#serial fiction
“Fuck no, Brendan. God. There.”
It was a week after Brendan had offered me the chance to be his ‘guy’ in Allison to help run the business. We were meeting at Norbucks—my idea. Not in the—God, he called it “the Facility”—which is where he had suggested. It was a busy day close to the end of the quarter, so it felt like we were surrounded by study-groups and group projects and the generally motivated on all sides. more 
The Residents, Chapter 3: Tall tales
I had two shots in me on Saturday night when Oliver said we’d been invited up north. We were drinking in his room—Gina was there, too—when he got the text from his freshman roommate, Ian, telling him he should come up and check out some frat thing. Don’t ask me which one it was. One of the shitty ones.
And so I, having coughed down more shots in the span of twenty minutes than I had in months, said I would go as well. I wasn’t drinking for any particular reason, I guess, except for the novelty of it. Gina gave me a look. Genuine astonishment.
“Look at you, Charlie Putnam,” she said. She reached for the bottle on the floor and took a deep swig, eschewing the shot glasses that Oliver had lined up on his dresser so meticulously. After a second, she caught her breath as the tequila worked its way down her throat. “Yeah, what the hell. I’ll go up with you guys.”
Tequila. That was our first mistake. more
The week where Tisdahl went soft on marijuana, hard on brothels
It’s the final week before the onslaught of midterms and in an effort to ignore the inevitable, Northwestern students are turning a blind eye and focusing their attention on preparations for this weekend’s football game against Michigan. To help you get ready, we unveiled a pregame playlist and showed you how much your friends at state schools pay to see their team play. The week began, however, by reliving the moments we may have liked to forget from the weekend’s parties (including crying about The Lion King), and then took a sociological look at our favorite dive bar, TKOE, in “How to NU.” more 
The Residents, Chapter 1: Friday night
“I think there’s a guy living in Jamie’s room.”
I looked in the mirror as I finished washing my hands and saw my friend Oliver standing behind me. I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. “You mean his roommate?” I asked.
“Don’t be cute,” he said. We used to say that Oliver looked like the Chinese version of a cartoon smiley face; a kid with a face so regular that he could arguably pass for any of his billion former countrymen. He probably wouldn’t have appreciated if I brought that up.
Somehow he came here, to Northwestern, to the place everyone comes to when Harvard and Yale and Stanford say “No thanks.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “There is a guy living in Jamie’s room. His roommate.”
He sighed. “Okay, fine. Another guy.”
Jamie Woods. You might still remember the name. He had a song a few years back that got decent radio-play—“Baby Doll,” I think was what it was called. I don’t know the story there, but somehow he came here, to Northwestern, to the place everyone comes to when Harvard and Yale and Stanford say “No thanks.” more
Prologue: “A Farewell to Welcome Week”
It wasn’t much of a pregame—that was for sure.
There were three of us: myself, and my friends Oliver and Gina. Gina had seeded the iTunes genius playlist with Katy Perry, and though it wasn’t as suffocatingly bad as you might think, it still wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever choose to listen to. It was her room, so any requests to change the music were shot down as soon as they were raised. I’d brought up to Gina that this couldn’t actually be a pregame, since it wasn’t really in anticipation of anything specific. What she’d told me was that we were pregaming the entire school year. It was hard to argue with her reasoning sometimes. more
