Cramped Quarters - Love Under Lockdown

At least the room was on the first floor, a small mercy for which I was still grateful. In my religion, didn’t really believe in ‘blessings’ in the usual sense but good fortune was still something to be noted, no matter what its source.

The smells filled my nostrils as soon as I was through the door. No one seemed to be home. I wondered if I should have knocked first.

The officials had put out notices to everyone, but it was still nice to give some warning. It was technically my place too, but I didn’t want to be walking in on anyone. Personal space and security are really important to most people.

I decided to compromise and stay in the living room, my boxes piled beside me on the floor by the couch. My wallet and keys were already out on the table. I didn’t see any reason to be hanging around outside or in the corridor, since I had already come inside, but I decided not to cross the line into the bedrooms or bathroom before making proper introductions. It was only polite.

Digging through my bookbag, I excavated my battered copy of I Await the Devil’s Coming while I awaited the arrival of my new roommate.

I hadn’t heard the shower, but I’d heard the door. I looked up in time to see Rachel, the girl from class and the fountain, stride in, clad in nothing but a towel. Her skin was still carrying the sheen of a recent shower. That’s what I had smelled. Her shampoo and whatever else she used.

I kind of expected a scream, which would be perfectly understandable under the circumstances. Instead, I was faced with something much worse. A cold, silent, terror, like I was going to brutally torture her before carrying her remains out in a suitcase the next morning, Henry Lee Lucas style.

“Hi,” I tried.

Silence. Her expression did not move one inch. A tear began to roll down her cheek. I had no idea what kind of change had come over her and began to worry that she thought I was stalking her, that somehow I had found out the address of her dorm room and had come here to mess with her.

“I’m your new roommate,” I said, picking my keys up off the table and holding them up to her. “Because of the new regulations. I was randomly assigned to live here now, from the cluster houses. Crazy, hey?”

Without a word, she backed away and burst into a run, going into what I assumed to be her bedroom. The door slammed so hard the windows in the living room shook.

I was surprised by her reaction, but not furious. People tended to fear things that were different, and I was about as different as it was possible to get. Not in the usual ways people tried to distinguish themselves. By what they wore, or the music they liked or who they slept with.

Even politics had become a mark of pride, the two sides playing off each other as though there was that much of a difference between cats and dogs. Even the self-proclaimed ‘anarchists’ were picking from the set menu of options like they were ordering Chinese. All the ‘choices’ were pre-set, even among the ‘deviants.’

I was deviant in a different way. Inside the head. My thoughts on the universe and humanity’s place in it tended not to match up with the consensus. Therefore, very little of what I thought did, either.

So, I was a bit used to people fearing me or not wanting to be around me. It took time for me to find my tribe and I only fit in with other ‘different’ people. However, I was a bit stumped by Rachel’s reaction in that I had thought we had had some chemistry. I thought she liked me, but I couldn’t have been more wrong, I supposed.

Giving it a respectable amount of time, I put my bookbag on and started hauling boxes to the room with the door that wasn’t closed. It was about twice as much space I needed, the bed roughly double the size of the one I had had in cluster housing.

I could pull it out from the wall a little and run laps around it, burning quite a few calories in the process. At least I could if I ate many. By circumstance more than intent, though, I’d gotten used to about fifteen hundred calories a day, which was how I managed to stay so athletic looking despite never having kicked a ball in my life.

I found a place for everything. Using the nightstand, which was similar to the one in cluster housing, I put my records in there, as well as some of my toiletries since there was a shared bathroom and I didn’t want to hog up all the room. There wasn’t a bookshelf but there was a desk, so I lined whatever books didn’t also fit into the nightstand up across the back of it, using two of the heavier, hardcover editions laid flat as bookends.