This is what I wrote for our writing group last night. The assignment was to write for fifteen minutes in first person present, from the perspective of you in college. I’m posting it here because why not, and because I’ve spent three hours today trying to fix a crashed computer. For the record, there’s only one working computer in this house right now, and I’m using it. Stee’s much more patient than I could be.

7:45

This is stupid. I shouldn’t be here. My roommate is going to worry about me and call my mom. I can’t believe I’m here. This is so stupid. I’m going to look like a little girl.

I don’t like this guy and I know he likes me and that’s why he’s taken me to his apartment. Two apartments, really. Two dirty-ass apartments connected by a piece of concrete outside sliding glass doors. The kitchen is filled with empty Double Gulp containers and a tower of empty beer cans line the front window. There’s a poster for Bad Girls with Drew Barrymore.

One of the boys, his name is Eric, and he can’t stop laughing because he got so drunk he just peed himself. On the couch. With a sandwich in his lap. He’s still wearing his green Subway artist t-shirt and he’s laughing with a piece of chewed-up sandwich in his mouth and he’s holding a lighter in the air because he was trying to light his sandwich which he thought was a cigarette and that was so funny he just laughed so hard he peed. Suzie tells me this is the third time he’s done that this month, peed on the couch.

Suzie is the girl from my acting class that all these boys want to fuck. Because they can’t because she’s with Eric, they are all in full-on antic mode, laughing and throwing things at each other, drinking beer faster than they might. I’ve brought friends, and there are girls in these two apartments, and that’s making everyone go crazy.

There’s a guy sitting on the stairs and I think he might be smoking crack. It’s a large tube, made of plastic, filled with smoke. He fits his lips around one end and inhales. His face is red. There are others hovered in the stairs, sitting on the filthy carpet, waiting for him, watching him hold his breath. I can’t believe I’m watching someone smoke crack. I’d better not tell anyone I’ve never even seen a joint before.

They offer me some of their crackpipe, but I decline because I’m trying to get a 4.0 this semester. Steve tells me that I should try it, that all drama majors like to get high.

I shake my head.

“More for me,” Steve says, grabbing the pipe from the long-haired boy in a flannel and taking a long inhale. “Good shit,” he says out of the corner of his mouth. He leans in close to my face and exhales. The sweet smoke is all over me, in my eyes, around my nose, in my ears. I cough and get scared. They say you get addicted to crack from the very first time you smoke it.

Suzie is helping Eric change his pants and I can’t find my other friends and now I’m in a bed with Steve, but we’re wearing all of our clothes because I don’t like him like that. I tell him, and he responds by licking my right hand, from the base of my palm to my fingertips. He sucks on my fingers, one by one. It feels like I’m being slowly eaten by a lazy dog and I wish I had smoked the crack rock so I wouldn’t feel this right now.

I wonder if I’m high on crack right now. I ask him. “How does crack make you feel?”

“I don’t know,” he says, my pinkie in the corner of his mouth. His other hand is on my thigh, squeezing, trying to rip open my jeans with his mind. “I don’t smoke crack.”

“You just did,” I say to him, slowly and loudly. Because he’s a crackhead and they need to be spoken to carefully.

Steve laughs and laughs, his goatee dancing around his lips, making him look like the devil on The Joker’s Wild. “That’s weed, baby.” He laughs again, so hard that he starts coughing, and needs to sip from his Double Gulp before he can catch his breath. He looks at me, eyes red and slitty. “Fucking freshmen girls, dude,” he shouts to the invisible people in the room. “I fucking love them, man.”