The RA Volume I: Orientation
Chapter One: Training
My name is Spencer Lawrence. I’m the RA for Higgins 3. RA—that’s resident assistant, commonly misunderstood to mean resident advisor. The mistake is an understandable one. After all, sometimes assistance comes in the form of a good piece of advice, right? As for me, I could use a little advice myself. I came to Lakeview University with a plan to study business admin. Five years later, here I am about to begin my super duper senior year to score a degree in communications with a minor in psych. What do I plan to do with them? Honestly? I don’t know. I already have my dream job.
This is my fifth year at it. If it sounds like a lot, well, it is. I got into it as a sophomore because the pay was hard to beat. Free housing in the heart of campus, so no commutes. A huge meal plan I could never hope to use up, and if Lakeview’s food courts and dining halls weren’t five star dining, they were better than whatever garbage I’d wind up cooking myself. The stipend wasn’t much, but it was an occasional date night and gas money for my dad’s hand-me-down minivan. (It was supposed to be a graduation present, but he’d gotten fed up waiting.) All things considered, it was one of the best-paying undergrad jobs on campus.
All I had to do to earn it was completely change everything about how I lived my life.
I wasn’t a troublemaker. Not really. Back before I took on the mantle of RA, I drank sometimes at parties, got high once in a while, let a girl stay the night if my roommate was cool with it. I sure as heck didn’t go to my RA’s floor programs. If the guys on my floor were heading out to the rec center or the intramural field to play sports, I’d join in, but try to impose organization on it and you lost me. I just wanted to do my thing, and didn’t see how some faceless university bureaucracy was going to do anything but hinder me.
It was hard to remember feeling that way, now. For the next four years, I was an RA over at Rowland Hall. It was a men’s only residence hall down in the southeast corner of the campus. I had a great supervisor who’d taught me a lot, and by the time I’d finished my sophomore year, I’d bought in hard. I’d seen how I could really make college better for people. Steer them in the right direction. Put them in touch with new friends and all of Lakeview’s resources. Keep them from making some of the more consequential mistakes. Help them appreciate, or at least not be a dick about, other cultures and lifestyles. Let them talk it out, hug it out, or cry it out, as the situation needed. I’d helped talk a guy down from suicide. Put someone who’d fast become at best a borderline alcoholic in touch with counselors. Put out a literal fire, and a whole lot of figurative ones. And yeah, I’d bought a shit-ton of pizza to sucker guys into letting me expose them to some educational stuff.
It wasn’t glamorous, and there weren’t a lot of thanks. Like any job, it had bad days. (Someday I’ll tell you about the time I nearly got shoved out a third story window.) Sometimes, I wasn’t enough. But sometimes, I got to make a real difference to somebody, and I loved it. I loved it.
This year, however, it was time for something new. This year, I’d gotten bumped from my old gig at Rowland and shifted to the north side of campus over to Higgins Hall. Higgins had been closed for two whole years of renovations. Now, it was the hall they used for all the websites and mailers. It had new furniture, new amenities, a new manager, new RAs, and—most excitingly of all—a new policy. It was the first hall on campus to attempt truly coed. Lakeview has buildings that have long housed all genders, but only with guys on the first floor, women on the second. Men in B tower, women in A. Higgins had five floors. I guess because of my seniority, or maybe because over the years I’d made an impression on Bob, the campus Director of Housing, I was the one who got to take the coed floor.
I have to say, I was stoked. For one, it meant fresh challenges and more to learn about my job. For two, though, gender-inclusive housing meant you had boys and girls to balance out one another’s worst tendencies. Having chicks around means the guys actually behaved themselves, tidied up occasionally, kept some of that toxic testosterone they passed around on move-in day at Rowland in check. Meanwhile the guys prevented the girls from stooping to the worst of their potential pettiness, kept the drama llama fed and satisfied. Win/win.
