Bellamy University

By the time my mother started crying, we were still twelve minutes away from Bellamy.

It was not even the dignified sort of crying she could have plausibly denied later, like one tasteful tear escaping while she stared wistfully out the window and contemplated how quickly eighteen years had passed. She was fully sniffling into a Starbucks napkin in the passenger seat while my dad drove like getting me to college seven minutes ahead of schedule would earn him some sort of federal recognition.

“I am not crying,” she said, after catching me watching her in the rearview mirror. “My eyes are irritated.”

“By what?”

“Fall allergies.”

I stared at the back of her head. “You were even crying when we left the house.”

“That was different. You almost left your straightener plugged in and burned our house down.”

“Mom, I unplugged it before we even left my room.”

“After I reminded you.”

Dad glanced at her and smiled. “Claire, you cried when she went to kindergarten too. You don’t have to invent a medical condition.”

Mom folded the napkin in her lap with as much dignity as someone could reasonably recover while being publicly exposed by her own husband. “I did not cry when she went to kindergarten.”

“You stood at the kitchen window for an hour.”

I laughed and looked out the window before my mother could wipe another tear. Bellamy was getting closer.

I could tell because the highway had gradually given way to ridiculously pretty streets that looked like they had been specifically designed to appear in college brochures. Giant trees were already threatening to change color, old brick storefronts lined the road, and every third business appeared to be either a coffee shop, bookstore, or a brunch place with outdoor seating full of students who somehow already looked completely at home here.

They had been here for three weeks while I had been in Italy. I know. Devastating!

While everyone else was figuring out which dining hall had edible food and making their first bad decisions in dorm rooms that probably smelled like cheap perfume and regret, I had been standing on a boat off the Amalfi Coast, eating good food and taking pictures in Positano, and pretending not to notice that my boyfriend had suddenly started texting me like I was an old coworker or worse: his dentist.

It had been an extremely difficult period in my life but I persevered.

I looked down at my phone again even though I knew perfectly well there would not be anything new because I had checked approximately thirty seconds earlier.

My last message to Ethan was still sitting there:

almost there :)

Delivered forty three minutes ago.Nothing underneath it.

Mom twisted slightly in her seat, following my eyes directly to my phone because mothers can detect emotional distress with the accuracy of airport security dogs. “Has Ethan texted you yet?”

“Yes,” I said automatically. The lie came out so quickly that I nearly respected it.

Her eyebrows rose. “What did he say?”

I locked my phone and slid it into my lap. “That he’s excited I’m back.” That one was slightly more ambitious.

Dad looked at me through the rearview mirror for half a second, but thankfully he did not say anything.

Ethan was excited that I was back. Obviously. We had been together for almost two years. The fact that he had not technically expressed excitement did not mean the excitement did not exist. People had feelings without documenting them all the time.

There was an entire period of human civilization before texting. People wrote letters and waited weeks for responses. Women stood dramatically at windows while their lovers fought wars overseas. I had been waiting forty three minutes. Practically identical circumstances.

“He’s also probably overwhelmed,” Mom offered, still watching me. “You know the first few weeks of college are chaotic, especially when everyone is trying to settle into a completely new routine.”

“I know. Between orientation and classes and making new friends, I know he hasn’t even had time to breathe.” I heard myself talking and realized I was supplying increasingly detailed reasons for behavior nobody had actually asked me to defend.

Mom noticed too. Of course she did. She turned back toward the windshield without commenting which somehow annoyed me more than if she had. My mother had been doing that since senior year, when Ethan and I both committed to Bellamy.

She had never once accused me of following him here because she was far too strategic for something that obvious. Instead, she asked innocent little questions like, “You would still choose Bellamy if Ethan were going somewhere else, wouldn’t you?”

There was no good way to answer that question without sounding guilty of something. And for the record, I would have.

Bellamy had one of the strongest political science programs in the country. Their law school acceptance rates were ridiculous, their alumni network was even more ridiculous, and apparently you couldn't throw a hardcover copy of the Constitution across campus without hitting someone who had gone on to become a judge, senator, attorney, or an insufferable political commentator on television.

I had earned my place here completely independently of Ethan Parker.

It was simply a very convenient coincidence that the boy I had loved since junior year would also be living twelve minutes away from me instead of four hundred miles.

Mostly a coincidence.

“You know,” Mom said after a moment, carefully casual, “you don’t have to see him tonight. You just got back into the country, and now you’re moving into a dorm three weeks after everybody else. You might want one evening to actually settle in.”

