A Reputation Ch. 04 - Word Spreads

Fair warning to readers new to this series: I don't bother with much in the way of recaps usually, and this story is no exception. You can certainly enjoy it on its own, but it will make a lot more sense (I think), if you were to start with Chapter 1. Regardless, as always, do not hold your breath for realism in my work. I aim to be plausibly ridiculous.

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A REPUTATION 4: WORD SPREADS

Mitch had missed the excitement, and indeed, I did not see him until after dinner.

I had thought that discretion was the better part of valor and gone to a different dining hall from ours to eat. I did not need to be sitting there in person to serve as a nucleation site for all the boiling gossip that I had now come to expect after something like this afternoon had happened. It seemed to me that my absence would make things calmer.

Also, I dreaded the possibility of being asked for clarifications.

Anyway, I ate dinner at the dorm where I lived my freshman year. It was restful... and even worse than my own dorm's food, of course. I'd have hit Chick-Fil-A again, but it was Sunday.

When I returned to the dorm, I slid up to my room and closed the door.

Mitch was sitting at his desk, reading. "Hey," he said, as I walked in.

"Yo," I replied casually, and plopped down on my still rumpled bed, wondering whether to resume my interrupted Industrial Design reading, or redo the Circuits diagrams that Cassie had so passionately messed up. The diagrams would be time-consuming, but the work was already done, I just had to re-draw them. That sounded like just the thing for this evening. I was not feeling energized.

I stood up from the bed again and at that moment, Mitch shook his head, gave up pretending to read and literally fell to his knees on the floor.

"I am not worthy!" he said gleefully, bowing like mad. "No one is worthy!"

"Get the fuck up," I growled, and reached for my rumpled homework. I contemplated just smoothing it out and handing it in. 'I'm sorry, Professor French. A girl I barely know crumpled it in a fit of sexual ecstasy.'

Yeah. No.

But Mitch was not going to be put off. "Dude. You cannot ignore this. I sure as fuck cannot ignore this. Today makes three in a row, man! You. Are. A. Legend," he exclaimed.

"Fuck off."

"No, seriously. You are literally a legend. There was a buzz at dinner. When I heard, I was barely able to keep my mouth mostly shut about Kate on Saturday."

Mostly? Oh fuck.

"Mitch..." I said, warningly.

"Relax, dude. I didn't say who she was."

"Mitch!"

"I didn't even say she was tall... or an athlete... or anything to identify her!"

"You sure as fuck identified me!"

Mitch shrugged.

"Dude," I angrily pled with him. "This thing is getting out of hand. Please quit fanning the flames."

*

Friday is always a busy day for me, with all three classes for my major, then Russian. Fortunately, I had gotten some rest.

I had not had sex with anyone since Monday, and it was... glorious? Well, sort of.

To be clear, my body, and more importantly my mind, needed a break. I do actually have a lot of work at college. I'm in a demanding major at one of the premier universities for that major in the world. I have papers to write, homework to do, material to study, a language to bluff my way through, and most of all, a little paper and wood car to build.

I do not have the time for an unending parade of sexy women demanding out of the blue that I scratch their itch.

But...

The hitch here was the 'unending' part. The parade was awesome. I'm not going to lie. I was most enthusiastic about the parade. I just needed a break.

But what if the break meant it was broken? What if it didn't happen again? What if I had just encountered a perfect constellation of events, and now things were done?

I pondered all this on my bike, as I rode from my dorm to my Circuits class in the early morning air. It was odd looking at the campus at this time in the morning. The student body looked profoundly different. With a few exceptions, virtually all classes this early in the day are science and tech, and it showed, if sometimes in subtle ways.

It wasn't like I was gong to go back to a life of celibacy. All three girls I had somehow, inexplicably been with had made it clear that the occasional return engagement was definitely on the table in the future. I should feel like I was living life in Paradise.

But the male mind is a funny thing, I suppose. Mine had certainly locked into sex with a string of new women as the desired normal condition in a hurry, impossible as it would be to maintain forever.

Having a reputation was odd for me, especially having a good(?) one. It was uncomfortable at times, just going to the dining hall, or stopping off in one of the common rooms, and feeling the looks behind my back. But since it was clear that that reputation was what had fueled my sudden, wonderful run, and it was also clear that that reputation was not going anywhere, I had hopes that the run was not going anywhere either.