Higgins isn’t a big hall, just five small floors. It made for a very personal, intimate format for the two weeks of RA training leading up to move-in day. We’d gotten to know each other very well. (Maybe too well, in one or two cases, but they can’t all be winners.) Rowland had had sixteen RAs, but here, it was the five of us. From basement to rooftop that’s Savannah, Vickie, Carmen, Vanessa, myself, and Janis. Then there was our manager Ramona pulling her first hall director gig, who I had fast become a big fan of, and our center desk operator Marcus. That was it, our tidy little Higgins family, at least until the residents moved in.
It was a little awkward sometimes, not gonna lie. Marcus didn’t interact with us much during training, which meant for two weeks, I’d usually been the only guy in the room. The girls jokingly called me “the diversity hire” when Ramona wasn’t around, and there was a real vibe like I didn’t quite fit in. This was compounded by the fact that I was told flat-out by Ramona when she showed me to my room that she wanted me to serve as a mentor to the other four, all of them new RAs. It didn’t quite sit right, a man positioned as the venerable expert over a group of young women, but half a dozen team builders in, we mostly liked each other, they came to see me as a resource, and I shed some of my anxiety over it. “Diversity hire” gave way to “just one of the girls.”
It was tricky at times. See, I’m a reasonably good-looking guy. I take care of myself. And my colleagues, they needed no mentoring at all in that regard. They ranged from Vanessa, who was pretty cute on a bad day, to Savannah. Savannah, of Higgins basement, was so hot that the other girls teased her about whether or not someone else would have to check the smoke detectors in the rooms on her floor because she’d keep setting them off. She blushed, sure, but she wasn’t modest enough to deny it either. I made sure to keep things strictly platonic. “Collegial” wasn’t really possible when you lived together in addition to working together, so platonic would do. There was a strict policy against staff members dating, which had good reasons behind it and I supported them, no matter how cute they were. Still, trust falling into the gentle, supportive hands of four beautiful women was enough to make any guy’s imagination stray at times.
Thankfully, my ex-girlfriend Marisa had done more than enough to keep me wanting a normal, uncontroversial relationship or none at all. For that, at least, I was grateful to her, nutter that she was. It’s got nothing to do with Higgins or RAing or move-in day, but let me just say that she would be my first and last experience dating a professional sexpert. Story for another time, but suffice to say having your girlfriend take post-coital notes on your performance for study and reflection isn’t quite as good as a little cuddling.
But hey, speaking of move-ins, tomorrow was the big day. Residents were due to show up starting at 8 AM. It was the calm before the storm, Higgins 3 as silent and still as it would be until winter break. The other RAs and I had the evening to put finishing touches on decorations, bulletin boards, and other preparations for move-in day and orientation. The girls had had their door tags up days ago, but I preferred to wait until the last minute so I don’t wind up having to redo them if the roster shifted around. Plus, that way names and door numbers would be fresh in my head for my guys’—and girls’!—impending arrival.
So there I was, crawling down the hallway, writing down the residents’ names, one to a tag, sticking them on with some transparent contact paper, and then onto the next. Each one needed a marker and scissors, so the floor with its stiff new carpet became my desk. Crawling was the only way.
I started next door to 310, my room. In 312 we had Lee and Angel, then Terry and Tony in 314. Fun alliteration. Then around the corner we had Alex and Joe, and to the other side of the hall, Shawn, in one of the floor’s few singles. (In 319 Higgins even had a triple room, of which I was told there were only a handful on campus. As yet, ours was unfilled—hence waiting until tonight for updates.) Then back to my side of the hall for Jack and Chris, then back to the other to Emma’s room. And so on. I was shit with names until I had faces to go with them, but I expected to know my guys first and last by the time classes started next Monday. Girls, too, though it didn’t sound like I’d wind up with many.
Some of these names, though, it was hard to say. It had struck me as weird that my roster was only room numbers and names, and often as not nicknames at that. I hoped it would be convenient in the end. You never knew when James was going to go by James, Jim, Jimmy, Jack, or whatever. I suppose since the vast majority of campus was single sex, I was one of very few RAs who might have some use for that third column.
