#bc i have people i’m vaguely friendly with in class but we don’t talk outside of it and will never talk again after the semester is over

[invisiblecities1972]

it’s almost funny how i genuinely have 0 friends idk how everyone else does it

[justkpopjokes]

Found You || OnlineRival!Felix

AU: online gamer friends + college + rivals to lovers

Anon: know it's a common au cliché but I've been craving some college au's of felix, maybe enemies to lovers ?? but enemies in a playful, competitive sense of course. I'll leave this vague so that you have more creative freedom, idc if you write in para. style or bullet point, I'll eat up anything you write skskj

A/N: I HAVE RETURNED!! Hope you enjoy this anon~ still can’t believe you’ve been following me since 2017 oml

If anyone else has lowkey specific requests for skz I’ll take them!! It can be any type/medium(?) of writing lol I just don’t want to write elaborate plots rn

You’ve been playing this video game recently

(I’ve been playing Valorant lol so I’m basing this off of that)

you’ve been playing solo for a bit

One afternoon, you match with a nice team that’s doing well

it’s a good game; you’re pretty evenly matched

you end up the last player standing, win a round for your team, & they applaud you for it!

But then—ohoho and then—

—you hear the deepest freakin Australian accent on voice chat

saying “ayy nice!!”

you say a polite thank you back to him

meanwhile the other people on your team are like

“holy crap bro your voice is low af!”

you get to hear this boy speak for longer lol

His username is #1Aboji or BrownieBoi915 or smth idk so you call him Brownie

and y’all get to talking lol

you send him a friend request on a whim because he seems nice

he accepts, sends you a party invite, and you play a few games together!!

Over the course of a couple months, you play together every time you’re online at the same time

(which is often bc ur timezones happen to be the same hehe)

It’s funny because although you’re friendly with each other, you’re competitive af LMAO

most of your games are spent competing for who can get more kills and who can be MVP of the team/entire match

it’s friendly competition but competition nonetheless

eventually he asks for your Tumblr/Twitter/whatever so y’all can chat a bit more :D

his @ can still be @/BrownieBoi915 lol

Brownie’s fun and you share some interests!!

your music tastes are similar too, so he sends you song recommendations, then you yell about them

You’ve been chatting a lot and reply to each others’ posts/tweets often, especially when you’re just posting about weird sh!t happening in your life

But one day… you post about something that happened at your college

something like “icb this ajlsdhf there’s this girl in one of my classes and she just sCALED THE SIDE OF THE BUILDING SO SHE WOULDN’T BE LATE TO CLASS”

less than a minute later you get a text:

“AHJKFLDSA WAIT YOUR MOST RECENT TWEET—

DO YOU MEAN VANESSA??”

and then

wAIT THAT’S BROWNIE TEXTING

HE KNOWS VANESSA?!?!?

So, naturally, you text him back

Then Brownie gets you to agree to another silly competition:

see who could identify the other first on campus!!

the 1 rule is that you have to find each other in-person

(there is a 2nd rule that you can’t ask exactly where the other person is, but that’s pretty obvious lol)

But because of the main rule, occasionally you’ll get a vague text like

Brownie: “Hey are you wearing a red flannel right now”

You: “No I’m not even outside lmao”

Brownie: “Dammit I thought I felt the vibes”

It’s a nice lil challenge because the only thing you know about Brownie is that he identifies as a guy and has an Australian accent

(but that may be unimportant depending on where you live lmao)

meanwhile the only things he knows about you are random details, your voice, and that you have a class with Vanessa lol

And it’s FUN!!

but you both start to get suuuuper competitive

mostly because of the 1 rule

there have literally been times you’ve probably found Brownie when you hear an Australian accent in the distance

however he always leaves before you can get to him, so it doESN’T COUNT GDI

Brownie tho lmao—he’s always putting on his detective hat and trying to track you down on campus

whenever he’s chilling after class he asks for where you are generally

he’ll ask you “Hey wyd”

You: “Studying”

Brownie: “In the library?”

