How to drop out of college

Everyone but me knew this was doomed from the start.

I told my mother that I was giving up six weeks before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic and two weeks before Valentine's Day.

C It was a frantic, frantic phone call I dialed with shaking hands—hoping, perhaps, that she wouldn't pick up and that I could put off the conversation for another all-nighter. She answered (I should have known) but barely registered the surprise; I don't remember much from that month, but I will always remember her voice on the phone saying, "Oh, honey, I know."

I resented him a bit. There's something romantic about being a spontaneous college dropout, but there's nothing at all romantic about being a college dropout that everyone knew was doomed. failed from the start.

But like with spinach-teeth and bad pals, I found out too late that everyone knew the punchline but me . My mother would tell me later that she had realized that I would be leaving before I had even started my first semester. For everyone in my life, the hints slowly crept in.

"You know that back pain you get when you haven't been up for a few days ?" I told a friend as we were going to dinner one night. I was wearing a neon green wig; I always forgot to wash my hair. "No," she replied. I laughed nervously.

It was a kind of interaction I would become intimately familiar with - you ask a question expecting laughter of mutual understanding, because its premise seems so mundane, but the answer actually reveals that you're doing so badly that you've forgotten what normal is. "So how many days you guys go before you change your underwear? "No one actually does this homework, do they?" Crickets, a sudden public vulnerability you didn't register for, the smell of pity. I always accidentally let people get to know me.

The night before I dropped out of school, I stuck a Kurt Vonnegut quote on my thigh with a sewing needle stuck to a pencil. It was supposed to say "SO IT GOES", but it ended up sounding more like "SO I GUES". I was almost immediately embarrassed by it, but now I joke that the mark of a good bad tattoo is that it can serve as an explanation.

Just a year before, I had been the kind of person who had a 10-year plan interspersed with bullet points that said "Nobel Prize (Physics or Peace)" and "'Ellen' show?" So that's fine.

Now I was giving up and moving across the country. My last day was February 14, 2020. It was also the day of the premiere of the movie "Sonic the Hedgehog", which seemed like the funniest thing in the world.

While chatting in the dining room, my friends and I ranked the funniest things to do on Valentine's Day: go see the movie "Sonic", ask to open your relationship, buy a sex doll, go to "Wheel of Fortune. The only thing more fun than seeing "Sonic", we determined, would be getting engaged to a Red Robin.

This idea seemed too good not to happen, and a plan was hatched. It would be the farewell of a lifetime, the glorious end to my five-month tenure in higher education: I would get engaged in fast casual restaurant chain Red Robin on Valentine's Day, then I'd go see the "Sonic”movie.

We posted a Craigslist ad asking for a secret film job - “VIDEOGRAPHER NEEDED FOR VALENTINES DAY EXTRAVAGANZA.” Responses were few and unhelpful at best (we got a never-ending email calling us "morons"), so we opted to ask a friend to take over.

My fake fiancé, Sam, was wearing a suit borrowed from a roommate, one size too small. I had planned to wear a wedding dress with a fur coat and sneakers, but I didn't want to not take a real wedding dress from Value Village, so I bought a floor-length piece of white lingerie with a lace neckline and side slits all the way down to the hips and instead called it a wedding dress. (The plan had an obvious logical flaw: why would anyone wear a wedding dress...