dormitory fire

short story

I was in the shower when the fire alarm went off, which is everyone’s worst nightmare, but not mine.

My sophomore year of college had thus far been a continuation of my antics from freshman year, punctuated by self-deprecation for the amusement of others, proving that I had learned nothing except how to be a wiser fool. The sufferings I imposed upon myself included: drinking various concoctions of disgusting combinations (beer with raw eggs and seaweed in it, for example, that kind of thing); running across the coals of an emptied barbecue grill on the quad; shaving off my eyebrows at the pre-game before the party, etc. Some of these ventures were aided by alcohol or a well-placed dare by a friend.

All were enacted because I was a slave to the laughter of others, but felt I didn’t have the wit or cleverness to produce it conventionally. I was all too regularly willing to sacrifice my ego and body in order to paradoxically justify their existence via that sweet nectar of humor.

Within the blaring screeches of the Mathewson Hall fire alarm, instead of fright, rightly or wrongly, I found opportunity. I would turn off the shower, then play the role of a skinny, grumpy curmudgeon, trudging outside with a towel around my waist, shower sandals flopping, my small frame of 150 pounds soaking wet (literally).

This was what I did, rewarded by incredulous looks and giggles of the feminine variety (bonus points, there) in the dormitory hallways as I made my way outside, the difference between being laughed at and being funny dissolving into immateriality.

For added comedic misery, it was well below freezing outside, Valentine’s Day weekend at SUNY Livingston in the bitter winter of upstate New York.

My roommates were all gone to class so I stepped outside alone on the heels of the evacuating masses, looking around for whom it’d be best to share my pathetic state with for a good chuckle. I already felt my body going pink and blue with cold.

Admittedly, I was a bit fuzzy on what exactly the protocol was for a fire drill and where we were supposed to go in the case of one. An R.A. I recognized came out behind me.

“What’s going on, Tim, drill? Someone burn some popcorn? Should I even bother—”

“GET BACK!” Tim yelled, putting his hand on my back and ushering me toward the dining hall. My flip-flops squelched down the hill. “GET BACK, everyone please, check in with your R.A.!”

“Dude, chill out—” I started, but was promptly shut the fuck up by an explosion.

Perhaps not an explosion. A loud pop, the shattering of a window from the eastern side of the dorm opposite my room and the billowing of flame from inside it.

You have made a mistake, the flames crackled.

Tim’s palm pressed my chest as he blocked the way back with his wider and taller frame. I grabbed him by the lapels of his warm leather jacket.

“Yo, Tim, I gotta get back inside, put on some clothes. This is it, this is all I have!”

My towel needed readjusting. The warmth of the inferno that my dormitory had become now beckoned in contrast to the frigidity that had shrunk my penis into a retracted tortoise neck.

“It’s bad, David, real bad, third floor, west wing, whole room went up, freaking crazy man! You CANNOT go back in there,” Tim asserted in the regimented manner he was willing to affect, the sort manner made him an ideal R.A. By the time I opened my mouth to make some smart-ass retort, he had already been accosted by some other anxious residents.

The laughter I elicited from passersby was not enough to warm me. My hand instinctively reached to my nonexistent pocket to grab the phone that was now surely choking in thick black smoke upon my dorm desk. I excused myself through a throng of anxious residents, some of them already on their phones with worried parents, and pushed through the swinging glass doors and vestibule into the foyer of the dining hall, into its warmth and smell of stale state school academic cuisine.

There I sat on one of the benches that lined the glass windows, the wetness of my towel having only narrowly avoided freezing to my testicles. I pushed it down between my legs for modesty reasons.

I’m not sure what my plan was. I told myself that I was waiting for some of my friends to get back or for Tim the R.A. to remember my predicament, or for anyone at all to at the very least lend me the use of their phone; but the truth was that someone who was willing to put themselves into my situation was probably not someone who was willing to proactively get themselves out of it.

It must have been around noon because soon the masses of lunchtime students began filing into the dining hall, meal cards swinging from lanyards and dug from backpack side pockets. By then I was fully ashamed of my condition, but this was ameliorated by the fact that it was now self-explanatory, as everyone had seen the fire and the refugees gathered around the dining hall as emergency vehicles began to arrive, and it was doubtless what everyone was talking about.

Rachel was upon me before I even noticed her approach, intent as I was on staring at the ground until the entire debacle passed. Little did I know I’d have been staring for days.

“Are you okay?” were the first words she said to me, and when I looked up and saw her I knew I’d be okay for the rest of my life.

“Oh, I’m okay. Just was taking a shower at an inopportune time,” I said. Her friends were reluctantly in tow, giggling at me like the curiosity I was, especially for using the word inopportune. Rachel’s eyes, though, the green ones, were hard and serious with kindly attention.

“You were taking a shower? When the alarm went off?”

“Yeah, didn’t really have time to, you know, prepare...” I lied.

“Oh my gosh, how awful! Do you even have your phone?”

“No, I uh, forgot it. I thought it was a drill or something, like I’d just go back inside.”

“Oh, totally, oh gosh I might have done that too! Do you at least have some clothes you can wear?”

I told her no, all of my friends lived in the dorm, which was pretty much true (and sad). She introduced herself and gave me her phone, but as I took it, I embarrassingly realized I had no idea what any of my friends’ phone numbers were, and calling my parents who were a three-hour drive away anyway felt like a lame capitulation.

“So you’ve got nowhere to go? It’s like you’re homeless!” she pointed out. The flush of my face blended with cold-induced redness.