There were a few obvious ones, and a handful where I could imagine going either way. I’d known women who went by Alex and women who went by Jo, for instance, though the roster clearly stated a more masculine “Joe.” I could count on one hand the number of obvious female names, but I kept telling myself that Bob had been hyping the new rooming situation all last year at training events. He was billing it as a big new diversity initiative, and if there’s one buzzword these HRL folks never seem to tire of, it’s diversity.
With nobody but me living there, the sound of the stairwell door opening and footsteps entering the hallway were impossible to miss. Not too surprising. Most floors had some early arrivals showing up. International students, athletes reporting early for pre-season practice, folks finishing up summer programs and moving from the summer school dorms to their fall housing assignment. This wasn’t my first rodeo, though; it was easy to get eager to meet my residents and rush up to greet them, but people moving in had a funny way of carrying heavy stuff. Staying out of their way was a courtesy—plus, it kept me from repeating my mistake my rookie year where I offered a hand, and wound up roped into moving hundreds of pounds of some dude’s stuff up the stairs while his jerk dad sat in the car, basking in the AC. Fool me once, and all that.
My focus stayed on the door tags. Move-in day was going to be its usual exhausting marathon, and the sooner I got this done, the sooner I could hit the hay and start resting up. I was bent over on my hands and knees with my ass in the air, shearing off the next scrap of contact paper for Morgan and Tyler’s door tags, when behind me…
Someone wolf-whistled.
Honestly? I smiled. Women flirted with me with enough regularity that this was my first time, and I didn’t get harassed so often that it didn’t remain largely flattering when it happened. Still, the smile had to be squelched by the time I turned to confront my whistler. It was hardly the way to make a good impression on someone, and while “authority figure” was rather heavy-handed for my role, I did have to be able to be taken seriously. I wiped the grin off my face, ready to deliver a mild rebuke followed by a warm greeting.
The woman standing before me was… hot. On the shorter side of things, trim but with a dynamite hourglass profile, blonde hair fluffed high from the August humidity, and absolutely rocking the shit out of an orange floral summer dress that, from my vantage point, posed more temptation to my eyes than they’d trained me to withstand. That alone wasn’t all that weird. Hot blondes go to school the same as the rest of us. Only… these legs didn’t belong to a college student—or if they did, she was nontraditional to the point that they’d never let her live in the dorms. Her hotness was probably shaving off a few years, but objectively she was easily 30, but could easily be into her forties.
The flirty smirk on her face was at least as aggressive as that whistle.
“Um, hi…?” That was what came of three years of RA training in conflict intervention, diversity appreciation, and de-escalation.
“Hey yourself,” the woman answered. I was already pondering my options for how to respond to this woman’s presence. Some alum checking out her old stomping grounds, maybe? Should I gently ask her if she got lost, or what her business here was? Tell her this was a private residence hall and ask her to leave? Invite her down to my room and try to talk that dress off of her?
Before I could decide, however, a voice accompanied a figure rounding the corner behind her.
“Mom! Oh my god, that’s so gross!” Joining my harasser was the answer to the riddle, a woman I’d peg as a few years younger than myself. Next to the wolf whistler, she stood a little blonder, a little shorter, a little more academic with her cute blue-framed glasses, but no less attractive. She was carrying two boxes, but looked to be on the verge of throwing them at her mom in mortification.
I stood, brushed off my knees, and put my smile back on. “Hi, there. I’m Spencer, the RA. What room are you looking for?”
“318,” the girl answered. “And I’m Dana.”
“Nice to meet you, Dana. C’mon, it’s this way. Are you a freshman?” Against my better judgment, I grabbed one of her boxes. She smiled gratefully, ample reward. Especially considering we weren’t twenty feet from the door to her room.
“Um, yeah. Is it that obvious?”
“Oh, he’s only paying you a compliment, honey. Treasure your youth while it lasts.”
