Things that Happen
The apartment I choose faces an alley.
“Beautiful view,” I say, the day I look at the place. The landlord leans against the doorway, swinging his keyring on a finger stained with something brown. I find myself hoping it will fall.
It isn’t the best place, but it’s a place. Besides, I am in college, and living in a shithole is sort of a requisite. I know I’ll barely spend any time really living in it. The concrete box will be something I’ll talk about later, when I am a famous writer, sitting on a white couch on a talk show. “Oh, yeah,” I’ll laugh, a hand fluttering to cover my lipsticked mouth, “it was terrible. It faced this awful billboard for some kind of lawyer who specialized in highway accidents.” I’ll make some disgusting existential joke, say that my life felt a little bit like a highway accident sometimes, memories and pieces strewn across the yellow lines and white dashes.
It only takes a day for me to move in. I don’t have much- after four years of moving in and out of student housing, I've minimized. The downside to this is that I have to keep buying things like kitchen spoons and bathroom curtains.
But it’s easy to stir your pasta with chopsticks, so sometimes the kitchen spoon stays unpurchased and I navigate a small puddle every time I exit the shower. There’s a word to describe this kind of life, I think, and it’s probably like the one my mother used when I told her I didn’t want to budge on having a bedroom door.
Priorities.
-
I don’t usually go out all that much. People are draining- keeping up a smile and conversation is probably my least favorite thing to do, once I realize I’m doing it. There are only a few friends who act as exceptions to this rule, but we all went our separate ways, to grad school, and now I have to start all over again.
It ends up that someone from a class invites me out. I’m not sure why- she honestly isn’t that interesting to me. I tell myself you don’t know her, she could be amazing, but all I wonder when I see her is why she dyes her hair a blonde that’s just a bit too yellow.
I agree to go because when I think about it, I can’t remember the last time I had a drink.
We meet up at some trendy bar that calls itself laid-back. I don’t think it’s as casual as the pizza place next door and when I show up in denim and a t-shirt, I try to ignore the small black dresses the other women are wearing. I order something small to start- a wine freeze, a glorified adult slush. One hour into the night I excuse myself and go next door, the wine already draining out of my system. The pepperoni pizza I order stays hot all the way to my apartment and it tastes a thousand times better than the conversation.
It’s a damn good pizza. I eat almost half of it before I try to tell myself to save some for breakfast.
-
Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I wake up at night to a sound.
There should be no sound.
I am suddenly glad that I have a bedroom door and I tell myself to tell my mother when I go home.
The sound resolves itself into footsteps- nervous, intermittent. I wonder whether I’m supposed to call the police or the landlord. Or if I’m supposed to try and scare the intruder off.
I remember a professor telling me his neighbor was killed by an intruder, because you don’t just get robbed here, you get murdered, too, and the dry humor gives me hope that at least I’ll die with comedic value.
The footsteps get closer and I hold my breath.
There’s nothing of real value outside the bedroom. Everything is in my room, with me, because somehow I always thought it was smartest to put valuable things behind a door. I am glad I did, but I am also worried because if the intruder wants something they’ll come in, locked door or no.
I am lying there like a child, breathless in anticipation, when they try the door handle.
For some reason, this is the point at which I decide not to lie there. I swing my feet out of bed, silent and quick, and roll off the sheets. It is amazing because I’m wearing a fluffy bathrobe and the sash should be strangling me the way it does when I’m doing anything else while wearing it. The first thing my hands curl around is the metal lamp on my bedside table. I don’t think to unplug it. Later, I question what would have happened if I’d tried to throw the lamp and ended up tripping backward when the cord resisted. I stand there, probably more disheveled than I feel, and I can hear someone pushing at the door.
I have decided to face this, whatever it is, and the first thing I think is they’re not getting my fucking violin.
It was almost stolen once before when I was a child, and I had always imagined what it would have been like if I’d faced a thief willing to take my prized possession.
I am a time travel technician, with my robe and my lamp, and it is horrible.
The pushing on the door stops and the footsteps recede, probably to the front door. I wait a good ten minutes before I attempt to venture forth.
The apartment looks the same. It shouldn’t- that’s the point, isn’t it, that everything changes and I was never the same. But I’m still the same, and my apartment looks fine, and I start to wonder whether it wasn’t just a drunk neighbor mistaking my door for theirs. Did I leave it unlocked? I question myself, trying to walk through the day, but it’s useless.
