B.U. | Grizz Visser (The Society)

new beginnings

part one.

The desolate town of West Ham, Connecticut, was always overwhelmingly hot, sticky and humid, surrounded by miles of infertile farmland and long stretches of empty highway. The people were below average, to say the least, each having their own collections of problems and complaints to discuss around the 5 o'clock dinner table. Gareth Visser, an eighteen-year-old football player and cynic, was beyond infuriated with his lifestyle.

After a childhood in what Grizz deemed to be the "worst town in the history of towns," Grizz wanted nothing more than to leave West Ham and never look back. So when he received an admissions acceptance from Boston University, he immediately packed his bags and prepared for a new life.

It was the 4th of September, the day before Grizz's first year of college would begin. His palms couldn't keep from sweating as he dug them into his shorts pockets, clenching them into fists. He kept his head down as he tried to navigate the halls of his new residency, peering up through his eyebrows just enough to avoid colliding with other passers-by.

"Up on the left," his mother explained, only a few feet behind him, rolling his dual-wheeled suitcase just behind her. Every bump in the carpet floor sent the ill-made luggage flying upward, then crashing back onto the floor and ringing a loud thud.

"Got it," Grizz replied, pulling his lip between his teeth. He had several ticks when nervous, and his mother knew them all too well. He was always nervous.

"You have your pills?" His mother asked, raising her brows, watching as his hands trembled in the pockets of his cargo shorts.

Through his teeth, hoping no one heard her personal question, Grizz simply replied "yes, mom."

The two arrived at a dorm room labelled C-08. It was a single room, much to Grizz's liking. He'd always been more of a suffer-in-silence type, and with the course load his mother had hand-picked for him, he knew the suffering was unavoidable.

After an hour of unpacking and micro-managing his room and schedule, Grizz's mother finally said her goodbyes and went home. As soon as the door closed behind her, Grizz fell back on his bed and sighed, alone at last.

He sat up slowly, his eyes wandering the small dorm room. The room consisted of a bed, a desk, a dresser, a lamp and a mini fridge (courtesy of his mother). Everything was neat and tidy, exactly how his mother liked it. Immediately Grizz reached into his backpack, puling out a collection of polaroids he'd taken in high school. Most of them were aesthetic shots of the town and the surrounding forest he grew up in, but a few contained his old friends.

It wasn't that Grizz felt bad for leaving them, because he didn't. He wished he hadn't needed to. He'd been planning it all senior year, that the second graduation rolled around, he'd never talk to any of them again. So, he never did.

They were a bunch of assholes, in all honesty. They partied and slept around, and fucked off from school whenever they felt like it. For a little while it was fun to hang around them, the cool kids and whatnot, but after months turn to years, you start to wonder, "what am I doing with my life?"

In the back of his mind, Grizz always thought himself above the rest of them. Though, he'd never admit it. He had ambitions, morals, goals he wanted to achieve before growing old and grey. The only thing his friends had going for them was football, the slim chance of getting a scholarship and the even slimmer chance of making it pro. Grizz didn't laugh when only one of them got a scholarship, but he wanted to. He wanted to hysterically laugh in their faces, yell at them for wasting their youth on shit that didn't matter, for disrespecting their peers and belittling his actual hard work, labelling it "being lame, again and again and again."

The only friend that Grizz hadn't completely cut off was a girl named Becca Gelb. He'd known her since elementary school, and though they hadn't officially hung out in years, they still had a snap streak, and he'd send her the occasional meme on Instagram. She was actually attending Boston University with him, and he hoped they could rekindle their friendship as the year began.Grizz shoved the photos of his football friends back into his bag and zipped it shut, mentally noting that he needed to get a hold of a lighter to burn the cursed images.

He spent the majority of the afternoon pinning up his photography collection and powering through several chapters of Moby Dick.

As his bulky, black wrist watch began to yell at him, bringing him out of the world of Ishmael and Captain Ahab, Grizz rolled his eyes. He stood to his feet, stretching up. It was that odd kind of stretch, where you can feel every pulse of your blood moving in your veins, and your eyes flash black for a brief moment. He silenced the evil beeping noise and grabbed hold of his pill bottle, unscrewing the cap and reaching for a small, disgusting little pill.

He'd been taking anti-anxiety medication since the start of junior year. With football, school, friends and his suffocating mother, he needed something to keep him from going off his rocker completely. Though, Grizz still hated the fact that he took pills to make himself feel normal, if that was what normal was. The sad truth of it all is, he supposed, no one really knows what another person's "normal" is.

His alarm was set for 5 o'clock, when he'd usually be having dinner with his mom. It was "always easy to remember" to take his pills, she would say, if he scheduled them for dinnertime. In reality, it was easy so long as she shoved them down his throat.

Grabbing his dorm key and his phone from his desk, he slid them into each of his pockets and pulled on a plain black hoodie. It was time for him to explore campus, and hopefully meet some people. If there was one thing he definitely needed, it was friends.