Everyone had forgotten that being entirely free is not necessarily an entirely good thing.
‘What is there but sleep,’ she asks, a little bit desperately, chewing at her hangnails. ‘And drinking, and sleep, and reading, and sleep?’
‘How does it feel?’ asks a boy enviously with folders and the pale look of having lived in the library for too long. And we shrug our sunburned shoulders, because none of us know what to do with ourselves but to sleep, yet when we are up after 8am we feel guilty.
The boy climbs into bed where I am sleeping to pass time (so much of it) at two pm (unprecedented this term). ‘Up,’ he says, very firmly, so I arise like a sea monster from my bed of sulk and emptiness with hair draped terribly in wr0ng directions and over my face, and decide the answer lies in the gym. Which it does, for a while, and it feels good sweating, only now the boy is in a funk of his own.
‘We don’t always,’ he says, ‘have to go everywhere together,’ and walks, feeling strange, he says, to King’s College to see the third years. They have adopted him, or maybe he has adopted them. P has an ensuite room and a projection screen, and film-wise, the boy is excited. ‘I’ve never been in there,’ I say, ‘what is it like?’ ‘It smells of weed,’ the boy says gleefully, ‘and he has a plastic bag over his fire sensor.’ M is mysterious and skinny and depressed, makes moonshine at midnight and has a drawer full of vices. I saw him walking across the court this morning. ‘I’ve just got back,’ he said, looking slightly dazed, and shockingly loquacious for him. ‘I think I might have broken something.’ ‘What?’ we aks, and ‘Where have you been?’ ‘I don’t know.’ he replies, and wanders away.
Goddamn Right 