The Morning After: The Case of the Frisky First-Year

Let me take you back to a simpler time: my sophomore year of college. I had recently been dumped by my longtime boyfriend, and after about a month of taking solace in Half Baked and Friends reruns, I was finally ready to put myself on the market again.

I went to a party with my friends and proceeded to get drunker than I had been since my senior prom. A few hours and several sketchy mixed drinks later, a curly-haired boy started dancing with me. He wasn’t exactly my type, but since I was on the rebound and, let’s face it, not exactly in the best position to be making decisions, I went with it. I had never randomly hooked up with someone I had met at a party before, but I was convinced that doing that tonight would make me forget all about what’s-his-face.

After an indeterminate amount of time, Curly told me he was leaving. “Okay!” I yelled.

“The thing is, I want you to come with me,” he delicately screamed over the dulcet sounds of Lil John and the Eastside Boyz’s “Get Low.”

“Okay!” I yelled again.

As we grabbed our coats and walked out, we got to know each other a little better. He was a junior, a philosophy major, and an RA in one of the freshman dorms. I was… way too drunk. It was completely embarrassing when a group of kids in the lobby of his dorm said hi to Curly, did a double-take after noticing me, and then started smirking, but I comforted myself by thinking that they were just freshman who I would never see again.

Then we walked into his room, and I noticed that there were two beds in it.

“Wait… you have a roommate? I thought you were an RA,” I slurred.

Curly told me a complicated story about how Housing had messed up and forced him to live with a weird freshman kid. It didn’t totally make sense, but I was too drunk and determined to care.

The hook-up itself was majorly underwhelming. After about fifteen minutes of fumbling and sloppy kisses, I was done. I bid Curly goodnight and stumbled back to my dorm.

The next day, I told my roommate about what I had done after the party. She wanted to see the guy, so I fired up Facebook and looked him up.  I typed in his name, and there he was: Curly, philosophy major, a freshman in our college.

Wait a minute—a freshman?

Yep, that’s right: Curly had totally lied to me about being an RA. In retrospect, it’s so obvious that he was a freshman that it’s ridiculous I was ever taken in by his bogus story. Curly called and texted me regularly for the rest of the semester, but I ignored him because I was too mortified even to pick up the phone and berate him for being a lying creep.

If only I had seen his Facebook before going home with him. Not only was he a freshman, but his profile picture was also of him literally sitting in a trashcan. That might have sent up a red flag for me, even if I had been too drunk to notice what year he was graduating. Lesson learned: even when you go to a party determined to have a rebound fling, make sure to set some kind of standard.