Just College Shit
Sarah has been dead for a while by the time I arrive and Sam sits in a crumpled heap on the floor. I was hoping she’d call me for this. The second the phone rang I grabbed my shoes.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, putting my hand on Sam’s shoulder. “You gave her a really good life.”
Sam looks up at me, scowls, and swats my hand away. “Fuck you, Gwen. Sarah was a guy.”
“He, then,” I say, correcting myself. “You gave him a really good life.” I lean over to inspect the goldfish floating upside down in the water like a bloated cigarette butt and pick up a chopstick. I poke at him gently, turning him over in the bowl in search of a tiny little orange penis but there is none. Maybe it flaked off with some of his scales that hang in the water with bits of algae and potato chip crumbs. Fingernail clippings. Tiny squares of plastic.
“I can’t believe you didn’t know that,” Sam says. She’s wearing what I assume is last night’s outfit—boot-cut jeans and a sparkly halter top—and last night’s make-up is a grotesque face on the pillow that she clutches to her chest.
“Sorry,” I say, “I totally knew that. But you only had him for a little while –” I stop myself because even though I haven’t known Sam for very long either I know this is the wrong thing to say. I also know her dad is an alcoholic and her mom is some kind of scientist for the government. She has lived in a cute bungalow in Hawaii and on an army base in Germany. Her favourite colour is green and she hasn’t declared her major yet. She allows herself one square of chocolate a day which she writes down in a little book hidden under her mattress, but she doesn’t know I know about it.
“We fucking bonded,” Sam says. I squat down next to her and put my hand on her knee. Her pants are stained with grass and she has grass in her hair. I reach over to pick some out but I stop mid-air when I notice an orange traffic cone caked with mud beside the cheap dorm-room closet.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask.
“What?” Sam asks. Her face is in her pillow and her voice is all muffled. I can see right down her ear where a flake of pink nail polish lies nestled among her ear curves.
“The traffic cone,” I say, pointing. “It’s made your carpet all dirty. Student housing is gonna be pissed.”
“I don’t give a fuck about student housing,” she says and I decide to let it go. There are bigger fish to fry. Shit.
“What can I do?” I ask. “Anything you need, I’m here for you.”
Sam turns towards me. Her lips are raw from day-old lipstick and her eyes are two black holes with fuzzy edges. My stomach lurches and it feels like there’s a trap door beneath me. I wait for it to swing open, for it to devour me whole.
“Can you help me with him?” she asks.
I breathe a sigh of relief and put my arm around her shoulders. I pull her in close. She smells like Smirnoff Ice.
“Of course,” I say. “Toilet again?”
Sam and I met at orientation and bonded fast like glue on fingers. We did everything together and memorized each others’ schedules. Fuck everyone else was Sam’s motto. She hated the girls in her dorm and how excited they were to be on their own for the first time, like a bunch of fucking babies. Sam had basically raised herself and already knew how to do adult things like open a wine bottle, mail a letter. She knew how to hang a picture but didn’t want to because then there’s a hole in the wall and you know how it goes. My neck hurt from agreeing with her. I parroted her insults. They can’t even do laundry we smirked even though my first load looked like cotton candy. I eyed my classmates with suspicion, these beachy-types with bouncy hair who moved in citrus clouds of confidence. I avoided them like I avoided the towering Douglas firs on the edge of campus. There were rumours of a cougar.
Pets weren’t allowed in the dorms but one of the girls on Sam’s floor had a goldfish. Sam started going over there all the time so I suggested she get one too and suddenly we found ourselves outside the pet store at the bottom of the hill. She tried not to look excited but I knew she was excited. It was the clip of her words that gave it away, the care she took deciding on a fishbowl: an oval one, a square one, a big one, a small one. She lifted them up to see how heavy they were like they were luggage.
She named her first fish Ben.
Sam always left her door unlocked even though I told her she would totally get murdered one day but she liked the idea of people popping in on her unannounced. What people? I would ask, the two of us sprawled on the floor. We would study and drink Diet Cokes and Ben would make bloop bloop noises. On Friday and Saturday nights the walls would shake with music from bands we were discovering via osmosis and Sam would drag me into the hallway in an attempt to mingle. Our already warm and flat beers would get warmer and flatter and we would give up after an hour, 30 minutes, because fuck everyone else.
One Friday I went to her room but she wasn’t there even though her class had ended an hour earlier. I waited and waited and while I waited I looked through her closet. I looked in her chocolate square notebook and saw that for three days she’d slipped and had eaten two pieces of chocolate and then for a week she’d allowed herself nothing. I rifled through her CDs: Sublime, Ween, Distillers. I crawled under her bed and found a sock with frills around the ankles. I took it because it couldn’t possibly be hers.
I waited for three hours and when she still wasn’t home I went to the PoliSci major next door and asked for a beer because she was a cool girl who hung out with the cool guys on the first floor and always had beers. As she pulled one from her stash she asked if I was someone’s visiting sister.
