Every apartment has the token roommate who flips out about natural disasters. Most people who like to be super- prepared and ready for any apocalyptic outcome, however, start calling for a retreat into Helm’s Deep at the first weather warning.
Not so with the protector of my apartment, who waited until 5:30 Sunday night to send out mass texts: “Everyone buy 2 liters of soda and freeze them so we can use them to keep our food cold if the power goes, we have a lot of perishable food; Everyone buy food, we don’t have a lot of food; fill bags with water; …”
After filling up a few empty wine bottles with water to humor him, we got the good news from our Voxy Gurl: no classes Monday. “Fuck it, let’s go to the Tombs!” shouted everyone in my apartment. An hour later, I remembered I needed to work on a group project. Luckily, my partner was similarly distracted.
Monday morning, influenced by my roommate’s insistence that we would need to loot Wolfington Hall just to survive, I decided to wear camouflage fatigues until the hurricane subsided. Influenced by his own insanity, my other roommate resolved to wear a speedo all day. He also decided that I would help him slackline in the worst of the storm—in said speedo. He made it two steps before the post that the line was tied to cracked from the wind.
We returned to the apartment and saw a puddle accumulating in the alley, about to overwhelm the sandbags in front of our door. Luckily there were loose bricks, so we were able to build a channel directing the water away from our place.
A pretty chill day of Settlers of Catan and Cruis’n the World ensued. The wind and rain settled down by 9:00 p.m. We never lost power. In fact, we accidentally fixed our speakers, which had been busted for a week. I had donned a cross around my neck in case of some sort of unholy apocalypse—unnecessary. We did hit a food crisis though: we ran out of Tapatío hot sauce and had to switch to Cholula!
Craving chaos, we threw some pumpkins into the wind. We sat down and signed people in at abandoned guard desks. You’d be surprised how much authority you command just from wearing camo, a mustache, and a beret.
We prepared to seize power in case the students lost confidence in the hall directors’ abilities to keep them safe, but, disappointingly, no one was rebelling. We wandered dorms looking for friends and trouble. Far too many people were alone, watching Netflix, or reading—no riots, no looting, no nothing! Where was the danger?
The danger was back home, where we had left 12 hamburgers defrosting in the oven. The three of us ran back, cooked, and ate them, avoiding bacterial infection but not high cholesterol.
We racked our brains for the dumbest idea possible and then it hit us—LXR rooftop. There the wind was decent, but not scary enough. Even our small, lightweight friend wasn’t blown off the roof. We insulted the personified Sandy, and dared her to try harder. We taunted her, dancing around, shouting. That’s when I saw the only real fear that night, in the faces of the passersby below who overheard us.