“I haven’t seen my boyfriend in almost two months. I think I can unpack and see him in the same twenty four hour period.”

“Yes, but you slept maybe two hours on the plane.” She continued.

“I slept more than that.”

Dad laughed. “You spent almost nine hours complaining about a child kicking the back of your seat.”

“I slept emotionally.”

Mom and Dad exchanged one of those silent married people looks that made me instantly suspicious. Married people had an entire nonverbal language specifically invented to discuss their children in front of them.

“What?” I asked.

Mom sighed, but I could hear the amusement underneath it. “Nobody is trying to keep you away from Ethan. We just don’t want you running yourself into the ground because you feel like you have to make up three weeks of college in one night.”

“Well good thing I don’t feel like that, right?”

This time nobody looked at anybody, which was somehow even more suspicious. I leaned forward between the seats and wrapped one arm around Mom and the other awkwardly around Dad’s shoulder, careful not to accidentally send us into a guardrail on the first day of my adult life. Mom immediately grabbed my wrist.

“There 's my little girl,” Dad said.

I almost stopped. “Do not make this emotional.”

“You voluntarily hugged your parents.”

I raised a brow and sat back in my seat. “And now I'm revoking it.”

“Too late. It’s legally binding.”

“I haven’t even started pre law yet and I already know that’s not how contracts work.”

Dad grinned. “See? Tuition is paying off already.”

Less than a minute later, the Bellamy gates appeared ahead of us, and my stomach immediately abandoned every sarcastic thought I had been using to distract myself.

There it was.

Actually there.

BELLAMY UNIVERSITY was carved into a stone archway stretched between two enormous pillars, and beyond it was the campus I had spent the last two years obsessively researching from my bedroom.

The pictures had not really captured it. Old red brick academic buildings sat behind impossibly green lawns, some of them covered in ivy that looked suspiciously curated rather than naturally occurring. White columns lined the entrance to what I recognized as the Carlisle Library. Students crossed between buildings carrying backpacks and iced coffees, and somewhere in the distance a bell rang from the clock tower.

“Oh my goodness.” My voice had come out quieter than I intended.

Mom turned around, and the crying disappeared from her face long enough for something softer to replace it.

Dad glanced back at me through the mirror. “Pretty crazy, huh?”

I nodded, suddenly incapable of pretending this was normal.

There are moments when something you have been planning for so long finally becomes part of your actual life and your brain has to catch up with the fact that it is no longer a Pinterest board, an admissions portal, or a sweatshirt your parents gave you for Christmas.

This was my college. This was where I lived now. This was where I was going to become whoever I had spent eighteen years insisting I would become.

Then, a guy on a skateboard slammed directly into a trash can outside the student center. The skateboard shot across the pavement without him. Three people nearby started laughing, and someone sitting on a bench actually applauded.

I smiled. Okay. Maybe becoming an adult was not going to be that serious.

Dad followed the signs toward residence halls while I watched campus slide past the window and tried not to think about the three weeks I had missed. Three weeks was nothing. Academically, anyway.

Every professor had been notified months ago about the family trip and I had spent half of Italy completing assigned readings from hotel balconies while my cousins repeatedly threatened to throw my laptop into the Mediterranean. I had watched recorded lectures in Florence, submitted assignments from Rome, and read seventy pages about constitutional interpretation on a train to Naples while everyone else around me got to enjoy being a normal person. I was prepared! But socially was another question.

But I had Ethan.

Dad pulled into the circular drive outside my residence hall and when I saw the sign beside the entrance, I stared at it long enough that Mom followed my gaze.

BENNETT HALL

“No freaking way.”

Mom looked back at me. “What?”

“My dorm is called Bennett Hall?”

Dad leaned forward to see the sign and immediately started laughing. “Maybe they named it after you.”

“This feels targeted.”

Mom was smiling now too, which at least temporarily stopped her from crying. “Maybe it’s a good sign.”

“Maybe.” I shrugged.

Dad parked and opened the trunk, at which point he underwent the transformation he always did whenever heavy objects needed to be transported. My father loved moving things. Not moving houses, nobody likes that. He specifically loved the moment when someone looked at an object and suggested that perhaps two people should carry it. That phrase activated something prehistoric inside Marcus Bennett.

By the time I dragged my suitcase out of the back seat, he had stacked three boxes on top of one another and was already walking toward the entrance with his face almost completely obscured.