I crawl back into bed with a fire bat, kicking away the sash that didn’t strangle me because it was already tangled in the sheets to begin with. It makes me feel better, somehow, and when I go back to bed I sleep through the night.
-
I am playing a video game when my TV suddenly goes black.
My immediate thought is that I didn’t save! I am angry, but not too angry to remember the autosave function. It’s still aggravating, though. I get up to check my console, thinking only that I must have left a textbook or something else covering the fan. School is the number one cause of accidental overheating.
When I rise, though, I notice the strobing red and blue lights suddenly thrown against my window. And then I hear it.
It’s faint at first, like a radio playing two rooms behind you, and I squint as if somehow my eyes have gained the ability to hear things. Moving closer to the window, I wonder if someone has been pulled over on campus. The lights are still moving, though, so I pull down one of the cheap shades. I can see a campus police car cruising, the heavy rain painting diagonal stripes across its shiny black surface.
“…indoors…downstairs…warning…”
They’re not the most desirable words to pick out of an ominous police car warning.
I assume, at this point, that the school has decided to warn its students- a few hours in- that the storm outside has become serious.
That morning, I had checked the weather and been excited when I saw the chance of rainstorms. Rain is one of my favorite things, especially on the weekends, and especially when I’m being lazy at home. The storms had started innocently, but in the past hour, the rain had sounded like it wanted in. I could have sworn there were plastic bullets hailing down on my dorm.
My first thought is that West Texas is prone to tornados. I think that it’s probably best to get downstairs. The rain seems terrible, so I grab a hoodie, but somehow I don’t have the presence of mind to change out of my sandals. When I leave my room, my roommate emerges from the other side of the unit, hair wet against her back.
“Do you know what’s going on?”
“Yeah- the police are telling everyone to get downstairs. I think there might be a tornado warning or something.”
“Great. I just got out of the shower,” she laughs, and then she turns back towards her room.
I find myself thinking, if you die it won’t matter how clean you are, but I don’t say it because that’s socially unacceptable and I don’t know Britt that well yet.
Instead, I say, “I’ll wait. Make sure to take your keys.”
When she meets me at our front door, she asks about my brother and his boyfriend. Out for the weekend, I explain, only half-listening because I can see the other three doors on our floor are partially open.
A girl walks out of the fifth door- the Resident Assistant, someone I vaguely recognize but I’ve never really met before. She seems a little distracted, so I wait patiently, and it’s almost a full minute before she realizes we’re standing in front of our door.
“Hey. We’re heading over to the Ranch House,” she explains, moving towards another door.
The Ranch House is directly across from the back staircase of the dorm building. I wonder just how soaked I’ll get running between the two buildings.
The answer is very. Very soaked.
While Britt and I stand, waiting for the RA to key in the access code to the locked door, I am trying to dry my feet on my marginally less wet sweatpants. My phone is already buzzing every other minute, my brother’s boyfriend neurotically checking to see that I’m still alive.
The lunchbox television inside is on, half static and half weather report. A blonde woman is saying something about flooding and I watch her move, the picture flickering in and out.
“I wonder if the power will go out,” I say, and three minutes later it does.
I am cold and wet, feet curled under me on the plasticky surface of the vinyl sofa. I find myself hoping, despite knowing better, that a tornado would just hit us already so that I can get back to my dorm.
The lights come back on and Britt asks me to go to the bathroom with her, afraid the power will go out again. I follow her, phone in hand, and make empty jokes to fill the space in the reverberating room. Wouldn’t it be funny, I start, and then I spin endless nonsense threads about storms and power outages and whether the storms will last until class Monday. It seems to make her feel better. It might be that she, like me, is not listening. Whatever the case, we leave the bathroom and the lights don’t go out.
Things never clearly end.
The rain is still there, and wind, too, when I leave. The football game has been canceled, and I wonder what the roads must be like, flooded and congested with oversized trucks trying to get back into town. The parking lot between the Ranch House and my dorm is flooded, and I resign myself to cold feet, walking through the chilly water and up the steps.
Unfortunately, my neighbor follows, and he asks if he can come inside because he’s alone in his dorm. I don’t know if this is true, but for some reason, I can’t bring myself to leave someone alone- even if it is a sibling’s roommate’s ex.
I spend the next hour listening to his drunk stories and regret every minute of it. This time, I hope the tornado that is undoubtedly heading our way puts me out of my misery.