Moving In With The Enemy

Chapter 1 ~ "You Should Move Into My Old Room"

I hate taking the bus.

It's not because I think it's too crowded or too gross, it because it's such a long ride to get to and from campus. I live about thirty minutes away from Brown, thirty minutes from point A to point B. But buses don't go from point A to point B, they take a bunch of different routes and turns. That makes my commute more like an hour when all is said and done.

That's my treat as a student, I get to take a big bus ride to start my day and to end it. I'm exhausted all the time, my backpack has everything I could possibly need because there's no going back to grab something. My day starts at eight a.m and ends at eight p.m, it should be illegal to do this much stuff.

But today's bus ride wasn't to get to class, it was to visit Caleb in the City. Caleb and I had met in my freshman intro to philosophy class, he leaned over and asked me if this was accounting ten-fifteen and I had to break the news to him that he was in the wrong class. Turns out, he'd mixed up the order of his classes and thought he was supposed to have our intro to philosophy afterwards.

We've been friends since then, we used to go out and grab coffee after class. There was never any studying going on for Caleb, never. I wasn't too sure how he'd even managed to get this far into school without a proper schedule nailed down. We weren't the closest of friends, he certainly had others but he was nice, kind. Just with tons of ADHD and would forget his own house keys if he didn't always have them secured to his belt with a carabiner. 

One thing was for sure, we were total opposites. We were great friends who had good conversations, but the way we lived couldn't be more different. I was always organized, always ready for a "what-if", compare that to Caleb who actively slept on a pile of laundry in his room for two weeks when his bed hadn't come in at his apartment. 

I hadn't actually seen him for a while, he'd been at a co-op placement since January in Newark and he was finally back in the city so we made a plan to get coffee. Caleb was an econ student and had sadly graduated back in April, he was a year ahead of me and I wasn't sure where he was going next year. We hadn't kept touch too well, and that was mostly my bad. I forgot to text people back all the time.

The one thing Caleb had that I was envious of, was he lived in an apartment that was a fifteen minute walk from campus. I'd only been once before and that was right after he'd moved in last August. 

I dreamed of living in a student apartment, dreamed of being independent and free like the other students my age. 

Most of the people I went to high school with were eager to get out of Rhode Island and I was looking to stay. Why go a hundred miles from home when I lived close-ish to an ivy-league school that had already accepted me?

But that felt like a worse and worse decision, I felt lonely. When other kids my age were black-out drunk in a frat basement, I was at home in my tiny bedroom. I had the money saved up, but there was no way I could afford to live alone, and I didn't have friends who were looking for places. Everyone I knew at school was closer with other people, which left me alone.

I snap out of my frustration hearing the bus call out my stop out-loud. I stand up and walk to the door, waiting for it to spring open. I step out on a corner in the middle of campus, looking around. It's still relatively quiet, campus in the summer wasn't too busy, just researchers and summer students.

I had the privilege of only caring a tote bag today, I had no class, no work, just a coffee with an old friend. I also got to wear a summery pair of shorts and a tank top. I wasn't a particularly fancy person, but I spent more time on my looks today, more time getting ready than I normally did for a commute to campus.

I walk up the road to the campus coffee shop, lovingly named "The Grind", it was in a cute little building just next to the arts centre. I step inside and look at the blackboards with the specials written out.