I Head To Cam’s For a Not-So-Private Tutoring Session

Before I could knock at the door of his off-campus house, it opened to reveal the blonde from the dining hall, now with tousled hair and a sheen of sweat over her body. Her nipples poked through her shirt; a bra dangled out of an overstuffed purse.

“Oh! Hi Andy,” she said.

“Andy’s here!” Cam called from behind her. “Bye-bye Chloe,” he said and smacked her ass. “My boy and I got work to do.”

She giggled and skipped off his porch back toward campus. Cameron led me to his room where the smell of sex hit me like a truck. There were fresh sweat stains on his bed and two used condoms that had been tossed to the floor.

He cleared a pile of fast-food wrappers off his desk and gestured to the chair. He flopped down onto a bean bag.

“Basically, it’s for my movies class. I have to write like a thousand words about something we watched.”

I found the rubric for the assignment beneath some Gatorade bottles. After looking it over and discussing our options, we decided to write the paper on the use of montage in Vertigo. Easy. I made a list of all the examples we brainstormed over the course of half an hour. Cameron kept glancing at his phone but still paid a decent amount of attention.

“I think that’s good,” I said. “We’ve got our thesis statement and a bunch of examples. All we have to do now is expand our bullet points into paragraphs.”

“Dope! Also, I invited one of my classmates over ‘cause she said she was working on her paper right now too. That cool?”

I shrugged, “It’s your house.”

“Hell yeah.”

Twenty minutes later, Cam introduced me to a curly-haired brunette named Abbie. If she was put off by the abysmal state of the room, she didn’t show it. He returned to his bean bag, and she curled up next to him, head resting on his shoulder.

“So what film are you doing?”

“Vertigo,” I said.

She scrunched up her face, “I didn’t like that one. I was gonna do Blue Velvet.”

“You haven’t started?” Cameron asked.

Abbie grinned mischievously, “Not really.”

Cam pointed a finger at the laptop, “Andy, open up another document. This lady needs our help.”

With a beautiful girl in the room and two hundred dollars on the line, I did as he asked.

“Watch this,” Cameron said. “He’s like the smartest guy ever. Do your thing Andy.”

I swiveled the chair to look at both of them, “So what was your favorite part of the movie?”

She tilted her head, “I don’t know… Actually, no, it’s when that guy lip-syncs that song and the other guy loses it.”

“Easy,” I said and swiveled back. As I spoke I typed out the title, “‘Dreams and Music in Lynch’s Blue Velvet.’ We can bang out a thousand words with that easily.”

“Yeah, we can,” I heard Cam pull her closer to him.

I wrote a couple bullet points based on my vague memory of the movie and its Wikipedia synopsis. I got kind of into it, structuring the essay, pulling quotes off the internet, and writing introductory sentences for each paragraph. Just as I realized I hadn’t gotten their input in a little while, I heard the sound of unzipping.

“Holy fuck,” Abbie whispered.

My mouth went dry. This couldn’t be happening? Right? The cursor blinked, waiting for me to continue typing.

The bean bag rustled as they shifted their weight. I swallowed, and, summoning every ounce of courage, looked behind me.