Breathless (2 page)

“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 think 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.

It was both like and unlike my high school cafeteria.
There were people lined up behind the food—some of them students, a few of them
older people—and there was the unquestionable similarity in the smells that
came rolling on the air. My school had had a pretty decent cafeteria program,
but the different stations here were a big change. Georgia and I looked over
the menu and decided that while we were hungry, none of the “international
fare” of the theme really appealed to us. Fortunately, there was a grill
station with burgers and chicken breasts—even a secondary grill with vegetarian
and vegan options. There was also a big salad bar with more stuff than I could
name off the top of my head, so we split off with the other people who were
headed to the grill and waited our turn.