The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Incredibly, I finally got to have a few “normal” days to round out opening week. My open door policy saw some use, but never when I wasn’t fully dressed, and nothing went up my ass. So that was nice. I learned to get discreet coming and going in the bathroom, to the extent that was possible. Hard to say if girls walking around in little towels, clingy pajamas, even sports bras and panties, was the norm in women’s communities, or if my ladies were just shameless.

Rowland had had women’s floors, but I only ever went on them on rounds. That meant my experience with women’s communities was restricted to late at night, when most residents were hanging out in their rooms for the night or already asleep. Plus they expected male RAs to be walking around occasionally. In the mornings, why wouldn’t Kendall (not “Ken,” as she’d been listed on the roster) brush her teeth in her underwear? It was probably that way in most women’s communities on campus. My girls simply had that lone male gaze to evade, and most seemed determined not to let it disrupt their lifestyle. I did my best to blend in with the paint on the walls and let them be themselves.

Compared to those first couple days, trying not to wonder if I was hearing heavy breathing from the next shower stall over, and if so, what that might portend, it was easy RAing.

I was on duty both Friday and Saturday nights. I’d signed up for a lot of weekend duty this semester. My friends had graduated and I was single, so it gave me a chance to be a working class hero to the rest of the Higgins staff. I was secondary Friday, doing rounds with Vanessa. She asked in hushed tones as we ascended the Higgins stairwells if it was true about that girl, to which I could only ask, “Which one?”

“In your room,” she said.

That still didn’t narrow things down much, so once the stairs were nice and quiet, I explained that a couple of my girls had gotten some crazy ideas about their RA. One of them was gone, and the other on notice. Somebody emerged midway through the telling a floor below us; I went ahead and finished, dropping Leigh’s name in what I hoped were audible levels. Leigh could use having her dirty laundry aired a little bit before she built up any worse of a name for herself. Indeed, she didn’t say more than a few muttered words to me in passing for the rest of Welcome Week.

Saturday I was primary, working the center desk. I had all of my roommate agreements and RCRs done by then, so I spent the evening giving directions to frat houses and apartment complexes to the freshmen heading out to learn the Lakeview party scene, and dutifully filing paperwork. After what I’d put Ramona through, it wouldn’t hurt to have her see me busting my butt and getting ahead of the curve on something.

Janis stopped by around 11:30 that night. As secondary, she was supposed to help me close up the center building, though I’d told her at check-in that I was fine doing it by myself.

“You’re here early,” I observed.

“Yeah, one of my residents is playing this ghetto music insanely loud and I just couldn’t handle it. You mind if I use the computer?”

Oh, Janis. I didn’t know whether to start with the phrase “ghetto music,” the fact that enforcing acceptable levels of noise was part of her job description, or that she’d just walked up and casually asked to evict me from the work I was doing. When we’d done our first icebreakers at the start of staff training, I’d been a little surprised to hear her share she didn’t have—had never had, in fact—a serious boyfriend. If she wasn’t Savannah grade beautiful (and who was), she was still very attractive, in a precisely banal way. She didn’t wear makeup, straight blonde hair evenly cut at exactly shoulder length, blue eyes that sparkled because they were blue yet were nevertheless dulled by her lack of curiosity. She had the confidence only a pretty white blonde girl can, tempered by a worldview that had taught her the world could be handily subdivided into two categories: people like her, and the tragically iniquitous masses—where “iniquity” meant “into things she isn’t.”

I understood pretty quickly why she was single. She was the sort of girl you fantasized about dumping.

“Go for it,” I replied, vacating the chair and taking a place on the stool in front of the service window. The center desk was the beating heart of Higgins Hall. It was the mailroom, the point of contact for work orders or other such complaints, Ramona’s office (closed and dark after hours), and right next to it, a dated but not entirely disused computer lab. From what I’d been told, it was mostly there for folks who needed but didn’t have a printer, but even now there were some students who didn’t have their own computers. At close to midnight on a Saturday, it was occupied by a single young international woman who looked to be video-chatting family. When she’d come in, she’d asked me in a thick Korean accent how long she had, and I’d promised her she could stay up until the moment I closed up. She’d smiled so big, I’d figured on staying late for her, up until Janis showed up. Janis would want to close at midnight, because that was protocol, and why wouldn’t one follow protocol. Ah, well.

