N♂RMAL

03 | Third

The third—and thankfully, final—day of orientation was much like the first two. I forced myself through their overly enthusiastic activities before retreating to the safety of my mom's arms. I got a single night's reprieve, and before long, I was back on campus. Fortunately, it was no longer orientation, and it was now the one-day break between orientation and classes.

The door slammed with a sense of finality, and I flinched. Mom, for once oblivious to my discomfort, set down the final box of my things with a huff.

"I think that's everything. Now we just have to figure out where to put it all." She looked around the tiny dorm room. "You really don't have a lot of storage room here, huh?" She began pulling out all of the drawers and opening the closet. She was grumbling to herself the entire time while I just stood there awkwardly. I didn't want to be here anymore; I wanted to be home with Skye curled up on my chest. I should have known I wasn't ready for college quite yet. However, the thought of disappointing my mom made me feel sick to my stomach.

"I think we can fit most of your clothes in the closet storage. We'll have to figure out what to do with everything else though." Her head was whipping around, brunette hair flying, trying to figure out what to do with all of the stuff.

"There's a lot of room under the bed," I mumbled half-heartedly.

"And you still have a dresser," Mom added. She tapped her finger against her chin for a moment before addressing me again. "Why don't you start unpacking your clothes into the closet? I'll get your bed set up. We'll see where to go from there."

I nodded and began doing as told. It was a fairly large closet with two doors and the bottom half of it was like another, smaller dresser. I hung up all of my sweatshirts and jackets before tucking away all of my other clothing into the built-in drawers. I wasn't necessarily happy with how it came out as I kind of just tossed everything into the closet. Whatever, I thought, it's done.

Mom was just finishing up my bed, tucking in the comforter and making sure my puppy plushie, Mister, was placed nicely on top of all of my blankets. She patted down the comforter, smoothing any wrinkles, before smiling to herself rather proudly.

"Everything fit?"

"Yup."

"Cool, we can just place everything else into your dresser then," she smiled. I nodded and began emptying the boxes and bags of dorm room items. Things like my medicines and junk food were sorted out and placed in the top drawer while school supplies were stored away in my desk. Replacement bottles of soap and shampoo, towels, and linens were thrown into the middle drawer, and all of the miscellaneous items that I probably wouldn't be using too much were put in the bottom drawer.

Mom set up my desk so that it was comfortable for me and added a little white board calendar to lean against the wall. I saw that she wrote on it already. Every Saturday had Call Mom written on it in pink ink. At the bottom, where other notes would usually be written, she had scrawled on Mom loves you with a little heart outline beside it.

We were done unpacking now, but there was trash and boxes everywhere. Unfortunately, this mess is what my roommate walked into. I paled when I saw the door open. I had forgotten that I had a roommate.

"Sorry about the mess," my mom quickly apologized. "We just finished unpacking everything."

"It's no problem," he replied nonchalantly. "It was worse when I was unpacking a couple of days ago."

My mom let out a small bout of laughter while nervously trying to clean up. The guy walked closer to me with a hand outstretched. He was tall, way taller than me at my puny height of five-four. He had to look down at me, and I despised my height at that very moment.