Obsessive Saint

ORIENTATION

Eli

Orientation officially began at four.

I found this out from a sheet of paper someone had slid under the door while I was unpacking, which listed a sequence of events with the cheerful density of a schedule designed by people who believed that relentless programming was the solution to homesickness.

4:00 PM — Welcome Assembly, Main Hall.

5:30 PM — Campus Tour, meet outside Main Hall.

7:00 PM — Orientation Dinner, Crestwood Dining Hall.

9:00 PM — Social Mixer, Common Room B.

I read it twice.

Folded it in half.

Then I went to the welcome assembly two hours later.

Main Hall was the kind of room that had been built to make people feel small in an aspirational way — vaulted ceiling, dark wood, portraits of men who had been important enough to have portraits commissioned and dead long enough that no one remembered why.

It smelled like old paper and the particular cleaning product that seemed to be mandatory in every institution I had ever been inside.

I found a towards the middle. Not the back, which would have been obvious, and not the front, which would have been worse.

The Dean spoke. Then the head of Student Affairs. Then a third person whose title I didn't catch but who seemed very committed to the concept of community, which she used eleven times in four minutes. I counted.

I looked around the room while they spoke.

The particular archaeology of a new place — reading the room before the room knew you were reading it. Who was performing with ease. Who was genuinely at ease. Who was doing what I was doing? That was sitting in the middle and taking careful inventory.

There was a girl three seats to my left who was sketching in the margin of her orientation packet. Quick, confident lines — not doodling, actual drawing.

Must be an art student.

I was doing well at not thinking about Dorian.

The campus tour took forty minutes and confirmed what I'd already mapped in my head from the university materials — the library was the best building, the science block was the worst, and the path between the east and west quads had a drainage problem that became relevant approximately thirty seconds into the tour when it started raining.

The girl from Main Hall ended up beside me under a narrow overhang while the tour guide consulted his notes with the defeated energy of someone whose script had not accounted for weather.

"He's going to say we should embrace the experience," she said.

I looked at her.

"Crestwood's founding ethos," she continued, in a tone that was not quite mocking but was standing very close to it.

"Perseverance through adversity. It's on the crest."

"You've done research."

"I do research on everything," she said matter-of-factly, without apology. "Nadia Osei. Literature."

So I was wrong about her major.

"Eli Carter. Same."

She looked at me with a brief assessing look that felt familiar in a way I couldn't immediately place.

"You're in Merton," she said.

"How do you—"

"I'm in Merton too. Third floor. I saw you unpacking through the courtyard window." A pause. "That sounded more alarming than it was. I was also unpacking. Windows face each other."

I almost smiled.

The tour guide said they should embrace the experience.

Nadia gave me a look.

I did smile then.

Dinner was loud in the specific way of large groups of people performing sociability at each other — the dining hall acoustics turning every conversation into a general roar, cutlery and voices and the particular energy of two hundred people trying to seem like they were exactly where they expected to be.

I sat with Nadia, who had accumulated two other people by the time we reached the dining hall — a boy called Marcus from Bristol who was studying History and had very strong opinions about the soup, and a girl called Devi who was doing Law and had already identified three upperclassmen worth knowing and two to avoid.

I liked them.

Not immediately, not the way you like people you've known for years, but in the provisional way of people who might become something. The particular ease of a table where no one was performing too hard.

I ate.

Answered questions.

Asked some back.

I did not think about the fact that Dorian was probably eating alone somewhere across the city, in whatever Ashford had instead of this dining hall, in his methodical careful way, with whatever version of a system he'd constructed for managing a new environment.

No.

I was going to savor this distance despite it not being the one I originally wanted.

"Eli," Nadia said.

I looked up.

"You went somewhere."

"Sorry." I picked up my fork. "Long day."

She looked at me with that assessing look again — the one that felt familiar. I placed it this time.

She read rooms the way I did.

"Okay," she said, and let it go, which was the correct thing to do and the thing I was most grateful for.

I didn't go to the social mixer.

This wasn't a deliberate decision. I walked back to Merton after dinner intending to drop off my jacket and go, and then I was in my room, and the room was quiet.

I sat at the desk and opened my sketchbook — a large one, good paper, the one I used when I was actually trying rather than just thinking — and looked at the blank page for a while.

Then I started drawing.

Not anything specific. The window first, the way the light fell through it from the courtyard lamps outside. Then the courtyard itself, from memory — the proportions of it, the way the old stone held shadow differently than the newer sections, the geometry of it.

I drew for an hour without looking at the time.

This was the thing about drawing — it was the only activity I'd found where the part of my brain that cataloged and assessed and carefully did not examine things went quiet. Just the hand and the line and the problem of how to make a flat surface hold depth.

My phone lit up on the desk.

My mother.

How was day one? Did you take any pictures?

I looked around the room. Took four photographs — window, desk, the books on the shelf, the wardrobe with the door that didn't close flush.

Sent them.

That wardrobe, she replied immediately. I'm calling the housing office.

Don't call the housing office.

I'm not calling the housing office. I'm just saying I could.

Goodnight Mom.

Goodnight my love. I'm proud of you.

I put the phone down.

Looked at the sketchbook.

The courtyard drawing was good. Not finished, but good — the proportions were right, the shadow was doing what I wanted it to do.

I closed it.

Made the bed properly for the first time, with the methodical efficiency of someone who had learned that disordered surroundings produced disordered thinking — I had learned this from watching Dorian, which was a thing I noted and set aside — and turned off the light.

I lay in the dark listening to the building settle.

Somewhere down the hall a door closed.

I lay in the dark for a while longer.

Thought about adjacency.

Thought about the way my mother had said you always land on your feet, and whether that was true, and whether landing on your feet was the same as landing somewhere good or just somewhere upright.

I closed my eyes.

Outside, the courtyard was quiet.

I was asleep in eleven minutes.