It was a few minutes before Janis and I exchanged another word.

“Are these your roommate agreements…?” she asked, lifting the stack I’d left there.

“Yep. Every last one of them.”

“You’re done?!” Her jaw dropped incredulously. “I can’t even get my girls to sign up for time slots, and you’re done? I think I have four, and you’re done.”

“Gotta go after ’em if you want to get them done,” I said with all the humility I could manage. It didn’t help that I was pretty pleased with myself over it. “Some real doozies this year.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Oooh, yeah.” I slid my stool over and picked out a few. The Tits Out/Timeout one from Lex and Jo in 316, obviously. Over in 307, Terri and Toni had put in writing that they were each cool with the other borrowing their clothes, including underwear, without asking, at any time—and these two were randomly assigned, not friends from high school. My next door neighbors in 308, Casey and Nikki, had included a clause about using headphones when ‘consuming media,’ which had made sweet little Nikki blush so hard that it was obvious someone had already been caught watching porn. Casey had grinned right at me, glowing with self-satisfaction, when she figured I’d figured.

Somewhat less salacious was Danielle and Dana’s, the latter of whom had insisted upon half an hour every weeknight to have quiet and/or privacy to call her mother. Janis demanded to know why I thought that was out of the ordinary. I let it drop.

There was, however, one thing I hadn’t noticed, that somehow Janis did as she flipped through the pages. “Spencer, did you realize literally every room on your floor checked the same thing on number sixteen?”

I craned my neck. “What’s sixteen? The ‘tidiness of personal effects’ one?”

“No, overnight guests.”

“Yeah?” I looked at the top one, Peyton and Sydney’s. They’d checked off ‘No opposite-gendered overnight guests,’ the last option. Made sense, considering they were a lesbian couple. Still… “All of them?”

Janis nodded as I flipped through the forms. “You’re not wrong,” I muttered, frowning in puzzlement.

“I know I’m not wrong.”

Most of the way through the stack, my frown intensifying by the page, I found a different response on Kendall and Georgia’s. They’d opted to write in an answer—but then I read it. No boys allowed! it declared unambiguously.

“I told you,” Janis said when I put the stack down.

“Yeah, you sure did. Doing them that fast, I guess I just didn’t notice. That’s, ah, pretty weird, I guess.”

It was more than weird, though, and Janis was on hand to make sure I didn’t let myself off the hook. “Looks like they should’ve polled the troops before they reinstated you,” she observed casually.

“I have no idea what that means.”

I did, though. It was the same conclusion I’d been trying not to elucidate in my head. “Seriously? It means that your girls don’t want you there. I would’ve thought that was pretty obvious.”

“It doesn’t either. I think we’ve been mostly getting along pretty well so far, actually,” I protested. Too well, in a few cases, but for the most part, I’d thought we were hitting it off nicely.

“You mean other than the time one of your girls accused you of sleeping with her, and you had to fight her naked and hold down the girl she was beating up, also naked. And then the girl you held down went to your room and again, for some reason, got naked.” Janis folded her arms, a cold little smile on her bare pink lips. “Right, I could see how nobody would mind living with an authority figure who might tackle you in the shower.”

“Oh come on, you know that’s not how it was.”

“Do I?”

“Seriously, Janis. I don’t know what people are saying, but that whole experience actually really sucked. I don’t need you trying to make it sound like it was some wild sexy thing.”

After a moment, her sneer dissipated, though only after a sniff of disapproval. “Yeah, probably. Sorry. Anyway, you ready to shut down? I’ll go kick that Asian girl out of the computer lab; you count down the drawer.”

Other than that, it was a pleasant couple days. The weather was nice, people were excited and happy and making friends and settling in, shorts were worn. Was I uneasy at the suggestion my ladies had decided to send me some kind of No Boys Allowed message coded in those roommate agreements? A little, yeah. I wasn’t ready to be pushed out yet, though.

I slept on it, then Sunday poured myself into community building. If a door was open, I was knocking on it to make sure folks were ready and excited for their first day of classes. You know how to find all the buildings? Got your books purchased? Know the drop/add dates and policies? How about good places to grab lunch on campus? I love the way you decorated, by the way! Have you met Person down in Room Number? Because I think she’s into Thing You’re Displaying too!

