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There were socially acceptable methods for obtaining a roommate for grad school – Darcy Kincaid IV had seriously considered those socially acceptable methods until one Spencer Moran entered his life. Shortly after Darcy's acceptance into Harvard University's physics PhD program, this Spencer Moran bombarded him with emails. The first was a generic message of congratulations, the second was an address and some low-quality pictures of a small apartment in Cambridge, and the third was a lease. That lease had already included Darcy's full name at every turn, and, at the end, was marked by Spencer Moran's hideously scrawled signature. It was immediately clear that this Spencer either had no love for subtlety, was severely socially impaired, or both.

Though Darcy and Spencer were not complete strangers, their one degree of separation was precarious: Spencer was the long-time pen pal of Darcy's close friend Emily Park, who was utterly embarrassed by his lack of etiquette and common sense. It would have been one thing if Spencer had responded to an open inquiry for a roommate, and an entirely stranger one to solicit Darcy from out of the blue. He had used a dummy email address that was a senseless jumble of letters and numbers to contact Darcy's school email, and had even forgotten to sign his own name. When Darcy blocked that address, Spencer tried again with another address, and wisely identified himself as Emily Park's pen pal.

They had been writing to each other monthly for over eight years, covering high school and college and several life changes. Over four years of undergrad, Emily gave her real-life friends the highlights of Spencer's diligent observations of the goings-on of Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. In that time, Spencer had become a running inside joke among Darcy and his immediate friends, on par with Darcy and roommate Ricky's obsession with blonde porn stars.

Spencer was plainly abnormal. When Darcy and friends trawled the internet for information on Spencer, they found no clear pictures but plenty on his accomplishments – his acceptance into Harvard's mathematics department was no surprise. He was a senior at MIT, graduating with degrees in applied mathematics and computer science.

Curiosity and admiration for Spencer's accomplishments – more first author publications than Darcy had; more hackathon victories than Emily – did not make up for the fact that Spencer seemed a borderline sociopath. The shock of receiving three very sudden, very audacious emails sent Darcy into silence. Spencer took Darcy's pause as a signal to send even more emails – four and five were filled with reasons why he would be a good roommate, and reasons why Boston was an excellent place to live in, respectively.

Perhaps Spencer knew that Darcy would not hesitate to matriculate to Harvard. The program's rigor and reputation – unparalleled, prestigious – were deciding factors, but Darcy craved change. His four years at Stanford had been the best of his life, but he needed to leave. Four years in sprawling, perpetually sunny Palo Alto had been wonderful, but Darcy needed to go back east.

He was the most recent Roman numeral in a line of blue-blooded Connecticut Yankees: politicians, businessmen, bankers, lawyers and judges, all Yale alumni. He had rebelled against family tradition first by choosing to study physics, and second by declining Yale's offer and escaping to California to what his sister derisively called the Harvard of the West.

California had changed him, no doubt. Darcy had gone from Exeter to Stanford, from dress code Oxfords and chinos to jeans or shorts and T-shirts every day, every week. In the course of four years, Darcy shot up three inches, got a tan, and gained nearly twenty pounds of muscle, and could have easily passed for a prospective law student during his campus interview at Harvard, which he had begun to consider the Stanford of the East.

You don't look like a Californian – Spencer had said that in the seventh email, and of course he'd sent even more. At least as far as Emily and your Facebook tell me.

It seemed that Spencer, too, had craved a change of scenery and thus decided to move down the street for grad school. Emily knew that Spencer was born and raised around Boston, liked the Red Sox and the Patriots, and had no intention of ever leaving New England. This Emily knew, and faithfully reported to her friends, because Spencer felt the need to give updates about his hometown teams and his opinions about this player or that game, comparing and contrasting to seasons of yore. This was a fanatic, in every sense of the word.

Spencer Moran was a math genius from Boston with poor social skills and no friends – that was the extent of his personality, though Emily insisted that he was funny and altruistic sometimes. Darcy had to admit that Spencer's letters sometimes had some dry wit – to prove her point, Emily always read aloud these infrequent jokes. True, too, was that Spencer tutored classmates, but this came off as self-aggrandizing and arrogant even to Darcy, who was excessively proud and vain himself. Emily was always defending Spencer in that way, but the emails out of the blue were enough to convince Darcy and his friends that perhaps Spencer was a few pieces short of a full set. He declined the offer with just enough bite to frighten Spencer off and resumed his roommate search on the more conventional, socially acceptable routes, in grad housing.

