I. Prologue
Graduation, the summer after? Woosh. Gone. It's been high-time fancy-schmancy excruciatingly mundane and boring Volcaldera Rex University life for a while now. I used to imagine how it will be a nice reprieve after the monotony high school, but no. Even the faces were mostly the same. Well, among the freshmen anyway.
You'd think colorful as our group was, the odds of us attending the same university would be slim. However, given the fact that this is the only institution close enough that ninety-percent of the students wouldn't have to live in the dorms, so ninety-percent of the pastel crowd persisted. Including Fang, Reed, Trish, Naomi, and basically everyone. Except for Naser, cause he of course had to pursue that elitist flare of his and go all "Ooh look at me, I'm gonna be a doctor!".
Honestly, I'm not sure why I was so upset about that. Him setting a higher goal should have been something to cherish, and not a thing to loathe. Maybe it was Fang's brooding about it that rubbed off onto me as well. We were both residents in the inner dormitory - there was another, newer facility on the outskirts of town - and thanks to her playing the they/them card and me playing the caveman card, we actually managed, against all odds, to get a room together. Just the two of us.
She was gonna get an arts degree. Something about music. I've never really committed it to memory, cause to me it was just her way of saying she's gonna be a burger flipper with a diploma. In fact I teased her about that quite often. I, on the other hand, was studying hard to become a video game developer. Because that's a highly esteemed and profitable career choice, obviously.
Actually, we took our respective courses seriously. With both of us being kinda dumb through highschool it had to be some minor miracle that we've got accepted here in the first place. We weren't gonna flush this one chance down the toilet. After the first month-and-a-half of welcome frat parties and whatnot we've settled into a slow but steady rhythm of studying in our room till evening, catching a shitty movie or watching some old-timey series while downing discount TV dinners, then going the fuck to sleep. Pre-bedtime copulation was also a possible reality.
It was one such afternoon when Fang made the decision that would change this town, and my life, forever.