The Do-Over(25)
Author: Suzanne Park
“Is that a dog?” Mia asked me.
“Oh! Ohhhhh! YES!” The panting abruptly stopped, replaced by shrieking, shouting, moaning.
Mia shook her head and closed the window. I hopped off the bed. The sounds were coming from somewhere in my bedroom!
“YESSSSSS! There! Ohhhhh!” The screams, now unmistakably close, originated from my dresser. The Google Home device next to my picture frames and jewelry box vibrated as the yelling grew louder and louder.
Someone was playing a porno on my Google Home.
I yelled, “Okay, Google. Knock it off!” and the room fell silent for a moment. But then a ding-dong sound came over the airwaves and the panting resumed.
Mia bellowed, “Okay, Google, stop! For fuck’s sake!”
The whimpering, panting, and ass slapping disappeared. I threw open my door and stormed into the kitchen, where Beth was making streusel.
I tried to destress my voice. “Was that you? Playing a prank on Google Home?”
She stopped piping icing and cocked her head. “What are you talking about?” Beth wiped her hands and motioned for me to follow her to her room. Beyond her door, the porn sounds were back. She fumbled with the smart device and asked Siri on her Apple watch to call someone named Grady. But Siri didn’t cooperate. Instead, she said, “I don’t know what you mean by Grady-Oh-Oh-Oh-Yes-Mmmm-Yes. Right there.”
I yanked the plug on her Google Home. Silence never sounded so good.
Beth called Grady on her phone and barked into the speaker, “We know you’re watching porn. You’re streaming it on Chromecast and it needs to stop NOW.”
She kept the phone to her ear a few seconds and then hung up. “Grady apologizes. He’s the mastermind behind the account sharing but obviously there are some glitches with our plan. We did it to save money but we might have to reconsider this group networking situation now that we’ve seen how this could go tragically wrong.”
I laughed. “Well, on the bright side, thank God we weren’t in a Zoom job interview.” I still admired her for trying to find ways to be frugal.
Mia walked in. “Look, it wasn’t that bad. My roommate from a few years ago tied tube socks to the top of her bed posts to keep them from banging the walls when she was banging her boss.”
Beth gasped. “Did the socks work?”
“That’s your question?” Mia shrugged. “Not really. And the posts made dents in the wall that cost us our entire security deposit. But that experience introduced me to the world of noise-canceling headphones. Best investment ever.”
Beth turned to me and asked coyly, “Will I need to make a noise-canceling headphone purchase?”
“I don’t normally watch porn on speakerphone at top volume,” I replied.
“No, I mean, I saw you around lunchtime with a hot guy at the Commons. I didn’t want to say anything yet, but now that we’re having girl talk—”
I cut her off. “Well, I don’t know how we went from Google Home porn to this, but Jake and I are not—”
“Wait, you had a secret lunch with Jake?” Mia slugged my arm. “How did you not tell me about this? I thought you were going to dropkick his ass to Mars! But honestly, if he’s just a fling and he’s hot, I say get it, girl. Seize the fucking day!”
“I’m not having lunch with anyone, secret or otherwise.” I crossed my arms. “Jake wanted to grab coffee and apologize. He asked for it to be civil between us, that’s all. And I cut it short because of this exact problem, I didn’t want people to get the wrong idea.”
Mia raised an eyebrow. “I hope there was groveling and a promise of extra credit or something. And no shade if you want to hold this grudge until you die. I’d respect that.”
Beth nodded. “Me too. So okay, you and the cute TA are not an item. But how about you and that other attractive guy you were in a group with?”
Mia slapped my arm again. “Seriously? Another guy?”
I sighed. I knew who she meant. “That other guy is Ethan. He’s just a friend, and the group is only using me for my brains.”
Mia looked pensive. “A brainiac angle could work. He uses you for your brain, you use him for his—”
Shaking my head hard, I said, “Nope. He’s ten years younger. Not gonna happen.”
Beth’s eyes widened. “Have you learned nothing from Nick Jonas and Priyanka Chopra Jonas? Age doesn’t mean poop these days.”
“I don’t know how to break this to you, Beth, but I’m no Priyanka Chopra in the looks department. The only thing we have in common is our height and that we both love posting photos of roti. And we both favor our right side in photos. She works her ass off though, which I admire.”
Mia peeled up the foil on one of the aluminum trays. “You know way more about Priyanka than I thought. It’s a little weird.”
She offered me a pecan bar, which I accepted. Beth grabbed a cookie and we all raised our treats to mimic a group “cheers!”
“Bon appétit!” Beth chewed and offered me a pensive look. “Well, Priyanka definitely works hard. But there’s no glory in any hard-core grind if it wears you down to a little stub, so I hope it’s worth it. I hope she’s happy.”
My roommate, with another oddly poignant and bizarre life insight.
“Amen to that,” I said.
Mia offered prayer hands. “Amen!”
Chapter Twelve
I needed to get out of the house. Beth was baking up a storm again, tempting me with all the extra calories, and the Google Home speaker was now occasionally broadcasting our neighbor Grady’s non-porn ESPN football highlights. But when I made the decision to leave the apartment to study elsewhere, I didn’t expect it to be sunny one minute and then raining cats and dogs the next. “Light drizzle” was in the weather forecast, but it wasn’t supposed to hit until the evening.
I especially didn’t expect to see Jake walking a tiny dog ahead of me on my way to campus. Had he always been a dog person? From my days in New York, a cishet guy walking a tiny dog usually meant there was a girlfriend in the picture. It was almost as certain as other evident truths in life, like how horse dewormers shouldn’t be used to cure human viral illnesses, or that drinking beer before liquor would never end well.