That bought him a week of silence.

Just when Darcy had found a roommate in Henrik, another incoming physics grad student who seemed perfectly reasonable, Spencer Moran apologized for his rudeness, and begged Darcy to be his roommate. When Darcy didn't reply, Spencer evidently called on Emily, who all but forced him to take Spencer. Emily was good at the art of persuasion, and tearfully told Darcy that if Spencer didn't find a roommate soon, he'd lose his apartment, which was the best deal in all of Cambridge, and that he had already signed the lease.

"He doesn't have anyone else, he's desperate," Emily simpered. "You're probably the first person he's connected with all year. He doesn't have anyone else."

The picture that Emily painted was truly pathetic – Spencer Moran, a lonely, possibly depressed mathematician who lived vicariously through Emily's stories about her friends – so Darcy took pity, and was done for.

And lastly, Emily's appeal to logic: "From all the letters I've sent, Spencer knows about your obsession with blonde sorority girls and he doesn't think you're a pervert for it. Who else besides Ricky would be that understanding?"

The blonde obsession was an inside joke that began when Darcy and Ricky moved into their fraternity house in their first summer. One of the graduating brothers gifted the house a flash drive filled with gigabytes of pornography from RC Studios, a high-end Manhattan-based porn production company, subscription-based and extremely hard to pirate, with deliciously hardcore scenes with the most beautiful models. Furthermore, the website had some of the best user interface and experience any of them had seen thanks to a top-notch engineering team that the very generous fraternity brother had interned with the summer before. The many tech-inclined brothers built a cult out of worship of RC Studios and its goddesses, and even constructed a makeshift shrine in the bathroom closet. Darcy, who had a moderate interest in computer science, had no pretentions about understanding the elegance of RC's engineering, and was content openly lusting for Susie Sweet, the face of the company and its most beloved model.

Susie Sweet was probably the most beautiful girl on the planet, and Darcy's ultimate blonde crush. She had the most gorgeous hair, a frothy waterfall of ash blonde hair tumbling to her waist, and every scene was rough, raunchy, and completely wild. Susie was so fragile, delicate, and virginal-looking that just her introduction clips at the beginning of each movie – fully-clothed Susie, speaking meekly in her soft sylph voice about all the filthy things she would be subject to – was enough to fuel his fantasy. Because of her, Darcy had an intense fondness for blondes and conquered many of them, providing Emily many stories to fill Spencer's curiosity.

In the end, some of the brothers bought and shared a subscription to RC Studios. Though they were initially successful in stealing many Susie videos, their theft had angered the porn gods, who afflicted their computers with incurable viruses.

The Susie obsession preceded the Spencer obsession by a few days. Emily's mysterious pen-pal claimed to have interned at RC Studios over the summer, remembered Darcy's frat brother, and was unsurprised that he had been the one to steal content. It was that year that Darcy and Ricky and Melissa first acknowledged Spencer's existence, that Darcy declared his major and decided to dedicate his time to working in a research lab, to never go more than three days without sex, and to seriously consider grad school.

Darcy and his friends certainly had fun, and the best of their adventures were faithfully reported in Emily's letters east. As Darcy packed up his room in the frat house, he felt a pang of nostalgia for those foolish, fun nights, and a bit of dread for what life with Spencer the boring mathematician would be like. Every Christmas visit home to Connecticut was a cold reminder that California had changed him, that his youth, the unrestrained and wild college parties, were all finite. He had graduated, and it was time to get serious. Even if he tried, Darcy did not think there was anything he could do to convince a hermit like Spencer to have fun.

Eventually, Spencer's emails became just as desperate as Emily claimed them to be, and Darcy knew that Emily would never forgive him for denying Spencer. He signed the lease with great trepidation, and was comforted by the fact that any friend of Emily's was bound to be a reasonable, decent roommate.

That was two months ago.

