Chapter 7: Chapter 7 – A Typical Day for an American College Student

Ryan planned to have a positive attitude this week. Instead of silently hating everyone around him, he would attempt to participate in student life. At least then he could tell himself that he’d tried. He found Ancient Greek Literature to be the most tolerable of his classes, as it was the largest and therefore involved the least amount of class discussion. This allowed him to hide in the back while the teacher lectured. He didn’t have to worry about people looking at him, because he was supposed to be there and he could keep his mind occupied listening and taking notes. The hour and a half it filled was a peaceful respite from the usual cloud of self consciousness that permeated his days.

He gazes at the brunette in the white tennis skirt sitting two seats in front of him and one to the left. Her hair shines like it’s in a shampoo commercial and the way she has her legs crossed makes her skirt ride up to reveal beautiful tan thighs. Ryan drinks it in, but makes sure to do so in short intervals, interspersed with bouts of notetaking, looking at the whiteboard, and other parts of the room. The professor gives a lecture on Aristophanes. 

The brunette takes notes on her laptop. She switches windows every once in a while to look at clothes online, or pictures of herself and her friends on Facebook. Ryan notices that her background is a character from the Legend of Zelda, a video game that he enjoyed as a child. He brainstorms conversation starters based on this fact that he could use to speak with her. What did he have to lose?

After class, Ryan packs up more slowly than usual, watching the brunette from the corner of his eye as he bends down to stuff a paper notebook into his backpack. She doesn’t look like she’s talking to other people, which is a good sign. Ryan times the zipping shut of his backpack so it’s secured just a little after hers. This allows him to walk in time with her while she leaves the class, without making it look like he’s stalking her. 

As the crowd of students reaches the bottleneck formed at the exit door of the lecture hall, Ryan turns his head to look at her. He’s timed it successfully and she’s standing almost directly behind his shoulder, looking vacantly ahead. Ryan turns on the charm. “H-hey.” His voice comes out in a high-pitched croak. Her eyes dart toward him momentarily, then back to the exit door, as though she didn’t hear anything. He clears his throat. “Hey, was that a Legend of Zelda background on your laptop screen?” He twists his neck to grin at her. She looks at him again and offers a quizzical smile. 

“Yes, good eye. It was.” He turns his head back to face the door. They walk with the crowd. He tries to slow his pace to get next to the brunette, like a salmon swimming backwards in a river. There are a few seconds of awkward silence. She offers, “Do you like that game?”

“Yeah, I do. That’s awesome. Don’t worry, I wasn’t trying to sneak a peek at your notes.” He forces a laugh to make sure she knows he was making a joke. Someone in the crowd looks at him. He keeps his eyes forward to avoid seeing her reaction. 

They exit the lecture hall to find that it’s raining outside. The brunette is prepared, and pulls out a transparent plastic umbrella. Ryan’s eyes light up. This is his opportunity. “Hey, mind if I walk with you? I forgot to bring one.” 

“Sure, why not?” He waits for her to open her umbrella and edges slightly closer to her. 

“Thanks.”

They walk up the path toward their next classes. Ryann feels elated to have come this close to a woman that he just met, but the elation quickly transforms into panic. He’s not sure what to do next. Her pace seems to quicken, like she’s attempting to get away from him. She sheepishly says “hi” to a passing group of girls. Ryan offers to hold the umbrella since he keeps having to hunch down to stay under it. The brunette says “Sure.” 

Ryan grabs it from her now and holds it tightly. The handle is warm from her hand. “See, now isn’t that better?”

“Uh huh.” 

“Umm, so what kind of hobbies do you have?” 

“My class is actually over here so I’m gonna walk this way.” 

“You sure you don’t want me to keep walking you?” 

“Yeah, I’m fine.” The brunette takes the umbrella from Ryan and speeds up in the other direction. Ryan’s heart pounds as he continues along the path to his next class. He puts his hood up to stop the raindrops from splashing onto his head and already fogged up glasses. The hot feeling of humiliation warms his face and neck.

After Ryan’s Intro to Psychology class, he decides that instead of going to his dorm to masturbate, he will put in a real effort to make friends. He remembers a Reddit thread he’d read about advice for incoming college students. Many commenters had given the advice to leave one’s dorm room open, so that people could walk in and say “hello.” When Ryan gets to his dormitory building, instead of going straight back to his room, he skulks around the hallways, looking for open doors.

