The Winning Submission of the Buzz's First Campus-Wide Fiction Contest, Dinosaur

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.

Menna was not one to call her loneliness what it was, so her process of platonically wooing June was subtle. She complimented June’s outfits, which usually consisted of sweatshirts over dresses, and offered her the answers to every homework assignment, until June finally asked to hang out outside of class. The first time June came over, Menna asked if she smoked weed. Though she had never done it before, June said yes. There was something special about their rituals: laying on Menna’s dorm room floor together, passing a joint back and forth, and blowing its smoke through the window screen. But Menna knew that the room was not a locked box outside of the consequentialism of time, as much as she wanted it to be. One thing she had learned quickly about June was that it was not in her blood to say no to being liked, so she knew that when Victor started to pester her into coming over, it was only a matter of time until June would say yes. Menna thought that Victor’s palpable jealousy of her closeness to June had something to do with June. Victor thought so, too. Victor made a regular performance of asking June to come over, to which she always said, “I’ll go if Menna goes.” This made Menna beam, but she usually covered it up by grabbing a tissue from her backpack and pretending to blow her nose. Victor grew so accustomed to June rejecting his advances that he asked more for the sake of consistency than anything else. When he asked her on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, when Menna had already left campus for the break, he had not even considered that her answer might be different. “Fine,” was June’s response. “Where do you live again?” Victor’s veins were suddenly composed of electric wires. He stammered the name of his dorm and tried not to be shocked. In the hours which preceded June’s arrival to his room, Victor felt his skin turn into a site for red, rashy inflammation. A bummer, he thought, and especially poor timing. He scrubbed himself abrasively in the communal dorm bathrooms, wearing flip flops. Afterwards, he stood, wrapped in a towel, at the bathroom mirror, trying to figure out what to do with his hair. He suffered from chronic and perpetual coldness in any temperature, and always wore knitted hats in class. He hoped that June would still recognize him without one. June had never taken anyone’s virginity before. With each knock on the door of Victor’s dorm room, this was on its way to no longer being true. She showed up twenty minutes late and was greeted by walls more bare than she had anticipated. Victor did not have a roommate, and this surprised June, who had assumed that he was not the type of guy who spent much time alone. When he told her it was his first time, a part of her warmed up to him. This allowed her to look at him during sex. Typically, she hated mid-stroke eye contact. When June got naked, Victor grew concerned for her health. It was visibly evident that the relationship between her skin and ribs was one of desperation, her ribcage like a traveller clinging to poles on a moving train. Without words, Victor tried to convey his apprehension. June was not a novice at receiving this look, and nearly a professional at translating it into a compliment. She pressed her body to his and Victor worried that he would break her. He did not know whether or not she would forgive him. June intermittently told Victor that he was doing a good job. It was a virtue of hers that she tried not to lie to people, so she first had to coax herself into meaning it. Still, he was certainly not doing poorly. Most of the men she slept with were much more aggressive and allowed her to breathe much less. Victor thanked her for the compliments, though it was awkward to say thank you so often during sex without the whole thing feeling like a transactional sham. Plus, it was patronizing. He noticed June wince at sporadic intervals, like she was bracing herself for something. He wondered if she thought he was too immature to hit her. Though it would not have been easy for him, he would have done it had she asked. When they were finished, Victor debated whether or not June would ever tell her future husband about him. He concluded that she likely would not. The first time you had sex was supposed to stay with you forever. The second and third and fourth times did not matter at all. He asked June if she wanted to go to the dining hall. This was how they ended up sitting across from each other at eleven at night, both of them eating Lucky Charms from white plaster bowls. “I hope you have a good Thanksgiving,” Victor offered. He wondered if he would get to kiss her again when they left. “Menna can never know about this,” June replied. The bowl of Lucky Charms was the first time she had eaten all day. She let milk disintegrate the marshmallows on her tongue and felt ravenous. It was finally time for uncontrollable weakness, the moment with which most of June’s nights began. Her days consisted of self-inflicted starvation. Victor took June’s eating to mean that she was someone who regularly ate, and was relieved. He was only seeing such vulnerability because he was no longer much of an audience, given that the only sexual experience June planned to have with Victor had already ended. It was not that she regretted the sex. She