There's nothing worse than getting sick at college. Especially when you're living in a dorm.
Freshman students are the worst. We get way too excited about living away from home for the first time and tend to behave as immaturely as possible.
We also love to make enthusiastic and unnecessary noise at all times of the day or night. Which is fine if you are a fellow participant in the hullabaloo. But when you're sick and laid up in bed, it's the last thing you want to hear.
Loud rock music, sudden shrieks of laughter, anaerobic games of chase and frisbee in the hall. It's like Lord of the Flies out there. And your bedroom back home can seem oddly appealing - even the specter of your dear old Mom, fussing around and taking suffocatingly good care of you.
At least this is how I felt one morning a few years back, laid up sick in my private dorm room, during the first semester of Fresher year at SFU.
To be honest, in this instance it was overindulgence from the night before that was responsible for my "illness." I was hungover.
I decided to skip my lecture and ask Emily if she wouldn't mind letting me have a copy of her notes when it was over. She was one of the girls who lived on the floor above and the only person in my block who was taking the same History class.
I went up to her room and knocked on the door to ask. She was oddly delighted to help. Almost too delighted. She lingered in the doorway, beaming at me through her dental braces. It was not cool behavior but it was nice to be reminded she had a little crush on me.
She promised she would take the best notes ever and deliver a copy of them later that day. She even thanked me, absurdly, as she closed the door.
Emily was a nerd. She was also that rare breed of student who actually spends time being studious. She kept her long blonde hair tied back and wore scholarly looking spectacles, while her wardrobe looked like it had been chosen on a shopping trip with her mother.
Like me, she was only 19 and living away from home for the first time, which may explain why she was so shy and serious.
It was around 3 o'clock in the afternoon and I was lying in bed. The History lecture had been over for a couple of hours and although I hadn't asked Emily to bring her notes at a particular time, I wasn't surprised when I heard a gentle tap at my door and the announcement she was here.
"Come in," I called out.
She opened the door, beaming. She was wearing a white, pirate-style blouse with two pens clipped to the inside pocket, and a long, multilayered navy blue skirt that reached the floor. She looked like she was dressed for church followed by a court appearance.
"How are you feeling?" she asked kindly, closing the door behind her.
"So much better thanks!" I replied.
"Can I get you anything?"
"Could you fill the kettle for me?" I pointed to it on the table.
"I can probably manage that," she said. She took the electric kettle to the sink and filled it with fresh water.
Although our dorm rooms did not have private toilets, they did have a small wash basin in an alcove with a mirror above. This area was typically employed by female students for brushing their teeth and applying make-up; and by male students for urinating in because we were too lazy to walk to the restroom.
Emily placed the kettle back on the stand so that its red light was activated.
"How was the lecture?" I asked.
She grew more at ease and began to tell a not-particularly amusing story involving our cranky History professor and a dispute he'd had with one of the students. I laughed in all the right places.
When she'd finished, I watched her take a clean, red file from her giant backpack and remove three photo-copied sheets of painfully-neat lecture notes. They looked like samples of fine calligraphy
"How neat are these notes?" I laughed, taking them from her. "I should get you to write them for me every time!"
"I wouldn't mind," she said, beaming at me again.
"Well, thank you," I said, a bit embarrassed. "Would you like to stay and have a cup of tea?"
"Sure," she said. "But I'll make it. You rest."
I quickly remembered one of the only two cups in the room had an intense mold growing inside it. I had been mentally washing it up for weeks (freshman hygiene). I didn't want Emily to see, so I leapt out from under the bedclothes and intercepted it from the window ledge.
"You're the guest," I said, "you can't make the tea. I'll do it."
"Are you sure you feel well enough?"
"I'm really not that bad. It was more a hangover. Sit down and I'll take care of it."
I indicated she could sit at the foot-end of my bed and went over to the alcove to wash up the mugs. It took a while to remove the mold from inside the filthy one and there was a heavy silence while I scrubbed away at it. The kettle came to a boil and I busied myself making us both a cup of tea.
Something that had only occurred to me at the moment I leapt out of bed was that I was wearing nothing but a pair of small, white trunks. While I was washing the cups in the sink, I noticed Emily looking up and down at my body. I played ice hockey at the time and was in the best shape of my life. My chest had a few bruises but it was bulging and lean in all the right places.
As I poured the tea, I checked to confirm she was still transfixed - apparently by my torso, or was it my ass? She was grinning while she ogled me; her braced teeth unashamedly shiny and exposed. I felt like a rock star with a starstruck fan in his dressing room.
Her undisguised fixation on my body began to make my loins stir. I looked down at the front of my trunks to make sure nothing indecent was evolving. The outline of my flaccid penis was visible but packed snugly into the skimpy briefs. It provided a thrill to think she might be looking at this too.
I finished making the tea, handed her a cup, and climbed back into bed with mine. We chinked them together and said cheers. I pulled the bedclothes over myself, and thought she might have registered some disappointment.
I can't recall what we talked about over our cups of tea, but she laughed a lot at the things I said, only a few of which merited laughter. She kept glancing at the outline of my body beneath the bedclothes, then catching herself.
She seemed prettier than I had noticed before, particularly when she was laughing. She had small, sensual lips and iridescent eyes. I loved the almost ceramic-looking paleness of her skin (the little of it I could see), and the stray wisps of butter-blond hair that escaped from a barrette and curled around her neck.
I also enjoyed her warm personality and genuine intellect (which put my own to shame in each case). She was a powerhouse of a human, this weird, attractive nerd. I felt foolish for never having noticed before.
But alongside the realization I had underestimated her, I felt a sinful new desire: I longed to know what her body was like.
I pondered the carefully hidden contours of her figure and wondered what was going on under all the seemingly endless layers of clothes. There were so few glimpses of flesh on display to provide any clue. She had managed to conceal all physical evidence of herself as a woman, let alone a beautiful one. She was like a superhero in their every-day disguise.
When we'd finished the tea, she took the cups to the basin and said she had to be going. She was taking clothes that needed washing to the laundry block and asked if I wanted her to take any of mine at the same time. I was about to decline when she saw the bag full of dirty clothes in the corner of my room.
"I'll do those for you," she said.
She was eager to be kind, so I didn't argue: "Thanks. Take some of the coins from beside the TV."
"Anything else that needs washing?" she asked, as she gathered up the bag of clothes, and picked up her backpack to leave.
At that moment I found myself doing something provocative.
