This evening I needed to go to my parents house to use their double boiler to make a family recipe. I don't have a car after my mom sold it to this Hispanic guy whose name we can't remember who pulled up in front of the house one day and asked if he could buy my car. I gave her my permission, and now I ride the bus. But it's cold. And dark. And there have been robberies on campus. I wasn't standing at no bus stop. So my roommate since freshman year let me borrow her car and I drove home and cooked and exercised and came back to our apartment. As I drove back, I had a rare moment all alone, enjoying how zippy her accelerator is and an acoustic version of Outkast's "Hey Ya" that happened to start up in perfect time with the moment the car hit the long stretch of lets-drive-fast-now road. I unloaded my cookie sheet of baked desert and my bag after parking, and began the somewhat long and very cold walk back to the apartment, and began pondering how I was going to return to a warm, noisy apartment full of everyone baking frantically for a charity bake sale tomorrow while cramming for our upcoming exams. I knew that we were all going to irritate one another in hundreds of little ways, but that we all secretly crave that sense of annoyance or we wouldn't keep driving each other up the beige cinderblock walls. I got back, and spent the evening desperately trying to write a paper in the living room, and failing, because of all the dish washing going on across the room, and exchanging looks of indignation and humorous defeat with the non-dishwashing roommate writing a paper with equal desperation across the couch from me. If Alex dumped me and I was forced, like some impoverished cousin from a Jane Austin novel, to rely on the generosity of others, I'd be pretty content following these three girls around in a decades long sorority of freak long after college. We might not have very common backgrounds-- there's the neurotic pre-med band-geek musical genius, the small-town rock-climbing chemistry princess, the pirate-obsessed creative-non-fiction penning soccer player, and me-- but we make a pretty good team. And we have wicked dance moves when Madonna's "Like a Prayer" pops up on the iPod shuffle at parties.
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