A Fresh Start
by rlfj
Book Three: Rensselaer
Chapter 23: Freshman Year
I tried reaching Jeana for the rest of the summer. I did a few drive-bys, and called every girl I knew who knew Jeana. The response was the same. They could get in to see her, but Jeana was on lockdown, and probably going to parochial school, a private girl’s parochial school, in the fall. She was depressed, but otherwise okay. Whenever one of the girls brought my name up, Jeana would sigh and or cry, but she didn’t ask to see me or send me a message. It was over in more ways than one, I guessed, but it was very depressing.
Tusker came over one afternoon. For the last year he had known about my apartment, but he kept it quiet. “I heard you and Jeana are broken up. Her old man do that to your face?”
“Mom joined in, too, but yeah, her dad tagged me pretty good.” I gave him a condensed version of what had happened, though I left out some of the graphic details. “I’m worried about her. I can’t see her or talk to her, and nobody knows anything,” I finished.
He nodded silently, and then went to my refrigerator and grabbed a couple of beers. “You ever think that maybe this wasn’t an accident? That maybe Jeana had this planned out?”
“Huh!? What?!” I just stared at him, my bottle frozen halfway to my mouth.
He shrugged. “Hey, you’re about to go away and she isn’t going to want to wait for you, is she? So maybe she managed to get caught by her parents, and that breaks you two up nice and neat?”
I rolled my eyes at this. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“I’m just saying, are you sure?”
“You think Jeana managed to time this so that she was buck ass naked and sitting on my face getting hosed with a facial just in time for her parents to walk in!?” I exclaimed.
Tusker’s face lit up. “You’re kidding me, right!? You gave her a facial while her parents were coming in the door? No wonder they went nuts! You’re lucky to be alive! Oh, that’s tremendous!”
I was less than thrilled by being able to liven up my friend’s afternoon. Still, I wondered, could Jeana have been cold-blooded enough and ruthless enough to manage our breakup in such a way? I couldn’t imagine she would have ever wanted to be caught the way we were, but what if she had been planning on me getting caught just ‘fooling around’ with her, my hands down her pants or her top up around her neck? What if our timing was off or she got hornier than planned? I just didn’t know what to think.
I stopped bothering her or her friends.
I spent the balance of my last free summer finishing my classes at Towson State and getting ready to move to Troy. I hate moving. I did before and discovered I still did now. I split things into two separate categories, stuff I would take with me and stuff I would put into storage. I rented a small storage locker/building out in Timonium, and went out and bought a bunch of storage boxes. Even though I had been renting a furnished apartment, I still had spent the last couple of years accumulating a huge pile of shit. I rented the storage unit for a year, and paid in advance.
Moving into the freshman dorms was going to be a wrenching change. I could have afforded an apartment, but RPI required all freshmen to live on campus. The only exceptions were students whose parents lived nearby, and I only ever met one guy who qualified. Everybody else lived in the freshman dorms, which a national college guide had described as being constructed in ‘the neo-penitentiary style.’ I could attest to that. Short of bars on the windows, the freshmen dorms had all the coziness of Alcatraz. The rooms were small, able to fit in two small desks, two single beds, and not much else. They had two built-in closet/dresser assemblies, one on each side of the doors as the inmates would enter their cells. Linoleum flooring, and cinder block walls completed the charming atmosphere.
I began packing up what I was going to store. I also brought out one of my trusty foot lockers, for the trip to Troy. I would fill a foot locker and bring it, my IBM Selectric, and a small half-size refrigerator which I picked up at a local appliance store. Those were allowed, although hot plates or toaster ovens were not. I would also bring several cardboard boxes holding my clothes, which I would chuck once I was unpacked. Lastly would be my stereo, a small but very nice Bose system.
Everything else went to the storage locker in Timonium. I called Tusker and he came over with his dad’s pickup truck, and we loaded it all up and drove over. This was just returning the favor I had done him. After graduation he had gotten a job tending bar at a place in Towson, and was also working at a repair shop. He had moved into a small apartment in town. A bunch of us helped him move, four fellow bikers, and me, the preppy college kid. Fuck it, we moved him, finished off a couple cases of beer, and fucked around and arm wrestled. I won a few and lost a few.
After we moved my stuff, we went back to the apartment and drank all my beer, finished off my open jugs of cooking wine, and ate or threw out the last food in the fridge and pantry. I was ready to travel by August 23, a Thursday. Freshmen could start showing up on Friday August 24, but most wouldn’t show until Saturday August 25, which was when the Freshman Dining Hall opened. The following Monday, the 27th, class registration would happen, and classes would start the next day, Tuesday August 28. My plan was to drive up on the 23rd, spend the night in a motel, and be first in line Friday morning. I wanted to be in the dorm room and unpacked by Friday afternoon. Saturday was going to be a fucking zoo! Worst of all, RPI has very few parking spaces. I needed to have the car parked Saturday before a zillion parents and kids showed up to drop Little Johnny off at school.
Mom, Dad, and Suzie came over Wednesday night to say good-bye. Dad and I hauled the stuff I was taking out to the Galaxie. The only heavy stuff was the foot locker, the Selectric, and the mini-fridge. They took me out to dinner and then we got the hugs and handshakes out of the way. I promised to write. I ducked any questions on when they would see me back home. That night I slept in my clothes on the bare mattress. Early the next morning I showered, dressed in my clean travel clothes, and stuffed everything into a duffel bag. I handed my keys to my landlords and was off.
I stayed the night at the same dump motel I stayed at in Watervliet when I came up for my school visit. I was up bright and early Friday morning and had breakfast at a diner in Green Island. I was parked in the parking lot between the Student Union and the Armory by 8:00. I looked around with quite the sense of déjà vu all over again. I actually wandered around the campus for a bit before heading into the Student Union for check-in.
Physically, Rensselaer is split into several different sections. You have the old school area, which borders on Sage Avenue and 15th Street, with a residential quadrangle for upper classmen and a number of stately brick and ivy covered buildings dating back to the 19th century. You can see these buildings for miles around because they are on the side of a big hill and have green copper roofs. South of this section is a newer academic area, where the new chemistry, physics, materials science, and library buildings are. The old school was engineering and architecture only.
East of 15th Street was a vast area that had been developed by the college during and after World War II. The Student Union was here, a three story modern building, the Armory (which actually had a fully functioning tank lift in the basement, in case your M-4 Sherman needed a tune-up!), and all of the newer student housing. The freshman dorms were over there, along with the dining hall, as well as some newer grad student housing.
I grabbed my paperwork and went into the Student Union about 9:00 or so, and the line for check-in was mercifully short. Tomorrow it would be much, much longer! This was still in the pre-Internet, pre-computer days, so it was a matter of standing in line until you got to the table, where somebody would pull out paper files on you and check you in. Still, I was an early bird and the people at the desk weren’t going crazy yet. By mid-morning I was marked as present and accounted for, had my room key for Hall Hall (The residence hall was named after a guy named Hall. Go figure.), and I had registered the Galaxie and gotten a parking sticker for the student lot (And the student lot only! The campus police were vigorous in their detection and prosecution of cars where they weren’t allowed.)