Tales of MU

In Which Nicki Changes Her Spots

Going to Burlew Hall to pick up Nicki meant venturing into unfamiliar territory, but it almost felt like going home. Burlew was part of a trio of dorms that had been built as part of the same wave of expansion, a cluster that included Harlowe Hall. The plaza in between them had been enclosed and roofed over at some point, becoming a wide lobby-like nexus that connected them. The nexus dorms were almost like a neighborhood of their own within the campus.

I’d been in Pelinor Hall a couple of times during a period of my freshman year that didn’t bear much thinking about, but I’d never been to Burlew. I decided to go in through the nexus, since that somehow felt more public. I knew very well that there was no rule against going into another dorm during daylight hours and that even the restrictions on late-night visiting were seldom enforced, but it wasn’t something I had done often enough to feel comfortable about.

The nexus was the nexus… familiar in its own way as the student union had been. In the latter half of my freshman year, it had been the site of “block parties” for the three dorms, orchestrated in part by Hazel.

It was more of a popular spot during the winter months, when hanging out outside or going to the union or other public hangout buildings meant going out into the bitter cold but people got sick of looking at the same walls. Now, at the tail end of the summer, it was sparsely populated. I saw some people I sort of vaguely recognized. It was nice to see that there were some Harlowites mixed in with the human students… at least, it was a good guess that they were from Harlowe, since they were hanging out just outside it and they were visibly non-human.

The boundaries on that sort of thing had weakened quite a bit, but Harlowe was still the non-human dorm.

It was especially nice to see a group of freshmen from Harlowe who already felt comfortable hanging out outside the bounds of their dorm. I assumed they were freshmen because I didn’t recognize them, and while I couldn’t have named all the junior girls, I was pretty sure I’d have noticed a sphinx at some point during the year. She was hanging out with a girl made out of translucent gel and a girl who looked like she might have had a postmortem condition… if so, then I was doubly sure these were new students. I doubted my own heritage would have been half as interesting to everyone if she’d been around.

Mindful not to stare any more than I’d already done, I headed for Burlew. Still, I thought it was a good omen for the future of the university. When I’d been a freshman, we’d been discouraged from mingling in ways both subtle and pretty heavy-handed. Either that had ended completely, or we had a crop of new girls who weren’t putting up with it.

Harlowe was the oldest dorm in the cluster, and it was blocky and institutional in the extreme. Pelinor was the newest, and its floor plan was kind of idiosyncratic. Burlew had been built a few years after Harlowe and was somewhere in between. The rooms seemed to have different sizes or layouts, to judge from the spacing of the doors, but the layout was strictly linear.

I found Nicki’s room without a problem… not only were they numbered, but the doors in Burlew Hall were decorated with construction paper sunbursts that had the residents’ names on them. There had been something similar on our rooms in Gilcrease when we moved in, but we’d taken them down… I didn’t have anything against the idea of meeting my neighbors, but I kind of wanted to do it on my own schedule, and I didn’t want to be too easy to find. The towers were the largest dormitories on the campus, and that meant that there were a lot of people who had access to the hallways at night.

Paranoid? Maybe, but I preferred to think of myself as being reasonably aware of my own tendency to attract unwanted attention.

It looked like either Nicki had scored herself a single room, or her own roommate had decided not to advertise, either. The only name on the door was Nicolette Harper.

It was a pretty name, but I could see it being a bit much for a person.

I knocked on the door.

“Nicki?” I said.

“Just a second!” she called. “I’m changing.”

“Okay,” I said, wondering if she was getting dressed up. I was suddenly glad that we weren’t fighting in our street clothes anymore. I didn’t tend to sweat much, but I felt ever so slightly classier knowing that at the very least that even if I was coming straight from the athletic center, I wasn’t wearing my workout clothes.

Then the door opened. While I’ve never been a fashion expert, it looked an awful lot like Nicki was wearing the same outfit she’d been wearing in class earlier. The only thing that was really different was her hair, which was down, straight, and a light brown. I’d never seen it in its natural state before.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “I’ve been swimming. Do you mind if I do my hair? It won’t take long.”

“Not at all,” I said. She stepped back from the doorway and I stepped in. “Do you swim often?”

