The alarm clock jolted me to consciousness. The walls of the room rose up and un-blurred themselves as I lifted my eyelids.

Freshman year. I anticipated to be heralded for this new beginning, but was met with only the celebratory stench of grease emanating from the kitchen and the chorus of breaths in my parents’ bedroom. How thin the walls are between my room and that of my parents’, so sonorous is their heaving and breathing and snoring, yet we are still segregated by some odd thing indescribable meant to act as a metaphor for the emotional distance between us. But I am much too straightforward.

As I walked out of the house, the still summery sun emerged from behind the neighbor’s house as if prodding me on to make good in the years to come, one godly eye staring at me that first morning in some slight spirit of hope. All around, the late summer breeze soothed me; I felt its cool embrace wrap around me as I stepped on the bus. I should have worn a light sweater that morning.

The chattering could be heard even a block and a half away from the school. In the distance I saw clusters dispersed here and there, the largest one gathered just in front of the Freshman Academy doors. Others avoided the cluster of naiveté and gravitated towards the smaller clusters. Is it my mistake or did I see them glare disdainfully at the cluster which I would help burgeon?

So nice that I should know most of the constituents of that large, misshapen mass blocking entrances somewhat stupidly, their light blue ID cards a fluorescent marker of their…freshness, what other words could describe them?

Neon blue in the distance, they could be blinding in certain lightings. I gravitated towards that fluorescent gathering.

I stumbled into Room 309, a row of faces turning at the doorway where I stood. Clearly I had interrupted something important. The woman who stood in front, facing the blackboard, gave me a glare so piercing I thought I’d die. The room froze in a terse silence. Her scowl relaxed into non-chalance, then appeared to have reformed itself as a contrived smile as I rushed to sit down and settle into the rickety old desk-chair. Its piquant squeak pierced the silence.

The woman continued her lecture (or whatever it was) and scribbled on the blackboard some words that were probably important to pay attention to, but I was so sick with embarrassment I couldn’t really figure out what was going on. All sorts of catastrophic situations sprung up in my mind, how this woman would hate me from that day forth and I’d never get anything above a failing grade…unless I redeemed myself somehow.