I was en fuego.

It was impossible to say if there was some undercurrent of resentment amongst the populace. What I did know, though, was that things felt good. Positive interactions. Bright smiles. Happy girls.

Last year, I’d attended a regional RA conference. Dorky, sure, but my hall director had been trying to encourage me to go into the field professionally after I graduated, and it was an all-expense paid weekend trip to another school. I even hooked up with an RA from Davis, so there. It sparked a year-long inside joke with me and the guys on my floor about “networking” after I bragged about my conquest.

Anyway, the conference had all these sessions to pick and choose from—decorating techniques, recognizing and using your leadership style, tips for soliciting donated food for floor programs, and so on. This one blurb had been vague enough to grab my interest. “Authenticity,” it had been called. The whole thing was this interesting (to me) critical perspective on the field, how all this effort we spend being woke and addressing inequality and promoting inclusivity amounted to a bunch of bullshit posturing—when it didn’t come from honest intentions.

Now, it made me think about RAs like Janis. Folks who wanted free room and board and would phone in what they had to in order to get it. Not that I judged them for it. Much. Lots of people phoned in their jobs. My first year or two, I definitely had. But as time went by, it made me question how much I believed in it all.

It turned out? I believed a little bit.

The one point I stressed to every resident I crossed paths with was to show up at the final floor meeting that evening. “Is it mandatory…?” asked resident after resident.

“It’s a funportunity,” I replied time after time. Of course it wasn’t mandatory. For crying out loud, who had time and energy to try to punish somebody for not coming to a floor meeting?

It was, however, an important one.

“Welcome, welcome!” I called out as we got things underway. I could hardly believe my eyes. Opening night floor meeting, sure, you could expect almost all of the freshman, and a coin toss for the upperclassmen. The third meeting, a couple weeks into the semester, most RAs were lucky if they had enough show up to fill the floor government they were electing that night. This second meeting tended, from most accounts and certainly my own experience, toward the latter.

Every last woman from Higgins 3 was in attendance. I counted them twice before I started. They were all here. Even the triplets. It was the RA equivalent of a blowout. It was hard not to giggle in delight—and this was without telling them it was mandatory, like a lot of RAs did!

What the heck had I done right?

“I am so, so glad to see everybody here,” I opened. Authentically, I might add. Doubly so, because holy shit was that a lot of legs and boobs in that lounge. I tried not to notice, but with them sitting cross-legged on the floor, sitting on armrests, sitting on the tables, sitting on window sills, every lap filled with another girl, there simply wasn’t anywhere to rest my eyes where there wasn’t skin.

We opened with a couple news items, reminders, and procedural bits. Make sure to turn off the tap behind you in the bathroom, quiet hours finally officially start tonight at 10, the poll results are in and congrats on being the most awesome floor in Higgins Hall.

“Did someone really take a poll…?” Katrina murmured, but loud enough to be heard.

“I asked everybody who matters,” I assured her. The girls laughed. “Now I know we started off the year with, well, let’s call it a little drama, shall we?”

A dozen pairs of eyes shot to where Leigh was sitting beneath Angel. The latter’s massive boobs hid her pretty well, but even with that golden tan, her blush was obvious. Beside her, Charlie put an arm around her shoulder and whispered something consoling. The rest of the eyes, however, went straight to my crotch.

“Damn, and I missed it!” called someone. I missed them likewise.

“Whip it out! Whip it out! Whip it out!” That was Casey. A few more daring girls picked up the chant, but mercifully it didn’t last long.

“Stay classy, ladies.” The agitators looked pretty pleased with themselves. “So. We have two things to tackle tonight, and as promised they are funportunities.”

“So you are gonna whip it out…?” Casey pressed, licking her lips theatrically.

“All right now, come on, let’s pretend I still have a little dignity left,” I deflected with a good deal more grace than I felt. I’d been so focused during the fight that I hadn’t internalized the identities of the witnesses, so talking with them one on one or in pairs hadn’t been too bad. In front of the crowd, though, it was hard to forget that a huge chunk of these girls had seen my hard wet dick. I’d worked hard not to find out if there were pictures circulating; nothing I could do to stop it, so the best thing for it was to impose a little willful ignorance.

