“Oh, my Kaileigh isn’t one to complain,” Mrs. Harris says, her skillfully made-up eyes widening at the idea of Kaileigh ever doing anything remotely wrong. “She doesn’t even know I’m here. A problem with Ameera—that’s the name of Kaileigh’s roommate—was the last thing we were expecting. Those two girls have been texting and Skyping back and forth all summer, ever since they found out they were assigned together, and everything seemed fine. I assumed they were going to be BFFs, best friends forever, you know?”
I’m aware of what BFF stands for, but I only smile encouragingly.
“It wasn’t until this week, when Ameera and Kaileigh actually started living together, that we realized—”
Mrs. Harris bites her bottom lip and glances down at her perfectly manicured nails and tastefully jeweled fingers, hesitant to continue. A father standing directly behind Mrs. Harris—not her husband—keeps glancing at his gold watch. A Rolex, of course. Few New York College students request financial aid . . . or if they do, they aren’t the types to have their parents do their complaining for them.
“What?” I’m as impatient with Mrs. Harris as the guy with the Rolex, only for different reasons. “What did you realize about your daughter’s roommate?”
“Well . . . I don’t know any other way to put this,” Mrs. Harris says. “Ameera is . . . well, she . . . she’s . . . she’s a slut.”
The parents in line behind Mrs. Harris look shocked. Carl, on top of his ladder, drops his drill.
I’m a little stunned myself.
Mrs. Harris appears uncomfortable, but doesn’t ask to speak somewhere more private, which is good, since the door to Lisa’s office is closed, and the conference room down the hall is being used as a headquarters for the surveillance team that’s monitoring our new VIR (Very Important Resident) twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
“Uh,” I say, struggling to remember what section in the New York College Student Housing Guide covers “slut.” Oh, yeah. None. “Maybe we should—”
“I’m not trying to be judgmental,” Mrs. Harris hurries to assure me (and Carl, since it’s clear, as he hurries down the ladder to fetch his drill, that he’s paying rapt attention. A slut in Fischer Hall? This is the best news he’s heard all day). “It’s the simple truth. Kaileigh’s been telling us about it all week. Ameera has only slept in the room once since she checked in. Once. And according to Kaileigh and her suite mates, it’s a different boy every night . . . and once even a girl!”
Carl stumbles on his way back to the ladder. A slutty bisexual? His expression is one of complete and utter joy.
Mrs. Harris is too caught up in her narration to notice.
“How well can Ameera know any of these people? She’s only been in the city a week, like my Kaileigh. They both arrived the first day of Freshman Orientation. I guess I don’t have to tell you how disturbing I find all of this.”
I’m too astonished to say anything in reply. There is a large candy dish on my desk, but instead of being filled with candy, it’s filled with brightly wrapped condoms from the student health center. All year students waiting for the elevator dart into my office to plunge their hands into the candy bowl, snatching up free condoms by the fistful.
This is how I combat the problem of frisky co-eds. They’re going to play, so why should they have to pay a lifetime for it?
Mrs. Harris doesn’t seem aware of the candy bowl, however, or that my attitude about teen sex is different from hers, since she goes on, “And apparently Ameera didn’t bother coming home at all this morning.”
I’m finally able to find my voice.
“Well, that was thoughtful of her. She’s probably aware of how much the odd hours she’s been keeping have disturbed your daughter, and wanted to allow her the chance to sleep in.” I pray this is the truth and that Ameera isn’t lying dead in a Dumpster in an alley somewhere.
She most likely isn’t. Most likely she’s curled in a hot hipster’s Brooklyn loft bed, enjoying some postcoital languor and her first latte of the day. I wish we could change places. Except that my hot dude of choice lives around the corner, not in Brooklyn, and would no sooner own a loft bed than a nose ring.
“You know, Mrs. Harris,” I go on, “here at New York College we encourage students to explore who they are in ways they might not have been able to while living at home, and sometimes that means exploring who they are . . . um . . . sexually . . .”
“But every night this week, with as many people?” Mrs. Harris is having none of my soothing administrative psychobabble. “That is simply unacceptable. They told me at that desk in the lobby that this is the place to come if students need their rooms changed.”
“It is,” Gold Rolex says. He’s as fully engaged in our conversation as Carl, and almost as excited by it. “That’s why I’m here too. My son was assigned to that dorm across the park, what’s it called? Oh, yeah. Wasser Hall. He’s miserable over there. Apparently Fischer Hall is the ‘cool’ place to live.”
Gold Rolex makes quotation marks in the air with his fingers when he says the word “cool,” and laughs at the absurdity of one building being “cooler” than another. A number of the parents in line behind him laugh along with him.
If only they knew just how absurd the idea of Fischer Hall being the “cool place to live” really is.
“At least your kid’s in the right building,” Gold Watch tells Mrs. Harris. “I gotta get mine on some kind of Room Change Wait List in order for him to be able to move in here.”
A lot of murmuring goes on in the line behind him. Apparently many of the parents have heard of this list. That’s why they’re here too. It’s essential that they get their kids into Fischer Hall, the “cool place to live.”
Especially now that they’ve heard about Ameera, I’m sure.
I can hardly believe it. If you’d told me a year ago—even a week ago—that there’d be a line out my office door of parents waiting to get their kids on a wait list to get into Fischer Hall, I’d have said you were nuts.
But here it is, happening right in front of my eyes. The line snakes out the residence hall director’s office, then disappears down the hallway, which is as noisy and crowded as my office, since it’s situated directly opposite the elevators to Fischer Hall’s upper floors.