On/Off - A Jekyll and Hyde Story Read online

  Fritz seemed like a pretty cool guy. Every so often they passed a crowd of older students, and more often than not, Fritz knew someone in the group. Several of the folks Fritz stopped to talk to were wearing Greek letters.

  “Are you in a frat, man?” Jamie asked as they left another group behind.

  “First of all. Don’t let them hear you calling it that. They only say that to each other. It’s the old do as I say, not as I do bit.” Fritz seemed suddenly more serious, almost defensive. “Second. Yeah, I am. Phi Kappa Psi.”

  “That’s cool.” Jamie answered.

  “You interested in checking any of the fraternities out?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t really been thinking of it.”

  “Greeks get a bad rap on this campus, but they can be pretty cool if you have an open mind. Winters can get cold and lonely up here. You might as well go to some parties and hang with some sorority sisters, right?”

  “As opposed to the guys in the Linux t-shirts and flannel?” Jamie laughed.

  “The fact that you even know the word ‘Linux’ scares me. Fortunately, I have the answer.” Fritz slapped him on the back. “We’re having our first party of the quarter on Friday. You can come with me and check it out.”

  “I guess I could-”

  “Trust me, this is a much sought-after invitation. You shouldn’t pass it up.”

  “All right. I’m down for that.”

  “Good!” Fritz suddenly turned serious. “I hope you don’t drink though.”

  Jamie looked at him with curiosity.

  “Phi Psi isn’t about beer and loose women, son. It’s about brotherhood and service to the community.”

  Jamie stared at him blankly.

  “I’m just kidding with you man, it’s all about the sweet sorority lovin’. Eat a good meal beforehand, cause it’ll be a long night.”

  They walked up the stairs to the third floor. The phone in Fritz’s room was ringing. He opened his door and answered it as Jamie stood out in the hallway.

  “Yeah, I was just telling someone about it.” Fritz pressed the handset against his chest and turned to Jamie. “Hey listen, I’ll talk to you later man, okay?”

  Jamie nodded and headed to his room as Fritz returned to his call. More people had arrived while they’d been at dinner. Most of the doors were propped open in the hall, and kids were walking back and forth between the rooms, talking or screaming at one another as they fought each other in online computer games. Jamie opened the door to his room and slipped inside. He turned on his desk light, took a couple of pills from the bottles on his dresser, and stretched out on his bed. He was here. Now what? He reached over and picked up his course schedule. The first class wasn’t until ten in the morning. That left plenty of time to get in a workout and grab some books beforehand. He tossed the paper on the floor and picked up his camera, playing with the lens and looking through the viewfinder. He sat up and looked out the window into the snowy night. One or two people were wandering around the quad. A guy ran out from behind some trees, wielding a snowball, chasing a girl who laughed hysterically. Jamie peered through his camera, zooming in on them.

  “Click,” he whispered.

  He stood, stripped down to his boxers, and pulled on a bathrobe. He’d bought one with a hood, which he pulled up over his head. He studied his reflection in the mirror for a second.

  “Looks great, Tyson. That won’t make anyone uncomfortable,” he muttered to himself, but it was better than answering any more questions tonight.

  Outside the window, snow was still falling. Wind whistled through the edges of the glass. He felt the cold air on his forehead as he ran his fingers though his hair, once again kneading the scars on his head. He was getting nervous about tomorrow. He was rusty when it came to talking to new people. A shower would warm him up and help him relax. He grabbed a towel and his shower kit and walked down the hall to the bathroom.

  ***

  He woke at dawn. The snow had stopped, and a cold, gray light was just coming up over the trees. Jamie pulled on a sweat suit, put on his gloves and hat, and walked downstairs. The halls were silent as he passed each level in the building. Every door was closed. He pulled the hood over his head, blew hot air into his gloved fists, and stepped outside.