I kept my attention on Dana. This was a classic technique, one I’d used to solid results in years past. Ignore the parents, focus on the student. Most freshmen were pretty excited to be escaping parental clutches. Having people choose to interact with them instead of the Real Adults was novel and empowering. Dana’s mom sauntered along behind us; if she was irritated to be written off so quickly, she didn’t give evidence of it aloud. Plus I had the unsettling feeling that she was looking at my ass, so I didn’t make things worse by looking back.
“Not at all, Dana. Just that most of the folks on the floor are freshmen, so it was a good guess.” Not that my roster said as much, but I’d asked Ramona.
“Oh yeah? Cool. I was sorta worried I might be the only one.”
“Nonsense. In fact, you’re the first person moving in, so that actually gives you seniority, kind of. Ah, and here we are. You can hand me that—then just swipe your student ID right in the slot there, and… voila!”
I followed Dana into the room, her mother right on my heels. I set the boxes down on one of the desks. “Welcome to Higgins 3.”
She looked around the tiny room in wonder. To be fair, the furniture was brand new, and while it was nothing fancy, it was her first place of her own. (At least until her roommate Danielle showed up.) I’d been in a lot of dorm rooms over the years, and most of them split the difference between the bedroom of a slob who’d never dusted or vacuumed in their life, and a medieval dungeon. These were bright, clean, freshly painted. If the floor tiles were scuffed and chipped in places and the ceiling bore evidence of where past occupants had burned their illicit candles, it was still going to be head and shoulders a nicer-looking pad than would be occupied by the friends she’d be making from other residence halls in the coming weeks.
“Wow, this looks so nice!”
“It looks so nice,” echoed Mrs. Dana, except pointedly at me. Was that more flirtation in her tone? Dana was distracted, that iconic “which bunk do I claim?!” battle playing out in her eyes, so at least she didn’t have to be embarrassed again.
“So, early move-in?” I opened, taking a space by the closets. Dana’s mom was inhabiting the doorway.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah. I’m in the marching band. They had us all living in Ballard, right by the School of Music, but they said we could move into our permanent dorms tonight instead of doing it with everybody else.” Then she made a face, squelched a smile, and I realized she was trying to seem too mature to giggle at her phrasing in “doing it with everybody else.”
“Band, huh? What do you play?” I thought to myself that I’d have pegged her as a cheerleader, but then I had to think even harder not to think the words “peg her” going forward lest I wind up making that same face.
“Piccolo, mostly, but I also play the flute and some clarinet. I’m not very good or anything, though.”
“Nonsense, sweetheart.” Dana’s mom eyed her daughter with pride bordering on reverence, then delivered her correction to me. “My baby was in the all state marching and concert band for the piccolo. She’s been taking private lessons since she was in fourth grade. She could barely get her hands around the piccolo then. Do you remember?”
“Mom! Don’t call me a baby!” Dana groaned, blushing.
“She was so cute, trying to learn her fingering, going around the house holding her breath so she could work on her lung capacity, and… what do they call that thing you did, honey, where you have to blow and blow really fast?” Mrs. Dana’s lips formed an “O” and I lost the specifics of Dana’s cry of agony at her mother’s embarrassing behavior in the display of violently heaving cleavage as she sucked air in and out in rapid bursts.
Her eyes stayed on me through the whole bizarre performance. The only thing I could think was that Dana’s dad must not have been getting the job done for quite a while now. Since Dana, maybe.
“Anyway,” Dana said after an exasperated look at her mother, who disregarded it but did slow her roll, “I’m gonna go get another load from the car. Feel free to not follow me, Mother. And Spencer, it’s been really nice to meet you. A boy RA, huh? That’s so cool.”
“The coolest.” I flashed my least cool smile. Dorky was better than smooth here. The last thing in the world I needed was a resident thinking I was flirting with her.
“I guess if there’s anything else to know, you’ll tell me? Our summer RA just kind of knocked on doors whenever we had to know something. I’m not sure I ever learned her name. I’m pretty sure I won’t forget yours, though, Spencer.” She smiled, and with the afternoon sun hitting her hair just so, she was radiant. Who knew I’d wind up with such a looker on my floor, huh?