“So. Thing one. I don’t know if you know this, but folks? You are rich.” They looked around at one another in confusion, mumbling curiously. “Because this floor was supposed to be coed, and thereby supposed to be included in the academic and thematic community program.” The confusion intensified. “Blah blah blah to say… for most communities, Lakeview charges a $5 activity fee for the year. Enough to order pizza a couple times, basically, as long as you don’t want good pizza.”

“So we got charged more?”

“How much more?”

I surveyed the room. “For us, it’s $100.”

As the girls looked around doing the story problem, slowly a ripple of energy washed over them. “That’s, like, thousands of dollars,” someone finally said.

“$100 per semester,” I added. Then, as they contemplated how much that was, I hit them with the finisher. “And while most floors’ unused funds disappear at the end of the year, because of the size of the ones like ours, ours rolls over from previous years.”

“How much was left from last year?” asked Tori.

“A little over twelve grand.”

I gave them a moment to process. Not every day a teenager finds out they’ve got a stake in twenty grand. It was Tori again—already my favorite for our future floor governor—who got them focused again. “So, what do we get to do with all that?”

“And that’s the funportunity. We were supposed to be using it on our theme, namely, gender relations. Now that gender relations has basically become me learning to sit down to pee…” They humored me with a laugh. It was mostly true. We had urinals in one bathroom, yes, but I couldn’t use the things when there were women passing through all the time. “We basically get to do anything we want. So. Let’s brainstorm, shall we? Program ideas. We can go places. We can bring in speakers. We can eat, we can party, we can whatever we want as long as it’s not against the law or Lakeview policy.”

The brainstorming took some time to get going, jotting down ideas on a giant flip pad I’d gotten on sale at the teacher supply store. Floor programs weren’t something most of them had ever thought about, naturally. I had a few ideas to get them going, several of which actually got a lot of traction. Far and away the frontrunner was the ever-popular massage night; the student health center had physical therapists in training who could snag some hours coming in and walking folks through the ropes. The most common scenario involved pairing up a girl’s floor and a boy’s floor, but my Higgins ladies insisted they’d rather keep things in-house.

They had lots of other ideas, though. Ideas that people seemed to like got pluses next to them until the detractors said to hold back. Purchasing a big-screen TV and doing movie nights in the lounge. A picnic at Bear Lake, maybe on Labor Day? There was some interest in exploring a few of the campus culture centers, especially the Latinx and API centers. (It felt a little sleazy, bribing them into learning opportunities with tasty ethnic food, but the staff working the culture centers never minded.) Attending a campus sporting event together, starting a book club, starting a knitting group—we had all the angles covered.

When a pause in the excited discussion hit, I dropped my other hidden agenda. “We were also fortunate to have the Hancock Institute here at Lakeview. Anybody familiar…?”

The girls looked around blankly. “The Hancock Institute is… well… They do sex.” Their looks instantly became less blank. “It’s one of the best respected research centers for human sexuality in the world. They have the biggest porn archive in the Western hemisphere, in fact, and it’s all open to the public.”

There was a mix of mortification, confusion, and thankfully, piqued interest. Jo raised a hand, her pinched face placing her in the first group. “Jo. Go.”

“Are you suggesting we volunteer for sex research…?”

“Whoa there, not at all. I’m talking about learning opportunities with their sexperts as teachers. I’ve done programs with their people before, and if it’s in any way about sex, they’re on it. Keeping yourself safe from the creeps out there? They do that. In fact, let me say, we’re going to do that.” Yeah yeah, ugly girls get raped too, but these girls had formed a vault of temptation for men of ill intent second only to the upper echelon of sorority houses.

The specificity of the example seemed to satisfy some of the nervous faces, so I went on. “On my last couple floors, we did a program where my guys got together with my girls and we did a thing, maybe you’ve seen, where everybody got to put down anonymous questions about the other sex, and the other sex answered. The Hancock Institute lended us somebody to provide some expert insight, too.”

