Sandra, part 1

Karen and I were together as an item for most of that first semester. She broke up with me after Christmas, saying she wanted to see other people, and we drifted apart after that. We still saw each other around campus, of course, but like so many others in the dorms, we just became acquaintances who used to have sex. I spent the rest of my freshman year being more or less of a male slut, trying to bed any girl I could. When the semester ended, a lot of people went home for the summer, but I managed to secure a summertime job on campus, so I stuck around.

The summer was fairly quiet. I worked my job, took a class during the summer session, and got ready for the next full year of classes. The day after classes started in the fall, I was sitting in my room, doing a little bit of reading, when someone knocked on my door.

I got up, opened the door, and couldn’t believe my eyes when standing there in the hallway with a shy smile on her face, was Sandra.

It took a few seconds for it to register with me who she was, but when she said, “Hi, Tom,” it sank in, and my eyes opened wide with surprise.

“Sandra!” I started, “What are you doing here? Are you okay?”

She stood in the hallway and explained that she’d enrolled in classes at Humboldt and had moved into a dorm room a couple buildings over last weekend. She looked basically the same as I remembered her from high school—about the same 5’7″ height, long blonde hair, blue eyes, still a very nice figure…if I had to guess, I would have said her breasts were a little larger than I remembered, but I wasn’t sure. “Actually, Tom,” she said kind of quietly, “today was kind of rough. I wanted to talk to someone, but it was a little weird thinking about telling my roommate, and I don’t know anyone else here, and I was getting kind of freaked out when I remembered that you came up here last year, so I thought maybe we could talk?”

When she stopped and looked at me expectantly, I suddenly realized that she was still standing in the hallway, and that snapped me out of my surprise a little bit. “Oh, sure. Yeah, come on in,” I said, and stepped aside to let her in. For the briefest moment as she moved past me, I half expected to see Micah following behind her; when he didn’t, I closed the door and turned to face Sandra.

She moved in and stood in the middle of the room, more nervous than I could ever remember seeing her. I pulled my roommate’s chair away from his desk and sat down, offering Sandra my own chair. “I didn’t even know you were looking at coming here,” I said. “When did you decide on Humboldt?”

“I dunno,” she said, “I wasn’t even thinking about college, but my mom and dad and I started fighting last year, and they said I had to get out of the house one way or the other. I could go to college and they’d pay for it, or I could just move out. I finally applied here after I’d missed the deadlines on a lot of other schools.”

“Wow, that sounds familiar.”

“You too?”

“Yeah, more or less. I really screwed up my last couple years in high school, and by the time I got cleaned up, I’d missed my chances at all the big schools. I thought about just quitting, but my mom and dad pushed me to applying here and, well, here we are.”

“Yep, here we are,” she repeated.

“So, how’d you know this was my room?” I asked her, a little more point-blank than I had intended.

“It’s not like I was spying on you or anything,” she said. “I remembered that you came up here for school after you graduated. I didn’t know if you were even still here, but I asked a couple of the older girls on my floor if they ever heard of you.”

I shifted in my chair a little, suddenly a bit uncomfortable with the thought of what someone from home might have heard if they asked about me around campus. “So who told you where to find me?” I asked. “I mean, not like I’m, like I was hiding from you or anything. I’m just wondering.”

“Well, I asked a couple girls in the common room on my floor if they knew you and both said you were here in this building. They said if I came over here & asked around, I could probably find someone who’d know how to find you. I ran into this black girl coming out the door when I walked up, and she told me exactly where to find you.”

I knew right away who she meant. The school wasn’t segregated or anything like that, but black students were definitely in the minority. And in my building there was only one black girl, Kathy. We’d gotten together a couple times toward the end of the spring semester. “Yeah, that’d be Kathy. We, um, dated, a couple times last year.”

Sandra gave me a bit of a funny look but seemed to ignore my discomfort. “So,” she started, and then let her words drop.

I waited a minute for her to continue, but she just sat there. She was so unlike the flirty, confident girl I’d known when she was dating Micah. She seemed unsure, tentative, almost afraid.

“You said today was rough,” I said, breaking the silence. “What happened?”

And that was all it took.