Page 2 of Unfix Me

“Give me a goddamn minute!”

Leaving without me, my ass. Was he going to drive to the airport with nobody to drop off?

He probably would do that just to prove a point, so I grabbed a burgundy henley. I rolled up the sleeves to ward off the heat and hoped it would be cool on the plane, otherwise the person beside me would hate me. I didn’t do well in the heat, so summer was my least favorite season. As soon as the weather breached seventy, I would sweat like a pig.

Did pigs sweat? A horn blared outside and I decided it was a question for Google on another day.

I grabbed my suitcase and backpack, then sprinted down the stairs. Once I jumped into the backseat, Dad took off.

“Ben, he isn’t even buckled yet,” Mom scolded.

Dad glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “He’s twenty, Sara. Not a kid.”

“You can still die in a crash at twenty,” I muttered.

Mom made a disgruntled sound at my statement. Me and Dad both smiled. I didn’t know how she’d put up with the two of us all this time. We sure didn’t make it easy for her, but that was part of being a parent, I assumed. If your teen didn’t make you question your sanity and your decision to have kids at least once a month, they weren’t doing it right.

In my opinion, they had it easy with me. I didn’t go out and party during high school- not often, at least. My grades always stayed where they needed to be and I excelled in sports. From sophomore to senior year, I had a steady girlfriend. I was the ideal that other parents would use to scold their kids for being fuck ups.

Look at Sen. He’s not failing math.

Sen didn’t knock his girlfriend up, Markus.

Can’t you be more like Sen?

It was funny to me. My friend, Josh, always told me that his parents liked me more than him. His dad even told me he was proud of me at graduation. It had struck something deep within me that made me hurry to the bathroom before anyone could see my eyes water, especially my dad. He’d get that weird look on his face, the same one he used to have all the time before I started high school. Before the summer when I turned fourteen. Before Camp Dumont.

I shook my head and focused on the city passing by outside. I didn’t like the way my stomach felt when I thought about it. I hated that there was anything but gratitude inside of me. That place saved me. It changed my life.

“You’ll behave yourself, right?” Mom asked, angling herself so that she could see me. “Don’t party too much. In bed early on weekdays.”

“Always use a condom,” Dad joked, making her glare at him.

I laughed and leaned my head back. “Yeah, I know. I’m an adult and I’ve been in college for two years already. This isn’t gonna be that different.”

It was just a bigger college in a bigger city. A few years there wouldn’t completely alter my life.

*****

I thought the whole formal tour thing was just something they put in movies, but they were really doing it. A blonde girl who looked like she played the trombone had been talking incessantly while she led a group of us through each area of the campus. I’d seen pictures, but I’d severely underestimated how massive the place was. If I had classes in completely different sections, I’d never make it to them on time.

This felt real. I should’ve expected that, but you didn’t really understand until you were standing in the midst of this madness. While the town I came from wasn’t small, it had nothing on a place of this magnitude. According to Leilani, the tour guide, there were over thirty thousand students enrolled here.

Well, at least it should be easy to find a few that I liked. A couple guys in the group seemed cool and we’d said some things to each other along the way.

West was here from Maine on a football scholarship. He looked the part at well over six feet tall with broad shoulders and a square jaw. The guy had ice-blue eyes that reminded me of the night king in Game of Thrones. His hair was shockingly black in comparison to his light skin and bright eyes. He was what people might call a ‘chick magnet.’ Since he was part of the football team, he’d been on campus for almost a month already, so he didn’t have much patience for the tour.

Brooks was coming in as a pre-law student. His parents were lawyers in New York, which must have been a recipe for expectations and pressure to succeed. He seemed down to earth, though. He had incredibly curly, chocolate-brown hair that came down to his shoulders. According to him, it was the only thing he had that was strictly his. His parents tolerated it, at least until he got to a certain point in school. Then, the beautiful curls would be chopped off. The sadness in his brown eyes betrayed how attached he was to his long hair.

The three of us made a decent trio. The jock, the law student, and the business major. It wasn’t something I was passionate about, but I’d never really latched onto anything specific. I always thought that it would click at some point while I was at community college, that I’d take one of my general education classes and think, “This is the one! I want to do this for the rest of my life.”

It just never happened.

My dad worked in marketing and unlike a lot of people, he didn’t seem to loathe his job. It paid for a decent life and once he was established with his company, it didn’t keep him away from home too much due to crushing responsibilities. That was good enough for me.

“Have you met your roommate yet?” West asked, keeping his voice low enough not to get scolded by Leilani again.

I shook my head. “I got a single dorm.”

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