He sees one dorm room with some of the nerds that were at the orientation bbq and ignores them. They’re standing around a TV monitor playing Dance Dance Revolution. Some are seated on the floor, others on one of the dorm room beds. They’re all howling with laughter. Ryan pretends not to see them while walking past. He sees another room with an open door, occupied by two guys who look like they’re golf players. They watch golf on their tv set. They look boring and unfriendly, and like they would feel interrupted if someone entered their room uninvited. Finally, Ryan sees a dorm room that looks more welcoming. In it, two guys play Nintendo 64, sitting in their dorm chairs. He continues to walk while building up the courage to enter the room.The familiar music of Ryan’s childhood, in the form of the N64 version of Super Smash Brothers music encourages him to take the next step. He enters the room.

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“Hey, is that Super Smash Bros?” The two guys look over at Ryan lazily. One is tall and skinny, his legs splayed out like an ostrich who fell over. The other is short, but very muscular. They’re both in basketball shorts. The tall one wears a faded yellow t-shirt and the short one a black tank top that shows off his arms. 

The tall one speaks first. “Yeah, man. You want to play?” Ryan’s heart pounds. 

“Yeah, sure.” 

“Grab a seat, bro. You got next round.” Ryan inwardly relishes the small victory. He sits down and watches the two guys play. They make small talk and get to know each other. 

It’s Ryan’s turn to play. His hand shakes when he grabs the controller from the tall roommate. His heartbeat steadies while he focuses on the video game. They continue to talk. Eventually, the guys ask Ryan if he smokes weed. Ryan has never done so but doesn’t want to appear uncool and ruin the friendship before it even started. He says that he does, indeed. The short one and tall one smile at each other. “Let’s smoke.” 

The three of them go to their dorm room’s private bathroom. The tall one shuts the small bathroom window and stuffs a bath towel under the door to seal off smoke from escaping, while the short one packs a long glass bong covered in condensation and intimidating stickers. Ryan's heartbeat picks up again, but he’s glad that he isn’t alone for the moment. They stand in a tight semi circle, with the door to their back. The tall one holds a cut off cardboard paper towel roll with a dryer sheet fastened by rubber band to one end. He indicates it to Ryan and explains how to exhale the smoke into the open hole, whereby the contraption will neutralize the smell of the weed smoke. Ryan nods in wise understanding, attempting to seem like he already had such knowledge, but had simply forgotten it among his mind’s deep troves of drug consuming arcana. 

The shorter one lights the bong and rhythmically sucks air through the mouth hole to nurse a thick milky cloud of smoke. He yanks out the stem, then sucks out all of the smoke, clearing the bong expertly in one quick inhale. He holds the cloud inside his chest for a few moments, then exhales it calmly, through the cardboard tube The dregs of smoke that emanate, as promised, smell like dryer sheets instead of the distinct marijuana stench that makes RA’s knock on dorm room doors. The short one passes it to the tall one, who performs the function of inhalation and exhalation just as expertly. The short one smiles. “This is some dank weed.” 

Ryan nods happily and answers as though he had already smoked and could provide an opinion on the matter. “Yeah.” 

The tall one hands the bong to Ryan. It’s much heavier than expected. Ryan holds it with both hands then puts his mouth over the hole at the top. “You gotta light it first.” Ryan smiles knowingly, then tries to light the bong while holding it. It’s impossible to coordinate. The tall one gently takes the lighter and lights the bong for Ryan, gracefully guiding him without acknowledging and drawing attention to the fact that Ryan doesn’t know what he’s doing. “Now just breathe in.” The tall one pulls the stem from the bong. Smoke fills Ryan’s throat and lungs. 

As soon as he inhales he realizes he’s made a grave mistake. He coughs and sputters, attempting to direct his coughing into the cardboard tube held out to him by the short one. The walls of the bathroom seem like they’re growing closer together by the moment, and he has the strong urge to vomit. It feels like he swallowed a tennis ball. “I gotta go.” Ryan hands the bong to the tall one, then opens the bathroom door. 

As he speedwalks away, he can hear the short one bemoan “Dude wait, you’re gonna let all the smoke out.” 

Ryan races the narrowing dorm hallway to the exit. The cheap gray mass-bought carpeting of the hallway writhes like maggots in a skull and the construction paper decorations plastered on the wall reach out to grab him, like the haunted trees in the forest in Snow White. Ryan smacks the dorm hall door open and leaps into the sunlight and fresh air. 