I drank on Sam’s bed alone. The walls started to vibrate with Dave Matthews and when Ben went bloop bloop I walked over to his bowl and poured in just enough beer to make sure the water didn’t change colour and then I left.
I scoop Sarah out of the bowl with Sam’s Mickey Mouse coffee mug. It’s just his bottom half: red shorts with iconic white buttons, clown-big yellow shoes, arms akimbo for a handle. I don’t know why Sam has it, she never struck me as a Mickey Mouse kind of person, but then again maybe Sam dreams of having a princess-themed wedding with bridesmaids dressed like Jasmine, Ariel and Cinderella. Maybe she has The Tao of Pooh in a box at her mom’s place and it really helped her get through the divorce.
Mickey is our fish funeral mug. After each ceremony I scrub it out, let it soak for a while, and then scrub it out again. I am fucking meticulous. Sam never does it. She always goes straight to bed and sneaks squares of chocolate that she doesn’t write in her journal.
It’s past noon on a Saturday and the building is starting to wake up. As we make the slow, mournful walk to the toilets, the Math major down the hall shuffles out of her room in fuzzy slippers. She has grass in her hair too and her nose is red like she’s been punched. She nods at Sam and Sam nods back and I look down at Sarah’s corpse. There’s a high-heel in the middle of the hallway and a blue wig hanging from a wall sconce. There’s mud everywhere.
“What happened last night?” I try to sound casual, like it’s funny, whatever, and I think I succeed. Sam shrugs and more grass drops to the thinning carpet.
The bathroom is empty except for the phantom puke that assaults us when we open the door. We stand together over the toilet and I take Sam’s hand in mine. She flinches, bare arms prickling in this tile box. She’s so pale she’s almost blue.
“Do you want to say anything?” I ask.
Sam sniffles and shakes her head so I turn Mickey upside down and the contents of his pants come tumbling out into the toilet. Sarah’s body hits the water with a smack and we both watch him for a few seconds before Sam reaches over and flushes.
Sam’s second fish was named Mary-Ellen. We got her at the same pet store and also picked up a little castle and some pebbles. Sam thought maybe Ben was depressed and that’s why he died. Maybe he needed stuff. She said stuff like it’s a weakness, like fish and humans alike should be able to pick up and move at a moment’s notice, taking only the very basics along with them.
Mary-Ellen looked exactly like Ben, but according to Sam, she was actually bigger and had more personality. If Mary-Ellen were a person, she would be Rosie O’Donnell, Sam said one day while we were lounging in her room, not really studying. A long weekend was coming up and that one extra day made it feel like we had all the time in the world. The dorms were buzzing.
I asked who Ben would have been and she glared at me. Too soon, she said, a vein popping, so I asked who I would be. Like, if you were a person? Sam asked, her face morphing into a wicked smile, like she’d caught me stealing.
Sometimes I would press my face against the glass and pretend I too lived in a little bowl. I would mimic Mary-Ellen’s eye movements, her mouth openings and closings. I would flap my arms like they were fins. Sometimes Sam would laugh but sometimes she would say Jesus Gwen, it’s not her fault she’s a fish, like I was a bully and she was sticking up for my victim.
Like I was one skipped breakfast away from throwing punches in the schoolyard.
I was pretending to be a fish when the PoliSci major opened the door, walked right in, and started talking to Sam. I froze, a fishy-look plastered on my face, and by the time she left it had been decided that Sam would be joining a long-weekend camping trip. The group was catching the early-morning ferry, and if you wanted to come you should have said something.
Whatever, I just didn’t know you were friends with them, I said. I could be friends with them, Sam shrugged, her words stinging like a slap. I flailed, knocking rows of empty Diet Coke bottles to the floor.
Sam was gone for three days, and while I could have just let Mary-Ellen starve to death, I visited every day to pour cafeteria packages of vinegar into her bowl.
“What do you want to do now?” I ask when we get back to Sam’s room. I am ready for her to take a shower and crawl into bed. I will sit patiently by her side and for dinner I’ll get us soggy 1$ pizza from the student center. Later, we’ll stake our claim on the common room and watch Judge Judy reruns. I will cling to her like a tree digging its roots into a mountainside and she will allow herself to be transported through the day like a leaf caught in the breeze.
“Let’s go to the pet store,” she says.
“Already?” I choke. I am thrown off my game because Sam likes to wait about a week before getting a new fish. This is how it normally goes: there are a few days of mourning, and then I will broach the subject of cleaning out the bowl. She will debate selling it and I will encourage her to give it another go. I’ll tell her she’s just had a string of bad luck. We’ll think about going to a different pet store because maybe these fish are all bad or something? Fish cancer? Something in the water haha? (I’ll start to make jokes but they’ll be careful ones). We’ll pretend like we have a choice about where to go but end up at the same one. She’ll tell the red-haired teenage boy behind the counter that her fish died and he’ll shrug because fish cost less than a late-night hot dog. We’ll spend an hour going from tank to tank, inspecting each fish carefully, and then she’ll seemingly pick one at random. She’ll name it then and there and I’ll get a kick out of how she names it something so human, not something classically fishy like Goldie or Flipper.
