Nonetheless, this is where I go to college. Details on how I made my choice are sketchy, but it's best not to dwell on the past. During my freshman year, I was feeling the effects of pure testosterone seeping through the dorm-room walls pretty badly. I lost most of the contact with my "feminine side" and subsided into constant, life-sucking gaming online with my friends. We stayed in touch only because of Skype and Left 4 Dead.
As cliche as it is, I became consumed with the virtual world and lost all the opportunities to get out there and experience college life. Like the GIRLS, there was little enough chance of me meeting a girl had I been trying to find one, but when the only time I spent outside my dorm room was transitioning between classes, my odds dropped to absolute zero.
That was how winter break found me: a quiet, lonely shut-in who would do anything to meet girls except try any harder than going to class every day. It was also how my friends found me when a group of them arrived to bring me home for winter break.
The drive between here and home is only 6 and a half hours (5 if you ignore stops and speed limits) so it wasn't really asking TOO much of my friends to come get me. They made it to me sometime in the late afternoon/evening and we immediately loaded up the car and set out for home. But as fate would have it, we were delayed in the form of a mysterious check engine light and the increasing darkness and snowfall. Full of resentment and Mt. Dew, we turned back.
Fitting two people in a dorm room is miserable. Fitting those two plus another three is just obscene. With two lofted beds, one un-pull-out-able futon, and like 10 square feet of open floor space, things were obviously uncomfortable. I honestly don't understand how my friends put up with it, but seeing as I had one of the beds, I was alright.
And because my bed was lofted, I had the perfect chance to employ my magnificent creeper skills. If you pay attention to my other writing, you'll know I have a super power, so it's pretty easy for me to be the first one awake in the morning when I want to be. Which, in turn makes it super easy for me to be peering ominously over the side of my bed when my floor-hugging friends first opened their eyes.
Etim was my first victim. I imagine it was more than unnerving to arise from happy dreamland only to find yourself staring into a pair of soulless eyes glaring at you from beneath a menacing jew-fro.
After the appropriate inappropriate words were tossed around, we all headed to breakfast and noted the lack of girls in the dining hall. Then we packed up the car noting the lack of girls walking around outside. Then we emptied the vending machines of pop because I had a bajillion unused dining dollars that were going to expire, all the while noting the lack of girls doing the same thing.
Finally, just as we were pulling out of the parking lot, it happened.
Mushel was the one to point her out, and it was love at first sight. There was a girl, presumably the only girl within a thousand miles, in the laundry room.
It explained EVERYTHING. We had seen no girls around because they were all doing laundry! Not that anyone cared about any other girls anywhere because holy shit: A GIRL.
For some reason, we were still moving, it's like some law of traffic forced us into perpetual motion. So, against all of our greater judgement, we left. Mushel and I kept screaming "Si" and "CUSOOOOO" at each other until we were hoarse, just like always. But something new came up immediately and lingered like only the smell of dirty socks can.
"Laundry Girl"
"LAUNDRY GIRL"
We bellowed it to the heavens, praising the glory of the universe to provide us with such a gift. For nigh on 5 hours straight, we talked about Laundry Girl. We joked about Laundry Girl. We speculated on what Laundry Girl was doing now, whether she had finished her laundry or not, whether she had gone to lunch beforehand or waited until she had finished all her laundry.
We examined every intimate, menial detail of this poor, unsuspecting girl's life. We took her very existence and made it one of the most integral inside jokes our group has ever come up with.
Laundry Girl was born not with a fizzle but with a bang.
History became myth. Myth became legend. And for 3 and a quarter years, Laundry Girl passed by her life without knowing her true calling.
But in the spring of 2012, everything changed...
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