Things about him glow and breathe on their own volition. The sky is extra blue and the pink-white clouds smeared against it look like globs of oil paint from an impressionist painting. Ryan concentrates on keeping his feet moving to avoid thinking about throwing up. He’s very scared. The noise of his fellow students walking around campus in droves, packs, trios, duos, and solos rises to a deafening volume, like the sound you would hear standing on the tarmac next to a jet engine. He walks faster, until he gets to the edge of campus called “the bluff.” An overlook that looks out over the Pacific coast and the Marina Del Rey basin. He sits on a bench and attempts to ride out the feeling of being high. At least there is no one around now to witness and ridicule him in his ridiculous suffering. Instead of trying not to throw up, now, Ryan focuses on breathing. It feels like if he doesn’t consciously focus on inhaling and exhaling, his lungs will cease to function. 

The sky’s appearance grows overwhelming to look at in its hitherto unknown spectrum of colors, tones, and dramatics. Ryan looks at the ground in an attempt to quell this feeling and sees his pathetic pants and shoes. New Balances with a smudge on the toe where Ryan had kicked a door in frustration a few weeks ago. He thinks about how his mom had bought him these shoes. She’d just wanted her baby boy to have a nice pair of shoes to wear to college and now he’d ruined them by losing control of his emotions, like a petulant brat. He stares at the fabric of his jeans. They look outdated and nerdy compared to the stylish shorts and trendy pants his fellow students were wearing. They scream out like a pre-apocalyptic sandwich board that he is out of touch and unlovable. The lonely student weeps into the dirt between his shoes. He squeezes his eyes tight to block out any more visual information and buries his head between his knees, squeezing his ears shut to feel some sort of security or comfort. He is utterly alone. 

After the high wears off, Ryan tries to go to sleep. He can’t, so he brings his laptop to the library. The library floor is about half full, and he sneaks glances at some of the sorority girls at the adjacent desk. One of them is wearing yoga pants and he can see her underwear as she bends under the desk to plug her computer into a charging outlet. He opens his theology textbook to review his notes, but his stomach sinks when he realizes he’d already thoroughly studied the material. He’d taken copious notes on the textbook and there was very little studying to actually be done. Ten minutes tops. He stares into space for a second and attempts to plan out the rest of his night. Micah texts him, “i’m having a girl over. is it cool if I have the dorm ‘till 11 :) ?” Ryan sighs. It’s beyond him how his disgustingly autistic roommate could seduce a girl, while he could barely get a person to say more than five words in a row to him. 

He’d been meaning to cut that compilation of the shooter’s highlights, and this was as good a time as any. He unplugs his charging cord from the outlet and carries it with his laptop to the other side of the library. He finds a cozy seat in the corner where his screen can face a wall and no one will see what he’s working on. He locates his “RANDOM” folder and picks out the stream highlights he’d screen recorded. He spends the next few hours putting together a fifteen minute highlight reel of his favorite moments of the stream, set to some unlicensed techno music. He uploads it to stream.y and then links it to the Discord channel where he’d originally found the stream. He packs up his stuff, and begins the long back to his dorm, eyes throbbing from fatigue.

It’s a little after 11 P.M. now. The fog from the day’s earlier rain has settled down on the lawns of the campus. Halos of water vapor emanate from the iridescent lamp posts that line the path to his dorm building. He walks casually. There are few people around to see him and they are just as pathetic looking as him, draped in hoodies, heads down, probably lost in their own individual worlds. It’s almost relaxing. Ryan decides to deviate from the concrete pathway onto the wet lawn, away from the light. The carpet of the grass crunches underfoot. He walks into the darkness so even those individuals out this late at night on campus on their own nightwalks wouldn’t be able to see him. He becomes essentially invisible, and imagines himself to be a wraith. A floating set of eyes that can perceive the night sky but cannot itself be perceived. He sets his backpack down, lies down in the wet grass and lays his head back. He looks up at the sky, domelike. Light pollution makes only a few stars visible, and the yellow glow of the city radiates from the bottom of Ryan’s eyeline. He contemplates dying. He wishes that he could just close his eyes and turn his consciousness off for good. No mess. No pain. He stays in this state of unbeing for a few minutes, until the wetness on the lawn absorbs into his hoodie and makes his ears and the back of his neck feel damp and cold. He gets back up and treads back to his dorm, looking forward to getting into his real bed. 

 He scoffs at the necktie on his dorm room’s door handle and enters the room quietly. His roommate’s asleep. The blue glow from his gaming computer serves as a convenient night light while Ryan undresses and finds his way into bed. As he’s scrolling on his phone, he gets a notification on the video he’d posted. Someone has already liked and commented. “This is awesome :)” It’s from the shooter.

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