Read Online Away We Go by Emil Ostrovski - Free Book Online

while flirting.
    â€œDid I tell you I’m going to be Peter Pan?” I asked him.
    Zach raised his eyebrows, so I explained about how Marty had won the annual MacGregor Playwriting Contest for Away We Go, his modern take on Peter Pan, and had offered me the main part.
    Zach squinted, tilted his head to the side, gave me a thumbs-up. “I’ve often thought about what Peter Pan would look like if he were a Polo-playing Westing student brushing his teeth in one of our bathrooms, and I have to say, you’re exactly like I pictured him, right down to both your chest hairs. The vice president is invited to the grand premiere, right? ’Cause if said vice president hadn’t saved you from being locked out, why, we would have proceeded down a completely different causal line. Butterfly effect, you know.”
    â€œI could’ve ended up as Wendy.”
    He tapped his temple a couple times, to indicate he’d thought of everything.
    Just then the bathroom door swung open, and Nigel stepped through.
    Nigel glanced from me to Zach to me.
    I realized with horror that I had a raging erection poking at one of the yellow polka dots decorating my towel. My stomach compressed into a single dense point—a black hole, an infinitely dense polka dot of sexual frustration.
    Nigel looked at my face, then at my towel.
    I looked at his face, then at my towel.
    â€œYo brosefs, there’s some fun been going on up in here !” he said, clapping us both on our shoulders. “ Somebody’s for real gonna need a new towel soon.” He threw himself into a stall, and proceeded to narrate his history of irritable bowel syndrome, but we weren’t listening.
    â€œCome to dorm tea this Thursday?” Zach asked me, but didn’t wait for my response.
    He’d pushed through the exit, gone, and I was left thinking about Earl Grey versus English breakfast.
    â€œYo, brosef,” Nigel said from his stall. “Hand me some toilet paper? I’m out over here, man, and these here are about to be some desperate times. I can feel it in my bowels.”
    My phone buzzed in my pocket.
    It was Zach.
    Get there early. Sofa spots limited. ;]
    I spent the next day and a half thinking about that winky face.
    I had never met someone who used a bracket in lieu of a parenthesis.
    Who knew Thursday Tea nights in Clover were the place to be? Faces sipping from mugs crowded the multipurpose room. I’d arrived early enough to guarantee myself a coveted sofa spot, thanks to Zach.
    â€œI would’ve defunded them, too, ” a wiry blond-haired guy named Matt said of F.L.Y.’s op-ed in the Westinger, in which F.L.Y. advocated students rushing the main gate. The editorial came out this Monday. By today, the student council had defunded F.L.Y. and threatened to do the same to the Westinger if the editorial board didn’t resign.
    â€œWe didn’t have a choice,” Zach said, rubbing at his eye. “The administration would’ve replaced the whole student council if we hadn’t yes-sirred along with it.”
    â€œThat’s some workers-of-the-world-unite shit they were on about,” a guy in a beanie said, radiating the scent of weed. Zach smiled at him encouragingly, so he went on, “which is fucked up, right? But if we don’t have free speech, then what’s the admin hiding, know what I mean? When I called my parents on the home hotline”—this prompted groans from all around. Nobody wanted to admit they believed in secret hotlines that connected youths in recovery directly to their parents—“I did, okay?” the guy in the beanie insisted. “And they told me—”
    â€œThey loved you?” someone suggested.
    â€œThat the hope of hearing your voice again was their only reason for living?” another piped in.
    â€œ Hey. Fuck you guys. Matt’s voice is my reason for living,” said a third.
    Laughter.
    â€œGuys, don’t be