“I wouldn’t say that but...I guess, for right now, yeah. The dining hall could be my home. It’s not so bad here.”

It was then she told her friends to go ahead and have lunch without her and they all did except for one, her friend Milena, who tagged along probably because she knew Rachel was just kind and naive enough to fall victim to a guy who, for all they knew, was the opposite of harmless, despite my pathetic outward appearance.

Milena kept me company on the bench while Rachel went and got her car.

“Rachel seems nice,” I said as she looked at her phone.

“Rachel is a bleeding heart for lost causes,” she said without looking up. “There’s never been a puppy she didn’t want to adopt.”

“Ah,” I said.

Rachel picked us up and we went to the school store, where she insisted I should pick up some clothes, the cost of which would be put on her father’s credit card.

“I’ll pay you back, I’ll pay you back,” I begged as I waddled through the store clutching my towel. I picked out some SUNY Livingston gym shorts, sweatpants, a t-shirt, a hoodie, beanie, and socks. I don’t think I ever paid her back, unless you count the rest of our lives together.

“So since you have nowhere to go, do you want to come back to our dorm?” she asked as I thanked her profusely and we got back in the car.

At this point, I was less concerned about whether I had anywhere to go and more concerned with the fact that I considered Rachel very cute and, for some reason, she had decided to randomly come to my rescue, which meant something, or did it? I intended to find out.

“If it’s not an imposition,” I said. “I have class, but I think I’ll be forgiven in not going.”

“Lucky bitch,” Milena said.

“Milena! He might have just lost everything he has!” Rachel laughed. “Well, I am done for the day, and since I skipped lunch and I’m starving and you probably are too, let’s go back to my quad and order some food!” she suggested.

Rachel took us back to her dorm where we ordered GrubHub deli sandwiches on her dad’s credit card (apparently this card contained limitless depth).

We sat on soft feminine furniture that could only belong in a dorm inhabited by four young college-aged women (a plush pink ottoman for me, a fuzzy, blanketed loveseat for her). And we talked.

Where are you from? Capital Region. Nice, me too. Siblings? Her—only child. Me—younger sisters. Speech therapy major. Music major. Her friend Milena quietly ate her sandwich like a bored chaperone.

“Are you a good Samaritan? Or do you just have a thing for pasty human popsicles?” I asked.

The majesty of it all was that I was making her laugh.

We talked and talked, until Rachel got a student-wide email saying the dorm would briefly open again under a fireman escort to retrieve personal belongings like phones, clothes, and prescriptions. The Red Cross had come to campus and was giving out clothes and setting up cots in the gym for refugees from Mathewson Hall to sleep on.

There was only ever one place I was going to spend the night.

---

Twelve years later, Rachel and I sit on the living room floor of our first house, newly purchased in the throes of fresh matrimony, a remote fixer-upper that would surely never be fixed-up, meeting my one and only criteria for a home: a working fireplace.

There’s no furniture yet, an expense we can no longer disburse to her father’s credit card. I get up off the unvarnished wood and grab the fireplace poker.

“I think this log needs some readjusting,” I say, as though I graduated with a Ph.D. in fire. Sparks fly and I flinch.

“Oh, be careful! Don’t hurt yourself!” she warns. I act cool, but me harming myself is always a possibility.

“How could I possibly have hurt myself there?” I point out, sitting back down beside her. There’s nothing yet in the kitchen so we eat GrubHub delivered deli sandwiches from the floor.

“Stop, you know fire makes me nervous. Ever since that fire in Mathewson Hall...” she says, staring into the flames, smiling with what she knows is the invocation of our origin story.

“That wasn’t because of a fireplace though. Some girls stacked their blankets on top of an old extension next to a wall tapestry,” I say matter-of-factly, missing the point.

“I know, I know. Awful though, so lucky nobody was hurt. At least one good thing came out of that fire...” she says, resting her head on my shoulder.

“Yes,” I say, my ignorance deliberate now, brushing some crumbs off the front of my SUNY Livingston hoodie. “I got this free hoodie from some chick who took pity on me.”

She laughs and punches my leg lightly. “You’re lucky I helped you that day.”

“You only did it because you thought I was cute.”

She refuses to contest this and her smile seems to confirm this theory for the one-millionth time, and for the one-millionth time I remember how lucky I am.

“What if I had taken a second...just a second to throw on some clothes, get my phone, my jacket...” I say, suggesting a scenario we hadn’t yet theorized.

“Oh, we would have met eventually. I would have found you drunk and passed out somewhere, or bailed you out of jail,” she says with certainty.

I laugh and hold her close, my butt aching from sitting on the floor.

“So now we got the house, when are we adopting a puppy?” she asks.

“This weekend IS Valentine’s day,” I say. “Let’s go to the shelter then. A gift to both of us.”

“Yes! Let’s do it! Oh, it makes me so sad thinking of all the doggies in the world who won’t get a home, alone and cold out in the elements,” she says.

“We can’t adopt them all,” I say, and together we savor the warmth of the fire and of each other.

---

thanks for reading this story about a fire in a college dorm. even if you didn’t like it, maybe click the little heart button so that people who might will find it. if you REALLY liked it, subscribe for more short stories on Sundays.

---

BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS:

How do you think David and Rachel’s relationship went in the intervening time between the two scenes?

What do you think fire symbolizes in the story?

---

thanks for reading PNP, where we love adopting puppies and ordering deli sandwiches. if you liked this story, you might also like my novel, the big T, posted here on Substack:

the big T