Finding Me

Chapter Two

School started in the fall. Leading up to college Jacey and I had been on and off the phone constantly, talking about what we both needed to prepare for our first semester. There had been a lot of debate about me bringing my dog Dizzle to live with us in the dorm that year. Although we had planned to live in pet-friendly housing, Jacey didn't believe in raising dogs in college so it was hard for her to understand where I was coming from. In the end, we settled everything nicely and we moved in together in August.
Our dorm had 17 floors in total, the first four being reserved for pet-owning residents. Moving in, Jacey and I had gotten notice that we'd be placed with a third roommate. Obviously, when a random assignment gets placed with you, you never know what kind of person to expect. You could be placed with a weirdo, a creep, or maybe someone you'll never even talk to. And, we wanted none of that in a roommate.
On the day set to move in, I get a call from Jacey at 8a.m. Now, I am not in any way a morning person so I was shocked to be receiving a phone call from her so early in the morning, awakening me from my not so beauty sleep.
"The elevators are shut down," Jacey says to be out of breath.
"What?" I responded, still waking up from my fresh six hours of sleep the previous night.
Jacey had told me that she had left her house at 5 a.m. to be one of the first ones to the school to move in and both the elevators in our dorm were broken.
"So, are they making people who live on the 15th floor take the stairs?" I question since it seemed weird the elevators were completely un operational on the freshman move-in day.
Apparently, the RA's were stationed throughout the balconies on every other floor, holding red flags that they would wave so an operator could control and move the elevator to them.
When I showed up at eleven that day, there was a line out the door of new students waiting to use the elevator with an estimated wait time of over two hours. This had been worse than waiting for one of the really popular rides at Kings Island, except then I wouldn't have had to wait in the hot Colorado air. Check-in started at noon so my parents and I scoped out the campus before I needed to get my key.
After an hour had passed, it was time to line up in South Hall and wait to get my room number and key. When I stepped through the door I was hit with a wave of air conditioning. It had felt like a whole different world, walking into this group of students most holding onto cages obtaining cats and all these dogs on leashes. It seemed like all these people had the potential for friendship and for the first time I had become excited for the year.
I finally get up to the desk and an RA hands me a paper with freshman welcoming events and gives me a key to my room on the fourth floor. Automatically, I take my dog and get my parents to head up to my room to start unpacking. For the first time, I actually thought college might not be as bad as I had originally thought. Living on my own. It might grant me the one thing I had always wanted... freedom.