That part was only marginally true. Lended us wasn’t quite the spirit of it. Marisa, one of their graduate fellows in their research department, had insisted on it. I was happy to let her. For one, it was educational and engaging, all the more so when my guys got to have their sex queries answered by a chick as cute as Marisa. For two, not many things made Marisa hornier than getting to stand in front of people and talk explicitly about sex. We barely made it back to my room before she was all over me.

I continued, “They do all kinds of LGBTQIA+ stuff, so we can have some pride events if we want. They can talk about heavy stuff like STD prevention, pregnancy prevention, what to do if you or someone you know has been the victim of a sex crime, they do—”

“Sounds like these folks really hate sex,” Casey said, snorting.

I regarded her evenly. “Last year, they came to one of the floors in my building and gave oral sex lessons. With props.”

“Daaaaamn,” said Angel. Which was what I’d said when Marisa, whom I’d recently broken up with, told me she was doing it. Except I’d elaborated a bit to say, Damn it Marisa, is that really appropriate? She’d told me I was being a sex-negative asshole and pointed out I could benefit from one of her lessons.

“Look, my point is, you’re not in high school any more. Statistically speaking, most of us are gonna have sex before we finish college, and plenty of us have already. I’m a fan myself.” I paused for the laughter that line had always gotten from my guys in years past when I’d hit them with my big sex-positivity spiel. I did not receive it. Oops. “Plus, statistically speaking, some of us are going to be targeted by some creepy guys. All I’m saying is I want you all to be able to enjoy yourselves, to feel confident, to be safe. So if you heard something you’re interested in, talk to me, and I’ll make it happen.”

“You just want us to learn how to give awesome head,” Casey teased, again. That girl really needed to get laid. Maybe after Leigh assaulted her in the shower for flirting with me and I rushed in nude to defend her, she’d back off.

“Hey, if you want to learn, I know a guy who knows a guy,” I quipped, not to be out-casualed about it all. “Anyway, hopefully you’re not freaking out. I know some of you probably never even got what some might call the basic sex ed birds and bees, and since that’s sorta the foundation of human life, it feels like it’s something worth knowing a thing or two about. For now, though, it’s coming up on eight o’clock already, so let’s get to funportunity number two.”

“Yay, funportunity,” said Jordyn with a sarcastic apathy that was, frankly, kind of adorable.

“We’re gonna get floor t-shirts,” I announced. “Higgins 3 t-shirts. And we’re going to design them ourselves.”

“It’s not my fault!” I insisted to Ramona during our one-on-one Monday afternoon.

We were meeting in the student union, where she’d only recently gotten out of a meeting with Lakewview’s director of residence life, Bob. We’d opened with that. She’d manage to clear me in the Lex & Jo scandal; that I hadn’t shared the Tits Out/Timeout calendar probably helped. Bob had told her he wanted to talk to me personally, which I was not looking forward to considering all that had happened. Then, before we pivoted entirely away from colossal fuckups, I told her about the t-shirt fiasco.

Or rather… “How could you possibly think that this would be in any way acceptable, Spencer?! I swear, you impressed me so much during training, and John had such good things to say about you. Bob, too, in fact. You made a name for yourself at Lakeview Housing & Res Life. But ever since those young women showed up on your doorstep, it’s been one thing after another with you. I’m honestly starting to worry you’re trying to gaslight me!”

“I swear, I tried to talk them down. I knew—I know—how it sounds! I said ‘let’s make t-shirts, who has ideas for a logo or a tagline or something?’ I said we could do a meme, or something with the Lakeview bear, or a bunch of other things that were not that. But when I opened it up to suggestions, before I knew it…”

“What about Higgins Hotties?” That had been Angel, though I thought I’d caught Leigh whisper something to her right before she spoke up.

“Uh, what?” I asked intelligently. But already, instantly, the girls were clamoring for it. “Um, no way that’s going to fly, ladies.”

“Come on, Spencer. Did you seriously not notice that we’re maintaining an easy 8.5 average up here? Lean into it, I say!” Angel took to her feet, motioning for others to join her. To my chagrin, they did.

“The university has rights regarding how its logos are used,” I tried to explain over a roar of boos. Their protests kept my anecdote brief and barely heard. One of the guys in Rowland my first year had learned that the hard way after the campus police showed up to confiscate a box of t-shirts that read Rowland Hall: No Fat Chicks.