At least, I could escape easily by leaving the dorm. In the small community of La Floridita, everybody either already knew me, or could easily identify me. Outside, in the nearly 20,000 student community of the greater university, I was an unknown. And besides, the story of Shower Guy seemed to have remained pretty encapsulated.

Right?

I locked my bike and entered the lab building where my first class met. Professor French was already at his desk, as usual, sitting easily on the front edge, and chatting with students casually as they arrived. He is a youngish black man, and a very popular instructor, with a casual manner, articulate voice, and a sense of humor. Plus, it is fun to watch the girls moon over him.

I waved idly as I passed his desk, and he caught me off guard by actually greeting me. "Well, hello, Mr. Green," he said idly. "You look clean and refreshed today."

Huh? There are a lot of hygienically-challenged guys in engineering, I'll admit, but I am seldom one of them. Perhaps he had been talking or just thinking about some other guy and the fact that I had brushed my hair had stuck out in comparison. I could see several candidates in the room that might have been triggers for his comment. A few were chronic, um, offenders.

Once class began, Professor French decided that today was a good day to go over some first principles about DC electricity. "For those of you who will have to take Fluid Dynamics in later times, I'm going to piss off your future professors by pointing out how similar DC current is to plumbing," he grinned. "The analogy isn't perfect, but it is a useful mental illustration."

"Imagine wires as pipes, and DC current as water flowing through," he said, turning to the board and drawing two long, close, parallel lines. Then he drew a long arrow between them. He turned and looked over our class, which was too small to be considered a lecture, but pretty big for a regular class at our college. His eyes flicked over me, oddly, then landed on a guy I did not know personally.

"Mr. Rogers, please tell me what the pipe's diameter and pressure would be analogous to."

"Uhhh," the guy said, "I guess the diameter is amperage, and pressure is resistance?"

"So if you increase pressure, the size of the pipe would decrease?" Professor French asked in his mercilessly deadpan way.

"Crap! No. Pressure has to be voltage," the dude recovered quickly.

"Exactly," our instructor smiled. He looked around again, but his eyes ended up on me.

"Mr. Green! Tell us about resistance in this analogy." His eyes twinkled for some reason. I was momentarily thrown by that. I was near the top of this class, as far as I could tell, but I had never been particularly on Professor French's radar for any reason.

"Resistance would be anything that restricts water flow," I said, surely. "In the analogy, debris in the pipe would impede flow."

"Mmmm," he murmured agreement. "But let's assume we have a well-designed, well-maintained system, shall we? Let's call our resistor something like a flow restrictor." He turned and started to draw more on the board. I saw him add a triangle at the end of the pipe and in a second or two, I saw it was a shower head, with arrows spraying from it.

That was an amusing coincidence for me. I smiled a little.

Professor French turned back and he was also grinning. And he stayed with me for the next question, which he almost never did. "So, Mr. Green. Let's say our current is feeding a... oh, let's say a shower head. What would the flow rate be equivalent to?"

Fuck. He was meeting my eye directly with that question. Was that a chuckle I heard from somewhere behind me?

"Power," I said, more quietly. Then I changed the way I wanted to put that. "Wattage."

"Excellent. Let's further our analogy," Professor Fuckwit said, not releasing me from his gaze. "If you were to, let's say, stay in the shower for some reason far longer than necessary to simply get clean, then what would you be wasting?"

There were definitely a few chuckles from around the classroom.

Fuck. There was no-one else in this class from La Floridita. And Professor French sure as hell had nothing to do with my dorm's community.

I kind of glared at Professor French, who merely looked back at me in good-natured expectation.

"Energy," I ground out. "I'd be wasting energy."

"Using a lot of energy, but sure not wasting your time!" some asshole piped up behind me.

About five people in the room laughed in various ways, including Professor French. But not me.

My nicely encapsulated reputation had clearly broken out of my dorm's tightly knit community. It had metastasized. Even professors had heard of it.

The rest of my morning went fairly well, particularly in the way that Industrial Design and Mechanics were both blessedly free of water-related class discussion.

