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Mark walks past the lemonade stand about four times. The girls look unhappy, one of them looks particularly annoyed and maybe like she’s about to start telling off the other three. He feels bad, briefly, about not stopping, but it’s far too cold for a cup of lemonade and he only has a ten dollar bill in his pocket that he needs to buy lunch with. He can already tell that they won’t have change for him, so he decides maybe he’ll grab a cup if they’re still there on his way back from his afternoon class.
He’s not surprised they are still there, wrapped up in winter jackets with pouts on their faces and four full pitches of lemonade and a fifth only half emptied as he passes by on his way to eat. He is surprised to see Jackson Wang, of all people, passing over a handful of change in exchange for three cups.
Mark can hear Jackson praise the taste, loudly, as he drinks all of them in quick succession. Most of the things Jackson does are loud. When he enters a room, when he’s walking down the street, when he’s goofing off in class, when Mark is trying to sleep four feet away. He’s always just making noise.
He’s even more surprised when Jackson has the audacity to approach him outside the dining hall to ask to borrow five dollars.
“What for?” Mark asks, rightfully suspicious. He can’t remember the last time Jackson spoke to him, after they’ve been living in the same room for two entire months, but bets it was probably to ask for a favor then too.
Jackson’s got a heavy coat and a cocky grin, made worse by his dumb hat that has his last name nailed to it in big, shiny silver letters.
“You know. This, that. Condoms, booze, food. The usual. I’ll pay you back, man, come on,” Jackson’s entire body moves when he talks, his body swaying, head tilting to the side, hands waving along with what he says. There’s a hint of anxiety in his tone that makes Mark hand it over, against his better judgment. He watches Jackson tuck it into his pocket and sprint away, without even ‘thanks, bro’.
He mutters the word ‘asshole’ after his roommate and turns to head to his last class, confused and annoyed.
Returning to his dorm room, Mark finds approximately twenty small, white plastic cups scattered across every available surface and Jackson half under his bed.
Sitting down, Mark watches Jackson’s socked feet try, and fail, to get purchase on the hard wood floors so he can push himself further under for about five minutes before he finally retreats and sits up.
He doesn’t see what, but Jackson hastily shoves a handful of something into his pocket. Mark is briefly worried its drugs, but figures Jackson can’t be that dumb, and doesn’t question it.
He does, though, question the cups.
“Why are there, like, forty cups of lemonade?”
Jackson is already worked up, has been since well before Mark arrived, and makes no effort to calm down before he replies.
“It’s too fucking cold for lemonade,” he starts, half-stomping around the room as he goes through every nook and cranny of his half of the dorm, shoving unseen items randomly into his coat pockets, “but these sad girls just want to sell lemonade. Even though no one wants it. Because it’s freezing. But they need money, and Andrea wants to buy a present for her mom. Her mom!” He turns to Mark to shout the word a second time, either ignoring or not seeing the shocked look on Mark’s face, because he goes right back to tugging on his shoes and rambling, “So I have to buy, like, seven thousand cups of lemonade,” he storms across the room to the door and Mark is pretty sure the clinking sounds from his pockets are coming from the changs he’s just scrounged up to buy those seven thousand cups of lemonade. Jackson gets his hand on the door, and yanks it open. He slams it shut behind him, but Mark can still hear him yell, “and I don’t even like lemonade!”
Mark is floored. He’s confused about what just happened and everything that was just said and what the hell the two of them are supposed to do with all this lemonade.
He takes the time he spends processing exactly what just occurred to count the cups of lemonade and finds exactly twenty. He can’t confirm, but he’s pretty sure that five dollars he gave Jackson for ‘condoms or beer or whatever’ went to little Andrea’s present fund.
Mark isn’t really sure what to do with the idea that Jackson Wang, terrible roommate and douchebag extraordinaire, may have just spent his entire day trying to round up enough money to buy out a sad lemonade stand.
It does, though, occur to him that, hey, he kind of likes lemonade, and he was going to buy a cup or two anyways.
So, he tries one, and it’s not the worst thing he’s ever tasted. The second has far too much sugar and the third not enough, but they’re all bearable. Noticing the time, he leaves the three empty cups in their original spots and rushes through getting ready so he can make it to the dining hall in time for dinner.
When he comes back the second time, the last remaining free surface spaces have also been filled with cups of lemonade and Jackson is nowhere to be found. On his way back, he did see four familiar girls carrying a small table and five empty pitchers between them, so he’s really not that surprised.
Mark couldn’t explain why if you asked, but one by one, he drinks every glass of lemonade in the room, slowly adding to the small pile of empty white cups in the trashcan that had already been there when he arrived home.
At the end, he slumps against Jackson’s desk, the last cup held loosely in his hand. His stomach hurts even worse than he expected it too. Somewhere in the middle of the ordeal, it became too much work for him to walk over to the garbage after every cup and he began throwing them instead. Most of them made it in, but there’s a circle of failures on the ground around the bin.
Groaning, Mark shuffles into the bathroom to take the longest piss of his life before collapsing onto his bed.
Waking up the next morning, Mark is still fully clothed, but his pillow has been moved under his head and his blanket has been neatly tucked around him.
Sitting up, abdominal pain hits Mark like a train, but it all seems kind of worth it when Jackson gives him the softest, most pleased smile in the entire world from the doorway, just before he leaves.