Sam grabs her jacket. It’s one I’ve never seen before; heavy black leather, tight at the waist and loose at the sleeves. It transforms her and I am dumbfounded.
“I love that,” I say. I pinch the fabric. It feels thick and real, not like her other jacket, her practical winter one. Brand name, meant for skiing even though Sam hasn’t skied since her knee surgery.
“I got it last night,” Sam says.
“The same place you got the traffic cone?” I ask. I try to be funny about it, but instead it comes out how I mean it.
“If you don’t want to come I can ask Amber,” Sam sighs, ignoring the orange thing in the corner, but I can’t no matter how hard I try. It judges us. Judges me. It glows like a radioactive mushroom, its spores pushing us apart.
“Nonono I’m here for you,” I say; I whine. I reach for her arm and her shoulder and I paw at her like a cat. Who the fuck is Amber.
Sarah was very small. Underdog small. I was surprised Sam chose him because he didn’t look particularly healthy from the get go. Not a robust fish ready to take on the perils of dorm-room life and survive.
We got Sarah and then went for coffee. Christmas was coming up and Starbucks was decorated with poinsettias, fairy lights and festive advertising. I sipped a peppermint mocha and swallowed clumps of whipped cream. Sam drank a small black coffee and Sarah swam on the floor in his little bag, propped up against Sam’s shoe so that he didn’t suffocate. I asked about Christmas and she said I’ll probably just stay here. She looked sad about it. Her mom was stationed in some desert town and Christmas in the desert is depressing. I didn’t ask about her dad. Isn’t Christmas here worse? I asked. It was rainy here, and cold. The sort of cold that burrows in hunched shoulders. Someone’s gotta take care of Sarah, she said, like she’d planned the whole thing.
A few days later I caught the shuttle bus to the airport and flew home. I called Sam when I arrived and she held the phone up to Sarah’s bowl. I said hi buddy and I miss you and Sam said he’s fucking thriving. She talked about moving off campus so she could have more pets. And a backyard! I cheered.
When I got back to school after the holidays the fog was heavy and the whiteboard on Sam’s door overflowed with scrawl I didn’t understand. I erased every second word and found myself knocking. When Sam opened the door my insides lunged forward, desperate to wrap my arms around her but my body stayed put like an anchor at the bottom of the sea.
She waved me in. Clothes and beer cans were everywhere and the air was thick with cheap perfume. I asked what happened, thinking something horrible, an attack, but she laughed and said just college shit. Then cool is that for me? I’d brought her a present and she grabbed the gift-wrapped box from my hands, ripping it apart like a lioness destroying a corpse. Paper fell to the floor joining an empty bag of chips and a bizarre pink scrunchie.
It was a snowglobe. I figured she hadn’t seen snow this year so it made sense but only when it was in her hands and she was looking down at it did I realize how stupid it was.
Cool, thanks Sam said, putting it beside Sarah’s bowl. I watched as he puffed his little orange cheeks and swam over to investigate this alternate universe that could be turned upside down; that could be shaken with safety. I didn’t get you anything, sorry.
I killed Sarah slowly. Every time I went over I dropped something else in his bowl. I’m not sure what did it. It could have been any number of things.
We walk to the pet store in silence and I steal glances at Sam. She is tired but focused. Hungover. We pass a construction site hole large enough to swallow the cafeteria and I count five traffic cones before realizing this information is useless.
The pet store is playing NSYNC and I start walking towards the fish but Sam veers off towards the hamsters. I follow her like a puppy and find myself daydreaming about coming clean. Would Sam forgive me? Or would she toss me aside, denounce me outside the library for all to see? Would she whisper to the dorm-room girls about me?
“The fish are over here,” I say gently and point to the section we’ve been to three times already. Me and her, not her new friends. That has to count for something.
“Maybe I should get a hamster,” Sam says.
My mouth drops.
“We’re not allowed,” I say. A drop of sweat pops from the small of my back.
“Everyone would think it’s so cool if I have a hamster.”
“Since when do you care about everyone?” I ask and Sam’s face twitches.
I manage to coax Sam towards the fish and my heart races. We stand in front of the bubbling tanks and Sam’s eyes dart from fish to fish. I feel the trap door beneath me again, its rusty hinges starting to sing. It was me, I imagine saying. I killed your fish. Ben, Mary-Ellen, Sarah. It wasn’t for fun though, I’ll have to quickly throw in there, just in case she thinks I’m crazy or something. Yes, I’ll admit, it was an odd choice. But, but… My chin will quiver, it always does. I thought we had a deal! I’ll scream, unable to hold it in any longer. Fuck everyone else! Have you forgotten?
I take a deep breath and reach forward. Sam sees a purple Betta fish and squeals, her hangover slipping away like a porcelain plate through wet fingers. She leans towards the tanks and my hand falls through the air, grasping at nothing.
Photo by Ahmed Hasan on Unsplash.
Read more