I did not have time on Fridays for lunch, so I just grabbed a snack, alone, from a dining hall I had never tried before, where no-one knew me. I munched a surprisingly fresh and crisp apple as I hiked back toward my Russian class.

This Reputation thingy, when it wasn't inducing hot girls to fuck me, had its drawbacks. And now that I seemed to be a subject of discussion across campus, it would have more. I had always viewed Professor French as a cool dude, but that had been kind of out of line. Especially since the whispers I heard between the clueless among my classmates during the rest of class were like hearing the story spread in real time.

I admit I was a bit grumpy. Not completely, but a bit. Thinking about my new, sub-rosa Reputation was never all bad. It brought up thoughts of how I got and expanded it, after all. But I always loved classroom interaction before. Now I had been embarrassed by being called on twice in one week: This morning, by Professor French, and Monday, by Ms. Godinova. At least in her case...

Wait. I had been literally the first student she had called on in class all year. And now that she had started, she had called on me again on Wednesday... twice. It was like she was suddenly noticing me.

I banished that thought with some difficulty. It wasn't like she had been talking about showers. Or noise.

Regardless, I seated myself a minute or so early for Russian, and banked a quick look at Elaine Waters to tide me over. I actually needed to pay attention lately in this class, as it had gotten simultaneously easier and harder, with Sveltana's sudden introduction of class participation. I got out my homework and started to run over it one last time before our instructor showed.

"Hey! Will!"

I looked up, confused for a second, before I realized it was Elaine, leaning over across the center aisle of the class toward me. She was wearing a scoop-necked shirt with broad, horizontal stripes today, and that lean gave me some additional visuals to bank before I had to pay attention for class.

"It's like we have to pay attention now all of a sudden, isn't it?" Elaine said quietly, mirroring my own thoughts.

"Yeah," I replied. "I wonder what has gotten into Svetlana," I added, instantly wincing at the question.

Elaine just shrugged idly. "Dunno," she said, in a voice blessedly free of any... speculation. "But it means I sure need to work harder now." I nodded agreement. "Are you still interested in studying together?" she added, getting to the point she had obviously intended when she spoke to me.

"Sure!" I said, hopefully no eagerly than I had really intended to show. "Uh, where? Your dorm or mine?"

Elaine hesitated suddenly. That was odd, since the location was what had always kept us from actually doing it the several times I had made the suggestion before. "Uh, we are so far away," she said, as if about to back off yet again. But then she smiled and said, "Let's reserve a study room at MemLib."

MemLib, or Memorial Library, was the huge central library in the heart of campus. Several floors of now largely unused bookshelves had been replaced with small study spaces. I had several times considered making this suggestion when I had asked if she wanted to study with me, but never had taken the risk. If she had turned down that suggestion, I would have known she was turning me down, not turning studying down.

Either way, regular (hopefully) study sessions with Eliane would be a nice thing in many ways. Mostly, I felt that a partner might actually be useful for Russian from now on.

Svetlana flowed into class, just as Elaine was reserving us a space at the library for Sunday afternoon on her phone. Our instructor, as always, looked hot and acted cold. Her all white outfit of elegantly flowing slacks and loose, billowy blouse was accented by a huge gold belt-buckle at the center of her flat stomach. And her teaching manner remained bland and hard to discern as she started in on the declension work we are slogging through.

Suddenly, her new-found fascination with calling on students reared its ugly, but productive head, and she asked me to run through the forms. My heart sank and raced in panic simultaneously. First. She had called on me first again.

But the bad part was what she wanted me to conjugate. Instead of any of our current vocabulary, she instead asked me to conjugate 'prinymait doosh'.

Prinymait doosh, in Russian, means to take a shower.

*

I bolted from class the second it was over. I should have stuck around to settle more details with Elaine, but I was fucking mortified. Mortified and scared. Not only had Ms. Godinova dropped a shower question on me in class, she had smiled a little when she did it. She never smiled, except when she was throwing in some extra-credit profanity for us to learn. And there had been chuckles in this class too.

As I wandered back slowly toward my dorm, marveling at how a situation in which I was regularly getting laid could still feel so bad, I made my way through the crowded Plaza where seemingly every student's path crossed. I always recognized a few faces, and said hi to a few of those.

