What Goes Around

4 - ORIENTATION AND OTHER FATALITIES

If she thought her first night was bad, it paled in comparison to what the next day held for her. It was packed from an ungodly hour to the late afternoon with orientation activities. With not nearly enough caffeine thrumming through her veins, Tuesday dragged herself to the student center. At least having the reassurance that Jordan wouldn't be there, since everyone was grouped alphabetically, she managed to don her familiar faux-smile she learned to adapt so well from her summer job.

There were enough people in the student center that no one had more than a foot of personal space. The sight made her sway on unsteady legs but pinching the inside of her elbow centered her hazy thoughts. She found the correct line to file into, standing around for a good fifteen minutes before she'd shuffled to the front just to collect a name tag marked with a red circle signifying her department. Then she was directed to find other red-dotted students to stand and wait for another quarter of an hour.

While most everyone else managed to make small talk, Tuesday huddled in a corner silently reciting the names in her journal just to keep herself from getting the hell out of there. It was the first day all summer she hadn't begun the day with that list–no breakfast, no coffee, no brushing her teeth until she'd read through it. She simply hadn't had the time. So she took the free time then to go down that list, to remind herself over and over the lives she'd help take so maybe she could make hers mean just a sliver of anything at all. And because, of course, Jordan had been forced to memorize that list once, so Tuesday would be damned if she let herself forget.

If hell was real, it should take notes off orientation, Tuesday mused as people were finally funneled off to respective groups based on major. She was paired with twenty other incoming criminal justice students and forced to partake in ice-breakers. This meant nearly two dozen sullen young adults were left to take half-assed attempts at talking to each other and lining themselves up by surname A to Z. The one kid with a Z name stood to the side, victorious, while everyone else had to actually make an attempt at socializing. Tuesday offered her name in a tone barely above a whisper whenever someone bothered to ask; beyond that, she relied on listening in to the others' to know where to place herself, shuffling around the other H's.

After that painful monotony came the hours-long presentations about campus life, wherein she was faced with the reality she did not fit amongst her new peers. When tasked with answering the question of why they'd chosen criminal justice as their majors, Tuesday had nothing to give. She'd planned this life back in high school, before everything went to shit, before... Before she herself had become a criminal. One who'd gotten away with quite a few different wrongs. What gave her the right to judge anyone else?

Just as her eyes were starting to glaze over at the trivial information overload, the discussions taking place in a stuffy auditorium ended and everyone was released into the fresh autumn air for campus tours. Again, she was thrown into the criminal justice group, feeling like she couldn't have stood out more violently if she'd dunked herself in red paint. Campus was beautiful, all archaic, ivy-choked and crumbling facades, a sprawling mini-city of blue-paned windows reaching towards the sky encircling a single rectangle of artificial greenspace. Don't get too attached, she thought to herself. This thing won't last. Beautiful things rarely did.

As she was dragged from building to building, she felt icy, hesitant fingers tickle the back of her neck. Shivering, straggling at the back of the group, Tuesday shot a glance over her shoulder. In the hazy intersection of two buildings' silhouettes mingling in the midday sun, for just one electrified moment, she saw familiar eyes looking back at her. Ones she hadn't seen since a beer and blood-stained night, ones that made a no-longer visible gouge on her palm ache. Ones that said, "What, because you killed me you think I wouldn't show up for this?"