“Dad, be careful! Those have my shoes.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”

“You can’t even see where you’re going!”

“All I need to see is the ground.” He huffed.

“If you drop those, I’m dropping out.”

“Then maybe I should drop them. Could save me forty thousand dollars.”

“Marcus,” Mom called after him.

“What? I’m kidding.”

“Well I am absolutely not kidding,” I said, pulling my suitcase toward the building. “There are boots in there that cost more than some of my textbooks.”

“And that sentence is why your generation is doomed.”

Inside, everything smelled like new carpet, air conditioning, and somebody’s vanilla body spray.

Students moved through the lobby without even looking at the signs, which felt personally offensive considering I had to stop twice just to figure out where the elevator was.

Everybody looked settled. Girls wandered downstairs in pajama shorts and oversized college sweatshirts, talking like they had been friends since preschool instead of twenty one days. Two guys passed us arguing about whose turn it was to buy toilet paper. Someone had decorated their door with photos already. Somewhere upstairs, music was playing loudly enough that I could feel the bass through the walls.

I hadn't even met my roommate.

I checked the housing email on my phone again while we waited for the elevator.

Room 214. Sophie Bennett.

The first time I saw her name, I assumed there had been some kind of administrative mistake because assigning Maya Bennett and Sophie Bennett to Bennett Hall felt less like a random housing placement and more like whoever worked in Residential Life had gotten bored.

We had exchanged exactly six messages through the housing portal.

All she knew was that I was arriving late and all I knew was that she owned a mini fridge. Our friendship had not progressed beyond that.

When we reached the second floor and found room 214, the door was already cracked open and music was playing softly inside. I knocked lightly.

“Come in!”

I pushed open the door and found a girl sitting cross legged on one of the beds with half her closet spread around her.

She looked up and her eyes widened.

She pointed at me like I had just walked onto a game show stage.“No fucking way. You’re Maya Bennett.”

Behind me, my mother made the tiniest scandalized sound. I liked Sophie immediately.

“And you’re Sophie Bennett.”

She scrambled off the bed. “Oh my gosh, they actually did it. I thought somebody in housing was messing with me.”

“You thought your official roommate assignment was a prank?”

“Bennett and Bennett in Bennett Hall? You don’t think that’s suspicious?”

“I think we should sue.”

Her entire face lit up. “Wait. Are you pre law?”

“Political science, so apparently I am already threatening litigation despite having absolutely no qualifications.”

“Perfect. I’ve been waiting three weeks for you and somehow you’re exactly what I ordered.”

Dad came through the doorway behind us carrying the tower of boxes. “Where do you want these?”

Sophie pointed toward my empty side of the room. “That side, Mr. Bennett.”

Dad stopped walking. His head appeared around the boxes. He looked at Sophie, then at me.

"Yup, we all got the same last name in here." Sophie nodded.

My dad laughed so suddenly that the top box shifted.

I lunged toward it. “Careful, Daddy, those are my--”

"Shoes, yessss, I know." He mocked me.

Sophie looked at the boxes, then back at me. “Should I be concerned about what’s in there?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Dad said at the same time.

I pointed at him. “Do not listen to the man holding my future in his hands.”

"I like you." Sophie grinned.

Mom finally stepped closer and smiled at Sophie. “Hi, sweetheart. I’m Claire.”

Sophie immediately straightened. “Hi. So sorry about the F bomb.”

Mom waved her hand. “Oh please, we're all adults here."

Sophie grinned.

Her side of the room already looked like somebody actually lived there. She had photographs taped beside her bed, a little lamp glowing on her desk, perfume bottles lined up near the mirror, two pairs of heels shoved underneath a chair, and a soft pink blanket folded at the foot of her mattress.

My side looked like someone had recently died there. Or went to prison.Bare mattress, bare walls, an empty desk. One tragic institutional chair.

She followed my eyes and gestured toward my side. “I was going to decorate your area with crime scene tape, but I thought that might be aggressive for a first impression.”

I laughed out loud. “I appreciate the restraint.”

“So, more importantly, how was Italy?”

“Hot.”

She stared at me. “Lucky bitch!”

“I know, I know, my bad!”

“Your vacation photos were beautiful nonetheless.”

I turned toward her. “You saw my Instagram?”

“I obviously stalked you as soon as I got your name. What if you were one of those roommates who microwaves fish at midnight or steals clothes?”

“And Instagram told you I wasn’t?”

“You post too many sunsets to be dangerous.”

