First Day At School

I had rehearsed this in my head. I had sincerely hoped that I wouldn’t make an ass out of myself the first day of college.I was, like so many other times during my life, wrong.

I think on the first day of college their freshman year, when they are moving their things into their dorm, they just try to keep their heads down. Nobody wants to be seen with their parents. Nobody even wants to acknowledge that they have parents, and sooner, or perhaps presently, rather than later, in the privacy of your other place of residence, they will talk at length about their college life.

My father, darling of a man as he was, was about to go into one of these monologues, “Ah, this reminds me of my first day of college. It seems like just yesterday,” he said, pulling his wife – my mother – by the hip at just the scripted moment. That was the last box: marked “Misc.” with an angry face next to it, in Sharpie.

“Right, no internet and all this, yes I’m sure it all seems very familiar. I’ll phone you if I need anything, alright?” I said, making no particular effort to hide the fact I was shoo’ing them out the door.

My father gave one of those deep, fatherly, sagacious laughs. He seemed to enjoy these moments of fatherness (fatherdom? patritude?). I enjoyed this moment only a little bit more than when he was cleaning his hunting rifle when I brought home my first boyfriend back in primary.

My mother looked at me with quite a pouty face. She reached, two-armedly pulling me into some last deep hug, as though I was about to go off to some boarding school for some indeterminable amount of years. Her prized daughter was finally going off to the wide world of higher education. She was eager to see me pursue a dream she had to abandon. We said our tearful goodbyes and followed them as far as my door before I shut it, leaning exasperatedly against it after I had slid the lock closed.I surveyed my new living space: my bed, or the bed I had chosen by the windows (and also the heater), was only about seven or eight feet away from my mystery roommate’s bed, which made the room no more than thirteen by ten, maybe? Tiny, certainly, but not undoable. Being a surprising credit to my gender, I tend to pack very light. I had a box of sheets and a comforter, and of course a thermal blanket. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been terribly adjusted to New Jersey’s cold snaps, so any advantage in warmth was a plus. I had a couple of boxes with neatly folded summer clothes. It was still too hot in September to really be thinking of anything like cold too seriously, however.

The final box, the one of miscellany, was the one that contained my laptop, and Fonzarelli, my teddy bear. What? I think I’m well within my rights as a girl to have a teddy bear. I had began setting up all of my accoutrements when I finally got a chance to meet my roommate.

I had a friend, a couple years older than myself, who said once that everyone has a weird roommate their freshman year. It’s inexplicable: all of these weird people seem to vanish, or perhaps find each other, after Freshman year, but for the duration of that first venture into real life, they are present in everyone’s lives.

Julianne would prove this for me. She wasn’t weird, per se, as much as she was just dynamically different from myself. Actually, I could see her viewing me, in the near future, as “the weird roommate,” but regardless, my first memory of her would be her crashing into the room with what seemed to be a blonde Zac Efron impersonator: complete with white V-neck t-shirt.

“Yeah, just put it right there,” she commanded, and the automaton obeyed. She was bleach blonde and wearing those obnoxious, bug-eyed sunglasses. Perhaps I was judging her pre-emptively, but she seemed rich, entitled, and showed a strong lean towards a habit of listening to whatever song happened to be popular in the clubs that she was allowed to get into underage, “Just be careful, alright. That’s the box with my shoes in it.”

No, I think I was just about right.

“Oh!” She seemed genuinely startled by my presence, “Are you my roommate?”

“No, I just like hanging out in random rooms. This one was empty, so I thought I’d park it here for a while,” I don’t know what drove me to sarcasm right off the bat. Maybe it was the knee-jerk instinct from dealing with these girls in high school.

“Oh, well… you can like… stay, until the other roommate comes, I guess.”

And just like that, I had cemented my status as the Weird Roommate From Freshman Year.