Elizabeth Johnson, Teacher

Dorm windows are outlined with strands of twinkling lights. At night, walking the quad it feels like Christmastime in September. It is inviting. I am 18 and new to New England air. Every room seems to have a party going on because of these lights. 2 weeks ago every strand sat in a plastic box on a shelf at Target or Bed, Bath, and Beyond. College freshmen and their parents pushed a cart through store aisles grabbing them at random to make a standard rectangled bedroom feel more like home.

The paths on the Vassar quad to each dorm building are like spider legs. One central tree marks the body of the spider, a conjecture of all the concrete sidewalks and the grand 200 year old doors they lead to. It is here I fall off my bike on the second day of orientation. It is here the concrete skins a hole in my jeans and a gash on my right calf. No one saw except Joe as he approached from the south spider leg. We met there on that spot where the sidewalks meet, as if we were sidewalks ourselves.

I didn’t like him. But I walked nightly through those paths to the southmost dorm. He walked sometimes north to my dorm, and we sat beneath the twinkle lit window in my bedroom. All of this began because he reminded me I had to clean the cut on my leg. I didn’t like him but I was trying to be different, trying to show off to my two roommates, strangers. I forgot he was also a stranger. We liked the same books, a similarity I have since then learned to not base relationships off of.

I didn’t like him but found myself on a September night looking for him in a crowd in a dorm room with my friend. Having been ignored for the last 3 days only made me want him more. And I wish I had not been that girl, because that girl was disappointed. I wish I had yelled at him and not let those spider leg paths become only where we saw each other and smiled softly with closed lips saying nothing, passing, as if we’d only been strangers the entire year.