B206 - CHRIS NOLAND

never you never you but i wonder why you have bled but not to me and why i have only bled to you undressed

-Kavya Krishnamurthy

B206 After John Updike

He woke me up by slamming the door on accident as he walked out of our dorm. I mean, he probably woke up the whole floor. I guess it worked better than my alarm would have, but... jeez.

He decided to charge right back in anyways, though. I sank my head into my pillow sideways and tried to fake being asleep so I wouldn’t embarrass him, but I couldn’t have fallen asleep if I tried in that stuffy little room. I gave up pretty quickly anyways and decided to watch with one eye cracked open instead. He was kneeling down and digging through our closet, looking for something to replace. He looked very frazzled as he searched through the piles of clothes, before finally settling on a Cool-And-Casual-But-Also-Socially-Acceptable Flannel. I watched him rip off his C.A.C.B.A.S.A. flannel to trade it for one with an identical pattern but with blue and grey squares on it instead of red and black. He stopped one last time at the small mirror by the closet to watch himself run his hand through his hair and then he made his exit with a soft door-closing. He must have been too focused on his hair to notice he’d put the flannel on inside-out.

Four out of five days- four out of the five days we had been there he’d rushed to the dining hall for breakfast way ahead of time to try and skip the line before his first lecture started. It was kind of excessive. Yeah, go wake me up and stomp out so you can get the Froot Loops before they run out. Since I was up, though, I thought I might as well get going now instead of when my phone was supposed to buzz in five minutes. Maybe there’d still be some faux Frosted Flakes or something.

I threw my green tee into my pile of shirts in our closet and began to try and plan out my day while I changed into something presentable. Leave in 5, get to the dining hall in 10, find my counselor’s room in 30… Just as I chose my new tee (red this time!) I heard his voice from one story below our room’s window, outside. Some tall 15

skinny brunette was gesturing towards him while they both laughed-- his inside-out C.A.C.B.A.S.A flannel had been discovered, demoted to its rightside-in version. They started to walk towards the dining hall but he started to turn around and looked up and pointed towards our dorm– I started to freak out and thought they must be pointing at me so I jumped away, waited, then creeped back to the corner of the window to check if they were still acting normal. They both had turned around and continued walking towards the dining hall, relaxed.

Maybe I needed a C.A.C.B.A.S.A. flannel of my own because I was freezing out on the lawn between my dorm and the hall in just my tee. Well, maybe not freezing, but summer still had a couple of weeks left on the calendar. If Mother Nature decided to make it this cold now then she might as well have made the leaves fall, too--just skip to the good part, right? The cold actually made me get to the dining hall pretty fast though, fast enough to see him still twenty-five spots or so ahead of me in the breakfast line. He was standing in line with someone different- must have ditched the girl for this guy, a clone of himself with different styled hair. They were both smiling and staring at his phone as he dug through endless texts until he rediscovered a photo I couldn’t make out from where I was, only for them to start having full-on laughing fits in the line. I even took out my phone and found his name in my contacts and everything to try and text him some BS question that’d lead to the photo, but I realized he would have seen through that so I just checked the weather instead.

The people around me in the line were all talking to each other and I was kinda lost so I just stayed on my phone and protected my place in line. Thanks to some benevolent forces far above, there were still Froot Loops left and I served myself a generous portion while questioning in my head how many kid’s tuitions went into the yearlong Froot Loop supply. The dining hall was packed at that point and it was only the first week so none of the faces seemed very approachable but I did see him finish a conversation with someone and start to walk away into the crowd. I didn’t think I had any other choice so I ran after him before he melted into the entire population of the ten square mile area. I caught up to him right as he set his sights on a nearby table- I had to try something, so I just let out a single pathetic little “hey” and immediately regretted it. Right after I said that though, he let out a dumb “hey” too and we started walking together.

God, I sounded so stupid but he sounded pretty stupid too so it all balanced out. He said sorry for slamming the door earlier; I laughed and said I was awake anyways. We sat down together on a long and half-empty table like we were Jesus and the apostles at the last supper but people began to take the rest of the seats immediately so I didn’t get to make that joke out loud. That’s probably a good thing. Just as we began to settle, Tall Skinny Brunette and The Clone sat down across from us and I finally got to meet them for real. Turns out they had