  Frigid air burned his nostrils, stung his lungs. He loved it. The snow creaked under his feet like packed cornstarch. He stretched against a brick wall, steeling himself for the workout, then slowly jogged around the side of the building, headed up over the crest of the hill, and down towards the parking lots. Everything was draped with a thick white blanket. Random flakes floated in the air, suspended in front of him, swirling away behind him as he cut through the stillness. The street lights were still on, and Jamie watched the snow showers set off by the glow. Two deer looked up at him from between parked cars as he crossed the street into the parking lot. They were digging through a half buried McDonalds bag. The animals gazed at him calmly, then went back to their frozen fries.

  He ran a loop around campus, running through the student lots, up towards the campus apartments, the signs read Perkins and Colony, then back through the residential neighborhoods. RIT had what struck him as an odd balance of apartment buildings and industrial office space. He passed a technology park, emblazoned with the school’s tiger mascot, turned south towards the Riverknoll apartments and down through the academic side of campus. All the paperwork he had read described RIT as The Brick City, as though trying to instill nostalgia in its students at an early age. “Remember our days at The Brick City? Boy, those were good times, eh?” Now, running through the campus, on the walkway the books dubbed “The Quarter Mile,” what came to mind was communist Russia. The stark brick buildings towered overhead like illustrations from an Ayn Rand novel, each more sterile and imposing than the last. The occasional smokestack shot out through a building’s roof, smoke and steam billowing up into the air, scattering clouds of snowflakes. Even under a layer of fresh snow, this was a bleak campus, but it would have to do. Trying times and hostile surroundings produced great art. Right? He’d have to remind himself of that.

  The dorms were still sleepy as he arrived back at his floor, stretched in the lounge, then showered and dressed. He grabbed his backpack and a handful of meds, stuff his schedule in his back pocket, and left for the day.

  His first meal at Gracie’s was an important college lesson: no one got up early, and NO ONE ate breakfast. Except for a group of Japanese students, a hunchbacked girl with thick, smeary glasses, and several engineering students, he had the place to himself. Every clink of a plate or clang of silverware echoed throughout the room. The radio played soft jazz in the background as he helped himself to a bowl of Wheaties, orange juice, and fruit. He sat at his table in the corner, his chewing and his thoughts far too loud for his own comfort.

  Finished with breakfast, Jamie walked over to the academic side, where the students with unwanted morning classes wandered the campus like grouchy, Cabbage-Patch-Kid zombies, all dressed in sweatpants and hooded shirts, the drawstrings pulled tight, like baby bonnets. He went to the bookstore and found more lethargic students groggily bumping into one another as they struggled to forms words and sentences, feeling their ways through stupors brought on by deep or all too brief sleep. Jamie found his books, gasped at the prices, then waited in the long lines for the registers. When he had finally been rung out, he worked his way out of the store, maneuvering around a group of students, each member carrying a thirty-six-ounce coffee mug, mumbling how tired they were.

  He was early for his first class, and sat on a bench looking down the length of the hall. Students in winter coats filed past him, letting in blasts of cold air as they shoved their way through the double doors. Jamie took out a notebook and pen, turned to a fresh page, and looked down the corridor. He hesitated. He’d attempted to sketch off and on since the operation, but it had never gone well. Though occasionally timid, Jamie’s movements were once again fluid and unfailing. His hands and body we
re steady. Yet, he was still unable to draw. It was like two wires were crossed in his head. He could pick out images and understand the mechanics needed to translate them to paper, but somewhere between his eyes and his hand, the signals became confused. Maybe it was lack of practice; inactivity had caked the workings of his brain with a thick coat of rust. He just needed to work at it and the old skills would return to him. He hoped. Jamie blinked and looked down at the notebook, beginning to draw. He glanced up, pulling the pen towards him as he compared picture to page. His hands quivered slightly, the line becoming a squiggle down the paper. He slowed his movements, focusing intensely on the tip of the pen as it careened back and forth on the page, shifting the lines away from their intended destinations, throwing the image askew. He stopped, again looked down the hallway, and again lowered his pen to the paper. Still his hand refused to cooperate. Jamie shot a look around him, then forced the tip of the pen into the paper as hard as he could, tearing the page and grinding a line across the sheets underneath. He pulled up on the pen and smashed it down onto the notebook, where the tip ruptured, splattering red ink across the white surface. Then he slammed the notebook shut.