would not even have been particularly concerned about keeping it a secret, were it not for the overlap between Victor’s mouth and Menna’s ears. Victor nodded to signal his understanding. June decided that she respected him. He resigned himself to the idea that he was not going to kiss June again, which was a bummer, but it was better than never having kissed her at all. When they all returned from Thanksgiving break, it was time for the final unit of Astronomy 101, which veered into philosophical territory. This was a relief to June, who was ready to never look at a calculator again, and a source of nervousness to Will, who felt more comfortable when the components of a situation could be substituted for ingredients to an equation. Still, all four of them found some interest in Einstein’s theory of relativity. The professor walked them through the concepts: Time was entirely dependent on the frame of reference of the observer. The linear progression of time mattered only to those who were entrenched in it, but to those people, it meant everything. Beyond the threshold of spacetime perceivable from earth, everything was happening at once. Victor choked back a comment in which he would call the professor a dinosaur. It was not supposed to be mean. It was an earnest attempt to address comedically what everyone was thinking. What was he supposed to do: lie? The professor was practically decaying at the lecture podium. Victor looked to his left and saw that Will was authentically engaged, and then looked forward and saw that Menna and June were taking notes. He knew that he would not get laughs, so he sighed, and the lecture dragged onwards. In a different situation, the joke would have killed. “I just got a new bag of edibles,” Victor whispered, once the class was wrapping up. Will had never consumed marijuana before. “Anyone want to come over?” “I’ll go if Menna goes,” said June. Menna was looking to be more adventurous. “If there’s free weed, I’ll go,” she said. Victor and June both snapped up their heads in surprise. June’s skin started to heat up when she thought about being in Victor’s dorm with Menna there. Her fingers meandered over to the baggy denim on top of Menna’s kneecap, and before she retracted her hand, she squeezed. Upon feeling the touch, Menna

turned to face June, but June was already packing up to leave. Victor watched the small act of intimacy unfold before him, and he knew it was the perfect opportunity for an excited comment, but he was too busy trying to process the acceptances to his invitation. “Alright, then,” he said. His shock was accompanied by nervousness. When it was only him and June in his room, at least the audience had been smaller, and wearing fewer clothes. “Will, come on,” he said. “Now it’s the whole squad. You’ve got to come.” Will was trying to pack up his backpack, and was growing increasingly annoyed. The lecture ended at two, and he had a class at two fifteen to get to, not that Victor ever seemed even remotely concerned about that. He let a momentary thought about how selfish Victor could be travel from his brain into his jaw, then he swallowed it. “Alright, alright,” he said. He sidestepped around everyone else’s desks on his way out the door. “Alright, then,” Victor repeated. He had gotten what he wanted. His palms were sweaty. June went over to Menna’s before they went to Victor’s that night, because it was obvious to each of them that they would arrive together. June mentally prepared how she would react to seeing Victor’s dorm room in order to pretend it was her first time seeing it. She planned to whisper to Menna: “Someone has definitely died in this room.” Menna was wearing sweatpants when June got there. June was wearing jeans and was therefore afraid that Menna might think she was trying too hard. “I’ve been so busy all evening,” she explained, though she had not been asked. “I didn’t have time to change.” An opened bag of tortilla chips sat on Menna’s nightstand, and June moved through the doorway and towards them. She gave herself permission to waft the salt-flavored air. “What did you think of the lecture today?” Menna asked, in lieu of a greeting. “I don’t really understand it,” June admitted. “How could nothing have consequences, when it feels like everything does? It feels like there’s always minutes going by. We aren’t wired to understand anything other than that.” “Technically,” Menna responded, “it means we’re the same age as our parents.” She slowly lowered herself to the floor and laid on her back. June mimicked Menna’s movement. They laid beside one another on the carpet, the strands of their hair becoming tangled in each other’s. “Or that we’re the same age as our professor,” June added. “That’s weird,” Menna said. “And also kind of gross.” They both laughed. About twenty minutes after the time they had told Victor they would show up, Menna and June found it appropriate to head over. Victor answered his door, and Will sat behind him, cross-legged on the carpet floor. “Hey, you guys,” Will called out, leaning over to make himself visible to the girls. This was an act of social bravery for him, and he was proud of himself. “Hi,” Menna said. She pushed past Victor, who was still trying to process the fact that everyone had said yes to his invitation and actually meant it. It was raining outside, and June placed the umbrella she and Menna had carried next to Victor’s front door. Victor smiled at