drafting again

Hey everyone: just popping in to offer you another snippet from my final project draft! I'm trying to create more than I consume, and I'm not sure if I'm being successful or not. Raise a glass for trying I guess? Here's an excerpt so you can meet another character I've been creating, Ezra.

September 14

Had my first day at work today. I’m a receptionist (eat your heart out, feminism) for the psychology department’s offices. The good part is I get paid. The bad part: my boss, Professor Brooks, seems pretty uninterested in the student workers here; she smells a little like cat food and doesn’t seem like she’ll be a good reference for future employers...oh well. She showed me the plants that needed to be watered, how to forward a call to any of the staff in the office, let me know that there are usually two students in the office at once, someone to do office hours about the intro psych tests and someone to do office work (me). I sat my butt in the desk chair and started to enter the requested appointments into the computer, and the office hours guy, Ezra, came in. Cue a sharp intake of breath: he’s really cute, in a college way. It looks like he hasn’t really showered in a while, but he inexplicably smells like old spice or some other generically nice man scent. He was wearing a shirt that had a bird skeleton flying towards the sun on it and seemed to be happy to have company in the office-- He’s a psych/Spanish major, a junior, and he adjusted his desk chair like 7 times, laughing about how his “long-ass legs” don’t fit under any desk. I watched him try (unsuccessfully) to look normal while moving up and down on his office chair and stifled a laugh. We talked for a while, the classic small things. He made a scrunched up face when I told him I was a freshman.

Me: What’s so bad about being a freshman? 

Him: Nothing! Nothing, it’s just a crazy year for most people.

He’s a psych/Spanish major, a junior, and if nothing else, I actually think we could be friends. I felt that thing that reminds me a little of Violet, where the conversation just worked. I’m particularly excited about that, because the hours at work are long and being alone gets weirder and weirder the longer I’m here. Roommate is never in our room which I guess is kind of a good thing, but it means I have no one to talk to but myself when I don’t want to do work, and as we all know, I’m not my own best friend. Ezra told me how to steal food from the dining hall and where to study in the psych building. He asked me what I did on campus, and I said radio, and he said he’d tune into my broadcast. We laughed about how our cat-food-smelling boss seemed frazzled. Maybe this can be something good. Here’s hoping.