“I could still be a midnight fish microwaver.”

Her face widened with a sly smile. “Bullshit, your Instagram also told me you're vegetarian.”

Mom held up one of the framed pictures she had just pulled from a box. “Where do you want this one?”

I turned around. It was me and Ethan at prom. He was behind me with both arms around my waist, his chin near my shoulder while I laughed at something that had apparently been funny enough for me to forget completely now. For some reason, the picture looked older than it had a month ago. “I guess the desk is fine.”

Mom hesitated for just a fraction of a second before setting it beside the lamp.

Sophie noticed. I could tell she noticed because her eyes flicked from the photograph to me and then immediately somewhere else, which I appreciated more than she knew.

Then my phone buzzed. My heart reacted before my brain had time to tell it not to. I immediately picked it up. It was Ethan, finally.

hey sorry been busy. glad you made it

For a few seconds, I simply stared at the screen.

Glad you made it.

I had crossed an ocean. We had not seen each other in almost two months.

He had been counting down the weeks until college with me since winter, talking about staying over in each other’s dorms and grabbing breakfast together before class and finally getting to exist in the same place without somebody’s parents asking what time I planned on being home.

Now I was finally here.

Glad you made it.

Sophie was pretending to reorganize something on her desk while Mom was absolutely pretending not to look at my face. Dad had become involved in a personal dispute with my lamp.

I typed back.

when can i see you?

The typing bubbles appeared almost immediately, then vanished. A few seconds later they came back. Then they vanished again! What the actual fuck? I waited long enough to start feeling stupid about waiting. Nothing came through and I locked the screen.

“Everything okay?” Mom asked gently.

“Yeah. He’s just busy.” I lied even faster this time.

She opened her mouth, probably to say something careful and motherly, but I gave her a look before she could.

Ethan would come around. Maybe I was being dramatic because I was tired. Maybe his roommate needed something. Maybe he was in the middle of plans he’d made before knowing exactly when I would get here.

Maybe his phone had been taken over by a demon whose only personality trait was dry texting. There were plenty of explanations and I had become extremely talented at finding them.

By six thirty, my parents had managed to turn my side of the room from an abandoned hospital wing into something resembling a place a person might willingly sleep, and my mom had emotionally exhausted herself enough that they finally had to leave.

She hugged me so long that Sophie quietly announced she was going downstairs to get water even though she had a perfectly full bottle on her desk.

When she finally let me go, Dad stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me. His hugs were usually quick and strong. One squeeze, maybe even a tiny kiss on the forehead, then release before anybody could become too sentimental about it. This time he stayed there.

“You call us if you need anything,” he said quietly. “I don’t care what time it is, what happened, or how stupid you think it sounds. You call.”

“I will.”

“And you don’t have to have this whole place figured out by tomorrow. You’re three weeks late, not three years.”

“Thank you, Daddy. I'll be fine.”

“I know you will be. That’s not the same as saying you have to do everything alone.”

That one nearly got me. I pressed my face briefly against his shoulder so neither of them could tell. Then Mom saw us and started crying again.

Dad pulled away, grabbing my mom and rolling his eyes. “Oh my God, woman.”

She buried her face in his neck.“I am allowed to be emotional today.”

“You’ve been emotional since I married you.”

"Mom, I am literally thirty minutes away. I’ll probably be home doing laundry by the weekend.” That earned me a wet laugh, and then she hugged me one final time before Dad managed to get her toward the door.

I followed them into the hallway. Mom looked back before they reached the stairs and then again at the end of the corridor. Dad turned around once and lifted his hand and I waved until they disappeared.

When I went back into the room, it felt different. Quiet in a way it had not been five minutes earlier. I walked to the window and watched until I saw their car pulling out of the lot, then stayed there another few seconds after it disappeared behind the trees.

That was it. I was officially in college. Just me and Bellamy U.

And a boyfriend who still had not answered the question of when he wanted to see me.

The door opened behind me and Sophie walked in carrying two fresh bottles of water. “I'm back.” She sang.

I giggled and turned away from the window. “Thank you for strategically disappearing.”

“Your mom looked like she needed privacy to emotionally disintegrate and I wasn’t sure we were close enough yet for me to witness that.”

“She has been emotionally disintegrating since I was born, I think.”

“I like her.”

“She likes you too. She called you sweetheart within four seconds.”

Sophie looked offended. “Do not tell me she calls everybody sweetheart. I would like to believe we had something.”

“She absolutely calls everybody sweetheart.”