“Not yet, but I hope to!” she said. “I, uh, knew the pool was open to general student use my whole freshman year, but never really got up the nerve to do more than go in and look around. At first, of course, I didn’t even have my suit… but I made a point of bringing it back with me when I went home for fall break, and then I never made it. You?”

“No, I… I’m kind of nervous about water, to tell you the truth,” I said. “And being in public in a swimsuit. I’m honestly not a big fan of showing skin.”

“I’ve wondered about that,” Nicki said. “I mean… I always kind of thought you were an exhibitionist. That is, back when I didn’t actually know you at all. But up close you don’t act like one.”

“I’m really not, in any sense of the word,” I said. “Except… well…” I blushed. “I do sort of have a very mild embarrassment kink, but it’s not enough to balance out my really genuine dislike of having strange eyes on me. I’d much rather deal with the thought of something humiliating be brought up behind closed doors than any actual, you know, thing.”

“I guess I can understand that,” Nicki said. “There are a lot of things that are sexy in principle but… less so, in practice. Would you mind turning your back? It’s easier to glam up when no one’s watching.”

“Sure,” I said.

I didn’t like to judge… I totally did, but I didn’t like to… but glamour had always seemed like a pretty fragile art. It altered people’s perceptions of an object rather than altering its appearance, which made it more susceptible to things like disbelief than illusion did.

Not that I thought much of illusionists…

Professor Stone really had me pegged, for better or for worse, with his “practical enchanter” label. I was into the hardest of hard magic, and my brain just didn’t have much space for caring about the softer arts.

I looked around Nicki’s room while she did her hair up. It was unmistakably a single room… there was only one desk and one bed, and not enough room for another set of furniture.

“I picked this dorm because the rooms have full-length mirrors on the closets,” Nicki said. “Only one on campus, except that fancy all-boys dorm… it’s furnished more like a hotel than a dorm.”

“Yeah, Ian was in there last year,” I said. “We have big mirrors in our bathrooms, but they’re not full-length, obviously.”

“Having a private bathroom might be worth the tradeoff,” Nicki said. “I could get a mirror and hang it on the back of the door.”

“It’s not really private, just… not public,” I said. “I mean, Amaranth and I are sharing ours with the two most polite people in the world, and some of us have… limited needs… but it seems like it could be small for four human girls.”

“Why’d you end up in Gilcrease and not Paradox?” Nicki asked.

“Gilcrease has mixed floors,” I said. “There’s no way to room with Ian or even share a suite with him, but we wanted to be close to each other. It was important that we could get to each other without having to go outside at night, or in the winter. I guess even if we were on different floors of the same tower we still wouldn’t have to, but we’re that much closer.”

“Ah,” Nicki said. “I’ve been thinking about trying to move into Paradox Tower… I’ve been looking into it online and it seems to be the, uh, traditional lesbian dorm. Or certain floors are. Well, obviously, since some of them are full of guys. But I mean, certain of the girls’ floors. But it seems like… well, I’d be trading my single room for a suite with two or three other girls, and at this point there’s no way I’d have anything like a choice in suitemates if I moved. Also… well, it’s not like it would make me any queerer to live in ‘the lesbian dorm’, or even help me find a girlfriend, necessarily. It’s more, you know…”

“The idea of the thing is appealing to you,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Exactly. I didn’t come out of the closet in high school, and I sort of hardly came out here… I just showed up. I’m not like ‘I’m here, I’m queer’… it’s more just that I’m here. You can look now, by the way. I’m finished.”

I turned around and saw that instead of another bright color, she’d scruffed her hair up into a sort of puffy mane and colored it like a leopard’s pelt… though when she moved her head, I saw that the pattern wasn’t so imprinted on individual hairs but superimposed over the whole thing. Her hair moved when she did, but the pattern remained constant. I supposed that was probably easier to do, but it looked more impressive. Shimmery.

“You’re getting fancy,” I said.

“I just learned this,” she said. “We had to do like a fan of peacock feathers in class, and it’s… well, it’s the same basic idea. I just wanted to see if I could take it in a different direction.”

I found myself smiling.

Soft artist or not, I liked the way that Nicki’s mind worked.

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Characters: Mackenzie, Nicki