“I’ll make sure you know what you need to know. For now, I’d say there’s not much more than we have our first floor meeting tomorrow night at 7, so we can all meet everybody, details on orientation, all that jizzness.” My eyes shot wide open. Holy fuckballs. “Oh my gosh, sorry! I think I was trying to say basiness and jizz—jazz! business! jazz!—and… You know, why don’t you go get your next load and I’ll crawl back down the hall and bury my head in the floor.”
Dana giggled sweetly, bit her lower lip self-consciously and she slipped past her mother without another word. After giving her a moment’s head start, I made to do the same—only to be stopped with a gentle yet implacable hand on my chest.
“Hold up, Spencer.”
I held up. “Um, sure. I’m really sorry, about, um… you know. The, ah…”
“The jizz?” She smiled without showing her teeth. “Forgiven. A boy your age… well, such things are known to happen.”
I grimaced. What did you say to that?
“You’re going to keep a close eye on my daughter, aren’t you, Spencer?”
God, I loved the way my name sounded from those lips. I loved it exactly in the way I wasn’t supposed to. “Oh, of course. Not too close, that is. But, you know, close. It’s my job, after all. Hehe.” Did I just say “hehe?” What was even happening?
“Good. My baby girl needs it. Dana’s a very, very sweet girl. So innocent. You know, she never even had a boyfriend in high school?”
“Oh. That’s, um… no.” What in the name of every single fuck did that factoid have to do with anything?
“I’ll feel so much better knowing she has someone here to keep watch on her for me. Someone young…” Her fingers teased at my pecs. “And strong.”
I tried to inch past her, but it only brought me closer. Unless I wanted to just push past the glorious balcony of MILF tits blocking the way, that door may as well be another cinder block wall. “Well, you don’t have a thing to worry about.”
Her head twisted to one side, poising her lips perfectly for kissing. Why had I gotten so close? What the hell was even happening?! “That’s a load off, Spencer. I’m so grateful. You know, Dana thinks I’m such an embarrassment—I had her so young, she’s always thought of me as more of a bratty big sister than a mother. We’re so close, she and I. But I promised my hubbins I’d see to it she was put in good hands. Are you good hands, Spencer?”
When had she grabbed my hands? Great googly fucks, was she going to put them on her…?!
She stopped short. Shit. I mean, thank god. Shit.
“I, um, think I should be getting back to work, ma’am.”
Her smile broke wider as she snickered. “‘Ma’am,’ he calls me. Such a gentleman. Go on and get back to work, Spencer. It was just an absolute pleasure meeting you.”
I squeezed past her, our chests barely grazing.
She grabbed my ass. Not a pinch. Not a pat. A full-on open-palmed grope.
I managed not to run back to where I’d left my supplies. Dana returned with her second load as I sunk back down to finish up those door tags. I gave her a wave, a smile. She gave me a smile, a wave. That was that. Jizzness as usual.
I had three more early arrivals that evening. They were all three women, which was heartening. One of them actually was a cheerleader, and looked the part. One of the others was cute, too, but I couldn’t have remembered any of their names if I’d been poised over the brink of a volcano, threatened with a hard shove. Come to think of it, I’d never gotten Mrs. Dana’s name, either. And think of it I did, for hours after.
I couldn’t let myself use the incident for… that. It wouldn’t be right.
About half past midnight, I had to head down the hall to take a cold shower. On my way past Dana’s room, I saw the door was open. And that she was in there, in a pair of pink PJs with some kind of tiny cartoon figures all over them. PJs that looked like they would be way the hell too tight for me to fall asleep in them. PJs that outlined each ass cheek perfectly as she bent down in front of her closet, arranging her shoes on a rack.
I didn’t know Dana, but I knew where she’d gotten her ass, all right.
That shower was as cold as it could get, and I barely kept my attention on getting clean.