Andrew was at Howard's mother's house.
Together with Steve and Leonard, he had arrived early to help pack all of their friend's belongings into boxes.
After that, they would have to load everything into a pickup truck, one that Jay had lent to Andrew, and make the final move to the university dorms.
At last, the semester at UCLA would begin on Monday, September 24.
That day, the residence halls would officially open, and the orientation sessions, academic advising meetings with counselors, and large-scale welcome events would get underway.
However, the day actual classes would truly begin was Thursday, September 27.
Howard stood in the doorway with his hands resting on his hips, staring at his half-empty room with a different, almost melancholic glimmer in his eyes.
Andrew, who had just finished sealing a large box with thick packing tape, looked up when he noticed the silence and raised an eyebrow.
"Don't tell me you're about to start crying right now," he asked in an amused tone.
"Of course not!" Howard shot back immediately, though he quickly wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
"Going to miss hearing Mommy yell at you during breakfast?" Steve chimed in with a faint teasing smile.
Leonard, who had been kneeling on the floor carefully inspecting a box overflowing with comic books, stood up with a grin and adjusted his glasses.
"Starting tomorrow, you'll have to learn how to make your own bed, remember to eat breakfast, and handle all those basic life functions your mom used to take care of for you," he said, taking the opportunity to poke fun at his friend's severe case of mommy issues.
Andrew and Steve laughed in unison.
Howard huffed indignantly, "Oh, shut up already! I'll be perfectly fine," he grumbled as he walked over to the box Leonard was inspecting.
Suddenly, his eyes widened, and he began rummaging frantically through the comics.
"Wait a second... My special edition copy of The Walking Dead #100 with the chrome Negan variant cover is missing. I can't leave without that one!"
"For God's sake, Howard, you've already got a million comics in there," Steve complained. "What difference does one more make?"
They had already been there for quite a while. They had come early on the one day of the week when he was supposedly allowed to sleep in, so Steve's patience was nowhere near its usual level.
The moment those words left his mouth, Andrew, Howard, and Leonard all turned toward him at the same time and glared.
Their faces carried such profound and solemn indignation that it looked as though Steve had just insulted a sacred relic. To them, every collectible comic was worth its weight in gold.
Seeing the unnerving synchronization with which the three of them stared at him without blinking, Steve immediately raised his hands and took a step back, as though he were trying to calm a pack of hungry velociraptors.
"I didn't mean that. I take it back," he said quickly. "What I meant is that you're already bringing way too much stuff, man. I don't even know if it'll all fit in your room. Remember, you're sharing it with another student."
"I'll find room for everything on my side of the dorm, and if I don't, I'll just keep it in the box," Howard replied, a little calmer now, before pointing back toward the mess with determination. "Now help me look for it, or I swear I'm not leaving this house without that comic!"
Faced with the threat, everyone spread out to different parts of the room. The room wasn't small, so the search wasn't going to be quick.
The main furniture was still in place, and since Howard wasn't taking one hundred percent of his belongings with him, they began carefully checking every available corner.
At one point during the search, Leonard crouched down, reached an arm beneath the bed, and felt around blindly. His fingers brushed against something with a strange texture.
He grabbed it firmly, pulled his hand out of the darkness, and frowned as he looked at the object.
It was an old sock.
"Why... why is this thing completely solid?" he asked aloud, unable to hide the confusion in his voice.
Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned around. Their eyes immediately locked onto the garment Leonard was holding up in the air.
Steve, whose mind instantly arrived at the disturbing answer, narrowed his eyes and pointed at the object.
"Do you use this sock for, uh..."
"Lovemakin', yeah," Howard finished in a completely matter-of-fact tone, nodding his head.
"That's disgusting!" Leonard exclaimed, immediately dropping the sock as though it had burned his fingers. The garment hit the floor with a dry, rigid thud.
"Yeah, it usually gets washed before it ends up like that, but I guess I must've lost this one a long time ago," Howard added, completely unfazed.
"Dude, how many times did you have to use that poor sock to turn it into a fossil?" Andrew asked, twisting his lips into a look of disgust as he stared at the item lying on the floor.
"That sock should have the legal right to sue you for abuse," Leonard commented, frowning deeply.
Without another word, he hurriedly grabbed a water bottle from the desk, opened it, and began desperately washing his hands, completely ignoring the fact that some of the water was dripping onto the carpet.
"Oh, come on, don't be ridiculous. It's not a big deal," Howard defended himself, dismissively waving a hand. "Masturbation is completely natural, guys. Don't start acting like it's some sin of the devil or something."
"No one's saying it isn't natural, Howard. The real problem here is having a sock under your bed that's been used who knows how many times," Andrew replied.
"Using a sock is a classic," Howard declared.
