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My Friend Surprised Me by Exposing Himself in My Living Room
Hindsight: when he started drinking weird shit, I should have just sent him home
I was eighteen years old, and I was so totally and completely grown up.
For the first time, I wasn’t going home to Missouri for the summer. Instead, I would stay in Boston and live in a grownup apartment — my very first — paid for with my own money, which I would earn from doing brain research. I had a grownup tattoo and a grownup long-distance relationship with Sam, who I’d been dating for a year and a half.
I hadn’t made many close friends during the year I’d been in Boston — partly because I worked a lot at the drugstore just off campus and partly because I was studying my ass off in a really challenging program, but mostly because Sam was super controlling and spent random days and nights (often until daybreak) reminding me of my worthlessness at the perfectly reasonable rate of 69¢ per minute. (My dime, of course.)
Most of the students had left for the summer, but I’d managed to get an extension in my dorm because my sublease didn’t start until June 1. The halls were bare. The roommate I never bonded with was gone. The field hockey girls who were kept up late on game nights because I was screaming into my phone in the hallway were gone. Even the guys I hung out with sometimes at one of the many off-campus party houses couldn’t be raised. I could go an entire day without seeing anyone in my dorm.
I’d stopped smoking. I had no way to procure any booze. There was nothing left to study. I was bored and lonely as hell.
So I wandered. The late spring weather was nice enough, and the days were getting longer. I would leave my dorm in the evenings after I’d changed out of my work smock, sometimes wandering up and down the streets looking for a party but, just as often, just sitting on the bench outside the dorm.
It was here that I met Kyung. He was a freshman and I was a sophomore, and though I’d never seen him, we’d apparently lived in the same dorm all year.
We became fast friends. We would grab food together at the student union, watch rented movies in my dorm room, and wander aimlessly around campus when I wasn’t…
