The first day of classes left Jason three parts exhausted and one part excited. The day had been good; he hadn't gotten hit in the head, all of his Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes looked like they were going to be decent, and there was a cute girl in his religion class. It was almost enough to make him forget that one of his roommates was the equivalent of Wakko on cocaine.
He liked Leo, but even a little bit of time with him made Jason exhausted. He would take some getting used to, especially after his old friends. People like Reyna, and Dakota – well, okay, get any amount of sugar in Dakota and he'd be close to Leo's usual level of hyperactivity – weren't quite the same as Leo Valdez.
Thankfully, Leo wasn't there when Jason got back to the dorm. Ethan and Will were arguing about something, though from the grin on Will's face, Jason deduced that it wasn't that big of a deal.
Then again, Will hadn't stopped smiling since Jason had met him, so it could be anything.
"Jason, be our tiebreaker here," Will said, waving him over. Jason went, if a bit unwillingly. He didn't know how to feel about Ethan Nakamura – he reminded Jason a lot of Nico, actually: way too hard to get to know, even if you tried to be friendly.
"Okay," Jason said. Will's smile broadened, and Ethan's scowl deepened. "What is it?"
"Walt Whitman was gay, wasn't he?" Will said. Jason shrugged.
"Dunno. Was he?"
"Okay, but either way – assume he is, both me and Ethan agree on this, by the way, and so does everyone else, but, along the same time period was Oscar Wilde. Who was also gay."
"Okay," Jason said.
"So, I don't think it's stupid to assume that they hooked up at some point," Will said, and Jason frowned.
"Why are you discussing the sex lives of classic authors and poets?" he asked. "And why don't you just google it?"
"I doubt Google would-" Ethan started, but pulled out his phone and typed on it so fast that Jason had an idea that he was misspelling everything and just letting autocorrect fix his mistakes. "I don't have time for this."
He turned to leave, just as Will said "Ha!" and then the three of them were crowded around the phone. Jason blinked, Will cheered, and Ethan sighed.
"This is almost more homoerotic than Howl," Will said. Jason had no clue what he was talking about, but it did seem that Will had been right. "But, either way, I'm totally right, and you're totally wrong, and now you owe me lunch."
"What are you right about?"
The three turned to see Leo, covered in grease, of all things. One of the straps on his backpack was ripped, so he wore it from one shoulder, despite the fact that it tipped him to lean to one side.
"What happened to you?" Jason asked, frowning. Leo blinked, looked at his hands, and nodded.
"Oh, right – I, uh, do work study with the computer help desk, and some people think that means literal help desk, so I fixed a car," Leo said, shrugging. "Also, my bag's always been like this. What are you right about?"
"Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde hooked up," Will said. He headed out of the room still laughing, and Ethan rolled his eyes. Leo glanced at Jason as if for clarification, but Jason just shrugged. He didn't know what his roommates were doing, and even the ones that had seemed normal were a little weird, but whatever.
"Alright," Leo said after a brief pause. "Uh, also, Ethan, there's this blond guy outside the dorm looking for you. He's talking to some girls, but he asked me if I knew you and I said you were my roommate and… well, he's outside."
Ethan brushed past, muttering a thanks, and then it was just Leo and Jason. It was awkward for a bit; Jason hadn't yet let go of his backpack, and it was starting to get heavy, so he crossed to their shared room to get rid of it. Leo followed him.
Already the two of them had split up the room. It was easy to tell that two different people lived there – Leo had begun cultivating a wall of blueprints and sketches, and there were tools everywhere. Jason had a basketball on his side; even if he didn't play anymore due to risk of severe brain damage, he did like the game, and sometime he'd go down to a park and shoot some hoops, or something. He had a pile of textbooks on the floor beside his bed, because even though he'd ordered a bookshelf it hadn't come yet, so he was stuck with them on the floor. His clothes were put away, while Leo's were strewn about the room, half of them covered in grease and the other half maybe some semblance of clean.
"So, what's your major, anyway?" Leo asked, scrunching his nose. "Because I look at you, and I have no clue."
"Political science," Jason said, dropping his backpack and pulling everything out of it. "You?"
"Uh, engineering," Leo said. He bounced over to Jason and grabbed the basketball. "Why do you have one of these when you're not playing?"
"I like basketball," Jason said. Leo bounced the basketball on the floor once, and that was all it took. He must have thrown it with too much force, because it bounced up, ricocheted off the wall, and Jason barely had time to duck. Leo caught it, dropped it, and swore. "This is why I don't play basketball anymore."
"This is why I never played basketball," Leo said. "Wow. Hey, do you have Netflix? Because I really don't want to do anything, and I really want to watch Friends, so it would be cool if you had Netflix. Hey, we could program it into Ethan's Xbox, so that we don't have to watch it on a computer screen!"
"Would he like that?" Jason asked, and Leo rolled his eyes. He threw his arm around Jason's neck and pulled him bodily out of their bedroom.
"Ah, who cares," he said. "He'll get over it during finals week."
This is just fun. I don't know what I'm doing.