Spencer and I started off going to the same college, after we graduated. We stuck pretty close together again after that whole night, and we had a few friends that came long with us when we ventured out into the world. I went in undecided, thinking the first couple years would point me in the right direction. Spencer went right off the bat into a pre-med program. That surprised pretty much everyone, since Spencer never came off as really bright, or altruistic, or ambitious...At all. Neither did I, but at least I went the prescribed slacker route about it and didn't try to pull any punches. He did seem to try though. Underneath it all he was grasping at something, desperately. I don't think anyone else could tell, but the way he tried to study, the way he took it seriously and got angry with himself, I could tell he was giving it as much effort as he could muster.
We were going to the same school and lived across from each other in the dorms. We did more or less the same thing we did in high school-- played a lot of video games, drank on the weekends, I let Spence copy my homework in the classes we had together. It was kind of a small college town, not a whole lot to do even on its best nights. By the end of the year every freshman was thoroughly sick of cosmic bowling. I didn't care much about anything except getting Bs, which would get my parents off my back, and skating-- I couldn't tell you how many times I'd been escorted off private property in the first semester, but the second semester saw a flourishing population of anti-loitering, skating, and roller blading signs around town. Spencer didn't stick with the basketball thing actually. As it happened our college basketball team blew really hard and he didn't feel like fighting that kind of uphill battle. He had to reinvest his time somewhere, somehow.
Things start to get a little weird here, so let me just preface this by saying it was all an accident and we're working things out, okay? Just suspend your judgment for a little bit and let me explain. Also, a quick and relevant side-story before we come back to Spencer's shit.
Laura was a mousey girl who lived on our floor. She moved in from somewhere in the Northeast of the country. She was short and skinny, with frizzy brown hair, comically thick glasses, braces with yellow rubber bands, and I think she may have even had a skin disease of some sort because she looked like she had mild acne that she wouldn't stop picking at. Her roommate had quit after the first few weeks of school, left for some family-related problem, and nobody had moved in in her stead. And nobody wanted to move in from the rest of the floor, to her dismay. She must have had asperger's or parkinson's or something because she could not function in normal society, with people her own age. The week after her roomie left, she went on a fruitless recruitment campaign. Every day that week, every day and I'm serious, she got fast food to eat. She had been depending no her roommate for actual food. This was Laura. A lone mariner stranded in an ocean full of capable young adults, desperately clinging to the makeshift raft of her social skills and utterly paralyzed by fear, unable to call for help. If she looked someone in the eyes for more than a few seconds, it was a good day for her.
Spencer kept himself occupied the next few months by pranking people. You know, like putting someone's hand in warm water while they're sleeping, or putting shaving cream in their hand and tickling their nose, or like filling the shampoo bottle in your shower with honey mustard. It was some sort of sick trickle-down stress pyramid; Spencer's professors would load him up with work, and he'd sit and stare at it for a few hours, get frustrated, then fuck with other people to let off steam. It started off pretty innocent, a lot of the classics like I said before. He was discovering this whole new side of himself he could use to stay entertained, and in exploring it he was learning a lot about the people around him. For example, I really don't like having the optical part of my optical mouse taped over when I have a term paper due the next day that I haven't started on. A lot of people really didn't like that.
I couldn't spend a lot of time with him, which is unfortunate because I think that's what was balancing him out, sort of. He's not psycho crazy or anything, I think he was just under a lot of stress. I shouldn't apologize for him. I just don't want you to think badly of him for what happened. I had a lot of homework and studying to do, so I sort of left him to his own devices a lot of the time, and those devices got more elaborate. Once, he had one of the girls in the dorm help him by holding a bowl of water against the hall ceiling with a broom, then he slapped her in the ass and it came down on top of her. She had a crush on him, so no harm no foul, but you see what I mean. He would take to shit like hiding in our room in ridiculous places, creeping out slowly when I wasn't looking and scaring me. I tolerated it, some people got pissed. Mostly, I think he got ignored, which was for the better. He didn't always stick to the dorms, though. The school newspaper started running stories about weird stuff happening around campus-- pranks like bikes taken apart and welded back together around lamp posts, or a crazy person in an animal suit running around and acting retarded in the middle of the night to scare people. He was getting really into this thing. It was moving past a hobby and was what most would call an obsession. I like to think he was refining an art form. Seriously, welding someone's bike around a lamp post? I didn't think he even knew how to weld. That's just dedication right there.
It was probably around February when he finally stopped, and it was cold turkey too. He started spending most of his time sleeping. Either studying, sleeping, or nobody knew what he was doing. At least, that's what I heard from his roommate and the other people on the floor. I was really too busy to notice, and I regret that now. It was also around this time that news spread about Laura. She'd gone missing that week. A few people from her classes became concerned that she wasn't around, and when her parents showed up it finally set off the whole powderkeg that'd been building up.
There was some commotion in the hallway that day so I peeked out to see. Mrs. Laura's Mom had the body of a retired professional wrestler from the 1940s, a stocky blob you could wrap a leotard around, and hair that was gray long before its time. Her husband wasn't faring much better-- he looked exactly like a molester would look, complete with a caesar-cut bald spot, big thick rounded-square glasses with a brown tinted plastic frame, and a big round puffy body that stick out over the belt just a little too much. From humble beginnings. They were both part of a huge combined emotional wreck, and when it got too awkward for me to watch I just listened from my door about how they talked on the phone every night to their daughter and that she hadn't been returning their calls for five days now, that they flew straight in from Montpilier when it started going right to voicemail because Mrs. Laura's Mom('s intuition) was going nuts. They poured their hearts out to everyone on the floor but me and Spencer. I didn't feel like dealing with it, and Spencer was nowhere to be found.
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