June, and she smiled back with her mouth closed. Victor closed the door behind everyone, kicking himself for not having prepared a one-liner to open the evening. Creating jokes on the fly was always a challenge for him. His mom had always known what to say, and he wished fleetingly that he was more like her. He had not seen her in three years. This was an absence for which she was preemptively forgiven, no apology required. Victor never turned his cell phone off before he went to sleep, just in case she called. He was sure that she would. It was only a matter of time. “Don’t forget your umbrella when you leave,” Victor said, “or else I’ll steal it.” Immediately, Victor was disappointed in himself. He recognized that this was an objectively weird thing to say. Menna tuned out nearly everything Victor said, and Will was wrapped up in trying to configure a way to pretend to be high without actually consuming the edible, so the only person who had heard it was June. She sat down on the floor next to Will and said to Victor, “An umbrella is a real mean thing to take from a person.” June could not have known how personally relevant such a statement was to Victor. Victor’s dad, the only person with whom he lived at home, owned and operated a food stand in Manhattan. This meant that when it rained, the stand and his dad both got wet. One day, in high school, Victor had made the short trek from their apartment to the food stand in order to drop off an umbrella to his father, who replied to the gesture with a nod instead of saying thank you. Naturally, Victor was surprised later that night when his dad arrived home in a soaked shirt, with his beard pressed to his neck in individual, wet strands. When Victor asked what had happened, his dad only laughed and said, “Some bastard stole my umbrella. Must have needed it more than I did.” Victor stood up immediately off the couch and offered to track the thief down as an act of familial retribution. His dad still only laughed. Victor’s hands fidgeted in and out of fists. “I stole someone’s umbrella, once,” Victor said in response to June. His tongue collided with the back of his two front teeth to pronounce the L sound and almost got stuck in the gap. He was not sure where the urge to lie to June came from, but he thought it might have had something to do with a lifelong desire to live up to his name. Menna rolled her eyes. “Seriously?” she asked. “You suck.” “Hey,” Victor contested. “I needed it more than they did.” Will bit his tongue, trying to minimize any outward expression of a reaction, but he knew no one was looking at him anyway. Umbrellas were not that big of a deal, sure, but Victor’s behavior was growing increasingly difficult to justify. Still, he knew that Victor had a single dad, and he did not know how hard that could be. Will had a notably difficult time squaring his experience of the world, with two extremely married parents and two extremely alive sets of grandparents, against the knowledge that this was itself a privilege. He was not sure how much of his guilt was overkill and how much was owed. June looked anxiously at Menna, who was standing up, evaluating the undecorated walls of Victor’s room. “Where are the edibles?” June asked. “I like the way you think,” Menna said, approvingly, sitting down next to June. This irritated Victor, because now June was sandwiched between Will and Menna, but he kept his annoyance to himself. He knew that the umbrella theft made him seem like an asshole. Victor opened one of the drawers in his dresser and pulled out a small sandwich bag from beneath a pair of socks. In the bag were four small gummies, shaped like watermelons. He popped one into his mouth before handing over the bag to Menna. In a sporadic burst of confidence, Will leaned over to June and asked in a hushed voice if she would mind

taking two edibles so that he would not have to take any. June felt as though she was being trusted with an important mission. She discreetly took both watermelons from the package. “I can’t stop thinking about how time is an illusion,” Menna announced after chewing the gummy. June was mid-chew on her second. “Just linear time,” Will corrected, but he realized after saying it that this had probably been implied, and he was embarrassed for having assumed he was the only one who had understood the class lecture. After all, he reminded himself, they were all at the same college. In an attempt to smooth over this potentially annoying thing he had said, he continued, “but you’re right. We think time is a line, when it’s really just a gaping black hole.” June heard this and understood it, so she assumed she was not yet high. Relieved, she blinked, but when she opened her eyes after this split second, her surroundings had changed. Music had somehow started playing, and Menna was standing up and dancing. Menna was a talented dancer, and June had learned this about her, but now that Victor and Will knew it, too, she felt territorial over the information. June looked around the room to try to discern how long she had blinked for and how much had changed in that time. Victor was perched on the edge of his bed, which was on top of not only the bed frame, but also bed risers, so when he sat up straight his head almost brushed the ceiling of his room. Victor and Will were both watching Menna dance, and she was not even trying to be seductive, but Victor was seeing her in a whole new light. He wondered