“So… what if they don’t say Higgins…?”

I looked at Ramona pleadingly. “It all happened so fast.”

“I don’t care how fast it happened, Spencer. You cannot spend university funds to sexualize university students. If it says Higgins, Lakeview… legal will have the head of anybody who tries to pull something like this, to say nothing of what Bob or Janie at the Women’s Center will say!”

“I know. I get it, believe me I do.”

“I appreciate that you’re a good-looking guy, Spencer. If you didn’t work for me—and I weren’t married…” Ramona suddenly blanched at her oversharing and shook her head. “Sorry, that was a joke in poor taste. But just because women like you doesn’t mean you get to sit back and bask in their adulation. Sometimes you have to be the heavy.” She threw her hands in the air in exasperation. “Jesus, Spencer. ‘Higgins Hotties!’”

“I told them no. I did! But then…”

“There it is.” Jordyn set the marker down and stepped away from my flip pad. “Higgins mothafuckin’ hotties, y’all!”

I had to hand it to her—considering it was off the cuff and only took her a few minutes, it actually looked really good. Two capital H’s adjoined in the middle. She’d made it look like a trellis, and wrapped around it was a vine coated with a bunch of really nasty-looking thorns. At the top left, crowning the left-hand H, was a big flower.

The girls loved it. Hell, I objected to the thing; I knew Ramona would hate it; and I loved the thing. Seeing my community this pumped for a little token membership merch was an RA wet dream as vivid as the wet dreams these women would doubtless inspire all over campus every night.

“It looks great, Jordyn. Really. Still, that slogan is going to cause some issues.”

“The hell with issues!” Lex countered. “Come on, Spency baby, go to bat for ya girls! Let’s hear it for our boy, yeah? SPEN-CER. SPEN-CER. SPEN-CER.”

Beneath it, Casey and a few of her friends tried another round of Whip It Out.

“They were very persuasive,” I murmured sheepishly. “But the logo doesn’t actually say Higgins on it, does it? We can’t actually stop them if it doesn’t say Higgins, right?”

I brought up a pic I’d taken of Jordyn’s drawing and passed my phone to her. I was relieved to see her expression soften a little. A smile even leaked out for a moment. “This is actually pretty sick,” Ramona acknowledged, but she caught herself immediately. “But even the Higgins name is proprietary. If that H implies Higgins, we still have grounds to object.”

“But if we object, surely they’ll just make up a different meaning for it and pretend that’s what they meant. Heavenly Hotties, or House of Hotties, or act like one of those posts is an I and it’s I Heart Hotties, or—”

“I get it, Spencer, you have some lookers with no shortage of self-esteem. I was a college girl myself not that long ago, you know.” She left unsaid that, yeah, she’d also been a hottie. Weird how going from college coed to college hall director had transmuted the way I thought of her from “hot” to “attractive.” Sexy, even. Sexy was a classier word, for a classier hottie.

Not that I devoted much thought to my, erm, attractive, married boss.

“So… I have to tell them no?” I grimaced in anticipation.

Ramona studied the image again, shook her head. Shook it harder. Sighed. “Look,” she said finally, and my grin bloomed before she said anything further. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t have it in her to glare down enthusiasm. “If you go through with this, you swear to me—and I mean it, swear, Spencer—that this will not be used for bullying.”

“For… what?”

“Seriously? It didn’t occur to you that a bunch of pretty girls clustered in groups advertising their cosmetic superiority might use that to get crappy to the not-so-hotties of the world? God, Spencer, my objection wasn’t because I’m a frumpy old lady who objects to hot young college women being proud of what they are. It’s because people like that, some of them, will weaponize any opportunity to drive a wedge between themselves and the less fortunate. Do you remember that little blurb last spring from the Delta Alpha Theta house?”

I shook my head. “Can’t say I do. Don’t really follow Greek life much.”

“Yeah, well, some local, not even a student, was chased out of the house sobbing. A campus policeman saw her—cute little blonde thing bawling Cinderella tears. Cute-ish, anyway. Let’s just say she wasn’t exactly DAT girl material. Anyway, she reported she’d just gone over to confront one of the sorority members over indiscretions with her boyfriend, and apparently the whole house came down on the poor thing like a category five girlicane, telling her she was ugly, fat, poor, et cetera. It was bad enough the Panhellenic Council fined DAT House pretty harshly over it.”

