by Claire Adams
Earlier that day, the housekeeper, my parents, and I—with some help from the landscapers—loaded up the car with everything my parents thought I would need to have. Mom had bought me just about everything that could possibly make an extra-long twin bed comfortable: a heated mattress pad, a thick, comfy down alternative comforter, huge pillows, a duvet, a few sets of sheets and pillow cases that I picked out to go with what she had decided was my “color palette.” She had also purchased prints of all the paintings I loved and all kinds of decorative touches. I knew my mom wanted my room to look “civilized,” and I went along with it—it was nice, and I knew my room would be comfortable, but it seemed a bit much, particularly when I knew that most of the other kids in the dorms with me would be making furniture out of cinder blocks and shipping pallets.
Dad parked the car and shut off the engine, and I threw myself out of the backseat, barely managing to get the seatbelt off before I shoved the door open and thrust my legs out of it. One of the staff—obvious in his color-coded t-shirt and khakis—came over and greeted my parents. “Welcome, welcome! Did you guys have a decent drive here?” He got my name from Dad as Mom and I went to the trunk to get it open.
The RA shook Dad’s hand and came over to me. “Here is your room key, Becky. Just as a heads up, the dorms are going to be open for today and tomorrow—the day after that you should have your ID card, and you’ll have to use the card reader like everyone else.” I nodded that I understood and took my dorm and room keys from the guy; I barely even noticed his name.
“How are the dorms set up?” Mom was looking around and I saw what I recognized as her “suspicious face.” Oh God, she’s going to start an argument with someone else. “I mean, I’m an old fashioned woman; I want to make sure that my daughter is going to be safe.” The RA laughed.
“Of course, absolutely. I totally get where you’re coming from.” I picked up a basket full of stuff and gestured for Dad to follow me into the dorm building while the RA talked to Mom about the format of the dorms. I honestly didn’t care how the dorms were set up; obviously they wouldn’t have me rooming with a guy—which I knew was Mom’s fear. Whether I got along with my roommates or not, they would all be girls. I knew, too, that the rules for the freshman dorms were way stricter than the rules for the upperclassman dorms and also the rules for the various frats and sororities on campus. I had my itinerary; I knew there was going to be an orientation meeting with the RA for my floor later on where they’d give me not only the rules of the dorm itself, but also the rules for my floor.
“This doesn’t look too shabby,” Dad told me as we walked through the double doors from the courtyard. The college had been around for a while, and the dorm building we were heading into was one of the oldest ones on campus. The brick exterior was cozy-looking and warm, while the interior had apparently been gutted and refurbished at some point in the last twenty years; there was a lingering fresh paint smell in the lobby and the floors were linoleum, but at least a nice enough pattern that it didn’t look cheap. The chairs and couch in the lobby looked like refurbished old pieces—good enough for the kind of wear and tear that a bunch of rowdy teenagers would put on it.
We carried our loads up to the fifth floor where my room was. The hallways were carpet instead of linoleum, much quieter than the lobby. People were streaming in and out constantly, moving like heavy traffic, and I smiled at everyone who greeted me—especially as we got closer and closer to my room. These were the people I would probably be spending all my time with, and I wanted to make a good impression. I wanted to make friends as quickly as possible.
My parents had had the option, when I signed up for the school, to pay a little bit more for this dorm versus the other Girls Freshman dorm. The benefit to that was that I had a tiny little bedroom to myself, with a common area that I shared, along with a split bathroom. One of the other Girls Freshman dorms was a more classic design—with two shared bedrooms complete with bunks, a floor shower, and half-bathroom. I was glad my parents had at least acted fast enough for me to get into the better dorm, even if they didn’t agree with my choice of college. While I was all about having the college experience, having at least a little bit of space to myself was definitely a good idea.
The common area of the dorm room had some basic furniture in it: a couch, a couple of chairs, a solid-looking coffee table and an entertainment center. The floors were tough, but the carpet was still fairly soft—and I could see that it was the kind that was designed to be easy to clean. Everything was absolutely clean, and neat, and I looked around with a happy smile. My key fit into one of the two doors in the room just fine—the orientation paperwork had said that it was possible that I’d have trouble with the tight locks, but the key turned and the next thing I knew, I was looking into a small, empty room. “Why don’t we get everything up here in a nice, neat pile, and then you and your mom can start sort out what goes where?” I laughed at Dad and nodded my agreement. We both knew that he meant Mom was going to set everything up the way she thought was best—and I’d let her do it.
Mom caught up with us finally, and we started the process of getting all of my brand-new stuff up to my room while she chatted with Dad about her overall much better impressions of the college after talking to the RA. I was surprised that we were able to get everything up to my room in only a few trips—especially considering how much Mom had decided was “absolutely necessary” for my survival. I rolled my eyes to myself, carefully turned away from both of my parents, as Mom started ordering Dad and I around, telling us where to put things, how to hang the window treatments, and where the art prints should be.
Fortunately for me, just as I was beginning to lose my patience, my new roommate arrived. “Oh! You must be Becky!” she said, coming into the room. She was a short, curvy brunette, with big, green eyes I couldn’t help but envy.
