cause were cool in college 😎😎😎

Consuming baked goods at this hour won't be beneficial to anybody's health, a snide voice rings out in his head.

So much for peaceful.

“This is gonna be beneficial to Michael’s mental and emotional health, so shut up,” Jeremy responds, rolling his eyes. “And like, it can’t be worse than that time we ate fried chicken off our floor after we dropped it.”

That was truly disgusting, the Squip agrees.

“We’re college students. We eat a lot of gross shit.” He turns the faucet and shuts the water off, wiping his hands with the dishrag. “Stop judging.”

If only your eating habits were the only troubling part of your lifestyle…

Jeremy scowls. “Okay, you know what?” He isn’t in the mood to listen to another lecture about vegetables and hygiene and cholesterol. “I’m not doing this.”

He heads out of the kitchenette and walks four doors down, pushing the door to his dorm room open. Michael’s laying on the bottom bunk bed, Jeremy’s phone held above his face as he taps away intently at the screen.

“Jer? You done already?” Michael asks, tilting his head towards Jeremy’s direction. He drops the phone in his distraction and it smacks him in the face. “Ow!”

“I told you not to hold phones like that,” Jeremy says absent-mindedly. He knows Michael’s never going to learn his lesson on that anyway. He squats down to open the mini-fridge and dig out a new bottle of Mountain Dew Red. He cracks it open, ignoring the Squip’s aggrieved grumbling, and chugs half the bottle.

“Electronic Voldemort being an ass again?” Michael asks when Jeremy’s done. His tone is joking, but there’s that telltale hint of worry in his eyes, in the slight furrow of his brows, and Jeremy wants to chase it away. Michael’s already had a shitty day and he doesn’t need to be worried about the voice in Jeremy’s head right now.

So Jeremy shrugs and leans forward, folding his arms on the bed and resting his chin on them to give Michael an easy grin from up close. “More like trying to be my health coach. As if any college student ever cooks balanced meals or eats vegetables.”

“Hell no,” Michael scoffs, rolling closer to lay on his stomach, his face inches from Jeremy’s. “Not even Jake does that.” A beat. “Well, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t.” Another beat. “I mean, he eats plenty of junk food and vegetables—shit, does that make it a balanced meal?”

“Depends on the ratio, I guess?”

Michael scrunches his nose. “I saw him eat, like, three pieces of broccoli once.” An ominous pause. “Uncooked.”

“Gross.” Broccoli isn’t that bad, but uncooked? Jake must be a masochist.

“‘Average person eats three pieces of broccoli a year’ factoid actually just statistical error,” Michael deadpans. “Average person eats zero pieces of broccoli per year. Jacob Dillinger, who lives in a cave and eats over ten-thousand each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.”

Jeremy starts laughing just before Michael starts to crack up, too. “A cave?” Jeremy wheezes, gasping for air. “He lives in the dorm across campus.”

“Tell me that cave is an inaccurate description of a college student’s dorm room,” Michael says between chortles.

Jeremy looks around their dorm room. “So this is our cave now?”

“Fuck yeah it is. Which reminds me.” Michael rolls away, settling onto his stomach and stuffing a pillow under his chin as he grabs Jeremy’s phone again. “I have a camp to attend to.”

Jeremy pushes himself up to sit on the side of the bed Michael just vacated and leans over to see Michael’s screen. “Did you get Kyle to come over?”

Michael scowls. “Not yet. Almost done building that fucking table, though, so his smug wolf ass is gonna be mine, soon.”

“What, my ass isn’t enough for you?” Jeremy pokes Michael in the ribs. “Plus, technically this is my phone, so his smug wolf ass would be mine.”

Michael bats Jeremy’s finger away. “Tone it down, you furry. Let me bask in my sweet, sweet upcoming victory.”

“You could’ve just downloaded Pocket Camp onto your phone,” Jeremy says, but he’s not really complaining. He’d been playing on and off for a while, but he hadn’t developed an obsession with the game the way Michael has over the past few days after trying it out on Jeremy’s phone during a fit of boredom. He doesn’t mind Michael stealing his phone for a while every day, and it’s worth it, to see the tension that’d been in Michael’s shoulders earlier all bled out, the smile on his face much more relaxed.

He watches Michael finally coax Kyle into their camp and almost gets smacked in the face when Michael flails his arms victoriously with a whoop. “Gotcha now, sucker,” Michael crows. He’s already tapping away, moving onto the next step, humming as he mutters, “Gotta catch em all.”

