It was 2011, and as I breathed my last breaths as a child- still comforted by the idea that my parents would fill my bank account, that, because of the law, their separate homes would always be viable options, I begrudgingly, unknowingly, set my sights on my first love.
Love, in this context to be read as a girl with blue eyes that belonged in a cartoon and bright red hair that eventually turned blonde. Let's be clear: her name was Chloe. Chloe sang with the honesty and purity of someone whose only love was music and was a pre-med major. She was perfect.
It all happened at Barden college- a school for idiots, and me, in one of Virginia's many random nowhere towns. I found myself away from home for nine heavily supervised (partially thanks to my estranged father's proclivity to pop into my dorm room at any given moment) and nearly unbearable months.
This first time I saw here, I was running from what would turn out to be the first of many unannounced encroachments on my space by aforementioned previously-deadbeat dad and somehow managed to wander into the career fair.
Unbelievable sights lay around every corner. There was a quidditch team, there were Deaf Jews... there was Chloe. Having spent my teenhood thus far secluded and avoiding all overly bubbly people like her, I set proper decorum aside and was as nonchalantly rude to her as I could possibly be simply out of principle. Not one to let my grouchy, snarky demeanor deter her, she stayed just as bubbly as ever throughout our conversation, her face only falling when I said goodbye.
If our first interaction could be classified as awkward thanks to all of it's hemming and hawing and pretending neither of us were completely enamored, our second was indescribably painful.
Except, as she skipped away, nude as the news after ambushing me in the shower, I didn't flinch in pain. Instead I gaped in awe at the situation.
I, Beca Mitchell, badass MC with a chip on her shoulder and absolutely no friends thanks to the headphones strapped semi-permanently to her head and the angry scowl pasted on her face, was smitten. Not only that, I was head over heels for a girl who stood for everything I hated.
She was bright and shiny and overly confident where I was dark and grungy and upsettingly self conscious. And yet...
And yet, I joined the bellas...
And yet, I began crafting mixes obsessively, all featuring Pale Blue Eyes by the Velvet Underground. Between classes, I'd whip my laptop out and tweak some new song here or there or create a better drum fill to meld a sample and the base track more readily, all the while hearing Titanium in the back of my mind.
And yet, I started texting Chloe throughout the day, meeting her for coffee under the guise of doing homework, during which time she would actually do homework and I'd invariably end up working on mixes, each time dissolving into us discussing music or life or her family back home.
When I texted her first, which was admittedly rare, they had the tendency to read something like, "My GOD, what did Locke have up his ass?" or "How long do you think it would take Kimmy Jin to notice if I hid all my stuff and make it look like I had moved out?" or, sometimes, in moments of desperation, just a simple, "Study sesh on the grass?".
Despite my getting close to Chloe, or at least as close as I could manage, Jesse was my first friend at the ever-illustrious Barden University. My first friend ever, if I'm being truthful. He elbowed and shouldered his way into my life much the way I did at concerts in order to get to the front. He simply wouldn't take no for an answer, all boyish charm and unwavering happiness.
Jesse was also my first customer in college.
It should be noted here that I am by no means a drug lord. I simply had good enough connections back home to be given good deals on a semi-regular basis, and only ever sold enough to pay for my DJ'ing equipment, which my father refused to pitch in for and my mother simply couldn't swing.
When I came to Barden, I'd assumed my dealing days were over.
However, when my Sennheisers broke after a particularly disastrous Bellas practice when Cynthia Rose fell on my bag during a lesson on pirouettes from Stacy, I called up an old dealer friend who lived an hour away and picked up enough to get the money for headphones and then some.
Soon after, Jesse mentioned a story featuring a bong, a cat, and a particularly disastrous interaction between the two. Seeing an opportunity, I offered to smoke him out in an attempt to start building my client base.
We smoked in the stairwell of his dorm, where not even the pungent aroma of smoke could overpower the stench of too many guys in too small a space, all, seemingly, with a proclivity for never washing.
Because I'd never bought from my friend, Dylan, before, I didn't know what to expect. As it turns out, Dylan's weed was far more powerful than even the premium stuff I'd been used to in Oregon. I was higher than I'd been in years after two and a half bowls, and Jesse... well, Jesse just sort of sat on the cement floor and stared into space.
After about an hour of this, we wandered outside to find the perviously-blue sky to now be an angry, ominous dark grey.
