Page 6 of Gettin' Lucky in Kentucky
Calvin
I walked to campus today. It was a gorgeous day, and the air smelled so fresh and clear that I decided to walk the ten blocks instead of drive. The red and orange leaves were already falling onto the ground, providing me with a fulfilling crunching noise underneath my feet.
Moray was a beautiful small town. Trees lined the streets, and people were already slowly preparing their homes for Halloween. Moray went all out for the major holidays, and the homes would be decorated in Halloween’s scariest witches, spooks, and vampires for all the trick or treaters they would have in a month. I had always loved it.
It would be hard to leave when college was over, but that was my plan. I had lived here my entire life and wanted to see the world, to experience something else than what was my everyday existence. It wouldn’t be a large city, but it would be somewhere new. Somewhere with mountains. I would visit Kentucky for the holidays when I came home to see the family. Maybe every now and then, I would come back for homecoming or some kind of shit like that. Moray was my past and my present, but it was not my future.
I had made a few good friends over the last three semesters. I joined the gay student union and found a few members of my tribe that I enjoyed hanging out with. One of them, Dante, worked at the comic book shop across from my office, and his boyfriend, Billy, is a theatre major. He was pretty good. I saw him in Romeo and Juliet last spring, and I thought he was quite talented. He was involved with some creepy kind of shit in our freshman year. Someone tried to murder him, but Dante somehow saved him. I haven’t asked… It doesn’t seem very appropriate, but they are cool, and I enjoy seeing them on occasion.
I also have made a new bestie. My co-worker Gina is a badass Latina with the mouth of a sailor and the heart of a nun. She’s a year ahead of me in school and might be one of the smartest people I have ever met. She’s from Arizona, originally, and both of her parents served in the military. Gina is ROTC and the other lead tutor in our office.
She is also a lot like me. I am the kind of person who plans out their day to the nth degree. I am strict with my time and commitments and come unglued when plans have to change. I’ve always been a bit of a control freak, which makes it odd that Chad and mike are my best friends. But somehow, we make it work.
I open the door to the office at the Lohry Center and walk inside. Gina is at the front desk going over folders with our Dean of Tutoring, Patricia Whiting. She looks up at me and grins. “Well, well, well, look who decided to waltz in here two minutes late! Has the world came to a crashing halt or something?” she teased. I was always punctual. I glanced at my watch and then to the clock on the wall.
“Check your phone, girl, and then check your attitude. That clock is three minutes fast. I happen to be a minute early, thank you very much. Hi Patricia,” I murmur as I walk over to my small cubicle.
“Is he right?” Gina scoffs as she pulls out her phone and checks the time. “Son of a bitch…” she says under her breath.
“Good try, sis. But you’ll have to get up a little earlier to get the best of me.” I sass her.
“Back to your corner, you two. Gina, have someone come to fix the clock, please. Now that I know that, it’s going to drive me crazy,” Patricia snaps in her heavy Kentucky accent. I have an accent, but compared to my boss, I sound like a Yankee.
“I can do it,” I laugh as I grab a chair and slide it over to the far wall. I take the clock off the wall and adjust its hands quickly.
“Shit, I hope that’s not a union job. You could get me in trouble,” she huffs, holding back her laugh. “You two have a heavy day today. I’m glad you don’t have Monday classes. I have a meeting with the head of athletics today to go over the players that are struggling, so we will probably have a few new students within the week. I think that I might need to hire another person. All of you kids already have too much on your plate, as it is. I just wish everyone was as good at their job as you two are. Okay, that’s enough, Gina. If I look at any more of these reports today, I might snap. Have I told you guys how much I love you and how much I hate Dean Winston?”
Patricia and Dean Winston, the head of the athletic department, were always bickering back and forth. She was as tired as I was about the jocks skating by on their athletic prowess in the classroom. In the last year, she had cracked down pretty hard on them. Anyone athlete with a D or below was supposed to be put on suspension until they raised their grade. It rarely happened, of course. It pissed her off.
I loved her.
“So, did you and the boys go to the game over the weekend?” Gina asks as Patricia huffed off towards her office. “I decided to stay home and binge-watch Real Housewives again. I love how faux-reality has become the new normal of expectations. It’s amusing.”
“Yeah, we went. Lost, of course. But the boys played hard. I think, finally, after all these years of going to the games, I’m finally starting to understand it,” I laughed. The rules of football had always been mind-boggling to me. Basketball, baseball, hell, even tennis was easy to understand, but football tried to be complex in its barbarism. It’s the only spectator sport that requires a mathematician to understand.
“I dated a football player in high school. He was the big guy who hiked the ball to the quarterback, or whatever you call it.” Gina smirked. “I called him the big guy in the middle, cause he was.”
“It’s the offensive center. See! That I know, but I get lost in all the damn downs and first and tens… It’s maddening.” I walked over and sat on her desk. Gina liked large guys. She was tiny. If she weighed more than ninety pounds, I would be surprised, and most of that was her big curly hair. She was a whipper-snapper with a quick wit. She was one of the smartest people I had ever met, too.
“Okay, that, then…The offensive center…He was quite good at offense,” she teased. “Motherfucker could have my bra off in about two seconds. For someone with such big hands, he had very nimble fingers.” She grinned, sticking her tongue out at me. “So, the game sucked?”
“Nah, it was fine. We had a good time. Had a little heartburn from the hot dogs, though.” I got up and walked back over to my desk. The thought of the game right now was bringing up the memory of Mason. It wasn’t as pleasant as I had wished.
“You guys went to the Omega party after? Chad said you might,” she said coyly. Chad wasn’t big. Hell, he was about as think as you could get, but he was tall. Taller than me and I wasn’t a slouch in the height department myself. But he was hard as a rock. It came from all the sports he played and working out on his uncle’s farm. His parents had tried to get him to help with the diner, but he was too much of a redneck to ever wait tables or cook.
“Yeah, we went.” I sat down in my chair. “Damn, Gina… I don’t see how I’m gonna have any time to get through all of these cases. How can I tutor thirty people a week, go to my classes, and have any time for studying and doing the classwork? This scheduling is a fucking nightmare!” This was my half-hearted attempt to change the subject, but I meant every word I said. I was getting worried. My major was economics, and the classes as a junior were a hell of a lot harder than they were when I was a sophomore.
“Yeah, I’m struggling too. It helps, though, when you don’t have a social life, Calvin. You should stay home, like me, every night, and watch Bravo while you study.” She slapped the cubicle wall and walked around to my side. She crossed her arms as she looked at me.
“Dude, Chad told me. He thought you might want to talk about your feelings, and he knows that he and Mike would suck at it. So you met your forever crush, and he sucked?” She looked at me with such empathy that I decided maybe it would help to talk about it. I hated talking about my feelings as much as Chad or Mike. I may be gay, but I was still a country boy.
I rolled my eyes and threw my hands up in the air in supplication to whatever gods might be listening. “Yeah… It sucked. I mean, Chad was a bit of a dick, too. I will admit that.”
“Chad? Nooo…” Gina was also sarcastic as hell.
“Anyway, after one of the Instagram twins got between them,” I started, and she reached over and grabbed my arm.
“Which one? Holy shit…They are like the golden grail of Moray. So, fucking hot.” Her long nails were actually hurting as she grappled me in an orgasmic seizure at the mention of one of the golden gods.