Beside him, Steve nodded a couple of times in solidarity while Leonard and Andrew stared at the two of them in disbelief.
Howard adjusted his shirt and looked at Andrew curiously.
"Do you masturbate?" he asked bluntly.
As for Steve and Leonard, their personalities already made the answer fairly obvious. But given the unexpected direction the conversation had taken, Howard wasn't entirely sure where Andrew stood.
Internet forums were already filled with discussions about strange performance philosophies. There was an entire breed of elite athletes obsessed with extreme discipline who preached doctrines like NoFap, swearing that retaining their life force turned them into superhuman beings.
Looking at Andrew, who was so disciplined with his diet, training, and football, Howard briefly wondered whether his friend subscribed to those same bizarre biological restrictions.
"Do I masturbate? Yeah, I do," Andrew replied.
His answer came out in an oddly flat and bewildered tone, clearly thrown off by where the conversation had ended up.
"How many times a week?" Howard asked.
Andrew fell silent for a second. He glanced at the floor, processing the ridiculous need to calculate that statistic, then looked back at Howard.
"Like... um... three or four times, maybe," he answered.
"Please. Pump those numbers up, Pritchett. Those are rookie stats," Howard said with a smug laugh.
Steve crossed his arms and nodded in agreement.
"It's not a competition," Andrew muttered, rubbing his forehead.
"Dude, the absolute key to succeeding in life is keeping both your body and mind relaxed," Howard said solemnly, raising a finger as though he were delivering million-dollar advice. "I do it every day, and there are even days when I go twice. And I don't do it purely for pleasure, okay? I do it because my body needs it to operate efficiently."
"That's information I would've preferred not to know," Leonard said with a resigned sigh.
"Come on, guys, it's natural," Steve chimed in, giving Howard a friendly pat on the back. "I mean, I don't take it to this guy's extreme, but six or seven times a week sounds about right. It's healthy. As long as you're not consuming pornography and developing an unhealthy addiction, there's nothing wrong with it."
"Whatever. Just keep looking for the comic," Andrew interrupted, shaking his head to clear the moment before returning to the task at hand.
Everyone resumed the search.
For the first few seconds, silence settled over the room, broken only by the rustling of paper, the scraping of cardboard boxes, and the distant echo of Mrs. Wolowitz's unmistakable voice as she appeared to be talking on the phone downstairs.
But as if the thread of the conversation had gotten tangled in his mind and refused to let go, Leonard stopped, looked up at the ceiling with a thoughtful expression, and asked:
"What if you have a girlfriend? Do you still do it?"
"Masturbate?" Howard asked without bothering to turn around, absorbed in rummaging through the back of one of his drawers.
"Yes, genius. What else would I be talking about?" Leonard replied.
"Yeah, I still do," Steve answered, pausing for a moment to consider the question before nodding seriously. "I mean, think about it. We're only just becoming adults and moving out on our own. When I had a girlfriend in high school, it wasn't like I could be with her every day of the week, you know?"
Howard snapped his fingers, "Exactly! If you were lucky, maybe you'd get one day when the house was completely empty, and you'd have to take advantage of the opportunity like your life depended on it. But the rest of the time, even if you had a girlfriend, you weren't having sex. So the fap was inevitable."
Steve and Leonard nodded in unison, sharing that logic.
All of them had their relationships and stories with girls during their four years of high school.
But they didn't live on their own, which made it impossible to maintain a regular sex life even if they were in a serious, stable relationship.
They weren't like an adult couple who might live together and do it whenever they pleased.
And in their current situation, where they were all single now, except for Steve, who seemed to be heading toward something serious with Sam, even if you managed to hook up successfully at a weekend party and it ended in sex, that was a one-night event. An isolated victory that did nothing to cover the needs of the rest of the week.
"And what about you?" Howard asked, turning his head to fix Andrew with an inquisitive look.
Immediately, everyone stopped what they were doing and focused their attention on him.
Within that group of friends, Andrew was the only one who had experienced longer-lasting relationships.
Pippa and Nancy had both been serious relationships that lasted over a year. And while his romance with Jade hadn't lasted nearly as long, it still counted.
Now that he was single, Andrew admitting that he did it three or four times a week made perfect sense.
The question occupying Howard, Leonard, and Steve's minds at that moment was: what did those numbers look like when he actually had a girlfriend?
Andrew didn't need long to answer, "When I had a girlfriend, I practically never did it," he replied casually. "Maybe once a week. Why would I if I was in a relationship?"
To him, real sex was simply better than taking care of things by yourself. If you were single, your own hand was your only option, but when you had a girlfriend, the idea of self-satisfaction seemed like a waste of time.
The three of them stared at him, processing his answer.
