Well worth the Read

I have a class in Briscoe this semester, and I am not impressed.

Everyone who lives there seems to wear the same clothes and come from the same state and have the same recurring phone conversations.

It makes me feel lucky that I lived in Read my freshman year. Unlike Northeast campus dorms, Read houses a hodge-podge of fascinating individuals, each one unique and a little bit off in his or her own way.

Across the hall from my room lived a girl who was about four feet tall. She was very judgmental, and she also had two lazy eyes so you were never quite sure if she was looking at you or past you.

On Sundays she would come into my room and ask if I was going to church.
“I have too much homework,” I would say on days when I had too much homework.
“So do I,” she would say in a deceptively pleasant tone, her lazy eyes piercing through me (as much as lazy eyes can really pierce through you), “but I think Jesus is a little more important.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum was my suitemate. At the beginning of the year, I asked her what her major was and she responded, “Um, I don’t know, sex? Can sex be a major?”

Several mornings I was awakened by her dramatic screaming. “I’m tangled in my web of liiiiiiiiiies!” The mantra of her college life.

At night I would stand silently in our shared bathroom with the lights out and listen to her phone conversations.

“I’m so horny,” I heard her announce one night. “When I open the refrigerator I get turned on by the carrots.”

The sixth floor of Read is a story in itself. Many people do not know there is a sixth floor because the elevator mysteriously does not go there. I am convinced that this is where the University hides its weirdos.

I once ventured up to the sixth floor to visit my heterosexual male friend. When I got there his door was wide open. He was playing his guitar and singing a song he made up as he went along called, “I went gay for Jonathon Taylor Thomas,” which consisted of multiple, highly-detailed verses about JTT’s locks of long, beautiful golden hair.

Another noteworthy inhabitant of the sixth floor was a large seventh-year senior who my friends and I eventually nicknamed “Fake British Accent Guy.”

From almost anywhere in Read you could hear his booming, British accent. We found out it was all a farce one day when my friend who lived next to him heard him talking on the phone to his mom in a completely normal American voice.

Of course I felt a little cheated when I learned the truth about “Fake British Accent Guy,” but I’m still just impressed with his dedication to keeping up such a life-consuming act for so long.

These are the kinds of people you could only meet living in Read. And that’s why Read is the best and most fun place to live.