The First Night

By the time Laura's parents disappeared into the traffic leaving campus, the day had already begun to feel divided into a before and an after.

She stood on the sidewalk outside the dormitory for a little while after their car was gone. There was no particular reason to remain there, but going back inside seemed to require an acknowledgment she wasn't quite ready to make. Until a few minutes earlier, college had still included her parents. They had carried boxes, helped arrange the room, commented on the campus, and participated in the general confusion of moving day. Now they were driving home and she wasn't.

Eventually another family came down the sidewalk carrying an empty laundry basket and several flattened boxes, and Laura moved out of their way. She was still holding the cardboard box that had contained the last of her belongings. She looked at it, realized there was no reason to be carrying it around campus, and took it back inside.

The dormitory had changed remarkably in only a few hours. Earlier, the building had been crowded with families trying to move too many possessions through hallways and doorways never designed for the purpose. Fathers had maneuvered lamps, stereos, suitcases, and small refrigerators up the stairs while mothers made beds, rearranged closets, and asked questions about bathrooms. Doors had remained open while strangers introduced themselves to one another, and every few minutes someone called down a hallway asking where something belonged.

Much of that activity had disappeared. A few parents were still making final trips to their cars, but the building was gradually being turned over to the students who would live there. Laura could hear music coming from one room and conversation from another. Somewhere down the hall two people were laughing about something that had apparently become funny very quickly.

Her roommate had gone to dinner with relatives who were still in town, leaving Laura alone in the room they had barely begun to share. One side already contained evidence of another person's life—clothes, books, toiletries, a photograph or two—but the room itself still felt temporary. Laura unpacked several photographs of her own and placed them on the desk: her parents, the ranch at sunset, and one of her horse standing beside the old wooden fence.

She moved the photograph of the horse twice before deciding where it belonged.

It wasn't homesickness exactly. She had wanted to come to college, and nothing that had happened during the day made her want to reverse that decision. But wanting to leave home, she was discovering, did not require wanting home to disappear. The photographs seemed to make that distinction easier. The ranch could remain part of her even while she sat in a dormitory room a hundred miles away.

After a while hunger gave her a reason to stop arranging things. She went downstairs and followed other students until she found the cafeteria. The food was ordinary, but the room itself fascinated her. Nearly everyone was a stranger to nearly everyone else, which produced an odd mixture of confidence and uncertainty. Some students had already formed groups and were talking as though they had known one another much longer than a few hours. Others carried their trays slowly through the room, searching for an empty seat while trying to make the search appear intentional.

Laura recognized the strategy because she was using it herself.

She found a place at a table where two other girls were sitting. One moved her books aside and said, “You can sit here,” with such obvious relief that Laura realized the invitation benefited both of them.

They exchanged names, hometowns, majors if they had one, and the usual information available to people who had known each other for less than a minute. One girl had come from several states away and had flown in that morning. The other lived close enough that her parents had already threatened to visit regularly.

“My mother said she won't,” the girl said. “Which means she'll probably be here Saturday.”

Laura laughed. “Mine has horses to take care of.”

“So you're safe.”

“I think so.”

The conversation wandered from dorm rooms to class schedules to whether either of them understood the campus map. None did. That too was reassuring. Laura had spent much of the afternoon assuming other students possessed some piece of information she had missed, but the longer she sat in the cafeteria, the more obvious it became that nearly everyone was improvising.

After dinner she walked around campus rather than returning immediately to the dorm. The heat of the day had begun to fade, and students moved along the sidewalks in small groups, stopping at bulletin boards or pointing toward buildings they were trying to identify. Laura followed one walkway farther than she intended simply to see where it went. She found a courtyard she hadn't noticed during the campus tour, a library entrance she would need later, and a path lined with trees large enough to make the buildings behind them seem older than they were.

Music drifted from an open dormitory window. Somewhere else someone called a name and another voice answered. The campus was beginning its evening without any reference to the ranch she had left that morning.

That was perhaps the strangest part. Home was continuing without her, and this place had been continuing long before she arrived. The horses would have been fed. Her parents would probably be home by now. Her mother might have walked past Laura's bedroom and noticed the boxes were gone. At the same time, hundreds of students around Laura were beginning lives that had nothing to do with any of that.

She returned to the dorm after dark and finished unpacking. The last cardboard box folded flat with more resistance than seemed necessary, and she finally pushed it against the closet wall. Her roommate still wasn't back. Laura changed for bed and climbed beneath sheets that were hers but did not yet smell or feel familiar.

The dormitory was much louder in darkness than she had expected. Doors opened and closed along the hallway. Footsteps passed outside her room, sometimes quickly and sometimes accompanied by voices. Someone laughed two doors away. Pipes made noises inside the wall. Much later, a train whistle sounded from somewhere beyond campus, faint enough that Laura wasn't sure how far away it was.

At the ranch she had known the nighttime sounds without thinking about them. Wind moved through the pasture grass in a particular way. Horses shifted in the barn. The screen door had its own closing sound, and she could often tell who was moving through the house by the pattern of footsteps. None of those sounds had seemed important when she heard them every night.

Now she missed them.

Laura lay in the unfamiliar bed listening to the unfamiliar building and understood something about leaving that the drive to campus had not taught her. Distance wasn't the important part. A hundred miles could be crossed again. What had changed was that for the first time the ordinary sounds surrounding her belonged to a place she didn't yet know.

She reached toward the small lamp beside the bed and turned it on. Her mother had tucked a notebook into one of the boxes, and Laura found it on the desk. She opened to the first page and sat for a moment with the pen in her hand.

She had never been much interested in announcing important moments simply because they were important. Anything she wrote about leaving home seemed either too dramatic or too obvious. She considered describing the dorm, then the cafeteria, then the two girls she had met at dinner. Finally she wrote the date at the top of the page and beneath it:

First night.

She looked at the words and decided they were sufficient.

The lamp went off again, and the room returned to darkness. Somewhere down the hall another door closed, followed by a voice telling someone to be quiet and another voice making no apparent effort to comply. Laura smiled.

Tomorrow she would have to find her classrooms. She would probably get lost at least once, though after dinner she suspected everyone else would too. There would be professors whose names she didn't know, students she hadn't met, assignments she hadn't received, and routines that would eventually become so familiar she would stop noticing them.

Tonight none of that had happened yet.

Laura settled farther beneath the covers and listened as the dormitory gradually quieted around her. The ranch was a hundred miles away, exactly where she had left it. This room wasn't home, at least not yet.

For her first night, it didn't have to be.