You: “…Yes”

then he starts to narrow down where you could be based on less-specific questions

Of course, that’s not the only thing you text him about

you’ve grown pretty close to Brownie

the competition has helped with that!!

and ofc you still play that game together lol

Honestly, you really want to meet him

he’s just super charming + considerate

Also he mentioned he likes baking

you suggested “we should bake together!!”

Brownie: “Gotta find me first ;)))”

so,,, yeah you daydream about baking with Brownie

you really want to know his name

I mean, c’mon, you’ve gotten his phone number at this point, but you still can’t find him??

it’s starting to get frustrating

to the point where he can hear the frustration through your texts

HIS NAME IS FELIX!!

YOU HAVE A NAME TO WORK OFF OF NOW!!!!

That small piece of information motivates you for the rest of the week

you give Felix your name in return, but he insists that neither of you should ask around for each other

(you can’t ask your friends if they know someone named Felix

but if you hear someone say “Felix” while you’re out and about, that works)

you’re still unable to find him for some time, but knowing Felix’s name makes you feel closer to him

You can’t video call Felix but you normally call him at least once a week

after knowing him for at least half a year, you get this warm feeling in your chest every time his name pops up on the top of your phone

One of your phone calls sounds something like this:

Felix: “Hey, y/n?”

You: “Yes?”

Felix: “Do you want to go out for lunch? I mean, once we find each other.”

You: “As in a date?”

Felix: “Yeah—I mean, if that’s okay!”

You: “Yes please!! So can you find me already istg 🙄”

Felix is itching to meet you too

…so he sends you a selfie

with a filter though! that way you don’t see his entire face

you send him 1 in return (also with a filter)

Felix immediately says “aww ur cute uwu”

and your heart m e l t s

you’d think, hey maybe that’ll help me find him

SPOILERS it doesn’t really help lmao

Your close friends really want to help lmao because they’ve been hearing about this “Brownie” boy you like

however, you & Felix are adamant of winning this competition because the person who wins doesn’t need to pay for your 1st lunch date lol

It’s the last Friday afternoon before you have a week-long holiday, when you’re hanging out in front of one of your friend’s classes to pick them up

you’re standing outside the building chatting with one of your other friends when your phone starts ringing in your pocket

other friend is like “ooOOOH is it brownie boy??”

You: “Oh yeah rip he’s probably calling because I missed some of his texts, give me a moment."

You’re about to pick up when the call drops

so you’re like ?? bruh what and are about to unlock your phone to see what Felix’s texts are about

That’s when you feel a tap on your shoulder

and a low Australian voice behind you says your name

your head whips around to find this cute face with freckles and a giant smile on his face

“Felix?!?”

“Heh, I found you~”

Dude doesn’t hesitate to hug you, pick you up, then spin you around

your friend is watching with a goofy smile but he doesn’t care

after he finally puts you down, you cup his face with both your hands

“The filters always hide your freckles… they’re like stars, Lix”

instead of a lunch date, Felix takes you out for dinner :DD

even though you lost he insists on paying :’))

your friends don’t even care that you’re ditching them ajlkfdhs they literally push you away to go eat with Felix lmao

and you return home with that warm feeling in ur heart still there

needless to say, he will arrange another date so he can bring you some homemade brownies

he is the brownie boy after all!!

[waitingforminjae]

When I was a kid I would spend my after-school hours at a place that, for the sake of potential creeper awareness I will call, somewhat ominously, the Center. The Center was right across the street from a Preschool, which I’m pretty sure was run by the same people. I attended both and have extremely fond memories of both bc there I felt safe and normal.

When I was about 7 my school switched to a “year-round schedule” which, for our purposes, meant that the new admin had no fucking clue what they were doing we didn’t have breaks at the same time as the other schools in the area. My dad worked at these other schools, and my mom was to sick to take care of me so I couldn’t stay home during these weird breaks. So that left the question of what the hell to do with me in these seven hours before the Center opened.