“Yeah!” I felt a little nervous—after all, I was going to be spending a lot of time with this girl. “Just… getting moved in.” I gestured to my parents.
“I’m Georgia—ugh; please don’t call me that, though. It’s such a gross, old-fashioned name. Everyone I actually like calls me Gigi.” I laughed.
“Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of ‘Rebecca’ myself.” My mom came out of my bedroom and looked my new roommate up and down. I felt myself starting to dread what she might say.
“Pleased to meet you, Georgia,” she said, and I gave my new roommate a look, rolling my eyes slightly. “Tell us all about yourself; what are you thinking you’re going to major in? How does your family like your choice of college?” I threw myself onto the couch and watched as Gigi responded to my mom’s questions, filing away the information, but getting more and more uncomfortable as the questions got more personal and less appropriate. Georgia’s parents were divorced, but both of them were comfortable in their incomes, she had chosen the college because she didn’t want to be too far from home, she ate a healthy diet.
“Mom, come on—we’re college kids, we’re going to eat plenty of junk food,” I said, cutting in when I couldn’t stand it anymore. “I mean, that’s the whole deal, right? College kids eat ramen and mac and cheese…” Dad popped out of my room, grinning at how irritated I was at Mom’s snobby ways. I could tell that if she had had a choice in the matter, I would have probably gotten a different roommate—someone from some country club somewhere.
“What sororities are you thinking of joining?” Mom asked, totally ignoring me. Georgia shrugged.
“I’m not really looking. I think most of them are pretty dumb—just people looking to party and dress up.” I had to laugh—the looks on my parents’ faces were pretty great. Both had been in the Greek system. They had met that way.
“There’s a lot of networking to be done in college, and you want to be with the right people,” Dad started to say. Mom started going on about sisterhood and lifelong friends, until I had to distract her with a few last decorative touches that she had missed to get her out of the room.
“I t
hink it’s really cool you’re studying Biology,” I told Gigi as soon as my parents were going over the bedroom for the last time. She grinned.
“What are you majoring in?” I shrugged.
“I’m thinking I’ll do English. I know it’s kind of lame, but I want to be a teacher—I had a few really great ones at my last school, and I’d love to be that kind of inspiring person.” I glanced in the direction of my bedroom, where my parents were arguing half-heartedly about something or another. “Actually, I was thinking I’d join Greenpeace right after college—get the hell out of dodge while my parents can’t do anything about it!” Georgia laughed.
“Oh God, that would be so cool! We should join Greenpeace together!” We started talking about how we should rearrange the furniture in the common area while my parents finished up whatever they were doing in my room. We decided we were going to see if we could find some cheap fabric from the craft store to cover the ugly chairs and that we were going to get some wallpaper samples and make a mosaic out of it for the walls. My parents finally came out of my room, and Mom announced that it was time for them to head out; they had to get back to town, and they didn’t want to hit bad traffic on the way.
Mom and Dad both gave me a hug and a kiss, and as Mom turned to leave, I could see she was crying a little—but whether that was because she would miss me or because she was still so doubtful about whether I could possibly be happy in such a small, un-prestigious school, I didn’t know. I told her I would call her after my first day of classes to check in, and then they were gone. All I could feel was relief that Mom hadn’t made too much of a scene, and that my new roommate wasn’t a total jerk or a snob, and that she was definitely just as smart as I was, if not smarter. It seemed at least like my first year of college was off to the best possible start.
Chapter Two
Georgia and I were part of a huge group of freshmen walking across campus to get to the admissions building; I had to admit—to myself, at least—that even though the school was small, it seemed like it was jammed with people already. I couldn’t imagine how much more anxious I would be at a bigger school. “Did you know the school had a hockey team?” Gigi asked as we passed by a slew of banners and posters promoting the first game. I laughed.
“I had absolutely no idea. Do you know anything about hockey at all?” Georgia shook her head and we both laughed. “Me, either. Wow. I mean—I knew it existed, and I’ve seen some old sports movies about it, but I don’t have the faintest.” We were waiting in line to get our IDs made, both of us looking around at all the other students who were waiting for the same thing.
“It always looked interesting to me,” Georgia said, eyeing the poster directly in front of us. “We should go to a game—could be fun.”
“I know there’s a lot of fighting, that’s about it.” I shrugged. “At least it has to be more exciting than football.” One of the guys I’d been friends with in high school had been on the football team and had expected me to show up to every game; I hadn’t been able to even keep the positions straight in my head and it was so boring that I invented excuses for not turning out.
We finally got our IDs printed with our pictures on them and joined the other line for the class schedule assignments. For the first semester, the courses we could take were more or less set in stone; we’d have to meet with our assigned advisors for the spring semester in order to discuss what we wanted to take and what classes would meet the requirements, but there were so many basic and introductory classes that had to come before anything else that it was just easier for the school to shuffle us all into the three “introduction” classes at random and let us choose the other two over the summer before we started. We signed into the lab and completed our check-in forms before going to one of the computers with the log-in information the desk gave us. There were plenty of signs all around the room—more temporary ones like the ones directing everyone around campus—that said that we were expected to be in and out of the computer lab with our schedules in no more than fifteen minutes.
