*“Oh my God, Em. Guess who I just got an e-mail from?”*
Em knew her roommate Cecily loved to make her blush. So when Cecily posed this question slowly, giggling on the common room couch, Em assumed it was from a dirty pen pal. She expected Cecily to read some erotic poetry from their Shakespeare professor, or show her a .jpg of some dining hall worker’s erection (the stress of finals week had a tendency to make everyone horny – even the townies).
Em closed her laptop, and played dumb. “Is it from our RA?”
Cecily, clearly enjoying her roommate’s ignorance, smiled devilishly, “It’s from the streaking team.”
Em, try as she might to contain it, felt the color rise in her face. She knew all about the college’s varsity streaking team. She and her extended family had watched them, and their bouncing body parts, make their annual sprint across campus on Accepted Students Day. Her mother, a good Christian Baptist from Georgia, was predictably horrified. Her grandmother, from her less-conservative father’s side of the family, had howled with laughter. For Em, seeing the display of skin was secretly the reason she had decided on Ryder College that day. She saw the buoyancy with which these students flaunted their bodies – in such sharp relief with her literally “buttoned-up” upbringing.