I traded shoulder bumps with Ed Fowler as we passed. Ed and I were in English Lit together. Then George... something, waved as he biked by, his always comically over-stuffed backpack wobbling precariously atop his back.

As I was just about through the crowd, I saw the face of Kim Fawn, a cute Korean girl I had crushed on a bit, back during my freshman year. She had lived right below me, a floor down in my freshman dorm, a thought that occupied my mind a few times. I had been interested in her right from orientation, but had chosen to pursue other options first. By the time I had determined those were all not going to happen, Dale Hall had gotten his hooks into her, and held on all year.

She saw me too, and we traded a passing look of recognition, but that was it... for about one step. Then her soft, round face widened into a smile and she veered toward me. Surprised, but not unhappy in the least, I stepped left, out of the main flow of bustling kids and beside a palm tree in a huge, ten-foot pot to talk to her. Her last steps brought her to me and she waved cutely.

"Will! I have not seen you since last year," she said by way of greeting. Fawn is actually a Korean, not Korean-American, and her accent shows both that she is not a native English speaker, and that she has been educated within an inch of her life. Her voice has this exotic tone where she clearly knows everything cold, but her mouth just can't quite manage to make the sounds quite natural, even though she produces the words with total ease.

"Hey, Fawn," I replied. (Kim's her last name. Korean, remember?) "I haven't seen you since last year. How have you been?" I asked, then added, on instinct, "How is Dale?"

"I am well," Fawn replied, then wrinkled her nose just a touch. "Dale and I do not keep in touch."

That was one of those pieces of information to which the brain says, 'good,' and the mouth wisely says nothing. Instead, I ignored the Dale situation, and asked, "So, have you settled on a major?"

She bobbed her head, sending her jet black ponytail bouncing. "Oh yes. Archaeology!" She twisted her lips slightly. "It was always going to be Archaeology, but it took until this summer to convince my parents that it was not going to be Pre-Med." We shared a grimace. While my parents tended to let me live my life on my own plan, I have known so many friends who felt like they were on an unwillingly guided tour through life.

"I can't believe that I haven't seen you since last year," I said, looking for something else to keep this nice, little, out-of-the-blue chat going.

"It is a big campus," Fawn shrugged, but seemed to leap on this thread of conversation for some reason. "It is easy to lose track of each other when we move to new dorms. Where did you get placed this year? Was it La Floridita?"

"Yep," I replied, inwardly surprised and kinda flattered that she had any idea where I was. I was sure I could not have come up with her dorm assignment. I was not on high alert, like I should have been, given my current situation.

Fawn suddenly almost pounced. "Ha! I knew it!" she laughed. Pointing a finger at me, she laughed, "Shower Guy!"

I let my mouth hang open. This was freaking crazy, and embarrassing as hell. Here I was, being called out by a cute former crush, one whom I had not seen for months. She had seen me and clearly stopped to talk so she could give me a hard time.

I hung my head and covered my eyes with my hand. "Oh Christ, this is so embarrassing," I groaned. This story was fucking everywhere.

Fawn giggled. "Oh, I must hear the story."

"What?" I asked, in shock, my embarrassment deepening, if that were possible. She wants me to tell the story? That was just fucking... no.

"Sure! I want the true details," Fawn went on. Then she asked, a note of puzzlement entering her voice. "But why are you so embarrassed about it? It is not like..." her voice caught almost violently in a gasp. The epicanthic folds at the corners of her large, dark eyes split wide open. Her jaw worked for a moment, then she blurted out, in weirdly gleeful panic, "You! You are Shower Guy!"

"You had just figured that out already," I said miserably, and very confused.

"I just thought you were in his dorm and could give me all the dirty details," Fawn almost gasped. "Then you freaked out like that and I realized you were not just in the know--you are the know!"

Fuck. All I had had to do was be cool, and she would not have known. My reputation has spread faster than my name, at least. I looked at her sheepishly.

As her initial shock of realization faded, I watched as Fawn's face fell a little, trying to process this more than awkward situation. As she looked at me, I saw the recognition actually fade a little in her eyes, as if she felt that I wasn't really me anymore, but somebody else.