There was a huge line of other freshmen behind us and Gigi and I both took the first desks available, logging on with no problem and pulling up our schedules. We printed them out and grabbed them before they had even cooled off and were on our way out of the tiny, crowded room in less than ten minutes, heading out to the courtyard on the other side of the admissions building to compare notes. “Which Introduction to Academic Life class did you get?” Gigi asked me.
“Five-thirty,” I said, making a little face. We both had that class, College Writing, and Freshman Seminar, that we had to take—it was such a drag that we couldn’t even touch most of the classes that we really wanted to take. We had College Writing together, and I promised Georgia that I’d help her with it; I had decided to take the first of the classes I would need for my major, and we also had a math class together. Georgia had the same strategy I did, and her one elective class for her first semester was the introductory Biology course, which covered two semesters and came with a lab. All told, our schedules were both chock-full, and we laughed about how ridiculous some of the requirements were.
“Maybe next semester with all of this out of the way, we can finally get into something meaty,” Georgia said. I could only hope so.
“I don’t even know why they wouldn’t let me CLEP out of College Writing—I scored tops in AP Composition and Literature. All that did was take out the requirement for the other two writing classes.” I made a face at my printed schedule.
“It’s probably going to be an easy class for everyone—I mean, it’s not like they’re high-credit classes. Intro to Academic Life is one hour out of the week and it’s probably going to be all that stuff about not getting an STD and how you should really manage to fit in some sleep.” I laughed as we started heading back to the dorms.
“I think I read that the Freshman Seminar class is just, like, a bunch of presenters every week droning on about their research—it’s mostly for the kids who have no idea what they want to study.” It was also only an hour long. College Writing brought the tally to four credits, the math class that we were both in—Precalculus, Algebra, and Trigonometry—was six credits, and my English class was another four. So I was at fourteen credits and Gigi was at fifteen for the semester. Our math class met three times a week, my English class met twice a week. We were in three of our classes together, which at least would be a little bit nice.
We got back to the dorm, working our way through the crowds of students heading to the admissions office or just around the campus, looking around themselves, obviously every bit as excited as we were, and I saw the posted notice on our floor that there was an RA meeting going on—that it had started while we were still getting back to the dorm from the orientation.
“Alright, everyone—as you know, the freshmen dorms have a lot of rules; you’re not allowed to have boys stay the night in your rooms. They are allowed to be in the dorms during the day, but after 10 pm, they’re forbidden.” Someone in the throng of teenaged girls hanging around the common area as Gigi and I came in piped up to ask how they were supposed to get laid. “That’s not really any of my business, but you’ll have to work it out. If I find out there’s been a guy spending the night in your room, it’s a demerit on your residential account. I don’t care how cute he is, I don’t care how sweet he is, I don’t care if you’re ‘not doing anything,’” and I grinned at the way she used finger-quotes and dripping sarcasm. “I don’t even care if it’s Johnny Steel,” a few of the girls giggled.
“Who’s Johnny Steel?” I asked Georgia as quietly as I could. She shrugged; obviously neither of us knew, even if some of the other freshman girls did. “Is that clear, ladies?” Everyone replied that it was, and the RA—a woman whose name we found out was Alice—went through the rest of the rules, like quiet hours and the rules for signing guests in, keeping doors locked whenever we weren’t in our rooms, all of those things. She told us her schedule for hours at the downstairs lobby office, when she
’d have “open hours” in her dorm room, and asked for volunteers to help her with the next month’s bulletin board decorations for the floor.
Finally, the meeting ended and Georgia and I headed back to our room, laughing at the emphasis on not having any male guests after 10 pm. “What is this, the ’50s?” Gigi asked, shaking her head.
“I guess they probably have problems…” I gave Georgia a look and she nodded. “Easier just to tell us not to have anyone over, instead of telling them to behave themselves.” We thought about it as we got into our dorm and I posted my schedule on my door, taping it up underneath the big, colorful name tag that Alice had put up for me.
“Hey!” Gigi called from her side of the dorm room. “I’m starving—let’s go grab some dinner!” My stomach was rumbling, so I was only too willing to head out with her.
Chapter Three
I had always thought that the cafeteria at my high school was pretty big, but as Georgia and I stepped into the dining hall, I was blown away not only by how huge it was, but how many people were packed into it. Gigi and I both swiped our cards, chattering excitedly to each other as we moved into the line heading into the food service area. It was impossible to tell how many people were in there—how much of the complement of the student population had all decided to grab dinner at the same time. The line moved slowly but steadily, and we could smell the good, the bad, and the weird of the different smells coming out of the food area.
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, looking around me constantly. There didn’t seem to be any end to the students who milled around, standing in line, calling out to people they already knew or making conversation with people they didn’t. I wondered how it was even possible for the school to feed so many people at one time. I was definitely hungry; and I was more than a little interested to find out what all was available on the menu. As we got closer to the service area, Gigi pointed out a big, broad bulletin board announcing the different soups and the theme with little placards underneath advertising the different options.