They'd all graduated, gone on a whirlwind road trip through the great national parks of the American West, and made memories to last a lifetime. With Ricky and Melissa starting their new jobs soon, they had one final hurrah over Independence Day, promised to keep in touch, and saw Darcy off at the airport, the only one of their group to leave California for good. There were tears, long hugs and pep talks and though Darcy kept his composure, he very nearly did shed a tear at their final goodbye.

His new life lay at the other side of the gate, and he thought optimistically about new beginnings. Perhaps Spencer Moran would turn out to be a decent roommate after all. Perhaps they could even be friends.

He could remember four years ago, disembarking at San Francisco International Airport, being struck by the marked lack of summer humidity and thinking to himself how out of place he must have seemed. Brooks Brothers and New England austerity, prep school Darcy could not have been more nervous entering the Sunshine State, damned if he could ever fit in.

He did eventually fit in, but just as Darcy was beginning to feel at home in Silicon Valley, he was returning to his patrician, Ivy League roots. But it was Ricky who helped him assimilate the most, and there would not be another Ricky in Boston. Darcy remembered long conversations with his hall mates, and Ricky alone, in the first two years, of a collective awe-like lust for Susie Sweet and RC, of furiously stressful study sessions and phone calls back to Connecticut that ended with a beer with his roommate. Over the past four years, Darcy had, on countless occasions, spent the night on Emily and Melissa's floor watching movies with them while Ricky hooked up in their room in the frat house, and to sexile Ricky just as often – and just the same for the girls, Ricky and Darcy kept an air mattress for Melissa or Emily to use when one of them had an intimate night.

They were going their separate ways now, and Darcy farthest away, to a cold stranger's apartment.

Ricky knew this, and as a parting gift, he gave Darcy a Stanford mug and a copy of the month's Maxim, which featured Susie Sweet, full interview, full-page pictures.

"You really shouldn't have," Darcy had said, stowing the glossy into his backpack, smirking in spite of himself.

"But I really should have." Ricky always knew the best thing to say, and Darcy knew that there would never another Ricky, never a better roommate, Spencer be damned.

Since leaving his friends, Darcy had seduced four blondes in total – a pair of sorority sisters in matching tank tops, with peroxide hair and push-up bras collapsed onto each other giggling when he winked at them; the TSA officer, dirty-blonde bun tight at the base of her neck, blushed almost red when his belt buckle set off the metal detector; and, lastly, a Paris Hilton look-alike with Louis Vuitton luggage set and an obvious overdose of silicone, sitting a few yards from him at the gate, was throwing him longing looks from over her bug-eyed sunglasses.

Darcy's phone vibrated with a text.

Hey darcy your boxes came. pick up some snacks when you come okay? Thanks.

With an exasperated shake of his head, Darcy whipped a quick text back: beer and chips. Getting on the plane right now. He put the magazines away and glanced out the window at the waiting plane. Massachusetts beckoned.

Darcy was seated next to a goddess who, in all his years flirting with and fucking blondes, was the closest to Susie Sweet as he had ever seen. Her hair, ashy and wavy, was pulled haphazardly into a side ponytail. When he sat down, she looked up at him with curious, eager blue eyes and hastily moved her handbag off the aisle seat. That beautiful Aphrodite he had to scoot past – facing her, and certainly she did glance down with fluttery eyelashes – was the only thing that could have made an eight hour flight bearable.

"Hey, I'm Darcy." He shook her hand, which had a slight tremble in it. "I always introduce myself to people in the aisle seat. Would it be incredibly rude of me if I asked you to switch with me?"

She was no match for his charm, and she gladly switched with him, making half-formed remarks about how long his legs were and of course he'd need the stretch room. As she stammered back that her name was, "Brianna, nice to meet you," Darcy's phone vibrated again.

Have a nice flight

"Sorry, just my roommate," Darcy said. Brianna nodded attentively and he asked her, "First time in Boston?"

"Yeah, I'm visiting my aunt. You?"

Darcy, with more confidence and arrogant nonchalance than he should have decently used, gave her the, "Oh, I'm starting grad school at Harvard in physics," letting his ego swell as Brianna fawned over his intelligence. He would need that armor, living with Spencer, a genius of tremendous proportion, and if he had met Brianna at a party, they would be naked and fucking in no time flat.

They talked for most of the flight and, as Spencer had suggested, Darcy did, in fact, have a very pleasant flight.