He had gotten the idea over the summer. Why not start a film club? There wasn't one on campus, and in the three years he had been at Trenton State (whoops, College of New Jersey) his contributions to the community has been comprised of watching the RHA channel, going to the occasional concert, and showing up to a solid 85% of his classes. This was his last year here (hopefully), and he wanted to do something worth remembering.
At least something not involving Busch Lite.
But there was nothing he wanted to do. Most everything there was to do was being done by some group on campus, and he wasn't all that interested in that stuff to begin with. But, there wasn't a film club. So he'd start a film club. That would be his contribution. He liked movies. He guessed that was all you needed to start something up, just finding something you liked and going with it.
Jack's work over the summer had a free photocopier, (well, unmonitored), so he copied a few dozen fliers for the Film Club. Just something saying to meet Tuesdays, 8:00 in Forcina 134. He pasted them up when he first moved in, and then waited until Tuesday for the meeting to begin.
There were a few flaws in Jack's plan. 1: He didn't know where to get a TV. But he figured someone in the club would be one of those A/V freaks who can get them. 2: He didn't bother going about officical channels to get the club founded. He didn't bother with the paperwork of it, or with finding an advisor. He couldn't get SFB money yet, but he figured someone in the club would be one of those campus paperwork freaks who knows what to do. 3: He didn't get his fliers approved with the stamp of the Approval Committee. This one hurt him, because all the fliers got yanked down two days after he put them up. In all likelihood, no one had seen the posters before their untimely departure. So he was just wasting his time here with a club that nobody knew about.
Well, Jack thought, there goes my shot at doing something at college. He stood up and was about to leave, but there was someone in the doorway. A female someone.
The thought in the back of Jack's mind while he was hanging up the posters was that he'd meet a girl running the film club. Your atypical soulmate: same interests, funny, likes long walks on the T/W beach, and naturally, she'd be gorgeous. They'd meet; she'd have the initial excuse to watch movies together for several weeks because of the film club. By then, he'd be well into a relationship with her, so he wouldn't need any lame excuses to spend time with her. He did think it might sit awkward with the other club members, but that didn't look like a problem right now.
The female someone was wearing a bulky sweatshirt, sweatpants, and a Phillies baseball cap four sizes too big. Her ponytail pulled through the back, and the cap's bill stuck down over her face. Jack hoped this was not masking some grostesqueness.
"Is this the, uh, film club?" She pushed up her bill with her finger. It was not.
"Yeah, I guess. You saw the fliers?"
"Uh-huh. The first day I was here. They all disappeared a couple days ago. I thought this might have been cancelled."
"It might have well been. No one got a chance to see the fliers. Well, besides you. Oh, I'm Jack. Hi." He awkwardly stuck out his hand, hoping it wasn't a too obvious sign that he wanted to touch her.
She slid her little hand in his. "Jill. Oh, Jack and Jill. Cute."
"Yeah." This was fate. This was the one thing missing from his life. A steady relationship, right from the beginning of school. And it even had those cute quirks to it already. Pretty soon they'd be finishing each other's sentences. But Jack was getting ahead of himself. He had only known her twenty seconds.
"So, is there going to be, you know, a movie?"
"Yeah, in my backpack. I figure I'd go with a movie everyone likes the first week, so I got Forrest Gump. I don't know how to get one of those TV carts yet, so I was just going to go back to my room in Townhouses and pop it in. My room can hold five or six comfortably, and I was a little worried about having too many people over. Guess that wasn't needed, huh?"
"Yeah." They'd be alone, together provided Charlie didn't come in, and watching a movie with some great romantic parts in it. "Oh, I could bring Dot. She's my roommate. You mind?"
"Nah, the more the merrier." Jack believed himself to be a moron. He not only blew his chance with getting Jill alone, but he used a lame cliche to boot.
"Let me run over to Travers and tell her. I don't, um, exactly remember my phone number right yet."
"I know the feeling. I can't remember mine now. Sophomore and junior years, I could pick them up in two minutes, but freshmen year and now, it's like memorizing someone's internet address."
"So I'll meet you at your room in when, half an hour?"
"Sure. It's a date." Jack hoped he didn't blow his hand there. He needed some better stock phrases.