I ended up staying the day at the Preschool, in the “Four Year Old/Pre-K Class” then going over to the Center about 2:30 when it’s teachers arrived. I have a lot of fun memories, and some of my most cherished ones, associated with this time. There was one other school in the area that had the same funky schedule, so there were usually two or three of us older kids there, but for the most part it was us surrounded by toddlers. 

And these tiny humans absolutely loved me.

At the time, I couldn’t have told you why little kids love me so much. They just did. Without doing anything consciously, I had an army of munchkins at my disposal to take over the world at any given moment. They would talk with me, follow me around their playground area, listen to me. It was wild and I miss them dearly.

I remember one time this other older boy asked me why these kids loved us so much. I, in typical me fashion, rambled out this idea that we were kinda like a cool gem to these kids, like a diamond, and because we were different they wanted to be be around us because we were cool. I didn’t know what I was trying to describe, but I was becoming aware of a vague idea of why these kids loved us, and me in particular.

They were twofold:

I didn’t treat them any differently.

One time when I was around 8, I was sitting at a table with some of the kids. This one boy was chattering away to me, and I was engaged and listening to him. He asked me if I had a boyfriend and I told him that I didn’t. He then looked at me, and said “Can I be your boyfriend?” 

I was like, Oh Shit. I just explained to him that I wasn’t really looking to date anyone right now, and that I was sorry to turn him down. He took this in stride and continued on about his day.

That’s the most singular instance I can think of aside from the kid who asked if I could come home with him but it also extended beyond talking to them like they were my age. Which leads to number two:

      2. I would actively engage with them.

Most of the other older kids weren’t interested in playing with them, or talking with them. They were babies, after all! But I never minded. If I was playing, as I used to when I was younger, I would let them join me when it was play time. I would play with them when they invited me too, and talk. I would compliment their work and help them if they needed it. My favorite instance went a little like this:

There was this one little boy, I think he was actually in the three-year-old class, who would always follow me around during their outside playtime. He would hold one of my hands sometimes, and he never spoke a word. One time I was sitting with my bag, I was probably around 11 or 12, and he came and sat beside me. He kinda poked around my bag and looked at the book I had brought with me. I took it out and gave it to him to look at. This is the image that has stayed with me:

This small, quiet little boy, even for his age, carefully flipping the pages of my book. He studies them seriously, slowly, almost as if he can read them. It was such a small, calm moment and it still gets me to this day. 

Both of these ideas have since developed into a single hypothesis:

Little kids engage so easily with me precisely because I don’t try to engage with them like little kids.

I’m happy to let children exist in their own space. If a child wants to engage with me, I will be more than happy to participate. I actually listen to what they have to say, and that probably shows in how I respond to them, keeping the conversation going or playing along in their game. I let them show me things, and I don’t talk down or over them. I answer their questions, and I direct questions or comments to them, not to their parents.

I stopped going over to the Preschool when I was about 12 or 13 but a couple of experiences with little kids since has helped solidify this theory:

When I was in my AP World History class, my teacher had to bring in her little girl, about 3 or 4 years old. She’s an adorably precocious kid with blonde hair and sass.

My classmates kept trying to engage with her, but she wasn’t having it. She was cutting up paper and throwing it away. This kid, Homeslice actually, asked “Can I have a hug?”

She brushes past him, little hands full of paper, and says “I’m a little busy right now.” 

I wish I had a picture of his face bc it was gr8.

So it’s about 15 minutes later and we’re doing individual work and she gets her IPad and comes up and clambers into the empty seat beside me. She looks at me seriously, then asks

“Do you want to see my games?” 

I told her I would love to see her games, and she spent the class showing me how to play her little kid games. It’s one of my favorite memories.

