Down The River Valley

It seems so long ago. The other day I painted Khajiit's nails a gorgeous sonic bloom color, although I have no idea what a sonic bloom is (I think it's a type of flower). We brought my rice cooker to the office, along with some canned food, and at the meeting Khajiit pointed to the rice cooker.

"Don't do that," our chair said. "Your nails, when you wave your hands. It's so distracting."

Something about sexism came to mind, sexism against men in this case but also against women, because who is to say nail polish (or anything "feminine") has to be for women? At the very least it is stifling, if not borderline deriding the practice not worthy for men. But I am not as brave in a group as I am alone, so it went unsaid.

Later, Sarah brought her bag of nail products. She plopped down in front of a computer and looked up rental cars. We sat around as she made the calls.

"What's the minimum age for car rentals? —Oh, okay. Yeah, no problem. Thanks. Good bye."

Khajiit started looking up buses. His dad had called earlier. We could have five in our party. There are talks about seeing musicals—"The Book of Mormon," for Sarah, who is Mormon—and buying shoes—Veronica is a shoe addict. We considered contacting the guy behind the sketchy van that left for the city every week.

It is so surreal. Only two weeks ago, I was in another office three doors down listening to a Veronica I barely knew cry about her relationship problems. The next day, Sarah confessed that she was really stressed out because of school troubles. As Khajiit puts it, "We're all failures." That was the day I slept through most of my classes. Somewhere amongst the snarky, angry jabs at ex-boyfriends, we decided to go to Khajiit's house over spring break.

We are a group of teenagers, Veronica included. I once remarked that Khajiit, in the car, suddenly possessed teenage qualities he lacked out of the car. On the streets, or in a room, or when we are sipping lattes at the coffee shop across the road, he is either a middle-schooler or an adult. But in the car, he is a teenager. This impromptu decision on all of our parts make us all reckless to some degree. When I signed up for college I did not think I would be signing up for this.

It's an exhilarating sort of freedom, one that has me up at three in the morning in a sketchy corner of the city where people have been known to be stabbed, drinking white hot chocolate from a mug and eating ranch-flavored potato chips. The buses at Islandtown run all night, one every hour or so, in a grid-like pattern. Khajiit and I took one that snaked through the northern part of the city. We sat in the back seat, munching on rainbow rice krispies and drinking iced lemon tea, and joked about staying at seedy motels because we were so tired.

We are always tired these days, sleep-deprived, because I have my games and Khajiit has his games (to program). Late at night we do crazy things, like walk in sub-freezing temperatures just so we can sleep on a futon instead of a single bed, or go to the coffee shop we always frequent late at night, so often that the night shift cashier greets us with, "Hey, it's you guys again."

The next day is sometimes full of regret. Why did we stay up so late? Why did we go to the apartment half an hour away from campus, when we had another one five minutes away? Khajiit regretted his bright red nails and took them off with acetone, although he painted them again in dark blue. A more "manly" color, he claimed. Some guy we didn't know with access to the office said, "Nice nails."