#bug ghoul

To their mutual surprise, they do actually have a good time. College Mall is doesn’t have quite the same selection as Starcourt did, but it’s also not backed by nefarious Russians. It shouldn’t be fun, shopping with someone who has objectively terrible taste, and who thinks Nancy has awful taste in turn, but it is.

“Seriously, Wheeler?” Robin asks, when Nancy picks up a perfectly nice set of sheets with pale pink roses on them.

“What? What’s wrong with these?”

Robin laughs. “Nothing, if you’re Laura Ashley!”

“Well," she says indignantly, "which ones would you pick?”

Robin gets a devilish look in her eye and leads Nancy across the bedding section, weaving between the displays. “Just look at these beauties!” she says, doing jazz hands in the direction of a set of sheets in an eye-searing geometric pattern, every angle somehow in startling disharmony with the next. Nancy actually feels a little dizzy looking at the fabric, something she hadn’t previously thought was even possible.

“They’re hideous,” Nancy says.

“I know,” Robin says, with barely-restrained glee. She holds the package up for Nancy to take a closer look, which only makes the design worse. “Isn’t it great?! It’s like someone vomited non-Euclidean geometry all over your bed. Imagine if a—if someone brought you back to their dorm and you start making out only to find that under their comforter. Instant hilarity.”

Nancy blinks at the mental image. “I guess it would be sort of a mood killer,” she admits, though her dating history’s been marred by some pretty lamentable bedroom décor, and that never stopped her.

Robin nods sagely. “Good for weeding out the faint of heart.”

“You should get them,” Nancy says firmly, though she doesn’t think the sheets are any less ugly now than she did a minute ago. But they make Robin laugh, and it's nice to see her toothy, sidelong grin.

Robin shrugs, setting the package of sheets back down on the shelf. “I’ll probably just bring some sheets from home,” she says, her voice carefully casual.

Nancy remembers too late Robin bemoaning the fact that her scholarship to IUB doesn’t cover room and board. It hasn’t escaped her notice that Robin’s got one shopping bag to Nancy’s three.

“D’you want to get some frozen custard?” Nancy asks abruptly. “My mom’s treat.”

“Yes, I absolutely do,” Robin says, with such seriousness that Nancy can’t help but laugh.

Nancy can’t help thinking about it, though, as they make their way to the food court and order their frozen custard, Robin shoving the remainder of the twenty dollars into the tip jar out of sympathy. She can’t help thinking how different their college experiences are going to be—Nancy almost a thousand miles away at Emerson, Robin here in Bloomington, not even an hour away from home. Nancy has a merit scholarship, too, but her parents are paying for everything it doesn’t cover without batting an eye, while Robin’s been talking about getting a part-time job on top of her work-study. Nancy’s not even sure when Robin will find time to take someone back to her dorm to make out.

That hasn’t escaped her notice, either, the little pronoun game Robin plays sometimes—when she talks about dating at all. Nancy’s never asked outright, because she’s afraid to shatter the tenuous friendship that’s developed between them since spring break. But between her vehement insistence that she and Steve are just friends and the way she looked at Susan Sarandon in The Hunger that one time they all tried to do movie night, Nancy’s reasonably certain that the someone Robin would be bringing home would be someone a little like Nancy herself. Probably not just like her. Someone cooler, with edgier taste in music. Someone who wouldn’t pick sheets with dainty little rosebuds on them. Someone with red hair, most likely, if Nancy’s not mistaken. But someone—at least in some particulars—not entirely unlike Nancy.

And Nancy doesn’t really know what to do with the way that knowledge sits inside her, the way she thinks about Robin leaning back on her elbows on her dorm room bed and feels a pang of jealousy for the girl who’ll get to push her down on the worn-soft sheets she brought from home. But it’s a moot point, because even if Robin’s interested in girls, it’s not like she’d attracted to girls like Nancy, and even if she were, in a few weeks they’ll be half a continent apart, and Nancy’s tried the long-distance thing and it didn’t work out great the last time, so what’s the point of even entertaining the possibility?