I think this little girl chose to talk to me because I hadn’t been bothering her before. When everyone else had been talking to her, I had just watched. When she looked in my direction, I would smile at her so she would know I was friendly and open to her. So she chose me because I hadn’t been cooing and crowding around her like a Special Object. 

The second one was just last night.

One of my floormates brought her little niece, maybe 3 years old, into the Common Room with her for a minute. Everyone said the usual “Oh she’s so cute!” and “Hi, *girls name*!” that people always say to kids. She didn’t respond, obviously a little overwhelmed and shy. Then, when they left to get something from Floormate’s room, everyone said the usual “Bye!” or “Bye bye!”. I made eye contact with her and smiled, and told her “It was nice to meet you, *name*.”

She gave this genuine and sweet smile around her bottle and it made my day.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this but little kids seem to respond best when you don’t treat them like little kids and instead treat them as valuable equals. That’s all.

[couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name]

pls expand on your ridiculous experiences during one semester at a fake college

okay I got a few asks about this so let me see what I can remember right now. These might not all be in chronological order

- At orientation, they were talking about the reservation near campus and all these pretty sites and this kid in the back of the auditorium goes “So uhh…heard this place might be built over a Native American burial ground?”

- The speaker: “…Let’s not think about that, okay?”

- The freshman were on campus alone for like a week and a half (other than the RA’s) before the other students and I just. The parties. Were out of control. An ambulance was called basically every night.

- I walked into the bathroom the first night there to find a girl literally dying because someone slipped something in her drink and she was having a Very Bad Reaction

- Sting- you know, the singer- ‘s son lived in my residence hall. This boy almost accidentally killed me on three separate occasions (while I was just trying to do my laundry)

- I told my family about this at Thanksgiving. Everyone in the room advised me to seduce him

- I ate breakfast in the dining hall exactly once. I got scrambled eggs. I noticed no one had brought out ketchup with the condiments and politely asked about it. I received glares from at least ten different people. Apparently people there don’t believe in ketchup on eggs.

- There were these two boys in my English class known as “The Lumbard Guys”. They didn’t live in my residence hall, but they would come over almost every night, start a party, and destroy part of the basement.

- At orientation this one kid got mad and set his shoe on fire to prove a point

- Also at orientation like??? My roommate disappeared???? And I never saw her again???

- Listen like…this campus just looked like the perfect setting for a horror film, but none of the people from the area got that. They all thought I was crazy until some comic from Comedy Central did a stand up act and said “Why the hell is this campus so creepy? I feel like I’m gonna leave here with someone else wearing my face!”. I felt way too validated.

- ALL OF MY CLASSES WERE SO FAKE

- My “math” class was actually a disguised home ec. course???? All we had were word problems that were incredibly detailed recipes or instructions on how to fix things. The teacher, who I swear to GOD was actually my Mr-Rogers-Wannabe guidance counselor from high school in disguise, spent more time trying to come up with names and backstories for the models in the text book than actually trying to teach

- I had to take a class called “first year seminar” because neither of my parents went to college. It was supposed to be teaching you about how the school works and stuff but SUPRISE BITCH WE’RE JUST GONNA YELL ABOUT RACISM AND PRIVELGE FOR AN HOUR.

- Literally that’s all we did. Just the whole class bonding over all these struggles we had gone through and getting fired up. Like, it was great, but I also ended up knowing very little about campus and school stuff bc that was the class that was supposed to be teaching me lmao

- My Psych teacher was fucking hysterical for the first few classes but then he just. Vanished. I had to drop the class

- My Fine Arts teacher just. Couldn’t stick to a teaching plan. Her entire wardrobe was scarves. She was very passionate about African masks. She had a flapper haircut. She spoke quietly, but with a marvelously forced tone of voice that I’m certain was her trying to sound impressive and hide a Boston accent. She didn’t seem to understand the year was 2014. She took us into the city to go to the Art Museum and we lost her in there, never to be seen again

