The day began like any other for senior Jerome Cohn. A few weeks ago, he woke up, crysterbated, then booted up his computer to check his email. To his shock and great joy, he had won the housing lottery.
“I was so happy. I called my ma, I told her, I said, ‘WE DID IT, MA! I’M ON TOP OF THE WOOOOOOORRRRLLLDD.’”
A senior taking an extra semester next year to finish his credits, Cohn’s class standing and a bit of good fortune had landed him the number-one position in housing selection. He had his pick of campus housing.
“The email told me that anywhere the light touched was my kingdom,” said Cohn, who conducted his interview via encrypted satellite phone.
He could never have anticipated how quickly the sweet taste of housing freedom could turn to bitter ash in his mouth. His first mistake was informing a friend or two of his great fortune. The news spread from Logger to Logger faster than mono.
Soon, the whole campus knew. This would have posed no problem, but for the fact that anyone who he chose to live with would be able to share his prime position.
“It wasn’t so bad, at first. Girls threw themselves at me like I was a prepubescent pop singer in a potentially sexual relationship with Usher,” Cohn happily reminisced. “Gifts of gold, chalices of silver…One girl offered her roommate as a blood sacrifice in my high honor and promised to refer to me as ‘Exalted One’.”
But the swarms quickly overwhelmed Cohn, and when he refused to commit to any of his suitors, things turned ugly.
“I didn’t know who to trust anymore. Out of nowhere, ‘friends’ whose names I hadn’t remembered for three years came calling, telling me how much they wanted me to room with them,” he said.
Cohn has been forced to barricade himself within the confines of his on-campus room. His phone was discarded days ago, next to the heap of letters students continue to slip under his door.
“I made a trip to Target a few days ago to stock up. I dyed my hair, shaved my beard. I even put two melons in my shirt and used red highlighter on my lips. It didn’t work.”
His disguise was useless against the kiss-ass masses. Everyone, from his closest friends to some people he was fairly sure weren’t even current students, was lined up outside to court him. The unthinkable amount of brown-nosing has led him down a tragic road to psychosis.
“They’re everywhere. When I close my eyes, I hear people telling me what a great roommate they’d make. I had to set my teddy bear on fire; all he did was stare at me, silently pleading to get in on my number. I can still hear him in my brain,” Cohn said with an audible shudder.
He does not know what his plan is. He anticipates that he will have to choose some people eventually, if only to make the others bugger off. But he knows, deep down, that the gratitude his selections show will dry up in unison with the ink of the housing contract.
“I have to go now,” Cohn said. “There are a few people outside offering me a lumberjack statue. Like I haven’t seen the Trojan Logger trick twice in the last week.”
