Dino saur
The winning submission from the Buzz’s first ever campus-wide fiction contest, 2021 Written by Melissa Boberg
June was always cold. When she was the first student to arrive for Astronomy 101 on her first day of college, she hardly even questioned where she would sit. Naturally, there was the crusade of her anxious mind against her mobile body, and the whirlwind of temporally unextended paralysis as she stood in the doorway, bracing herself as she was penetrated by a forceful procession of seconds. Otherwise, it was simple. She chose the left of two desks paired in the back right corner of the room because they were the farthest from the window. Her body, trained to feel warm in whatever situation was the least cold, was relieved. When June realized the legs of the desk she had chosen were uneven, she considered moving seats. She decided instead to sit with intentional stillness so as not to make noise. When Menna sat next to June, June instinctively assumed that Menna had a crush on her. It was not that June was trying to be presumptuous. It was just that Menna walked around everyday wearing collared tee shirts, with a ring pierced through the septum of her nose, so what did she want people to think? What was surprising about Menna was how quickly she became June’s friend. June had lived enough life to learn that friendship required careful preservation, so she never mentioned anything about her original diagnosis of Menna as a lesbian. In exchange, Menna never mentioned anything about sex. Initially, June had assumed that this meant Menna was a virgin or a prude or something. Then, Menna had shown up to class one day with a faint red bruise on her neck. June was keen enough to recognize what that meant. Nonetheless, she took no issue in following suit. Mutually maintained silences were nothing new to her. They were practically her craft. Plus, June liked sex, but she did not love it. Anytime she talked about it with her other friends, the conversation consisted mostly of embellishments, and the truths she told always ventured off into lies. Selective silence was a better alternative, a method by which June and Menna never had to lie to each other. When Victor and Will sat in the two desks directly behind her and June, Menna thought nothing of it. Meanwhile, June was trying to determine which of the two boys had a crush on her. What was annoying about
June thinking that everyone had crushes on her was that she was not always, or even usually, wrong. It was not until Victor repeatedly struck up conversation between every line of the syllabus as the professor read it out loud that Menna realized what she was in for. She tried not to hate people, but had a hard time locating the humanity in men who never shut up. And not for nothing, she found it a bit much that Victor had to initiate every conversation by tapping on June’s shoulder. Menna felt bad for Will, who she assumed was Victor’s best friend, because he always seemed uncomfortable. Everytime the professor asked a question, Menna could tell that Will really wanted to raise his hand, but only about a third of the time did he do it. This was partly because he was visibly shy, but also because he basically sat next to a circus clown. Victor was always trying to orchestrate some grandiose distraction. Luckily for the rest of the class, Astronomy 101 was packed to the brim with college freshmen, and the professor wore on his face the years he had spent trying to lasso students into respecting him. There was nothing Victor could have done that would have interrupted the professor’s motive to plow through the material. With little in common between them, June, Menna, Victor, and Will did not talk much at first. The awareness that it was their first year of college contaminated all of their conversations with a unique pressure. It seemed like your college friends were your lifelong friends, and thus your future identity was confirmed by who you decided to hang out with. Will was especially hesitant towards the group. For one thing, he assumed that he was the only one of the four who had actually studied for the SAT. Plus, with time, he was only growing more tired of Victor’s antics. Still, deep down, he felt a certain conviction that Victor was a good guy. He knew this in the distinct way that men can recognize goodness in other men, a type of goodness invisible to women. He supposed that it was pity which tethered him to Victor, which was ironic, because Victor felt the same way about Will. Victor had charged himself with the responsibility of elevating Will beyond a life of doing homework and wearing seatbelts. Pity was sticky, like a two sided tape.
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