While registering for the summer semester someone told me I should sign up for a physical class to get out more and meet new people, which sounds horrible. I don’t want to intermingle. If I was Tom Hanks in Castaway, I would not have ever left and Wilson would have been turned into a funky hat or canteen. It would have been a really boring movie. I crash. I get to the island. I go full Swiss Family Robinson and retire at 19. It would have been very anticlimactic. I’ve seen enough Naked and Afraid to know how to live out there. I would be Naked and Having an Alright Time. Someone get the Discovery Channel on the phone.

Yet there I was at 4:30 humming along the freeway in my car. Off to mingle with other twenty-somethings and talk about Instabook or Facegram and how my sweater was gluten-free-range from local farmers. The thought made my heart race and small beads of sweat form above my eyebrows. This was my nightmare. I looked down over my outfit. It was pretty trendy. It was a bright blue dress with geometric cuts strategically placed along my chest and a square, strappy neckline. Very Modern.

“This is what the kids are wearing this days right?”

I had left early to beat traffic and find the room. The class started at 6:00 but it was a good 45 minute drive. I hated how late in the day it was but this had been the only one available. In total, it was a three hour course. It started at 6:00 p.m. and ended at 8:55 p.m. which bothered me for some reason. The five minute short of 3 hour class takes place three consecutive days a week for five weeks.

I hadn’t even pulled into the parking lot before I was already sick of this class. I get to campus and find a perfect spot right by the entrance. I get out, lock my car and navigate my way through the empty east-wing building before finding the classroom. The classroom, like the rest of the campus is devoid of life. Two fluorescent lights flicker in the back of the dingy room, casting an eery pale across the room. In a horror movie, this would be the part where a little girl appears during a flicker and then slices my head off in hyper-speed. But no, I wasn’t so lucky.

I took my seat at the back of the room in the far corner. I settled in at a desk that was 2nd to last on this side. The desks were already uncomfortable. They were a hard polished metal that made you want to confess to murders you never knew existed. I was almost positive that Guantanamo uses these chairs as interrogation techniques.

I checked my phone.

5:15

Where was everyone? Am I the only person who likes to be early on the first day? I tapped my pen on my notebook impatiently. After ten minutes, I started doing lunges down my row. Fifteen minutes and I was Facebook stalking someone who had just gotten a new puppy. 20 minutes, I was watching Ellen Degeneres prank people on youtube and by 6:00 I had already ordered various skincare products on amazon as well as traced the entire royal family ancestry on wikipedia.

Finally one by one people started to trickle in. After around twenty or so people, our professor hobbled in. He looked like a little Amish Hobbit back from taking a stroll around Mordor with Jedediah and Moses in his straw hat and black suit. He was no taller than 5’2 and just about as round as he was tall. Essentially, he was adorable and had two rosy cheeks and a tiny button nose. It was like meeting Santa’s third cousin.

“Is it okay if we switch seats? My laptop is dying and the plug is right there”, came a voice from behind me.

I turned and smiled, telling her “Sure.”

The minute I sat down I knew she was full of shit. This chair was twenty times worse. It had a bump right on your left butt cheek that almost hurt. I shift over and over in my chair, but still I can’t catch a break from the tiny mountain of death. It was beginning to become obvious that after three whole hours of sitting there a bruise was going to remain. Sure enough, it did.

The professor cleared his throat and began talking in the quietest voice I’ve ever heard. I caught bits and pieces of what he was saying. He was just going over how to log into a computer. Luckily, he went over this for the longest thirty minutes of my life and I didn’t miss anything. After a brief discussion about the packs of feral cats roaming the campus and how he has infiltrated their trust and been accepted as alpha, he decided to let us watch his community theatre performance tape of Oedipus the King, a touching tale of a boy and his mother.

The door opened and in walked the type of man that the Greeks would have surely thought was a god. Demi-god at least. He looked like an angel. He was tall enough for his dark hair to brush ever so lightly against the doorframe. His exquisite hair was cut so that it looked both ruffled and refined. It had a slight curl to it that gave the florescence something to play with as light danced over it.

My God. He pulled off florescent lighting as if it were candle light or a spotlight on a runway.

He was at most 24 but his looks were timeless. His face was reminiscent of a sculpture in a museum. His nose was strong and straight. He could have easily passed for a Roman emperor. His eyes were shadowed by his neat eyebrows and long eyelashes but you could tell the exact shade of ice blue from across the room. I was positive that he could use those very same eyes to guide ships home in the night of a storm. His eyes were like glaciers falling into the sea. His jaw was chiseled and that chisel was mimicked in the rest of him. He had a body that was lean but not thin. Strong but not overbearing with broad, taut shoulders. His white t-shirt clung to a torso like I have never seen before. If it had been pioneer times, he could have washed many a cloth on those abs and I’m not doubting that even now people would pay to see it. His jeans were dark-washed and clung to life on his hips with help from an expensive looking leather belt. He was the most handsome man I had ever seen in my life.

“Sorry, I’m late, I couldn’t find the room.”

The professor grumbled something unintelligible and motioned him off with a wave of his tiny Hobbit hand.

This guy had a darkness about him. A certain depth in his manner. A mysterious cloud that hung on his every movement like a cape. He looked like the words sultry and seduction sound. He walked like he was being photographed for an elegant magazine or posing for an artist to paint.

Wait, he was walking this way.

Oh, God. I’m hungry and my stomach is growling. What did I eat today? Jesus, I didn’t.

I quickly get a piece of gum out of my purse and pop it into my mouth, adjusting my clothes and hair as subtly as possible.

He walks down my row.

No. No. No. No. Don’t sit here. Go away. Shoo. Git.

I watch him from the corner of my vision but pretend to not see him as he sits in the desk next to mine.

There is a light tap on my shoulder and I jump from surprise, knocking my pen off my desk with a small clatter.

“Oh, sorry, could I have a piece of that gum?”

I turn my head and look at him wide eyed as if I had just seen a llama swallow an Australian Bushman.

“Um, y-yea, sure, here”

I reach down to my purse and as I’m digging for the pack I see his long, toned arm reaching for my pencil that I had dropped.He smells like fresh-cut grass and sweat.

No, he smells like summer.  

I pry my eyes away from his wrist and grab a piece of gum. As I sit back in my seat he lightly places the pencil on my desk with long fingers. hardly making a tap.

I wonder if he plays piano.

I look back at him and shakily hold out my hand with the piece in my palm. He smiled. It’s the kind of smile that inspires romance novels and the sonnets that high schoolers tend to agonize over. I notice he only has one dimple on his cheek. I felt the heat radiating from his hand as he took the gum from my hand.

The lights turn off and the movie starts. I barely see his mouth move and hear him whisper.

“Thank you, Blondie.”

As I sat in my desk looking at the projector screen, going over the events in my head and trying to figure out if it actually happened or if I had just been reading too much Teresa Medieros, I realized one thing. I really liked Composition II.