"We understand that point, but what Howard and Steve were talking about earlier..." Leonard said, adjusting his glasses in an attempt to sound analytical. "At most, in high school, you could have... s-sex with your girlfriend once a week, right? You almost never have the house to yourself. Either her parents are around or yours are, which makes it risky, or forces you to sneak into her room in the middle of the night."
"Not in my case," Andrew said with a shrug.
"Alright then... when you had a girlfriend, how many times a week did you do it?" Steve asked directly.
"Three or four times a week," Andrew answered.
Howard's eyes widened dramatically.
"H-how... how did you just say that?" he managed to stammer, waving his hands awkwardly through the air.
"We found ways. Besides, I stayed over at their houses pretty often," Andrew explained.
"How the hell did those girls' parents allow their boyfriend to spend the night?!" Howard exclaimed. "That's impossible!"
As a general rule, no sane parent would willingly allow their daughter's boyfriend, both of them overflowing with hormones and right in the middle of their rebellious years, to sleep under the same roof.
Claire was the perfect example. Under no circumstance or planetary alignment would she ever allow a boy to spend the night in Haley's room.
"I guess they liked me a lot," Andrew said, not entirely sure what else to say.
Howard stared at him for a sacred moment. Then he slowly brought his palms together and clapped once.
And then again.
"Being the GOAT has its advantages, I suppose," he said reverently.
Andrew rolled his eyes, choosing to ignore the comment. Then a smile appeared on his face.
"Found it!" he announced, grabbing the comic book and holding it triumphantly in the air.
But nobody seemed to care about that.
"Are you telling me you had that kind of frequency with Pippa or Nancy?" Steve asked.
The last thing Steve would have expected was that level of activity from either of those girls, considering they both seemed far more reserved.
"Man, it must really suck having to go back to using your hand now," Howard commented, suddenly realizing a crucial detail.
Andrew had been single for months.
Going from an average of three or four encounters a week to a complete drought had to be devastating. At least in Howard's opinion.
And the worst part was that during all that time, Andrew hadn't even been linked to a casual hookup.
Which Howard considered a complete waste.
Having already thrown himself fully into UCLA's social scene, it was obvious to him that Andrew possessed a ninety-nine percent chance of success with virtually any girl he decided to flirt with.
In fact, the campus had already come up with a very specific term to describe his current status.
He was the golden bachelor, the most sought-after athlete at the university.
"I can live with it. It's not that big a deal," Andrew said dismissively.
Leonard narrowed his eyes at him.
His mind drifted back to the previous week, when Andrew and Pippa had slipped away from Steve's house party together.
Seeing the chemistry they had that night, Leonard had assumed Andrew was simply driving Pippa home and that maybe they'd make out a little in the car afterward.
Now, however, he completely ruled that out.
He was fairly certain they had gone back to Andrew's apartment and hooked up. Knowing they had been doing it that often each week, it seemed like the obvious conclusion.
"Man, you could always look for a hookup every now and then at parties," Steve suggested. "Sure, you can take care of things with the fap, but after all these months... sex is always better, dude. It's like it relaxes you ten times more, if you know what I mean."
"I'm fine, I assure you," Andrew replied, letting out a slow sigh to maintain his patience. "Now let's drop the subject and start carrying these boxes to the truck."
As they hauled the boxes downstairs and loaded them into the truck, Steve, trying to keep the conversation going, asked,
"So, aren't you interested in any of Sam's friends? They're pretty smart girls..." he said casually, as if casting out a fishing line.
By now, Steve understood that Andrew wasn't particularly interested in one-night stands. If he ever made a move, it would probably be toward something more serious, and Sam's friends seemed like an ideal place to find that.
The previous evening, they had all gotten together, watched Rocky I, played several rounds of Pictionary, and spent the night enjoying a fun, relaxed atmosphere.
Andrew paused for a moment to adjust one of the boxes, growing thoughtful before answering honestly.
"I guess Paige."
However, the moment he noticed the immediate, mischievous smile forming at the corners of Steve's mouth, Andrew hurried to add,
"But I'm only a little curious, that's all. I have absolutely no intention of flirting with her or anything like that."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever you say, man," Steve nodded, raising his hands and deciding not to push the issue any further.
Steve knew Paige wasn't the only option on the board for his friend.
Willa's return to the group for two consecutive weekends had opened an interesting possibility, and there was also Rachel.
Steve wasn't blind. He had already picked up on a few looks and subtle signals floating through the air between Rachel and Andrew.
Once they had moved the very last box, they climbed into the vehicle and drove to UCLA.
After unloading all of Howard's belongings and finally getting him settled into his new dorm room, Andrew barely had a moment to catch his breath.
Now he was on his way to Claire's house with Gloria.