The Big Move!

This is NOT what my dorm room looks like, but the color scheme is similar.


I'm in my dorm room right now. I actually ate dinner at one of the cafeterias. A random girl knocked on my door and said some of them were headed to the cafeteria and asked if I wanted to come along. I grabbed a sweatshirt and my ID and went with them. At first it was slightly uncomfortable small talk. Eventually someone asked how old I was. Several jaws dropped when I told them I was eighteen. Truthfully, I don't look eighteen yet. I'm getting to the point that fewer than 10% of the cops who spot me while they're just cruising pull me over to check my ID, which is a decent indication that I probably look pretty close to 16. It's not THAT unusual for eighteen-year-olds to look sixteen or vice-versa. There's a whole range of what is normal in terms of appearance age-wise. I don't think I'm jaw-droppingly young-looking, although those whose jaws dropped could hardly be blamed for their gut reactions.

The small talk over dinner centered around the basic things people ask one another when they're becoming acquainted. I hoped no one would ask where I was from. I didn't want to lie and say northern California, though it wouldn't have been a total lie, but sooner or later someone would find out my parents live here. So when the inevitable question came, I just said I graduated from high school in my northern CA town, but that my parents live here know. They wondered why I would live in the dorms if my parents live here. I then had to explan that I would be going away next year, and I needed some transition between living at home and living in an apartment at least a hundred miles from home.

They were curious as to why I was going elsewhere next year. I explained that I had started university at sixteen and was finishing in three years because of AP units. Then of course they wanted to know where I was going next year. I said I hoped it would be to medical school, but there were no guarantees. Someone else said that she had heard I was a music perormance major. I said that I was music performance and biochem. They all looked at me like I was a ghost. One of them finally made a comment about knowing where to go if homework help was needed.

I was happy to be removed from the center of the conversation. One of the girls on the far side of my dorm floor is a piano major. My mom is her prof, but she hasn't made the connection yet. Once she meets my mother it will be obvious enough.

I explained to girls whose rooms are on both sides of me that I occasionally have bad dreams in which I scream. If that happens, I told them, they should pound on the walls and tell me to shut up. Eventually how it all started may be a topic of conversation, but for the moment, it's nice to be around people who know nothing about the more strange and sordid parts of my history.

My room is nice. There's no way my aunt could have taken the raw material of a dorm room and converted it into something resembling a 5-star hotel room, which is pretty much what my room at home is. She did as well as could conceivably been done. The color scheme is similar to that of my home bedroom except that the basic structures are all dark-colored wood. It works, though. It's one of the smaller dorm rooms, but it's more than adequate for one person.

I'm going in a few minutes to watch a movie with some of the other residents. I don't even know what the movie is; I'm merely going to be social. I'm here in part to relate to age-level peers. Then next year, if things go off as planned, I'll get to be a baby genius again. There may very well be a few students as young as I, or maybe even younger, but they probably won't look quite as young as I. If that's the biggest problem I have, though, I'll be a very lucky person.