Jill skipped to Townhouses with Dot. She liked skipping when she was happy, even if it knocked her hat off three times since leaving Forcina.
The past two weeks had been a mad rush of events, people she was pretty sure would be her friends for life, and places she would probably get sick of after a while but was all new at present. She loved it. Most of her life was spent in a static routine; for the past four years she woke up at the same time every day, went to the same building, had the same lunch period and had the same eight meals for dinner. The best parts of her days were when something broke the routine; snow days, extra long fire drills, even the flat tire she had last year. The past two weeks had been routine-free for her; some of the best days of her life. Even the classes she went to were still hectic; no one had their unassigned assigned seats yet, and she didn't know who half her teachers' names were.
Dot pushed up her glasses and chugged after Jill's gait. From the week that Jill knew Dot, she seems nice. She was sort of studious; she did the little homework she had gotten so far as soon as she had gotten it, and spent most of her remaining time reading. Not even required reading; just books she wanted to read. Jill had no idea what motivated Dot.
"Which way's the Townhouse we're going to? West or east?"
"This way." Jill skipped on.
"So who's this senior boy? What's his name?" Dot was 5'1", and her little legs didn't seem to keep up with Jill's bouncy gallop. Jill slowed it to a trot.
"His name's Jack. He seems nice."
"You mean NICE nice, or just nice?"
"I don't know, but he seems like a nice person."
"Okay. Nice person nice. But not, uh, NICE?"
"He could be. I don't know." Jill felt something when she first saw Jack. She had no idea what it was. It might have been the inkling of a crush, but it had been a while since she was stupid enough to have one of those, so she wasn't positive about the feeling. It was a feeling when you know you want to see the person you're talking to for extended periods of time for the rest of your life. Maybe it was fate. Or a crush. Or she could just be woozy from skipping breakfast. She got a little scared by these feelings. "Well, it's all sort of moot, because of Kevin."
"I thought you two agreed to see other people."
The hat fell off a fourth time. "Well," Jill said as she picked it up, "it's just something you say, just in case Kevin finds someone more compatible than me at his school, so he doesn't feel too guilty. I love him, but I don't want him to do one of those Bridges of Madison County things just for me."
"And it has nothing to do with you seeing other people?"
"Well, I guess I could, but I could also stand on my head for the rest of my life. But it doesn't mean I'm going to do it, just because I can."
"You can stand on your head?"
"Yeah, I got a flat head."
They walked to the number of Jack's Townhouse. There was a plush Grover head wedged in the door.
Jill tapped her knuckles against the door, which had a metallic ring. "Hello?"
"Yeah! Come up!" Jack's voice echoed from somewhere within. They pushed open the door and stepped into the plastic smelling hallway.
"Decapitated Muppets. Very nice," Dot mumbled as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. A wooden cable spool was in the center of the hall, and four doors against the wall. The door at 8:00 had a giant poster of a UFO on it, the 11:00 and 4:00 doors were bare, and the 1:00 door had Jack popping out of it, hairbrush in hand.
"Hey, uh, hi," he said, nonchalantly throwing the brush in a corner of his room. He jerked out a hand at Dot. "I'm Jack."
"Dot. As in polka."
"Hi. Hope you don't mind the Grover head. Charlie's idea. Why should we run down to the first floor for every shlub who wants to bother us for five minutes?" Jack suddenly looked very angry at himself.
Jill decided to let him off the hook and change the conversation. "So there's ten people in each of these, huh?"
"Yeah. Two on the first floor, and four on two and three. Charlie's got the UFO on his door. He might come in while you're here. Those other two doors are Tom and Martin's. They both practically live with their girlfriends in Decker, so you won't see much of them. If you're coming here a lot, that is." Jack looked angry with himself again.
Jill dehooked him again. "Who's on the first and third floors?"
"The first floor's some soriority girls. I forget which soriority. And there's weird girls on the third floor."
"Weird? As in how?"
"As in one of them bringing a weedwacker up there. They all have L names. Lauren, Lucy."
"Hey, can we watch the movie soon," Dot asked politely. "I've got some reading to catch up on for tomorrow."
"Yeah. Let me fast forward through the FBI warnings and stuff." He hunched over the VCR in his room and got the tape ready. Jack's room was surprisingly clean, except for the hairbrush in the corner. Dot and Jill sat on the bed; Dot by the pillow, Jill next to her.
