Free 30 Guys in 30 Days by Micol Ostow Page A

don’t smoke; that’s definitely weird…. “What time is it?” Yeah, except I’m wearing an oversize G-Shock in electric blue—highly inconspicuous. Not.
    All right, I got it. Walk. Walk, dammit!
    “So, is this where we wait for the shuttle?”
Smile at him. With teeth.
    Fewer teeth, Claud.
    He’s looking at me. He looks surprised. He’s nodding.
    Ah, yes. He’s pointing …
    … to the huge yellow sign directly overhead, marked,
WOODMAN UNIVERSITY SHUTTLE PICKUP.
    I see.
    “Thanks!”
    Yeesh.
    Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I’ll be here all week.
    —xx
    By Sunday morning I decided I had to study, lest my many trips to the bookstores of Cambridge—not to mention so many rides on the safety shuttle—be wasted. My handy-dandy reading schedule suggested that today would be an ideal time to address chapters one through three of a particularly dense and nonillustrated text on the spread of AIDS in North America. I took one look at the book and tossed my pop culture anthology into my messenger bag instead. I threw on some track pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt, my favoritebroken-in sneakers, and a denim jacket and made my way across the residential quad and down the hill to the library.
    In the two weeks since I’d arrived at Woodman, summer had truly begun to give way to fall, and the air outside was crisp and cool. The sun sparkled off of the surface of the buildings on Picard Street, and the color of the grass seemed bright and rich. Despite Friday night’s flirting debacle, despite the fact that Professor Hartridge hadn’t really appreciated my little coffee incident, and despite the fact that I was
definitely
on the verge of running out of clean underwear and had
no idea
where the laundry room was, things were looking up.
    The library was quiet, which of course, wasn’t unusual, it being a library and all. I bypassed the computer lab with its dangerously tempting high-speed Internet access, and traveled straight through the Great Hall, a tremendous room with stained-glass windows known for being a hotbed of social activity. I finally settled on a cozy cubicle in the far corner of the reading room. I tossed my bag down, pulled my iPod and my books out and, within moments, was deeplyimmersed in the issue of Complicity and Viewership: The Active and the Passive Audience Examined.
    I read for about an hour or so. All was well in the world of studying when, out of nowhere, Eminem went from whispering in my ear to screaming straight into my brain. Highly soothing. Not. “What the—,” I began, confused and more than a little bit annoyed. I grabbed my iPod and quickly turned down the volume.
    That’s when I heard it. Chuckling. More specifically,
Gabe-
style chuckling coming from just behind me.
    I whirled around and glared at him. “Very funny.”
    He was laughing so hard, he was practically crying. “I’m sorry, Claudia, I couldn’t resist. You just looked so focused.”
    “That’s the whole point,” I fumed. “The focus.” But it was really only fake-fuming, at this point. Gabe was wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt with the Atari logo emblazoned across the chest. How could I stay mad at that?
    “What were you listening to?” he asked, swiping my iPod from me before I had thechance to protest. He scrolled through my playlists. “Eminem—not bad.”
    “Please. Just because I don’t wear faux-vintage-eighties apparel doesn’t make me any less hip than you,” I said, wondering furtively where I could get a T-shirt like Gabe’s.
    Was this banter? Were we having banter?
    “Touché,” Gabe said, pulling up a chair next to mine and settling in. “And, anyway, I got this shirt in a thrift shop in the suburbs, so I should probably mind my own business.” He eyed my Pumas. “Cool kicks.”
    “As it happens, I got these sneakers in the city,” I said, smirking at him.
    “New York City?”
    “Yeah, I’m from Northern Jersey,” I explained. “My friends and I would go shopping