Chapter Text
There is something in the air today, Natalie is sure of it. Something sinister and hellbent on making her life as miserable as possible. Something that she is simply not in the mood to deal with with a solid forty-five minutes of fitful sleep in her system.
She never should have let Van drag her to that stupid party. Who even throws a party on a Monday night? Frat brothers with nothing better to do, that’s who. They couldn’t care less that it’s only the second week of the new semester. Hell, half of them probably aren’t even fully registered yet.
Regardless, she foolishly let Van talk her into going and now she’s paying the price. First her alarm didn’t go off, leaving her with roughly eight minutes to get to her class. Okay, so she can’t shower. That’s fine, she’ll just throw on a clean shirt and layer on enough deodorant to mask the smell of her poor decisions from the night before. Except Monday night is usually laundry night, but Nat didn’t do her laundry because she spent the night in a frat house with Van. She’s starting to wish she had taken them up on their offer to crash in their dorm. It would have been convenient, Van’s place is much closer to her lecture hall and she could have borrowed a clean shirt. She would have stayed, but in her drunken state Nat couldn’t think of anything more unpleasant than running into Van’s new roommate.
___________
For their first two years of college, Natalie and Van had lived together in an off campus apartment. It was kind of an awful place. Tiny, overpriced, and constantly leaking from areas that Nat wasn’t even sure had pipes running behind them. It wasn’t paradise, but it was functional. Then Van somehow weaseled her way into some upperclassman scholarship that covered most of her academic expenses, including housing. And thus was the end of their time together as roommates.
So, the summer before their junior year, Van entered the roommate lottery and Natalie started scrubbing through craigslist for a new place. That’s how she met Jackie and Shauna. God that first meeting was a disaster.
After Nat responded to their listing, Jackie invited her over to check out the place. It took about an hour of being sandwiched between the two of them on the couch before Nat started to get the idea that they were in the market for more than just a roommate.
She was about halfway through letting them down gently when Shauna started laughing in her face. Guffawing even.
“You think we’re looking for a third?” Shauna laughed. Still hunched over on the couch, winded from laughing at Nat’s, apparently ridiculous, accusation.
“She’s been running her hand up my thigh for the past hour!” She yelled, pointing a finger at Jackie accusingly.
Shauna just sighed, “That’s just Jax, you’ll get used to it.”
And that was that. They’d been living together for five months now and Shauna was right, Nat did get used to it.
If you asked Nat, Van wasn’t so lucky with her roommate. She ended up with this girl Lottie, who was apparently the perfect roommate. She paid for all their groceries and she was almost eerily silent. According to Van, Lottie was a living angel. Nat’s not so convinced.
Natalie met her once, and after about five minutes of talking to the girl she realized that they just didn’t mesh. At all. There was something off about her, and Natalie really didn’t care to spend enough time around her to find out what it was. So, when Van offered a spot her couch for the night, Nat politely declined and made her way back to her apartment.
__________
So now here she is, half running to her astronomy lecture across campus. Poptart dangling from her mouth, wrinkled work shirt covered in dough stains, and a throbbing toe from an unfortunate run-in with her bed post during her rush to get dressed.
By the time she makes it to her lecture hall, she’s already over this day. Thank God she has an easy class to start.
Introduction to the Universe wouldn’t have been her first choice, but she needed a science elective to graduate and Jackie swore to her that this class was a breeze. Fortunately, Jackie was right. It was mostly just lectures and open note quizzes, with an additional course project. Plus, her professor couldn’t give less of a shit if she slept through the entire semester; a fact that she planned to take. She spent the first hour and twenty minutes of class working to reclaim some of the sleep she missed out on the night before.
By the time she was drifting out of sleep and back to the land of the living, class was nearly over and her professor was dragging through the end of his lecture. She was starting to zone out again when she heard him say something that made her heart drop, “Alright, everyone should have a project partner by now. If we have any stragglers, just stay behind after class and we’ll figure something out.”
Shit. Of course this would happen the one day she decides to take a nap. Maybe Jackie is still available, but based on the way Shauna’s glued to her side that doesn’t seem very likely.
She might as well accept her fate now, she’s gonna be stuck with some weirdo for the next eight weeks. Maybe she’ll at least get stuck with a motivated weirdo, doing this project by herself would suck. The project didn’t seem too hard when she was skimming the syllabus, just time consuming. Something about tracking star trails? Or maybe planet movement? Fuck, she really needs to look over the syllabus again.
As the class clears out, she begrudgingly makes her way up to Professor Ritch to meet her fate. God only knows who she’ll get stuck with.
“Ah, Natalie. Let’s see who we can get you set up with,” he paused, “You’re in luck, someone was absent today so she’ll be needing a partner.”
When he speaks again, it confirms her hunch about that sinister spirit she felt lingering in the air this morning, “Alright, you’re all set. It looks like you’ll be working with Lottie Matthews for the rest of the semester.”
Of course she is.
Fuck