“Congratulations. You’ve ruined my first meaningful maternal connection at Bellamy.”

I took the bottle she handed me and sat down on my newly made bed while she plopped onto hers. For a moment we just looked at each other, the weirdness of suddenly sharing a room with a complete stranger hanging between us.

Then she nodded toward the phone still sitting in my hand. “Ethan's the boyfriend?”

I looked down at it. “Do I look that devastated?”

“You looked like someone had just told you your package was delayed until next week, so either it’s a man or you care way too much about online shopping.”

“Unfortunately, it’s worse than a package.”

She sat up. “That bad?”

“He goes here.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Your boyfriend is at Bellamy?”

“We picked Bellamy around the same time. We had this whole plan about being here together.” The moment I said it aloud, I could hear how it sounded. Sophie could too.

I pointed at her before she could open her mouth. “I did not follow him here.”

Her hands came up immediately. “I didn’t say you did.”

I squinted at her. “You were about to.”

“I was actually about to ask how long you’ve been together, but your lawyer-ness jumped out so fast that now I’m wondering if you did followed him here.”

I sighed. "I got accepted before he did. Bellamy’s political science program was my first choice and I got scholarships, so even if he had decided tomorrow that he wanted to transfer to clown college in Nebraska, I would still be sitting right here.”

She stared at me for a minute and then started laughing.

“What?”

“All I did was move my eyebrows, girl.”

I smiled. “They were prosecutorial.”

“First of all, we’re both Bennetts. So you need to learn trust.”

“I’ve known you for about twenty minutes.”

Sophie nodded. “Exactly. So our bond should be impenetrable by now.”

I threw one of my decorative pillows at her but she caught it against her chest. “Tell me something embarrassing about yourself so we’re even.”

She considered that. “I dated a guy for four months in high school almost exclusively just because he had a car.” This time, I stared at her. She explained further. “I was sixteen and my parents wouldn’t drive me anywhere.”

“What kind of car?”

“A Corolla.”

I burst out laughing so hard I nearly dropped my water.

“Oh shut up. It's a reliable car!.”

“You compromised your romantic integrity for a Corolla?”

“My romantic integrity had a curfew, Maya. I was working with what I had.”

I shook my head. “Are you at least single now?”

“Painfully. Tragically.”

“Good.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Good?”

“For me. I need somebody who isn’t going to disappear every weekend because she has a boyfriend.”

“Darn,” She relaxed. “I thought you were hitting on me.”

I laughed again, and something in my chest loosened.

It was strange how quickly loneliness could creep up on you. I had not even technically been alone yet, but there had been a little voice in my head all afternoon reminding me that everybody else already had people here and that friendships were already forming. That I was the girl arriving three weeks after the story started.

Sophie seemed to notice the shift in my face because her teasing expression softened.

“For what it’s worth, you already have somebody,” she said. “We share a last name and an address now which I think makes us legally obligated to defend each other in public. Bennett solidarity.”

I smiled. “Bennett solidarity.”

My phone buzzed again and I reached for it without meaning to look eager.

It wasn't Ethan. A Bellamy University email notification had appeared across the screen. It was a reminder for my first in person seminar tomorrow morning.

HON 112: Justice, Power, and the Modern State with Professor Adrian Calloway. 8:30 a.m.

Sophie leaned forward when she saw the course title on my phone.

“Oh, gosh, you have Calloway.”

“You know him?”

“I’ve never taken him but everybody knows about his seminar. My friend has him this semester and said he basically sits there throwing morally questionable situations at the class until somebody starts a fight.”

“That actually sounds fun.” I looked back down at the email. “How bad can it be?”

Sophie made a little sound that instantly made me suspicious.

“What?”

“The only thing is, apparently Julian Cross has basically taken over that seminar since classes started, so if you’re one of those people who needs to be the smartest person in every room, you might have a difficult morning.”

I frowned. She reached over, switched off the little lamp beside her bed, then slid underneath her blanket. “You should get some sleep. I have a feeling you'll need plenty of it for tomorrow.”

I smiled. “Goodnight, Sophie.”

“Goodnight.”

I plugged my phone into the charger and set it on the desk beside the picture of me and Ethan. For another hour, I unpacked, reorganized things that did not need reorganizing, checked my schedule four separate times, and resisted the urge to send Ethan another message. My phone stayed silent.

And for the first time since landing back in the country, I let myself wonder whether Ethan’s silence might actually be trying to tell me something.