The Institution

Chapter 3: My First Football Game

Sometimes when I get really nervous I start talking to myself out loud. Not in a weird way, or anything, but it helps me to organize my thoughts. There will be times when I am doing this without realizing that I'm actually speaking out loud, so if there are other people in the vicinity they usually assume that I'm loony and go to great lengths to keep their distance.

On the morning of our first day of classes at UK I woke before the sun. The waking up part was pretty terrible; my entire body ached from the tumble down the stairs, and I couldn't move my left arm at all. I still managed to drag myself out of bed and set about preparing for my first college class ever: Medieval History. It is at 8:00 a.m. in one of the lecture halls on North campus. I figured it would be better to be early than late on my first day, especially because I tend to get lost when journeying through previously uncharted territory.

As I was getting dressed I felt my stomach lurch like there were beetles in there crawling to get out. I didn't want to be sick so I did the next best thing I could think of- I reassured myself that I would love my classes and that I wouldn't be late and that college isn't scary and that I would survive my first day and that eleven pencils was more than enough pencils to make it through my classes that day. I always bring extras just in case I drop one, you see.

I forgot that Arthur was still in the room. He was asleep, at least until I started talking to myself.

An empty water bottle came flying through the air and hit me on the back of the head.

"Ouch!" I turned around. A thoroughly alarmed Arthur was sitting up in bed.

"What are you doing?" he asked, his voice still thick with sleep.

"I'm getting ready for class," I said.

His bleary eyes peered around the room, as if expecting to find somebody else hiding in the closet. When he realized that nobody was there except me, his lip curled.

"Well kindly do it without talking to yourself," he grumped, before slipping his feet from under the covers and trudging across the room to the closet.

"Sometimes I talk out loud to myself when I get nervous," I tried to explain, and he paused in the act of pulling his shirt over his head. "I didn't realize I was doing it."

He didn't reply but I saw him roll his eyes when he thought I wasn't looking. He picked up his shower tote.

"Are you excited for classes today?" I asked the back of his head. "I am. I have my first class at eight o'clock. What time does your first class start? Are you nervous at all? Because I'm pretty nervous. I always get nervous on the first day of-"

"Ethan," Arthur interrupted without turning around. He snatched his towel from the towel bar and pulled the door open.

"Yes?" I said.

"Shut up." He slipped out into the hallway. The door slammed behind him.

I left the room not long after Arthur did. I knew the walk to North Campus would take twenty minutes, so by leaving now I would get there twenty five minutes early. That should be plenty of time to get a good seat, right?

Wrong. I took three wrong turns and ended up in the wrong classroom building. I walked two laps around the corridors and up two staircases, peering into rooms all the while in search of my lecture hall that didn't seem to exist. It wasn't until I finally stopped a passing student to inquire about where I was that I understood I had made a wrong turn into the Business and Economics building. She pointed me in the correct direction and I scampered across the road to Whitehall. I made it to class with two minutes to spare.