Dust Bunnies

One more story from my college days:

When I was in the living in the dorms I had a buddy who lived across the hall. I'll call him, Steve, but only because that's his real name. He had a roommate whose name was Dustin.

Dustin never talked.

Ever.

It sort of freaked Steve out. I think he used to get a, "Hi," out of him now and then, but other than that it was silence. After a few months of this, it was freaking Steve out.

Steve, my roommate (Ecks -- not his real name, but that's what we called him,) and I used to play cards together every Friday night. Dustin used to vacate the room for us and we would hang out in Steve's room and play cards for a while.

One night, we got to talking about Dustin and how he was wearing on Steve since he never talked to him.

Steve: "It's really weird. I don't even like being around him. It's not normal. I keep waiting for him to snap."

We agreed and the night wore on. We got a little impish at one point and started playing tricks on Dustin. Nothing serious...we turned his drawers over so his stuff would fall on the floor when he opened them, we glued the pages shut in an unused notebook...you know, standard college pranks.

The night wore on and we kept playing cards. Normally we only played cards for about two hours and Dustin would come back. That was usually our signal to break up the game. He didn't come back that night though, so we kept playing. After close to four hours, we were getting tired, so we were ready to call it a night. Ecks wanted to squeeze in one more prank though. It was just a simple tie all his shoelaces together prank.

Ecks reached under Dustin's bed to grab some shoes.

Ecks: "Um...guys?"

Me: "What?"

Ecks: His voice quavered a little, "Um...Dustin is under the bed."

Us: "You are so full of shit."

Ecks: "Why don't you come look?"

We shook our heads and walked over. We laid on the ground next to Ecks. Two eyes glinted back at us from the the far recesses under the bed.

You have never seen three people depart a room as quickly as we did that night. We got back to our room.

Steve: "There is no way I am sleeping in that room tonight."

Me: "You can sleep here. Of course, he can get through that door with an axe pretty easily."

Steve: "Hate you."

We all jumped when the door flew open and Dustin stood there. He slid a chair into the room and said, "You forgot your chair."

He left and Steve said, "That's the most he's said all semester."

Eventually we all calmed down and Steve went to confront psycho boy. It turned out that ultimately he was just really, un-freaking-believably, shy. He had hidden under the bed that night to see what we thought about him and since we never left, he was trapped. He came out of his shell after that and we all became close friends.

We were sort of lucky that he wasn't a psycho though. He would have totally murdered us in our sleep for that one. The headlines would have read, "Three college students found murdered with 733 stab wounds...each."I still laugh when I think of what it must have looked like from his point of view with the three of us peering under the bed at him.

He still remains the first and only person to have ever burned me in effigy though. That happened after I started calling him 'dust bunny."