Wells was toward the center of campus, in a fairly new building (unlike the freshman dorm, Parks, with its lack of air conditioning and concrete walls). I spun the keycard around my fingers and thought yet again about how hard I’d worked to get here.
How many hours I’d slaved away at Tifton’s only fancy restaurant— the golf course clubhouse—where in-between tee-times, wealthy patrons could pop in for fried chicken and mint juleps and really get the full Southern dining experience.
It’d taken more than a year of working every available shift at the clubhouse for me to save up enough for Harton. The realization that I was actually, truly in college now, hit me full force as I went up the steps, waved my keycard in front of my suite’s lock. It beeped, lit up green, then whirred open. I turned the handle and stepped into my new home.
Which smelled like hair products.
“Hello?” I called, stepping inside. The front door had opened into a common area, which looked very lived-in, especially given that today was move-in day. I frowned and called out again. “Anyone? Hello?”
A stunning girl with thick auburn hair poked her head through one of the bedroom doors and smiled. Her teeth were so straight that she looked like she belonged in a mouthwash commercial. “Hey! Are you our new Lily?” she asked.
I had no idea what she meant, but decided to play along.
“I guess?” I said, stepping inside and letting the door swing shut behind me. I dropped my two shoulder bags down beside my rolling suitcase, and my arms thanked me for the relief.
The auburn-haired girl stepped into the living area, a towel pulled around her body. I couldn’t help but blush a little— I couldn’t think of a time when anyone had seen me in just a towel. Tifton, like most small towns, was too modest for that.
“I’m Piper,” the girl said, extending a hand, trying to hold the towel up with the other.
“Sasha,” I said, smiling.
“Is that the new Lily?” another voice called.
“Yep,” Piper yelled back. The other second girl emerged from her bedroom in a sundress with so many cutouts, it was a feat of engineering that it held together. She introduced herself as Kiersten, taking care to enunciate the name in a way that told me she was tired of being called “Curr-sten”, “Kristen”, and “Cry-sten.”
“Look at you. You’re adorable!” Kiersten said, shaking my hand.
“Thanks,” I said, unsure when I’d last been called adorable. Elementary school? “What’s a Lily?” I added.
“She was our old suite mate. She isn’t coming back this year, so they filled her room with you,” Piper explained.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“Flunked out. She was a party girl. The party girl, actually,” Kiersten said, looking a little too delighted at her suite mate’s demise. “We moved into Wells right after spring semester, but she was out before July. Not that we aren’t glad to meet you, but we are a little sad that we won’t get to keep using the spare room as a closet. We were going to do it up Kardashian style,” she finished wistfully.
“Oh! So you’ve been here all summer?” I asked. That explained why the place looked so lived-in; the pictures on the walls, the array of empty liquor bottles decorating the top of the fridge, the un-vacuumed floor. It was tidy enough, but definitely didn’t have that new-apartment feel or fresh-paint smell.
“Trust me, New Lily. Once you’re at Harton, you don’t want to go home, not even for a few months,” Piper said wryly. “Everyone basically stays over the summer. Everyone worth knowing anyway. Come on, I’ll show you your room.”
Piper and Kiersten lead me to the back corner room. It was furnished with all the stock Harton stuff— a twin bed, a dresser, a desk and a nightstand, all of which were covered in lint and makeup dust.
“Is the rest of your stuff in your car? We can get some of the guys to help carry it up,” Piper said. She was still wearing a towel, but was doing so with such confidence that if she’d told me it was a new style of dress, I’d have believed it.
“Uh, no. This is all my stuff,” I said, motioning to the suitcase and my shoulder bag. “And I don’t have a car.”
Piper and Kiersten looked at each other, wide eyes. “That’s it? That’s literally all you brought?” Piper asked.
I tried to laugh their surprise off. “I mean, I have more stuff at home. But I had to take a bus up here, so it’s not like I could bring everything.”
“You took a bus?” Kiersten asked.
“Yeah. I don’t have a car.”
“You don’t have a car?” Piper asked.
I did my best not to show my annoyance with this line of questioning.
“Nope. No car.” And even if I had one, I could never have paid for a parking pass on campus, I thought.