why he had been so entranced by June, and why he had let it blind him. “You are so money,” Victor said to Menna. “She’s not an object,” Will replied. “You think I look green?” Menna responded to Victor, attempting to antagonize him, even though she blushed a little at the idea that she was being noticed the way June always was. “I was thinking like a coin.” Victor rolled his eyes. “I just meant that you look pretty.” “Money is not usually pretty,” Will said. “But I guess it’s only a concept anyway.” June thought she was going to be sick. Not only was the room moving at a much faster speed than she was, but also, watching Victor talk to Menna felt like watching her dad flirt with her teacher. She was disgusted, and also she felt like she had the right to be pretty pissed off, but she did not know who to be more mad at. She felt the distance between Victor and Menna losing way into a pangea, and she wanted to lay a flag in that distance, to preserve it, to own it. Home was a townhouse in suburban Connecticut, and this she knew, but right now June felt home lodged in her chest, threatening to erupt volcanically onto the floor of the dorm room. She remembered how when she was in the third grade, she had seen her mother and her school principal kiss in the parking lot. In the car, she had asked whether this meant that her mother was in love. What did this mean for her dad? Her mother assured her it was nothing. June’s parents were still married, but in the way that meant they only wore their rings when they saw their friends, and her mom usually slept in the living room. June had been happy to leave home, to watch the minivan in which her parents had carted all of her belongings to campus pull away. Now, she wished she had asked her parents more questions. There were so many things that she did not know. “I don’t understand Menna,” June whispered to Will. She was surprised at the ability of her voice to be stable. She was also surprised at the words which came out. She was not sure whether or not she meant them. “It’s like she doesn’t want boys to flirt with her.” Will was surprised by this statement. He presumed his own opinion of Menna was the obvious, universally accepted fact. “It’s not confusing,” he whispered back to June. “She doesn’t.” “You know, Victor,” Menna said, still dancing while everyone watched, “usually I hate you. And next week in class, I’ll probably hate you again.” Hearing this felt to Victor like listening to a smoke alarm gradually increase in volume. His ears were ringing so intensely he thought they may implode. “Alright, alright,” he replied, loudly, repeating it over Menna’s voice so that he could drown her out. “That’s enough.” “No,” Menna protested, her hands above her head and her hips swaying in circles, from left to right, then right to left, then left to right. “I wasn’t finished. I was going to say that right now, I like you. I think you’ve got it in you to be nice.” June was sure that she was going to throw up. “I feel sick,” she whispered to Will. She knew his sobriety would enable him to help, and she wanted him to feel guilty that he had forced her to get so high. Unfortunately, her ability to gage the volume of her speech had been lost. “Are you okay, June?” Victor asked. “She’s fine,” Will declared, because he did not want anyone to worry, since he knew he could take care of her. Unfortunately, he realized after he said it that it sounded like he was downplaying the issue, or that he did not care. He wondered why tonight of all nights he just could not get his mouth to align with his heart. “I’ll take you home, June,” Menna announced, and once she said this, everyone knew that it was the best idea. It was pushing midnight anyways, not that June had any clue what time it was. She had never been so high before in her life. June raised her arms above her head and Menna grabbed her hands, pulling her to her feet. Once standing up, June’s face fell nose-first into Menna’s collarbone. Both of their knees momentarily buckled in response to this, but luckily, neither one fell down. “I slipped,” June said loudly to Menna, her face still engulfed in Menna’s skin. Even though everyone was watching her and listening, she did not think anyone besides Menna could hear. “I was trying to kiss you.” “Jesus,” Victor said. “Shut up, Victor,” Menna responded. “Let’s go home, June.” “Get home safe,” Will offered. Menna put her arm around June’s waist and stabilized her as they walked out of Victor’s front door. They left their umbrella behind. “Tonight went by so fast,” Victor said aloud to Will, who was already preparing to leave. Victor found a certain degree of comfort in this: the familiarity of people leaving, the reliability of linear time to keep trudging. The procession of time took people away from him, sure, but it also gave him a second to catch his breath. For all the grief it caused, it birthed its own healing. Victor was used to marching through his grief the way time marched through him, the way ages marched through his body. This was what made him a man, and that itself was a godsend. He thought back to Astronomy 101 class and wished that he had just gone for it and made the joke about the professor. Not everyone would agree with him, sure, but no one could tell him it was not funny when he said that the professor was as old and decrepit as the fossilized remains of a dinosaur.

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