My stomach turned over with a main course of nausea with a side of fear, but tried to play it cool. “Um,” I said. “That seems a little harsh.”
He looked confused. “How so?”
“Because –“ I started to explain what I thought was the obvious, but seeing Randy’s quizzical face left me speechless. So I made a joke instead. “Who would ever want to be stuck at an Arby’s, am I right? That weird horseradish sauce.”
He nodded, chuckling under his breath. “I know, right?”
I looked around at the contents of the house, marveling at how jam packed it was with so much lightness and fun.
“You still want to check out my Tron record?” he said. “It’s a first pressing.”
Randy led me to it, and I tried to hold my own in a conversation about Tron. At least I smiled and nodded to a lot of it.
“Mmm,” I said. “Neon rings and stuff.”
Randy laughed. It came out as sort of a choking, nasally sound that made his overly soft belly shake. “That’s funny,” he said.
“Is it?” I cleared my throat. “So what kind of work are we doing here?”
The question seemed offensive to him and he became suddenly abrupt.
“That sounds like a nosy question,” he said. “And we can’t allow that. So you should think about that by folding some laundry.”
“Excuse me?” I asked. “What—”
He pointed down the hall. “Laundry room’s over there. So you should probably get started on that.”
My reward for doing laundry without complaining was spending the night in a bed. A real bed. It had covers and sheets and everything. I also spent the night next to a framed picture of Randy’s family, all four of them chunky and clean, preserved in a magic minute of time where everything was fine in the world.
Before I went to sleep, Randy kindly offered me a shirt.
“Sometimes girls like to sleep in guy shirts,” he said, awkwardly, avoiding eye contact with me. “Something I’ve noticed. You could change into it after you have a shower.”
“A shower?” I asked. “With hot water?”
“Of course!” he said. “Is there any other kind?”
“Like a real shower,” I said. “What other kind is there?”
It was indeed a real shower with real hot water. While I shampooed my hair, I briefly considered never leaving it.
The best part was I got ten hours of sleep and Randy pulled no funny business. Maybe he wanted to, but maybe he just liked having someone next to him. I crawled into bed awkwardly, accepted that I may be the first girl there and I was going to negotiate some fumbling around. But instead, he flipped over and muttered, “Goodnight.” So I laid there and listened to him switch on his tablet that made sounds that sounded like girlish giggling.
I spent one week there. At least I’m pretty sure it was a week.
The first day, I spent pretty much taking everything in. The guys played video games, watched movies, marathoned TV shows and had spirited arguing matches about the Silver Surfer’s role in the Ultron saga while slumped into overstuffed couches. Every now and then I would pipe up with a stupid quip, sometimes they laughed and sometimes I was met with awkward silence, to which I would get up to clear dishes and go into the kitchen to clean them.
“Hey, guys,” I said. “Howard the Duck wears pants and Donald Duck doesn’t? What’s up with that?”
That got a laugh and I felt comfortable enough to claim me a blanket to sit under on the couch.
“Black Manta?” I asked later on that day. “Isn’t it more PC to call it African-American Manta?”
One of the roommates wordlessly took the blanket away and I spent the rest of the evening scraping burnt cheese off a cookie sheet that had previously been used to bake six tier nachos on it.
If Jeremy left his table, it was always when I wasn’t looking. Usually, he was hard at work on his laptop, tapping furiously or preserving 80s era action figures all while constantly pushing his glasses up his nose.
Randy was sweet. He opened doors for me and made sure I had everything I needed. We talked about Star Wars, Star Trek and the vices of J.J. Abrams. He seemed afraid to touch me and was genuinely interested when I tried to recommend episodes of the Powerpuff Girls to him. It was hard to get him away from his phone and his computer. He was occupied with work—all members of the house were, but they were in no position to answer questions about what they were doing.
And there was food. Guh, so much food. They had converted the dining room into some kind of food storage shelter that was jam packed with anything you could possibly want or at least everything I’d been dreaming of since I had started my Survivalist Jesus Diet. Bags of Doritos, Twinkies, Pop-Tarts, cases upon cases of both regular Coke and Coke Zero—that being for one of the roommates who was trying to cut back. In the kitchen were two freezers, also filled to the brim with food—ice cream with Reese’s pieces shellacked inside, frozen pizzas, soba noodle bowls, which I had never tried, but since it was now a luxurious option, it had moved to the top of my must-eat list.
Randy pulled out a Coke from the refrigerator and handed it to me with a smile. “Sorry that this is all we’ve got,” he said. “There’s a shortage on everything else.”
I took the can and admired it, as if it were some valuable piece of art or one of those fancy expensive jars of face cream with things like cow placenta and gold that celebrities use.
“How are you getting all this?” I asked. “And how have the monsters outside not figured it out?”
He held a pouch of Capri Sun and stabbed it with a straw. He closed his eyes and gulped deeply from it. “We have our ways,” he said, smacking his lips, then licking all the drops of juice that had escaped out of the bottle. “But don’t worry about it. You should see the table top Pac Man we have upstairs.”
Day two was much of the same. I was still navigating my joke territory, but becoming more and more interested in what these guys were up to. They snacked constantly on everything rich, sugary and deep fried, which made me notice the parallels of what they were eating and how often the toilet got clogged. If they needed refills or anything from any part of the room, it was my job to jump up and get it. No one was interested in any kind of movement at all.
I got another shower and earned a place in the Super Smash Bros tournament for making a joke about The Walking Dead, which I was really thankful for being the one thing there that I was kind of familiar with. I was already getting cabin fever. No one left that house and the windows were sealed shut and covered in boards. It smelled the way you would expect a houseful of pop culture enthusiasts who never go outside world. I noticed there was a door leading to the backyard on the second day. I opened the door and drank in fresh air like a soldier desperate for water after long days in the desert. Jeremy was quick to shut it and give me a stern look.
Randy was getting more and more disinterested in me as the days were going by. I enjoyed not having to be awkward about sleeping arrangements, but this was the Apocalypse, and weren’t we supposed to be fearing extinction? Before the threat of our survival, I was maybe a six on a ten scale, but this should have definitely bumped me up to a seven or eight.
For a group of guys with anytime access to a shower, they weren’t keen on using it. They rarely got up to doing anything much less breaking a sweat. They were content to work on their laptops and stare at that big screen in the middle of the living room, occasionally breaking into arguments over which X-Men mutant power was better.
It was day five, maybe day six, and Jeremy had gotten up to make crab cakes for the group. Not me, though. I got caught rolling my eyes and was sent to think about what I’d done by organizing the storage closet. Jeremy was at his desk and saw my reaction through the reflection in a mirror. He stopped and stared at me as he stared at his screen. I hung back close just to get a glimpse of what he was doing. I craned my neck and expected to see something, anything other than what I saw, which was just lines and lines and lines of code.