- I’m not even kidding

- My “writing” teacher was my absolute fav omfg. She was this long grey haired hippie lady who worked as a nurse for the Grateful Dead and was still stuck there. She may or may not have hooked up with my uncle. I was her favorite student because one day I came in wearing a “HAIR” shirt. She wanted to take the class to England for the sole purpose of going on a Beatles tour

- But like…she did not teach a writing class omfg. She taught a social justice class. All we did was have informed debates about The Issues and listen to music and occasionally watch the Breakfast Club. Every time there was a big paper due on the syllabus, she’d just sit on her desk and go “I mean, I don’t have to cover anything, right? You guys know how to write!” Like I genuinely don’t think she knew what class she was teaching

- There was a boy who sat next to me in that class. He was deaf in one ear and used that as an excuse when he got caught blatantly not paying attention. It worked every time. But I was right next to him. I saw him playing Yu-Gi-Oh on some website on his phone under the table. One time we started talking about model cars and he pre-cummed.

- There was a boy who roamed the campus in a long black trench coat and a weird hat. I never saw his body and started to suspect he might not have one, just the theory of one. He took interest in me because I was the only person in class who ever got his Doctor Who jokes. He’d come up to me at dinner and blast quiz me on various nerd culture before running off and disappearing into the shadows. Just as I was starting to grudgingly accept I was probably going to have to eventually hook up with him for the greater good, I apparently offended him by saying I like Picard more than Kirk. He didn’t stick around to listen to my reasoning. Whenever I saw him after that he would loudly start talking about how great his girlfriend was. Everyone knew he was lying. I wonder if Kirk ever sucked his theoretical dick as well as I would have.

- I gave a football player a shout out on Yik Yak. He really appreciated it, and gave me some fries laced with weed as a thanks. That was such A Night ™ , I watched the Lorax and left the dimension.

- Every time we had dances, this creepy guy named Horace would find me and use my obvious discomfort to make me dance with him. He’d hold my wrists and shove his crotch on mine while vaguely swaying to the beat. I had to escape to the bathroom every few minutes. Finally the security just banned him from the events altogether. I can still see his face clearly in my mind.

- One night, I walked into the bathroom to find a perfect, untouched pizza laying on the floor…but not in a box. Someone literally just took it out of the box and laid it down. I’m still fuming.

- One time I was in the mostly empty library when I smelled something. I walked down the rows of shelves before rounding the corner, and found the President of the college hidden there, sitting on the floor, smoking, a bottle of vodka in his hands. We held eye contact for a solid minute. He slowly shook his head at me. I said “Sir, your house is like…literally across the street.” He shook his head more vigorously. I left the library.

- One night, I heard screaming. I looked out the window to find a girl in a giraffe costume scaling my building. People were throwing water bottles at her. I was concerned. I didn’t know who to talk to for answers.

- I was in line trying to pay for dinner. One of the lunch ladies climbed on top of the ice cream machine and refused to come down. Her friend came over and they started recreating the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Very few people acknowledged it.

- Someone jacked up the soda dispenser so it was only dispensing beer. None of the staff cared enough to fix it.

- I caught my RA in the middle of a drug deal so she gave me a coupon for free ice cream

- Also side note: The soft served ice cream machine on campus was actually a frozen yogurt machine. I had no problem with that, but like, advertise correctly, you know? Nobody else seemed to understand my confusion. Nobody else seemed to understand that froyo and ice cream are two different things. What the hell.

- There were just…so many moths all over the campus. A terrifying amount. When it started getting colder I was like, finally, I won’t be attacked by moths anymore! Only for even more moths to appear. I asked a local about it. “Oh, those are the winter moths!” What the fuck are winter moths? What the fuck, Massachusetts? My friend back home grew convinced that Mothman was in the area. I was inclined to believe her. Sometimes I close my eyes and all I can see are moths everywhere, waiting for the moment to strike.