  Jamie’s first photo class was anticlimactic at best. It wasn’t that it was uninspiring, it just was what it was, the first class, in which students meet professor and the professor gives them the rundown of what they’re in for.

  In this case, the professor was a short, gray haired woman with a distinct Southwest flare about her. She wore large turquoise rings, a hefty silver and stone necklace, and billowing clothes of deep red and brown fabric. When she spoke, her voice had the breathy sound of words forced out over smoke-hardened vocal chords. Jamie could almost see the puffs of ash breaking loose from her lungs and fluttering out with each syllable. Officially, she was Professor Taylor, but she said to call her “Judy.”

  Judy was a great fan of the Xerox machine, handing out piles of pamphlets on everything from F-stops, to light meters, to department policies. She continually licked the tip of her index finger as she flipped through several massive, swaying towers of quarterly assignments. When everything had been passed out, she gave a dismissive invitation for questions, then directed them to their first assignment, working with photos using a manipulation program on the computer.

  “If any of you have used Photoshop, then you have a bit of an advantage; if you haven’t, the pamphlet I passed out should be all you need.” She hoisted a massive packet of papers above her head for emphasis, then dropped her arms with visible relief. “If no one has any questions, I’ll leave you in the hands of our student assistant to take a tour and learn the lay of the land.”

  The assistant was an unpleasant character from the photo cage, a young man named Victor, with spiked black hair, a ring dangling from his nose, and deep, black bags under his eyes, who made a point of calling a mopey “What’s up?” to every upperclassmen who passed the tour. The woeful cry of the second year student burdened with the task of showing the newbies the ropes. Victor took them through the school’s massive facilities, which included dozens of photo studios, darkrooms, locker bays, and digital photo setups. Then he filled them in on the complex process involved in checking out every piece of equipment available at the photo cage, the underlying message of which seemed to be:

  “You break it, you bought it.”

  Everything seemed to be worth several hundred dollars.

  “We have ten high end digital camera backs. They cost a near mint,” Victor said flatly. “Freshman aren’t allowed to check those out. You guys get to choose from these cameras over here.” Victor waved a baggy-sleeved arm toward a shelf of camera packages. “They’re old, but they work fine. Once again, parts are scarce, and repairs are expensive, so, you break it-”

  “You bought it?” Jamie interrupted him.

  Victor turned towards him, a mangy cat appraising a squeak toy. He flexed his jaw, “Yeah.”

  The class looked on in silence. Jamie hadn’t even meant to speak. This guy just pissed him off. Something about him rubbed him the wrong way, and before he knew it, he had made his first enemy.

  Victor looked pissed. “Once again, freshman have to wait a while for things. If an upperclassmen or a grad student needs anything you’re signed up for, they have first dibs. If they have equipment to check in, you will have to let them in. You can fight it, but you won’t be doing yourself any favors by making enemies.”

  This guy was a prick. Jamie knew it, the rest of his group knew it. He could see several of them stifling smirks. Jamie glanced around the group. Unfortunately, there weren’t many interesting girls in the class -- two or three showed promise, but they had a distinct edge that Jamie found off-putting. One in particular, a tall girl with a smoking body, seemed incapable of smiling; she just kept pulling her cell phone out every three minutes to check for text messages, then scowling when she saw who had or hadn’t contacted her. When Jamie started going at old Victor, he caught the cell phone girl lifting her head to shoot him an indignant glance. Her lips were clenched shut, a straight line across her mouth. No movement, not even the slightest curl at the corner of her lips. Jamie looked at the other girls, sizing them up. One resembled Grimace from the McDonalds Happy Meal commercials. She looked like she’d just bitten into a cookie and found a moldy nut. Another had a Kid Rock beard. Another had an enormous ass! One girl with short spiky hair was laughing. She looked pretty cool. Jamie craned his neck to get a better look, but one glance at her wardrobe warned him off. A girl with a pink t-shirt with the silhouette of a cat reading “I wanna pet your pussy” probably didn’t want anything he had to offer. Shit. He turned and focused his frustration on Victor, who continued with his condescending spiel, emphasizing the word “freshman” in every sentence. Jamie lowered his head and looked up at their tour guide with wicked eyes.