Jack hit play when he found the floating feather, and was about to take his seat by Jill on the bed when someone else flew into the room and plopped down on the edge like a dropped wrecking ball. Dot was lifted an inch or so off the pillow. Jack looked at him.
"Jill, Dot, this is Charlie, from across the hall."
Charlie pulled some fries from a McDonalds bag and leaned back against the wall. "Hey. Movie just started? All right, didn't miss anything. Hate when I don't see the beginning of a movie. Then I have to rewind it, and impose on everyone else in the room."
Jack sat in the desk chair a good five feet from the bed. "No, it'd be awful if you imposed."
They settled in and watched the movie contently. Well, Jill did. Dot was constantly saying how the book was just Forrest burping and farting through various stages of history, while Charlie felt obligated to explain every special effect scene he knew of. Jack didn't say much, but he was constantly rocking ont he chair and tapping his foot, as if he just wanted the movie to end. Jill felt like she needed a motive to do something else, but she was content at the moment.
When the feather floated back in the clouds, Jack reached over and rewound the tape. "Okay, what should we get for next week?"
Charlie looked up. "You mean we're doing this every week? Cool. I got nothing better to do." Jack rolled his eyes.
"Same time next week?" Jill asked.
"Yeah, uh, same time." Jack tried a desperate gambit. "Hey Charlie, how's the Roswell shrine coming? Dot would probably like to see it."
"I just found some new photos to put in the left corner. Up by the autopsy printout. They're of the crash dummies the government claimed were the real aliens people saw. Load of crap."
"You actually believe in aliens?" Dot smirked.
"What, and you believe the line of bull the CIA's shoveling at you?"
"Oh please, a few hillbillies get drunk and see Venus, and suddenly there's hordes of flying saucers who stick anal probes in people but leave no physical evidence."
"You want evidence, Scully? Get your patootie in here, and behold the shrine. It has converted before, and it will convert again." Dot went out of Jack's room into Charlie. Charlie followed, subtlely closing Jack's door behind him. Jill had the feeling that she wasn't invited up here just for a movie. Which was fine by her at the moment.
Jack moved from the chair to the bed by Jill. "Charlie's a little nuts. New X-Files don't come on until November, so he's just killing time until then." He fidgited with his hands a little.
Jill accoridngly fidgited with her hands. "I know. Dot's the same way. A little nuts. Doing these weird impulsive things. Of course, with her it's mostly staying up overnight to finish a book, but..."
Jill had words she was planning on saying after that, but she found Jack's lips pressed against hers just then, and whatever the hell she was talking about took a back seat to Jack's lips. She thought she should feel a little offended by this, getting invited up to watch a movie just so a senior could score with a naive freshman, but she was too busy kissing Jack back to worry about principles. Jill lay down on the bed, and Jack slowly took her hat off.
Jack looked out Charlie's window as Jill and Dot walked back to Travers. Charlie stared in disbelief. "You didn't."
Jack beamed a little. "I wasn't planning on it, but we were alone, and we were talking about, I forget, something, and then we were kissing."
"You didn't, um..."
"Well you banged on the door a minute after you left so we could see your stupid Roswell pictures. I didn't really have the chance to do much."
"Thank God I did knock. Who knows what I could have walked in on."
"Why exactly did you knock? You knew what was going on. That's why you closed the door. Oh, thanks."
"Not a problem. But the roommate was getting suspicious. I didn't want it to seem like we had this system arranged to lure and capture freshmen for our own perverted desires. Although that would be nice." Charlie sighed and looked at the website he was currently at, an analysis of a Bigfoot video. "You never struck me as the spontanous type of guy."
"I'm not! I sit around and make decisions three weeks after they happen! But this time, I didn't! I saw something I wanted, and I went for it."
"Jill must be honored to be the thing."
"SomeONE I wanted, whatever. But I didn't do any of that stupid waiting, or three months of talking or anything. I wanted her, and she wanted me, and I guess that was all we needed. Those stupid consequences I always thought would happen if I did something spontaneous that I wanted just didn't happen. This year's going to turn out great."
If Jack would remember these words at the end of the year, he would find them deeply ironic.