The tale of a girl who just wants to be alone

Location: Brody Learning Commons

Time: Friday afternoon

Scenario: Two people sit together in adjacent armchairs. The girl has light brown hair and black glasses, while the boy has messy black hair. Both of them have computers open and resting on their laps, except only the girl is actually using hers. The boy is talking on and on, while the girl nods her head absentmindedly.

Backstory: She wishes he would just shut up already.

She’s trying to write her IFP story, and her character has begun to channel some of her internal passive-aggressive anger as the story progresses. Now she has an inconsistent baker who has gone from happily making apple pies to contemplating the benefits of poisoning her customers’ food for no apparent reason.

Through all this, he continues to talk. Now he’s talking about his research or something. She honestly can’t care less. Yes, they’re friends (though she uses that term loosely), but she’s an English major. She wants to talk about Shakespeare and the juice cleanse that she just started after her brief stint on an all carrot diet. She doesn’t want to hear about how he’s amplifying bacteria.

The worst part is that she can’t even speak. Literally. She lost her voice exactly two days ago after a week of cycling through the other symptoms of the Freshman Plague — sore throat, cough, congested nose — and it’s given him an incentive to talk her ear off, as if one form of torture isn’t already enough.

They met only two weeks ago. She had been eating at the FFC with her roommate when he had plopped himself in the seat next to her and introduced himself. He was a freshman. He asked if she was one too, and she said she was.

His company had been tolerable, almost enjoyable at first, although she was a little apprehensive when he spent three minutes explaining just how much he loved curry. Then, while gesticulating widely, he accidentally knocked her soda right into her lap, and it had drenched her brand new jean skirt. $120 went right down the drain.

She should have taken the hint then, but mistakes were made that day on her end, and now he seemed to be popping up everywhere she went. The other day he had spontaneously appeared in her Intro to Literary Study class before rushing out not even a minute later.

After briefly finding it all a little weird, she didn’t think much of the incident, marking it off as a coincidence. Little did she know that two days prior to the incident, he had snapped a picture of her schedule from her computer when she was in the bathroom at Brody. Now on his computer sits a color-coded excel document of his schedule combined with hers that shows the times that they’re both available along with the locations she frequents the most.

Noticing her fingers have stopped moving across the keyboard, he asks her if she’s okay. He offers to buy her anything she wants. It’s a tempting offer. She decides she can cheat her juice cleanse for one day. After all, she deserves some compensation for tolerating his company.

She types out coffee on her Word document, and he cranes his neck over to see. Watching him hurry off, she lets out a long sigh, finally relaxing in the quiet that now surrounds her.