Freshman Year: A Good Day

The train takes about an hour and a half. 

You spend most of it looking out of the window at nothing in particular. You’ve been on trains like this before—not this specific train, but trains like it, going to competitions in places that looked like this. The difference is that this time, your luggage is much heavier and you’ll be staying for much longer.

Princeton appears in the window before the train announces your arrival.

Getting from the station to your agreed upon meeting spot with Carlos takes another twenty minutes. By the time you find the Blair Arch, he is already there, staring up as if it was the eighth wonder.

"Okay, this is actually insane. You're telling me this is where we're living for the next four years?" he says. "This looks like a place where people get haunted."

"It's just old," you say. "They’ve renovated the inside."

"That doesn't make it less haunted."

You start walking and he follows.

"You're seriously not impressed?"

You think about it for half a second. "It's just a building, man."

"That's crazy. People would kill to get in here."

You think about your own acceptance letter. Full aid—tuition, housing, meals. Yet every dollar you earn between now and graduation goes somewhere that isn't here.

"Some of the little bastards basically did. Or their parents did at least. Blood money and all that." Despite your comments, you have to admit that the building really did have a weight to it. It looked straight out of the set of Game of Thrones and had the kind of gravitas only found in old money architecture.

He exhales. "I better not room with you."

“Well consider it your lucky day.”

“What?” 

"You didn't check the housing emails..? They sent it like a month ago."

Carlos immediately pulls out his phone and starts scrolling. "Oh…oh, you've got to be kidding me. I got Forbes."

"Whitman." you flash a grin at him.

He looks up. "What about your roommate?"

You check your phone again, even though you still remember the name. You've seen it before plenty of times. Competition brackets, leaderboards, and the occasional school newsletter you never read but always heard about anyways thanks to Carlos.

The two of you had become somewhat of a famous pairing—the two names from different schools that always ended up next to each other at the top of whatever ranking someone was printing out that semester. People knew her for being a genius and for being, frankly, difficult to not notice. You were known for only entering competitions that had a cash prize involved, and for sleeping through half your classes at school. 

You can’t say you’re fond of the assumptions strangers have of you because of that, but you don’t really care enough to tell them the reason.

"Someone familiar," you answer.

Carlos squints. "Why do you keep saying things like that?"

You look down at your phone, navigating to the campus map, and wave as you call back to Carlos, “See you at orientation.”

He's still squinting when you round the corner.

Whitman is built of dark grey and brown bricks, laid in irregular patterns. Although this residential building was built relatively recently, the intention of sticking to the original Oxford-Gothic architecture made it look a lot older, especially with the steeply pitched slate roofs, dormer windows, chimneys, and the ivy starting to climb some of the walls. Arched entryways are cut into the stone which leads into interior courtyards. The courtyards themselves are wide open—flat stone paving, trimmed grass and even a sundial mounted on the facade. 

It’s also louder than you expected. 

People moving in and out constantly, dragging suitcases, propping doors open with boxes. It smells less like the usual old wood today and more like the cleaning supplies and cardboard your peers brought along with them. Doors are open all along the hallway and you can’t help but catch glances into their lives. You see someone building a shelf, parents giving last-minute advice, and even someone already lying on their bed, scrolling their phone. You honestly expected to see rich kids making their butlers do all the work for them, but to your surprise, these people look mostly normal.

When you get to your room, the door is already slightly open and you push it the rest of the way.

The first thing you notice is the layout. You see a common space with a couch, a table, some shelves, a microfridge. On either side of the common room are two doors, which you’ve been briefed beforehand from the email, had keyless locks that require your id and a pin to open. The right side of the room, notably, is already mostly tidy.

The second thing you notice is Wonyoung. She is on her side of the common room with an opened box at her feet wearing a dark sweater over a button down. The sun is hitting her hair in a way that makes the rest of the room look like it is designed specifically to frame her standing there. She looks, for a moment, like something out of a painting.

She looks up at you. 

"You're late."

"It's still move-in day."

"I know. You could've come earlier."

"And you could've come later."

She looks at you for a moment. Then she goes back to unpacking. 

You set your suitcase down inside your room and look around the space you’ve been given. It was pretty small, a bed, a desk, a wardrobe, a window looking out to the courtyard. If you actually had things to fill it with you'd have to think carefully about the space, but you don't, so the room stays mostly hypothetical for now. 

"Three-room double, huh."

"We got lucky."

You can hear her—drawers opening and closing, things placed with intention. You unzip your suitcase without much urgency. A framed photograph goes on the desk first. Then your electronics.

"I heard you're taking Chemistry," you hear her say across the room.

You step back into the common space and lean against your doorframe. "And you're in Math." 

"Yes."

"I guess this is where we part ways, princess."

She doesn't look up. "Stop."

"Stop what?"

“Stop calling me that.”