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The Midpoint

October 2010

Nora didn't think there would ever be a place in this world that would be prettier than Newport in the heat of the summer. But after moving to the big city, she found that New York in autumn might just beat it. The concrete streets aren't as terrifying in the fall months, with the way the sun falls over the London planetrees lining the sidewalks as they change from a full bright green to a thinner yellow until the leaves are brown and fluttering off their branches.

Her campus is the city and her quad is an acre of grass in the middle of skyscrapers and it's somehow the most comforting place Nora has ever been in her entire life.

Nora's roommate is a beautiful girl with raven hair and toffee-colored skin named Ebony who moved across the country from Los Angeles to go to Columbia. They live on campus in Furnald Hall where both first and second-year students roam the halls, and surprisingly, Ebony is the easiest friend Nora's made in her lifetime.

They bond over growing up with only one parent and they both learn how to operate the subway together, and when Nora starts to feel homesick after the excitement of the first month of college slips away, Ebony's there to hold her tight and promise that everything is going to be okay. And when Ebony can't sleep at night because she misses her boyfriend back home who's over two thousand miles away and in a different timezone, Nora slides into her twin bed and lets her friend cry into her chest while Nora runs her small fingers through Ebony's thick curly hair.

For the first time in Nora Priestley's existence, she finally feels like she's in the right place. She finds that she gets along with people easily, and almost everybody accepts her for who she is without examining her background or what she wears.

During the second day of October, Nora is uncharacteristically late. Her alarm never went off, and after Ebony flings a throw pillow across their room to shake Nora from her slumber, she awakens with bleary eyes and a thumping heart and realizes that she has only thirty minutes to get dressed and book it across Morningside campus to her Intro to Communications lecture.

Blindly, Nora throws on the same pair of jeans she wore yesterday that were conveniently thrown across her floor in her missed attempt of reaching her hamper, as well as the first thick sweater she can find in her small wardrobe. She simultaneously shoves her feet into a pair of boots while throwing her laptop and appropriate textbook into her trusty Jansport with a hair tie resting in between her teeth. With one arm through her jacket and the other grabbing her keys hanging by the front door, she hip checks her way out of the room and sprints over to the elevators at the end of the hall in record time.

Her Jansport is hanging off of one shoulder while her hands gather up her knotty blonde hair into a messy ponytail. And just as she's securing the band around her frizzy hair, the elevator opens to reveal somebody else inside.

More specifically, a handsome somebody, who looks at her with a phantom smile gracing his lips.

Nora is almost positive that it's because she looks like a tornado of a woman tying up her hair with sleep still clearly evident in her foggy blue eyes, but before she can even have the time to blush in his direction, she remembers that she has to somehow make it across campus in nineteen minutes, and shoves her way inside the tiny steel box.

Luckily, the lower level floor button is already pressed, and once the doors close and the elevator begins its gentle descent down eight floors, Nora can breathe a little clearer.

She finishes her ponytail with one final cinch of the hair tie, but she makes the rookie mistake of leaving her backpack unzipped. So while her hands begin to fall back to her side, the backpack on her right shoulder falls with it, and the contents of her bag come springing out and cover the floor of the elevator in the space between her and the handsome boy.