Diving Into The Wreck

Buddy Holly

Halloween is a big deal at Egmont College. People talk about Halloween for weeks beforehand, gossiping about what they're going to dress up as and which Halloween party is going to be the wildest. Students spend hours on their costumes, hoping to win costume contests or just to impress their friends. On Halloween, all of the students and professors dress up in elaborate costumes, and there will be at least a dozen different parties to attend that evening, even if it's the middle of the week. The festivities continue on for another few weeks afterwards, if only as an excuse to get rid of extra candy.

Egmont's obsession with Halloween is something that I've never understood. Even when I was little, I usually just threw on a pair of animal ears or a witch's hat for Halloween. Some years, I didn't even go trick or treating. Halloween was more of a precursor to the winter holidays than anything else. I definitely don't get why it's considered the greatest holiday of them all in a college town surrounded by a statewide retirement community, but I don't want to be a killjoy, so I always celebrate Halloween at Egmont by dressing up in some sort of fancy costume, even if my heart's not in it.

For Halloween during my junior year, I dressed up as my Dungeons and Dragons character, Darkhan Carter. That morning, I found a long, green dress that seemed like something that she would wear, and I paired it with boots and a dark brown cloak. I then took the staff that I had bought at a convention a few years earlier and headed for breakfast.

Aditi and Kara immediately figured out who I was supposed to be. "That is an awesome costume," Kara said. "You look exactly like Darkhan."

"You should come to the party in Greenway tonight," Aditi said. "I bet everyone would love your costume."

However, nobody else was able to tell that I had dressed up as my D&D character. A few people in my Environmental Policy class complimented me on my costume, especially the ornate staff, and then immediately asked, "Who are you supposed to be?" As soon as I started telling them about all of Darkhan's incredible exploits over the course of our D&D campaign, they usually stopped listening.

After lunch, I went to Jonas' class, and when I got there, I was surrounded by superheroes, witches, wizards, vampires, pirates, Jedi, zombies, and ninjas. I glanced across the room at Joyce, and she had a cup of coffee on her desk and her nose was in a book, as usual. She had curled her hair, she had replaced her round glasses with a pair of square ones, and she was wearing a suit and tie. A plastic guitar sat under her desk, next to her backpack.

Everyone had dressed up, and Jonas was no exception. He was wearing a pair of cat ears, and he was wearing a T-shirt that had a picture of a cat on it with the words "Wanted Dead and Alive."

"Who are you supposed to be?" a kid dressed up as Marty McFly asked.

"I'm Schrödinger's Cat, obviously," Jonas said. "Anyways, happy Halloween to everyone! I hope you're having a great day so far, but we do need to get started on researching for your next project."

He passed around a stack of papers and began to explain the assignment. We were working in pairs to design an experiment using the techniques that we had learned so far, which seemed easy enough. Jonas then started reading off the groups. "The first group will be Leo Schultz and Ashley Tran." Leo and Ashley high-fived as Jonas said, "The second group will be Dani Bloomberg and Joyce Nielsen."

I glanced across the room again, and Joyce smiled slightly as her eyes met mine. I wasn't sure how I felt about being Joyce's lab partner. I could probably trust her to do her fair share of work, but there was always the risk of getting distracted. Even at that moment, I was too busy staring into her deep brown eyes to listen to Jonas.

Once Jonas was done explaining the project, we all moved to sit next to our partners so we could start brainstorming. "What do you think we should research?" I asked. "I think it might be interesting to study the interactions between fish species, but we can really do whatever you want..."