"Do you hear that rumbling?" I whispering, trying to listen quietly. Jesse, his lids heavy and his face slack-jawed, simply mumbled, "huh?" and blearily tried to get his eyes to focus on me just before the first crash of lightning ripped through the sky.
Curiously, it wasn't raining, and therefor we stayed outside, laying down on our backs, partially enthralled by the storm, partially too scared to move.
"What IS lightning?" I asked. Jesse just shook his head in an attempt to indicate that he didn't know. "Does lightning burn the clouds? Is that why there's no rain, because clouds are water and it's burning all the water?" Jesse just chuckled.
"No, seriously... we don't have lightning storms in Portland. I don't get them. How big is a lightning bolt?" I started to become frustrated at his lack of knowledge.
"Text Chloe. Didn't you say she grew up here? I bet she's a lightning expert," he offered, emphasizing the "expert" part of the sentence.
I nodded my agreement. His logic seemed sound. I attempted to type out all my questions to her, but the text became too long, so, in the interest of time, I deleted it and simply wrote, "Here's the thing. I'm really high and I have a lot of questions about lightning." then, after a moment, I sent another, "We're on the grass in front of Baton. Come watch God knock on the sky." I got no response but wasn't too worried, the monstrous storm overhead holding my rapt attention.
She showed up a few minutes later, shaking her head at me, those now-blonde curls swaying back and forth. I grabbed her ankle lightly before I could think better of it.
"Come lay down with us, it really is cool," I said, trying to sound as un-high as possible.
She looked around for a moment, as if undecided, before nodding and laying beside me, her head resting my outstretched arm.
After a few moments and a single lightning rip, she shivered, moving in close, tucking her body against mine.
"It's cold out here," she whispered, her breath tickling my cheek. I wrapped my closest arm around her, pulling her closer, when Jesse began snoring.
"Oh jesus christ," I breathed out. Kid clearly couldn't handle his shit.
"We should get him inside," she said, this time sitting up, looking down at me.
I deliberated leaving him outside for a moment, finally groaning and sitting up as well.
"Jesse, dude, let's get you inside," I grunted, trying to pull him up by one surprisingly heavy arm. Feeling the tug on his arm, he slowly got up, his eyes barely opening. Chloe and eyes each slung one of his (again, shockingly heavy) arms over our shoulders and began the arduous trek to his dorm room, luckily on the first floor and luckily unlocked.
We deposited him unceremoniously on his bed and waved goodbye as we walked back to my room, two floors above his.
Kimmy Jin was gone, an unusual but not unwelcomed occurrence.
As Chloe sat down on my bed, I pulled open one of my drawers, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and pulling one out.
"Do you mind?" I motioned to the cigarette as I opened a window. She shook her head, still smirking as she watched my light it and blow the smoke carefully out the window.
"It just helps me clear my mind when I'm high and want to be clear enough to talk to someone," I offered by way of an apology. She nodded her understanding and laid down with a yawn.
"It's getting late," she commented sleepily after a few minutes of silence. As I flicked the last of my cigarette out the window into the now-torrential downpour, I noticed it wad long since gotten dark.
Jesse and I must have been laying in one of the streetlights they had outside the dorm and just not noticed the sky change from grey to black.
"Yeah, well, it's raining pretty damn hard now too. You should probably just crash here, you live across campus, right?" I tried not to gape at what came out of my mouth. Clearly, I was still high.
"Okay," apparently needing no arm-twisting. "Do you have some stuff I can borrow?"
I nodded, frowning in concentration as I went to my closet and began digging around for a pair of sweats and an extra shirt.
Eventually I found a shirt that read "Keep Portland Weird" and a pair of Roosevelt High School sweats, handing them to her at change into while I pulled on my usual boxer shorts and oversized Voodoo Donuts shirt.
Foregoing my usual bedtime ritual of brushing my teeth and washing my face, I opted to crawl into bed immediately, partially scared that if I left the room, Chloe would magically disappear.
After she set an alarm on her phone to wake up the next day, she edged her way into my bed, wrapping an arm around me and pulling my back towards her, causing my entire body to tense, as I was now sober enough to be uncomfortable with physical contact.
She didn't seem to notice.
"Will Kimmy Jin care?" she whispered, her breath once again tickling my ear.
"Don't care," I mumbled, too tired to truly care about anything except the fact that Chloe smelled like warm sugar and vanilla, and she came when I asked her to.