-  I’ve encountered deer many times in my life. I know how they act around people. But the deer on this campus were just weird. They’d run out at people all the time. One almost shoved me into traffic.

- My roommate gave my phone number out to literally anyone she found who mentioned they liked to read or liked Doctor Who. She was concerned I had no friends. No one ever called.

- I met a small Greek girl in my Fine Arts class. Our first day of talking, she made me climb a mountain with her so she could get to tutoring, even though I had no reason to be in that building. Her roommates kept mysteriously disappearing. She was late to everything. She’d call me randomly to get food at 1 in the morning. She kept somehow breaking phones and tvs and other electronics. When I asked her how they kept breaking, she waved it off with “Oh, I have OCD. You wouldn’t understand”. I have OCD, and I still don’t understand. One time she invited me out with her friends from high school. I waited outside her building for two hours, while the other friends waited in the parking lot for two hours, because we didn’t know how to find each other. She eventually came outside at 10:30 pm. We went to Friendly’s. She made us stop at her house so she could grab something. We pulled up a long, winding driveway and stopped in a parking lot. At the end of the parking lot were stone stairs that lead up to a mansion on a hill. She ran inside and the rest of us stayed in the car, listening to High School Musical and talking about Supernatural. When she came out 40 minutes later we decided to try and prank her. It went wrong. We almost ran over her friend’s sister with the car. They invited me to a pumpkin patch. When I started complaining about my roommate, she asked me to move in with her. I thought about the other three girls who had seemingly gone missing. I politely declined. Six months after I left the school, I received a text from her asking for notes for an exam, and radio silence after that. I can’t find her on facebook. I fear she might have gone missing too.

- One night, as I was standing outside huddled in the cold, a boy came up and offered me a cigarette to help me stay warm. I turned it down, but he stood around talking to me for a few minutes afterwards. I felt absolutely no awkwardness at all. He was a musician from Colorado. He sang a bit of one of his songs. He was dropping out of school to go to California the next week. He told me I had beautiful eyes, but his were the most alive eyes I’ve ever seen so I couldn’t believe the compliment. We talked for about ten minutes and I fell a little bit in love. He had to rush off to a club meeting, but he told me he’d rather keep talking. He gave me the sweetest smile before he left. I didn’t get his last name or number and I never saw him again.

- There was a dance on Halloween. I couldn’t think of a sufficiently slutty yet classy costume, so I just went as Osgood from Doctor Who. When I got there there was a huge crowd, but people quickly grew bored and started leaving. There ended up being six people left (myself included). We stayed because we could see the upset faces of everyone who had planned the event, but actually had one of the most fun nights of my life. We- myself, the girl from across the hall, Trench Coat Boy, his tiny friend who never spoke, and a boy and girl I didn’t know who seemed to be professional dancers- danced nonstop for almost three hours. The strobe lights and poppy music solidified an unspoken bond. I had never and to this day haven’t felt as free as I did that night. The tiny quiet boy’s smile could have lit up a city. It’s etched into my mind. We all left the dance talking about the surreal feeling in the air, as if something had shifted. None of us ever mentioned the dance again. It’s still one of my fondest memories.

- For a solid month, there was someone in a gorilla costume running around campus.

- There was a rash of sexual assaults on campus. A gang of boys kept jumping girls in the woods. The only thing the school board did was give out free rape whistles at lunch one day. I missed that day, making me one of the only students on campus without a whistle. Later that night when I ordered pizza, the delivery guy tried to start up a conversation with me about all the assaults. He blamed the girls. I took back my tip.

- Sometimes the showers just…filled up with black sludge. No one knew why.

- The girls in the room next to me were very bizarre. They always shot me odd looks and whispered to each other constantly. I couldn’t figure out if they were sleeping together or not. They never washed their hands when we were in the bathroom.

- The doors to each dorm were thick and heavy and required effort to push them open. My roommate and I made sure to lock ours every night, and would triple check it. It swung open by itself almost every night. The channels on the tv would change with the remote equidistance away from us. Sometimes I heard humming in the showers when I was the only one in there.

