Kenyon is so charming! Rakishly/disturbingly unwashed boys/girls! One-speed bicycles! Gravel! The bay window in the room you share in Leonard even though you’re a junior and the president of EDMs and a candidate for honors and have a significant other of more than one whole year (Kenyon marriages!)! Oh yes, my Kenyon compatriots, you could have the privilege of graduating with a four-year degree in liberal arts fuckery (I see you, film majors) but never inhabit a single. Neato, right? With the destruction of our last salvation imminent (Goodbye, Bexleys! Sad face emoticon! Womp womp! We’re all weeping together!) let’s talk about the most special kind of sleepover there is: the one where you, your roommate and your naked friend* all wake up in the same four-walled space.

Ground rules**:

1. No fucking while your roommate is present. That’s rude. (Unless they accept an invitation to join in! Then it’s hot! Just kidding!)
2. No fucking while your roommate is present. (Subtle and silent fooling around is condoned but not encouraged.)
3. No fucking while your roommate is present. (There are tons of other places on campus to hook up before you pass out.)
4. No fucking while your roommate is present. (Stop complaining and just wait for them to go to Peirce first meal. Mmm, morning sex!)

Sleepovers are fun and can even morph into pseudo slumber parties! If your roommate also has someone sleeping over, you can all sit in a circle and braid hair and eat popcorn, wistfully remembering fourth-grade birthday sleepovers where you would laugh until you cried, grabbing each other softly for support as waves of youthful mirth washed over you, flushing your cheeks red. These moments were staving off the inevitable tremors of adolescent unrest, keeping adult conflict at bay with earnest joy. And then there was the night Amanda kissed you, only quickly on the lips, but leaving you tingling to your toes for days after. She wouldn’t kiss you again until the night of senior prom, slinging her arms around your neck on the dance floor and easily sliding her tongue into your mouth. Life is cyclical that way. It always comes back to those first feelings. But college slumber parties! So great!

Recently I had the pleasure of changing into pajamas (it was fucking cold, I’m not a never nude) in front of my trick’s (yo buddy!) roommate and friend. Her roommate and I discovered we had the same bra in different colors and then got to have girly chat time about beauty secrets and boy advice. All this conversation happened while I was cuddling in bed with my lil’ trick. Sooo ideal and soo college slumber-party-core. Also, it’s kinda cool to wake up to a full room in the morning. Everyone stretches and rubs their eyes and recaps their nights in conspiratorial tones. You get the morning gossip way before you make it to Peirce!

Mixed-gender roommate sleepover pairings can be even more of a treat. The easiest way to learn that not all lax bros are assholes is to have your roommate sleep with one consistently: soon the two of you will be exchanging sincere good mornings as you wake up three feet away from each other. These good mornings will blossom into good afternoons, which will blossom into you getting priority at the KAC Heads keg line, which will blossom into sincere positive feelings about said lax bro, which might even blossom into long, friendly discussions about hegemonic masculinity and gender norms. You’ll both learn something!  Sleepovers for social change is what I’m talking about, friends.

In the end, it’s only four years that we have to share our sleeping space with non-paramours. Soon memories of roommates, cinder block walls and regulation mattresses will fade into our cloudy recollections of college. Before you know it, it’ll be 2:34 a.m. and you’ll just have stumbled into bed alone from the bar three blocks away from the apartment you split rent and utilities for. Massaging your temples, you’ll look around your bedroom and hear strains of The Dirty Projectors spilling out from under your housemate’s door. The words come back easily to you — your sophomore year girlfriend’s roommate loved that band. “MJ?” you’ll call. “Do you and Robbie wanna sleep in here tonight?” And MJ will walk in and stare at you and maybe consider crawling in next to your warm body for a second, just to make sure you’re okay and not fucked out of your mind on Xanax and vodka, but mostly look confused.

“Do you think this is some kind of fucked up slumber party?” she’ll ask. “Since when is it normal for three non-dating adults to share a sleeping space?” And you’ll shrug and giggle, brushing the whole situation off as a joke, letting MJ walk back to her bedroom and her boyfriend. But you’ll miss the camaraderie, the easy friendship between non-dating but cohabitating adults that Kenyon’s asinine housing situation wrought. You’ll drift off to sleep with Bitte Orca circling your head, knowing that in the morning the only thing the three of you will have to share will be coffee, lukewarm in the pot.

Whoa. Weird tone this week, friends. To stop this drivel from getting any more maudlin, start asking me some goddamn fucking questions! Post them anonymously in the comments or email them to me at hafterr at Kenyon dot edu (except use the actual punctuation, you know the drill).

*I don’t sleep over unless it’s a serious naked friend. Not only is there nothing more awkward than sharing a bed with a semi-stranger, but it’s also too much pressure in the morning. Is breakfast happening? Am I supposed to remember your name? No, I don’t want to borrow your dirty sweatshirt to cover up my “slutty Franzia box” Halloween costume. No, I don’t want to hear about your comps on homosexual Nazi erotica (is that what you were trying to do with your costume mustache last night?). I do, however, like to leave at 4:00 a.m. after a lil’ catnap. What could be better than sleeping in your own bed, leaving your new friend without having to define the situation and avoiding any walk-of-fame stares (no one else is awake at 4:00)? Uh huh, I thought so. I get that hooking up is intimate; it’s just that actually sleep-sleeping together is another kind of intimate.

**Unincluded but extremely important: ask your roommate for general permission for this kind of adult sleepover shit.

B.H. is a sophomore sociology major from Narberth, Pa. She is a co-leader of the Queer Women’s Collective, but is totally into the straights too. She bought her bike off of an 11-year old kid in Fishtown.