally die down, a weird hush settles over the room. Not awkward, exactly—more like we’ve cracked open something sticky and secret, and now we’re not sure what to do with it.
