Love in the Time of Corps Law

You sit in your massively cluttered bedroom at your massively cluttered desk, which you’ve

used not once for actual study. You stare at your glaringly bright phone screen (keeping it

generic for diplomatic purposes: the iPhone/Android debate is for another day and another

writer). Maybe tomorrow morning’s hindsight will reveal that this was the incorrect choice to

make, that instead you should’ve taken up your friends’ offers to ‘get lit @ Moose’.

Regardless, here you are waiting in your cold, dark room whilst your roommates get down to

Cotton-Eyed Joe for the third time that night. 

 

Finally – YES – the beautiful sound of that long-awaited notification. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t get so worked up over such things, but you saw him in the back row of that lecture you had in Manning Clarke last sem and you’d been praying that you’d both end up here one day. He only had the one photo on his profile, but it didn’t matter because you knew it was him – yourecognised that bookish (yet coy) smirk even at 2am in the bowels of a packed upstairs Moose, strobes and all. Another point in his favour: the photo is a simple, fully-clothed, wholesome outdoorsy shot. No naked bathroom mirror selfies, or quintessential-yet-depressing Wolf bathtub photo with The Lads™. This is a rare find, and you aren’t going to take it for granted.

 

What you are going to do, however, is let it sit for a minute. Be still your beating heart.

Instead, you check your emails. The weekly forum digest, always a good summary of the

latest dating news. Scrolling through, you see reference to a post from a John Knapley. Shit,

he’s still messaging? Curious, you click across from ‘courses in progress’ to ‘past’, absolutely

disbelieving but also completely unsurprised that there seems to be no quit in these men. As

you wait for your reliably shit Internet to load the page, you look through the brief messages

you and John exchanged last semester:

 

John (his profile pic is of him holding a dead fish – you must’ve been super drunk to

have actually responded to this one): Oh, so you’re doing corps law next semester?

You: Sure am

Him: Haha nice

 

As it turns out, after you’d decided his eloquent final message hadn’t required a response,

John sent you a snide gif of a little ghost dancing. Bold move, John. But not quite enough to

rekindle (or just kindle, let’s be real) a spark. Here’s hoping he recovered quickly.

 

Your back-row Manning Clarke man has responded to your message about a ‘study session’ –

it’s no Netflix and chill but hey, hopefully it’ll get the job done. There it is, the response

you’d been looking for: ‘I’m free Sunday evening’. As you sit there mulling these new and

exciting prospects, another notification banner appears at the top of your screen. Damn,

maybe he’s super eager. Not that there are any issues with that. You click to open.

 

I’ll also be there.

 

What?

 

A new message:

 

I’d be really keen to go through some past exams, so it may be worthwhile having a

look through some before this meet up? Let me know which years you guys end up

looking at – Steve.

 

Wait, who’s Steve? Does he realise what Wattle is used for these days? Maybe he’s one of the

few who haven’t yet caught on to its purpose of coordinating extracurricular activities.

 

Goddamn, what does this mean now? Does this actually have to be a study session? In

Steve’s defence, the Wattle announcements forum really had been going off this evening. A

perhaps confusing combination of exam prep and flirtatious small talk. You can’t blame the

lad for wanting to get in on the action, academic or otherwise. You check out his bio: overall

very wholesome, no dead fish or Wolf bathtub pics. He seems like the sort your friend Ali

would like, so you finally write a reply.

 

Sure Steve, my friend Ali will be coming along too. He’s much more knowledgeable

about this course anyway. See you all at Badger. 8pm? Bring whatever papers you’d

like.

 

This could be interesting. Ah well, even if it doesn’t quite work out this time, there’s always

LAWS2204 next sem. Or maybe Manning Clarke man is on Tinder, if that’s still a thing?

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