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Dex’s reputation as a handyman spreads around Samwell’s campus pretty quickly.
It starts at the Haus, obviously, where he fixes up Betsy as best as he can, until he can’t fix her anymore. By then, the entire hockey team has figured out that Dex is pretty good with tools. When he’s working for dibs, he helps Lardo with her art projects, until he realizes Lardo herself knows how to use all these power tools and she doesn’t need his help with construction as much as she needs help lifting and moving heavy things. He replaces the showerhead in Shitty and Jack’s bathroom, fixes the screen in the back door, and repairs the railing on the porch. Nursey starts calling him “Mr. Fix-It” and he only pretends to hate it the first few times.
One day he sees the lax bros across the street trying to work on a car on a jack. No matter how terrible the lax bros are, he doesn’t want to see anyone crushed by their own stupidity, so he finds a couple of jack stands and takes them across the street, and then, jesus christ, if you’re changing your oil you need a pan or something to drain it into, what kind of monster just pours five quarts of used motor oil into their driveway. So these bros just stare up at this freshman hockey kid, amazed, before they drag him into their house and ask if he can fix their kitchen table, which had been shimmed with several empty pizza boxes.
“You should start charging for your services, brah,” Shitty says when he walks back to the Haus. After that, he’s really in business.
The theatre kids really love him. Sure, they have a scene shop where students build sets for the official department productions, but those kids are busy and there are a lot of independent, student-produced pieces done every semester. “We just feel so much safer when you help us with load in,” they say. “We’ll only need your help for an hour or two,” they say. “You saved the show,” they say. He doesn’t mind helping them when he has the time. They’re loud and a little weird, but sometimes the projects are challenging and he never has to pay for any of the supplies he needs. When he goes to see their shows, he always gets a round of applause, and that’s pretty nice.
While Lardo is very self-sufficient, some of the other art students don’t know how to use a hammer (“No, hold it at the end of the handle, it’ll act as a lever and you can apply more force”), much less how to use power tools, so when he has the time and patience, Dex will follow Lardo down to the art studios and help a few of her classmates. One day, after spending most of the afternoon building a plywood frame for an installation. He loses himself in the work and doesn’t realize it’s almost time for team dinner, so he rushes out of the art building and over to the Commons for dinner, wishing he had time to shower because he knows he smells like sawdust and there’s dried wood glue on his fingers. Nursey stares at him for a weirdly long time before slowly, carefully, brushing a huge spray of sawdust out of his hair.
Students who live in the dorms can fill out a form to have the university fix their dorms, but students who live in houses off campus start calling Dex. He works for a kind of barter system. Cash is great when he gets it, and not having to buy plywood or paint is even better. People offer alcohol or food, and Bitty’s pretty offended when he brings home a plate of peanut butter brownies after he patches over a hole in the wall at the volleyball team’s house.
He really doesn’t mind helping people out, but he starts to suspect the girls in some of the sorority houses like having him around so much, they start breaking things on purpose. He goes to the Theta Gamma Eta house three times in one day because they’ve managed to blow the same fuse, three times. The first time he goes over, they seem surprised to see him. They have no idea where the breakers are in the house, but Dex sorts it out pretty quickly and heads back down the street. He doesn’t even make it back to the Haus before he gets another text, asking him to come back because “the power’s out again.” So Dex goes back and shows a few of the girls where the circuit breaker is, explains how to reset it (“All you have to do is find the switch that’s flipped from ‘on’ to ‘off’ and flip it back.”), and suggests buying a surge protector, or maybe not using a flat iron, a curling iron, and two hairdryers at the same time. He goes back to the Haus and barely starts his homework when he gets yet another text. This time when he get there, the house is lit with candles and four of the girls follow him, giggling, down to the basement circuit breaker. “Not that I don’t want to spend time with you,” he says, “but I can’t rewire your house, and by now I know you know how to fix a fuse.” This time when he leaves, the girls promise to only call him if they have a real problem they can’t take care of themselves. (“Damn,” Becky mutters after he leaves. “There goes my plan to text him every time we need to change a lightbulb.”) He gets invited to all of their parties, and Nursey fumes with jealousy, until he invites him along. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea for him to go to their house alone, anyway.
His hands are always calloused from working with them. He’s started carrying a roll of gaff tape in his backpack (because honestly, what can’t it fix?). He has to buy a planner to start scheduling appointments - it gets much trickier once hockey season starts, but he does what he can, leaving little pieces of himself all over campus. Some days it feels like he’s putting the whole school back together, bit by broken bit.