Lessons

â€œI don't know if I can do this anymore,â€ [[he]] says one night, as you sit together on his bed eating pizza so stale it makes your jaw hurt just to chew the crusts. â€œI think I want to see other people.â€ You're silent for a moment, just sitting there staring at the opposite wall without blinking, eyes fixed on his roommate's generic poster of [[Bob Marley]] and the way it goes sort of hazy as you watch through the dim [[light]] of his [[dorm room]].

You met him when you were sixteen and probably [[too idealistic]] for your own good. He was the new kid at school, and he'd just moved to your hometown in [[Ohio]] with his family over the summer. He was from [[New York]], so he seemed exotic and exciting, and all your friends were jealous when he asked you to be his date to [[Prom]]. Now, sitting here in his dorm room and feeling so far away from the person you were back then, you're almost embarrassed at how hard you're [[trying not to cry]].

It's one of those expensive cloth posters, and he has it hanging in the window so that [[light]] filters through it during the day. The roommate sometimes gets high and lays on his bed staring at it for hours, and you've wondered more than once if he's one of those [[white boys]] who worships Bob Marley like a god despite not even knowing that Rasta is a religion.

You haven't realized yet, at eighteen, that all sixteen year olds are too idealistic for their own good.

He's from upstate, near Rochester, but you don't really have an idea of how big New York is. You grew up in a small city in [[Ohio]], and you've always imagined that everyone in New York lives close to the city. He's never actually seen New York City, but [[he doesn't correct you]].

You were never really the type to be very interested in school dances, but you went because he asked you. He bought you flowers that matched your dress, and you went to the Olive Garden for dinner before the dance. He [[kissed you]] after, in his car when he was dropping you off at your house.

Dayton isn't a <html>small town</html> exactly. It's technically a city, but it's not at all on the list that people think of when they're rattling off [[American cities]]. When you get older and move away, you'll flip-flop back and forth between [[defending]] its size and [[lying]] about where you're from.

Maybe that should've been a warning sign, when you found out that he was lying by omission.

New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami. Maybe Detroit, sometimes Dallas. Hell, sometimes people even include Cleveland or Cincinnati, but definitely never Dayton.

It's the sixth largest city in Ohio, and you still haven't decided if that's something to brag about or not.

Usually you'll tell people you're from Cincinnati because it's closest to home and you can convincingly pretend like you grew up there. Sometimes you'll venture further out: Indianapolis or Louisville. One time you told someone you were from London, and you had to fake an English accent the whole time you were speaking to them.

Later, when you were talking about it with your [[best friend]], you didn't tell her that it was your first ever kiss. You'd already claimed that your first kiss happened three summers ago at Camp Wyandot with an older boy who was known for swimming morning laps in the lake. You'd told her <html>that</html> kiss had been soft and romantic and sweet, and now that you've actually had your real first kiss, [[you wonder if she knows]] that you were lying the first time.

Maria, a girl you met in the first grade when you were the only two on the playground who wanted to play imaginary horses. She feels like your entire world at sixteen, but you'll [[grow apart]] once you get older.

You wonder this because, as it turns out, your first kiss <html>wasn't</html> all that soft or romantic or sweet. It was mostly just wet, and maybe a little bit scary. The buckle of your seatbelt dug into your back, and there was a crinkling noise as you remembered that your feet were resting on an empty McDonald's bag on the floorboard of his car.

It takes you until your third year of college to admit that your friends from home were mostly friends of convenience. It takes you almost as long after that before you accept that it doesn't make you a bad person if, as an adult, you no longer have common interests with a girl who you met when you were seven.

It's never <html>enough</html> light, though, and it gives the room a closed-in feeling. Even more so now, when you're [[trying not to cry]] and the walls feel a little like they're closing in on you.

You manage to maintain your dignity and make it back to your own room [[just down the hall]] before you collapse onto your bed in a very undignified heap. Your roommate [[Ashley]] still doesn't know much about you, only just met you a couple months ago when you both [[moved in]], but she knows enough to know that something's wrong.

Your mind is running a mile a minute imagining all [[the awkward scenarios and run-ins]] that you're going to have to suffer through for the next six months until you both [[move out]] of the dorms. Your stomach churns when you realize that even if you manage to make it through that, you'll both be going back to the same town for the [[summer]], and you'll have to go through the awful process of dividing up old friends, like trying to decide who keeps what in a divorce. You think about unloading this all on your roommate [[Ashley]], but you're not sure if she'll want to hear it.

She's from Chicago and has a big, brash way of speaking that intimidated you a little bit when you first met her. It seems like it's softened some over the last few months, or maybe you've just gotten more used to it. Either way, you're surprised at how quickly the two of you have gotten close. She may not know everything about you, but she's a good friend, and she doesn't mind [[listening]] to you rant about things that are going on.

You remember how nervous you were those first few days, when everything seemed big and scary and brand new. You were so afraid you wouldn't get along with [[Ashley]], and you were convinced you were going to fail all your classes. You've mostly adjusted by now, but you still sometimes find yourself breaking down to call your mom at odd hours of the night when you've had a particularly stressful day or something terrible has happened. You have a feeling that this is going to be one of those nights.