“Huh. Sounds bad. And I’m sorry, but did you just spontaneously throw out ‘category five girlicane?’”

“I used to be a sorority girl, too, Spencer. I was ousted from the tribe, but I still speak the language. Now swear to me you’re going to make it crystal clear that these shirts are to build community, not foster exclusivity.”

“I promise. I’ll go at them one on one once they’re in from the print shop.”

“They’re already at the print shop?!”

Fuck. “They were eager! There’s one right near the art studio where Jordyn is—Jordyn is the one who did the design—where she’s interning this semester. She said she’d take it in.”

“You know, I was a much bigger fan of the ‘better to ask forgiveness than permission’ approach when I was on the permission-seeking side of things instead of the permission-granting,” she grumbled. She glanced one last time at the image before handing me back my phone. “What’s that at the bottom? It’s too blurry for me to read.”

“Oh. Ah, yeah. That’s sort of the other thing I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Am I going to need Tylenol to continue this meeting, Spencer? Or something stronger?”

“No! No, this isn’t another… This is just…” I looked at the indeed blurry words scrawled beneath Jordyn’s drawing, then let a gust of air out of the corner of my mouth and spat it out. “It’s about my roommate agreements.”

“I’m really pumped, gang. You guys—sorry, you girls—had so many awesome ideas and so much good energy tonight. There is one last tiny thing I wanted to talk about, and this one, well, it’s a little more… personal?”

“Is this about whatever nasty bitch ain’t flushing behind them?” Lex snapped.

“Um, no, and they’re automatic, so it’s probably just a problem with the sensor. Show me which stall after, and I’ll get it fixed. No, it’s actually about your roommate agreements.”

“If we don’t have a roommate, can we go?” Jordyn asked. She’d only just sat back down, but bounced right back up at the promise of escaping a meeting.

“Yeah, I suppose.” She was out the door in a flash. The other single room occupants followed behind her. Katrina, who had recently inherited a single after Quinn’s dismissal, stayed. I made sure to flash her a grateful smile, which the former salutatorian graciously reciprocated.

“We don’t have to go over those again, do we?” groused Peyton. “I know you’re just doing your job, but seriously, that was so boring.”

“No, you’re good.”

“Is this about Tits Out Timeout?” Lex inquired, grinning salaciously. A ripple of inquiries about what the hell that meant crossed the room, but I waved them down.

“No. No, it’s actually that… Well, there’s no easy way to say this, so here goes. I was looking them over, and I noticed that all of you—literally all of you—indicated that you didn’t want any visitation privileges for members of the opposite sex. Namely, um, men. Ever.”

They looked around, not a one of them seeming to grasp where I was going with this. Like I’d said they all indicated they liked the thermostat kept below 70 at night. So what, their expressions read.

“Yeah, so ah, I guess I just wanted to ask if any of you had anything you wanted to say, um, to me?”

“What do you mean?” shy Andi asked quietly. She read my anxiety, though; her voice was concerned.

“Do you guys want a female RA? Like, I guess I’m trying to ask if this was your way of telling me you don’t want guys around, and as the only guy around…”

The chorus of women reassuring me that I was wanted immediately shot to my top five most touching moments ever.

I hate girl bosses! said someone.

No way, we love you! insisted another.

Whip. It. Out! Casey tried once more to start.

They were so loud, so forceful about it, that the girls in the singles came back to see what was going on. Charlie rushed at me and threw a full-on bear hug at me. “You’re not getting out of here that easy,” she said into my chest.

In no time flat, it became this gigantic group hug. I think the only person not in it was Jordyn, who was the last to double back, arriving once it was already underway. She got out her camera and recorded it.

We filed out together, Lex taking me into custody and making sure I knew which stall was “the grody one.” Only later, when I remembered to go back for the flip pad, did I see someone had made a final amendment to Jordyn’s design.

I cleared my throat. “It says ‘no boys allowed.’ With, um, a little caret there to insert a ‘more’ between ‘no’ and ‘boys.’”

Ramona couldn’t help but chuckle at my discomfort. “Yep. Tylenol isn’t going to cut it.”