Dating during a pandemic is extremely difficult, especially when you live off campus during your first year of college. You see, a friend from high school found a way for us to get an apartment with no consequences from our university. Of course my relationship with her fell apart by the time our story begins. So I will just give you the gist.
Her name was Penny. We were friends during our senior year of high school and since we were going to the same college, we had decided to room together. Not only that, we both became servers at the same restaurant. I had been told that it may not work out, but I did not believe a single person. Why? Because until the day that everything fell apart, we were like the best of friends.
To this day I am still not sure what happened, but this is what happened from my perspective. Penny had gone home to see her parents for 2 days. One night after work I got back home to find that my roommate had gotten back earlier than expected. Since at this point I thought we were still friends, I went into her room to have a chat before I took a shower. However everything I said seemed to make it worse. She had major attitude me and eventually I chose to just go to sleep. "Maybe she is just cranky" was my thought.
However, the next morning I went into the living room to watch some television just like I did every morning. That was when I noticed that everything she owned was removed from the shared living space. I could not understand what happened.
When she left that morning I tried to talk to her, but it was like I was not even there. Nothing I said made her turn around and tell me what was going on. So, I decided that if she was not going to talk to me, then I would give up talking to her. In my heart I knew she was going to move out it was only a matter of time. In fact, I got a front row seat when she finally started moving things out and into her parents' cars. I would have just stayed in my room but I had work that night so I had to face them. I was so hurt. I grabbed my stuff and went to work and tried to pretend it didn't happen, but by the time I got there people already knew.
Fast forward about 2 months and i was still working at the same restaurant as my former roommate. I had a running streak of ignoring her because she had never tried to talk to me about why she left. Some mutual friends had also tried to ask her about what happened but her only response every single time was "I don't want to talk about it".
Our story begins at the beginning of November. I had befriended a few girls in my major who lived on campus and I was invited to go with them to play laser tag. This is where our story really begins.