Until now, you'd been counting the days until the roommate would announce that he'd decided to get dreadlocks. You've had a speech prepared for weeks on why that's offensive.

The sound of thumping house music drifts up from the floor below and the smell of [[burnt popcorn]] seems thick in the air around you. You take a deep breath in through your nose and [[let it out]], and you're surprised by how much it shakes.

You've never understood how it's possible for so many people to burn popcorn. Making popcorn is almost as easy as boiling pasta, but the dorm building has already been [[evacuated]] twice since the semester started in August.

This is an old trick that your mom taught you when you were four and scraped your knee on the playground. Take in a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Do it three times or more, until you can breath without feeling like you're [[trying not to cry]].

The first time it happened, it was at four in the morning. The alarms screamed everyone awake, and they all had to stumble outside into the parking lot in whatever clothes they could manage to throw on in the dark. No one wanted to own up to causing it, but everyone eventually found out that it was a girl on the third floor. People hated her for two weeks until it happened for the second time, caused by a boy from the fifth, and then everyone moved on to hating him instead.

The worst will be in the mornings, when you're both heading to your respective morning classes. It had been convenient until now that you both had classes [[starting at 8AM]], but now you're dreading the moment when you'll see him, puffy-eyed and hair still soft from sleep, as he jabs at the [[elevator button]] impatiently and eventually decides to give up and take the stairs.

Your only comfort in this is that you at least go to a college where most students leave the dorms after their Freshman year. Your campus is big enough that once you both move out, you might not ever run into him again.

You don't even know exactly what it is that college students <html>do</html> during the summer. After senior year of high school, everyone had gone all out celebrating their "last ever summer" with [[parties by the lake]] and road trips with their friends. You kept a detailed journal last summer, writing down everything you did and not wanting to forget it, but now you sort of wonder if it will be a lot of the same [[this summer]] when you're all back in Dayton.

You've never understood exactly why he does this, because the elevators are always busy in the mornings with [[luckier]] students making their way to the dining hall for breakfast. He argues that it's his human right as a person who lives in the future to be allowed to take an elevator down two stories when it's this early in the morning.

It's your first semester of college, after all, and you when you were excitedly enrolling in classes, you didn't know that no one takes classes before 10 if they can avoid it. Your morning Chem lecture is full of bleary-eyed students drinking [[coffee]] out of well-used travel mugs and nodding off into their laptops as the professor talks about electrons and molecular weights.

The guy who sits next to you in lecture always brings instant coffee, except one time, he shared his secret: he makes it with Red Bull instead of water. There's another student, a fifth year senior who always looks like he barely remembered to put on shoes that morning, who you're pretty sure has been filling his own travel mug with Bloody Marys all semester long.

As in, they were smart enough not to enrol in classes that require them to wake up before sunrise.

People with older siblings took turns bringing cases of beer out to the campground where everyone gathered, and everyone pitched in to help pay for it. There was a bonfire one night, and you remember sitting around it with a circle of your friends while he wrapped his arms around you and held you tight. Now that memory almost seems to mock you in the fluorescent glare of the dorm hallway lights.

It won't be quite the same, but you don't know that yet. People will grow up and [[grow apart]], and it'll feel weird and slightly strange and maybe even a little bit wrong when you notice that you don't have a whole lot in common with any of these people anymore.

â€œWhat did he say [[this time]]?â€ she asks when you storm in, propping her book open on her lap and watching you carefully from across the room. â€œNothing,â€ you say, words muffled into your pillow. You turn your head to stare at her where [[she sits]] perched on her bed, identical to the one you'd been sat in just minutes earlier. â€œHe didn't say anything. He broke up with me. But he didn't really say anything.â€

Ashley's silent for a moment, and you can tell that she's thinking about [[all the times]] he's already let you down since you came to college. You're not good enough friends with her yet for her to have told you [[what she really thought]] of him.

You've been fighting a lot lately, arguing over things that you [[used to agree on]] without thought. His wanting to see other people really shouldn't have come as such a shock to you, but you still can't help feeling like you've been hit by a truck.

Which movie to watch, where to go for dinner, which part of the library you should both study in. Stupid stuff, small stuff. Now, though, it feels like it's taken over everything. Ashley's still watching you from where [[she sits]] on her bed, and you feel like she can see everything that's going through your mind and more.

He's been absent lately, and even though you've [[tried to ignore it]], it's gotten more and more obvious. He lives [[just down the hall]], but sometimes it feels like you never even see him anymore. He's always cancelling plans to hang out with his friends, ditching you in the library in favor of meeting up with a study group from his lecture, and it's really starting to make sense now.

She never told you, for example, that she could tell you two weren't going to last, because relationships started in the hectic late months of high school almost never last into college. [[She doesn't say it now, either]].

You've never wanted to be clingy, and when you both first got here, you were afraid that you would suffocate him or drive him away if you kept insisting that he spend more and more time with you. Now you kind of wish that Ashley <html>had</html> told you [[what she really thought]], but you know that you never would have listened until now.

â€œDo you want to watch Mean Girls and make fun of people on Facebook?â€ she asks instead. You take a deep breath in through your nose and let it out, and wonder if maybe you'll be okay after all.