- My roommate…deserves a whole separate post dedicated to her, honestly.

- She would call her mother and have her do her homework for her. She blasted music constantly, and it was either country or hard rap, nothing in between. She sexiled me constantly. I once walked in on anal. She’d meet guys on Tinder, fall in love with them after a couple of days, and then bring them into the school and into our room like it was no big deal. One of them made it clear he was a budding serial killer. She was in a new drama every week. One time someone called her a dilf on Yik Yak. She was firmly convinced her cousin was blonde because her aunt dyed her hair when she was pregnant. She tried her hardest to get me laid by a football player. She was the loudest drunk I’ve ever encountered. Honestly there’s just too much about her for this omfg

- John Zaffis, the famous paranormal researcher, came to the school on my birthday. I went because I’m a loser who’s been watching shows with him since I was a kid, and I was having a bad day so I decided it could be a treat. I sat in the front row. He held an uncomfortable amount of eye contact with me the entire presentation. He was impressed with my questions. He lamented about the fact he’s always cut out of movies or replaced by priests that look like him. He apparently came to the school every year around Halloween to do a ghost tour around the campus for the students. A girl allegedly killed herself in my floor’s bathroom. He apparently always got a lot of activity around the campus. Everyone in the freshman class started wondering if the rumors about the Native American burial ground were true.

- One time in “writing” class the teacher gave us a number and then whatever song came up as that when we put our music on shuffle we had to play for the class. I ended up with “Touch Me” from Spring Awakening. Midway through the song, the teacher from another class came to complain that they could hear everything. My teacher tried to defend that all music has an important message. “Molly, dear, tell her the message in this song!” I looked around the room and at the other teacher. “It’s about sex,” I said quietly. She stormed out of the room while the class started laughing.

- There was this girl that just had the natural ability to make anything boring. I feel bad saying that, because she’s such a sweet girl, and she’s smart, and she’s gorgeous, and she’s talented, but just…every time she says anything, it’s boring. I’m still friends with her on facebook, the talent transcends to writing as well. You could be having a fun, lively conversation and she could say something completely relevant to the point and yet it would still just be boring. It’s a baffling talent, I still don’t understand how she does it.

- There was a boy who’d come into my room. He lusted over my s’mores poptarts. He kept trying to hit the high notes in Broadway songs. He didn’t understand my sense of humor at all, so we both were constantly worried we were offending each other. He cried about Selena Gomez a lot.

- The dining hall only offered horrendous food. I had pasta almost every night because it was the only thing remotely edible. If you wanted good food, you had to go to Late Night, which was between like 10:30 and 1 I think??? They set it up specifically for stoners and people leaving parties. I was frequently the only sober person there. Except for the moths.

- The chief at the pasta place found out I like theater and got like…weirdly passionate about it. He kept telling me about different theater groups in the area and wanted to know if I was in the school musical. He asked me every time I went up for food.

- There was a disproportionate amount of large black birds to trees. It wasn’t hard to figure out why we so rarely saw smaller animals

- When I told my advisor I was thinking about leaving (mostly for financial reasons but also the fake classes were preventing me from getting an education I wanted, you know?), this little old man looked around his office as if checking for people listening in, then put his hand on top of mine, leaned in close, and whispered “Oh, you sweet little girl. Run as fast as you can.”

There’s definitely more but listen. This school was weird and fake and vaguely surreal and off-kilter. I am fully afraid that one day, years from now, I’m going to be driving through the back roads and pass the place where the campus should be, only I won’t find anything there at all, and won’t be able to find any trace of it ever existing. I won’t be able to find any record of it. I won’t be able to find a record of any of the people. Every time I think about this place I just get a weird feeling, like I somehow managed to escape the Twilight Zone but left a part of me behind in the process. Be careful when applying to college, kids.