“That just gave me some really intense Pokemon Go flashbacks.” Jeremy blinks away the vivid memories of chasing down the whereabouts of a Dratini behind a 7-Eleven at two in the morning. Michael had announced he was disinheriting Jeremy when he found out Jeremy was Team Mystic (“Remember when I told you that you could have my Gameboy and my Magic The Gathering card collection if anything happened to me? I take it back. I’m taking you off my will, Jeremiah.”), and then promptly cancelled the disownment in favor of recruiting Jeremy into kicking some Team Instinct ass.

“Man, I walked so much for that Flareon.” Michael squints at the phone screen. “Fuck, I need more Bells. I should get somebody to buy my shit.”

Jeremy pulls out Michael’s phone from where it’s been stashed in his hoodie pocket to check the time. The screen flashes 3:14. “Michael, nobody’s going to be awake at this time on a Tuesday night.”

“Nuh-uh. PJ will sure as hell be awake,” Michael says.

Jeremy thinks about that for a sec. “You know what, that wouldn’t surprise me.”

There’s a minute of silence as Michael switches from the game to open Jeremy’s message app, tapping furiously at the phone screen, and then he’s grinning up at Jeremy with a smug slant to his mouth, the way he smiles whenever he’s having an I told you so moment. “She’s awake.”

“Why is she even awake?” Jeremy asks with a laugh. “It’s past three in the morning!”

“I don’t know, maybe she’s staying up to play Pocket Camp just like me,” Michael says with a fond snort.

Jeremy’s about to say that Michael’s up playing Pocket Camp to destress from a bad day when his brain tugs at that train of thought, derailing him from saying anything. Aren’t you forgetting something? echoes in his head, sounding eerily like the Squip’s voice.

He’s blankly staring at the wall, mystified, when Michael’s voice drags him back to the present. “Hey, weren’t you making Nutella cake?”

Jeremy blinks, then looks down at Michael, who’s giving him a curious look.

“Yeah,” Jeremy says, as his derailed train of thought is replaced back on the metaphorical traintracks, starting off slow and steady. “I was.”

Michael stares at him.

Jeremy stares back.

The thought train cranks up the speed from one to eleven, his thoughts all crashing into him at the speed of light. From the look of rapidly dawning horror on Michael’s face, he’s on the same track (ha fucking ha) of thought.

“Did you just,” Michael says very slowly, “leave the stuff in the kitchen?” Even more slowly: “In the microwave?”

“Oh fuck,” Jeremy blurts, and that’s the exact moment the fire alarm starts blaring.

-

See, the thing is, the microwave on their floor is a piece of shit that’s probably older Jeremy and Michael’s ages combined. It has many buttons but no settings work aside from Fires of Mordor, and its timer settings operates solely on thirty-minute intervals, for some reason. So it’s the duty of the poor dorm residents who use it to stop the microwave accordingly using their own timers.

It hasn’t been replaced because, for all it’s shitty, fire-hazard qualities, it still works and it hasn’t actually caused a fire yet.

But just because it hasn’t caused any real fires doesn’t mean it hasn’t set off any fire alarms. There’s been enough fire alarms this month that a few days ago, Rich--who had been spending the night on their top bunk--had literally clamped the pillow over his head and went back to sleep.

It’s a building full of hungry, easily distracted college students and the world’s most tyrannical microwave. It’s the worst combination possible.

So it’s absolutely normal for Jeremy and Michael to be standing outside their building in the middle of the night, surrounded by dozens of their cranky, sleep-deprived neighbors, waiting for all-clear to head back in.

A lot less normal for Jeremy to have been the cause of the fire alarm, though. Usually people set off the fire alarm trying to make popcorn. Jeremy set it off trying to make Nutella mug cake. Which is probably a scorched hell cake now.

“Holy shit,” Jeremy mumbles, still kinda in shock about the whole thing. “I almost burned down a building with a cake.”

“Good thing Rich isn’t sleeping over at our place today,” Michael says. “He’d either be really proud of you or really disappointed.”

Jeremy stares at the dorm windows, feeling indignant. “I used the last of my Nutella for that cake.”

Michael makes a choking noise from beside him, and Jeremy remembers that fuck, he’d been making that cake to cheer Michael up after a shitty day. And then he went and had the whole building evacuated instead.

“Oh my god,” Jeremy moans, dragging both hands down his face as the shame properly kicks in. “I was supposed to make you feel better, not get us kicked out of our room.” He turns to Michael to apologize. “I’m so s—Michael?”

Michael, he realizes, is doubled over and wheezing, laughing so hard that he’s nearly crying. He straightens up and hooks an arm over Jeremy’s shoulder, pulling him in, still giggling breathlessly as he leans against Jeremy, grinning as bright as the rising sun.