Oh my god, are you serious?
Monday morning, 10:07 am, Griffin 1 of all places, the semester truly begins. Upon retrieving your PSYC 277: Theory of Bullying course packet, you found the inevitable: the top right quadrant of each of the 489 pages is oddly crumpled, weird, discolored – just plain fucked up.
Your life flashes before your eyes. Freshman fall. November, you walked home from class in the rain with your backpack open. Two course packets ruined. March of your Freshman spring, an entry mate you no longer wave to on the sidewalk spills a Goodrich hazelnut latte while you’re actively reading. The smell haunts you to this day. On three separate occasions during your sophomore slump you treated yourself to ice in your water bottle, then let it sweat all over your desk. Though you didn’t mean to, you wiped up the water with your course packet. Four more Goodrich beverages visited your course packets during your Junior year – two vanilla lattes, one plain, and god rest the dirty chai with oat milk.
However, this instance is record-breaking. Day 2 of class? How are you expected to carry on without the fleeting hope of maintaining a normal course packet? Despite the 70 assigned pages from this “Part 1” of the course packet, you hadn’t even opened it yet! Although, the mere act of picking up your course packet in high humidity can lead to its demise…
Was it the mistake of a Lee’s table at 1:30 pm following the lunchtime massacre? Taking the Tunnel table after a father and two gross babies left? Treating your friends to glass bottle beers and allowing them to nurse them sitting on your desk? Was your backpack open in the rain again? Is your JA going to yell at you in front of their friends from across frosh quad again? Are you going to have to put your computer, earbuds, and iPad in a big big bowl of rice in your common room again? Is your drunk roommate going to knock over that big big bowl of rice and not help you clean it up? Again??? It can’t happen again. Please.
For now, you take a deep breath and look around. You lock eyes with a student across the room sitting in front of a closed course packet with pages all spread out looking way taller than everyone else’s closed course packet. Like a fucked up accordion. Or a cat when you pet its fur backward. Ah, you’re not alone, their waterlogged pages offer you comfort. You nod. Maybe you two will get a meal sometime.
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