Jeremy

I called the vending machine Jeremy, after my ex. If it’s a she, then sorry, I don’t have any female exes to christen it with. And anyway, this machine sulked the same way he did, loud when you needed quiet, silent when you needed advice. You’ll think I’m exaggerating about the machine. I’m not. Who would make up falling in love with a vending machine? That’s humiliating, even for me.

The hallway always smelled like Clorox and wet carpet. Someone had definitely puked there last week, because the disinfectant’s sting still clung to the radiator pipes. The scent wasn’t clean so much as chemically violent, like the air itself had been bleached out. Jeremy didn’t care. He hummed steadily, the kind of hum that settles in your molars until you start biting down just to check if your teeth are still yours.

He started flirting on the second night I used him. The first night, he was almost disappointingly normal. I pressed B7 for pretzels and I thought nothing of him except that his buttons were sticky and someone had scratched a star into the metal beside the coin slot. But the next night, I pressed B7 again and he clattered out two fun-size Snickers instead. I don’t even like Snickers. Jeremy knew that. I could tell from the way his LED flickered, brightening, dimming, then stuttering in quick, uneven pulses. Or he didn’t. But after that night he kept at it: swapping my orders, buzzing louder when I passed the hallway, flashing his LED. 

I’d love to say I was too mature, too philosophy-brained, to notice Jeremy’s growing feelings for me behind the acrylic glass, where the coils clicked and shifted like his nervous  heartbeat. I spend my days reading Husserl, for god’s sake. But you try walking past a seven-foot machine that coughs up candy like a lovesick Labrador and see if you don’t feel chosen.

Campus in October is all radiator heat and wet wool, leaves smashed flat on sidewalks, everyone sick and coughing and hunched into scarves. I was tired, frizzed from the rain, glasses fogging every time I walked inside. The building creaked like a mausoleum. Jeremy, glowing under fluorescent light, looked more alive than any of us.

Jeremy had a personality. Don’t roll your eyes. He was deliberate. I’d ask for gum, he’d know to give me chocolate. I’d ask for water, he’d give me Coke, sensing, through some sort of vending machine voodoo, my blood sugar was low. He got every order wrong, but wrong with commitment. Like he knew better than me.

I told myself it was a coincidence, faulty wiring, busted circuits. 

But then he started buzzing when I walked past. Only when I walked past. For everyone else, he kept to his usual low, mechanical hum, steady and unchanging. For me, he started low in his casing, a vibrating growl that followed me around the opposite corner, long out of sight. The more I ignored him, the louder he got. 

At night, when the hallway was empty and smelled like mop water left too long in the bucket, I could still hear him through the walls. Or maybe it was just in my head by then, etched there, droning on even when everything else was quiet.

One afternoon a boy from class shoved coins in and punched Sprite. The LED blinked 888888 and swallowed his money whole. He smacked the Plexiglas, swore, and stormed off. The second he was gone, Jeremy rattled and dropped a Coke that rolled to my boots.

Jealous. Jeremy was jealous.

By midterms, I’d stopped pretending this was a joke. I’d sit on the floor with my notes spread around me, back against the radiator that burned too hot, Jeremy buzzing at my side.  Up close, the sound was almost soft, less growl than an affectionate purr, like my childhood cat rumbling on my stomach until my legs went numb. Everything about it steadied me, drew my thoughts into a single quiet thread. The hallway smelled of boiled dust and stale popcorn, the lights buzzed, and my glasses kept sliding down my nose. Jeremy didn’t mind. He never blinked.

He took the tailoring even further. After my professor said my paper was “promising but incoherent,” Jeremy dropped three packs of Smarties into the tray. Once, when I was late to class and rushed past without stopping, he refused to vend until I muttered “Sorry” to his Plexiglas. Then he released a Hershey’s Kiss, silver foil crinkled as though it had been pocketed and smoothed back out.

Another time he gave me a grape Laffy Taffy. I pretended not to get the hint, even though purple has been my favorite color for as long as I could remember.

Cute, a little irritating and too precise to be coincidence.

Then, on Halloween night, with a full moon glaring down at the mortal fools beneath it, Jeremy lost it.

I’d stopped in the hallway to talk to a boy from my seminar, right in front of Jeremy, which in hindsight, was cruel. He leaned against the lockers, close enough that I could smell spearmint gum and his cheap cologne on his shirt. He asked if I was going to the party later, and I said maybe, letting it hang there a second too long. Behind me, Jeremy’s hum sharpened.

First he wouldn’t take my money. Spat the bills back so hard the corners curled. Then, without me pressing a button, he dropped a packet of candy corn.

And another.

And another.

Plunk. Plunk. Plunk. Until the tray overflowed and waxy little triangles spilled onto the floor. If you’ve ever eaten candy corn, you know it tastes like crayons pretending to be food. Jeremy showered me with it. Pelted me, even. My shoes crunched against it, packets bursting open, the air sharp with sugar-dust and faintly burnt plastic.

“Jeremy,” I said, “this is humiliating for both of us.”

He buzzed louder, shaking in his casing, and then the LED stuttered:

BRU-NO.

Laugh if you want. Standing there ankle-deep in the world’s worst candy, I felt that, rather than blinking back at me in too-bright LEDs, my name had been carved into stone. The next morning, Jeremy was gone. No candy corn. No wrappers. His hum was still lodged inside my ear like tinnitus. There was just a pale square on the wall where he’d stood all semester, the paint behind him brighter like the building itself had been hiding his shape.

I was still staring when Lina came down with her laundry basket. She followed my gaze and said, “They finally hauled it off. People thought it was weird. Haunted, even.”

“Weird how?”

Lina shifted the basket against her hip. “You never heard about Vincent?”

I stared at her.

“Hannah from third floor called it that last year. Said he was in love with her because after her boyfriend dumped her, he kept giving her peach rings. Said they were her favourite and her ex never remembered.”

Lina frowned, thinking. “And Mira from bio said he knew she got shaky before exams because he always dropped Coke for her.”

The radiator clanged. 

The hallway still smelled faintly of Clorox. The wall looked naked, like a mouth with a tooth pulled out.

Jeremy. Vincent. Whatever else he’d let himself be called.

I didn’t argue. I went to class.

Later, when I pulled out my notes, something slipped loose. A grape Laffy Taffy wrapper, purple as soda syrup, folded into something fragile, more carcass than flower.

I thought of Hannah with her peach rings, Mira with her Coke, all the names he’d answered to before mine.

It had no business meaning anything, this torn little scrap of sugar-purple plastic.

Still, it was there, tucked between my pages after he was gone, crinkled and mine. 

I decided to keep it anyway.