  “I’m gonna enjoy pissing you off Vic,” he muttered under his breath.

  ***

  The guy in the back was cute. Kelli kept peering toward the corner to get a peek at him. Nice build, not an ounce of fat, a little scruffy, with dark brown eyes, and a sort of… menace about him. She smiled. All right, not menace, but damn… he was intense. Like he was taking everything in, sizing everyone up. He looked over and she glanced down at her nails, then dug around in her backpack for a pen. A moment later he was pulling out a notebook, doodling. His eyes narrowed under a wool cap. She looked at the hat. Normally she didn’t go for that kind of look, too Eminem 8 Mile, but this guy was just… she laughed and looked away.

  Jamie rolled his eyes up, watching the girl across the way. She had to be an art student. She had that look, only… better. Her hair was jet black, with a few scattered patches of deep red highlights among the twisted strands. She wore heavy black eye makeup, bordering on goth, but with a nice, inviting angle. She turned to the side, and he caught a better glimpse of her profile. She was beautiful. His eyes slowly slid down her body, hanging close against the curves, down to her waist that just… barely… peeked out from the space between her jeans and her tank top. She leaned forward and the edge of her shirt slid ever so slightly up her back. His mouth went dry.

  BAM!

  A man in a tweed coat and khakis walked in, slamming a book down on the desk at the front of the room. The entire class spun around to face him. The man turned, rubbing his hands together quickly.

  “Okay! So this is Media and the Mind. Welcome to it.”

  Kelli watched the man in the coat, who leaned back against the desk and lifted himself onto it lightly, training his eyes on the audience. He was in his late forties, in good shape, with a boyish face, and salt and pepper hair, more salt than pepper, and white at the temples. This guy was cute too.

  “So, the question I’d like answered, is just what exactly is on your dirty little minds? No doubt all sorts of dark, wonderful stuff, much of it placed there by the media, or bubbling up from your own grubby little hearts, ready and waiting for you to send out into the world through your own form of media. You’
re all art and photo majors, correct? Raise your hands if that’s a yes”

  He looked up as nearly everyone in the room raised their hands.

  “That’s what I thought. And everyone here has a dirty mind?” He looked around expectantly. No hands went up, and he grinned, nodding his head. “Suspicion confirmed.”

  The class laughed, and he stood up, walking around his desk to a white board at the front of the room. He picked up a marker and wrote his name on the board.

  “So, let’s pretend we’re in an old high school movie. I am Professor Ryan, and for the next ten weeks we’ll be discussing a whole bunch of things, all off which, I hope, will be related to the media, and the purpose, message, and motivation behind everything we can possibly think of.”

  He swept his arm across the room dramatically. Then looked up with a grin.

  “Damn,” Kelli thought to herself. “This guy really is cute.”

  “You’re all in media. Whether you think of it that way or not, everyone in this room works with some form of communication. Everything you create is sending out a message. The medium you choose to work in, on its own, sends a message. Who here is a photographer?”

  Half the class raised their hands. Kelli noticed the intense guy was part of that group. Ryan nodded.

  “Who here is an artist or sculptor?”

  Another quarter of the room raised their hands. Jamie kept his in his lap.

  “Writers?” Professor Ryan raised his hand, and a handful of other students did likewise. “And who here is a filmmaker?”

  Jamie watched as Kelli raised her hand. Christ. Even the angle of her wrist was cute.