“Rise and shine, dear freshmen,” says Stacy, our RA, in a chipper voice. She’s wearing a neon-green plastic circle around her neck and rainbow clown hair. She grins. “Put your shoes on and come out front.”
Outside we’re met by a scene that seems straight out of those bad acid trips you see in the movies: the Stanford marching band in what appears to be mostly their underwear and glow-in-the-dark necklaces and bracelets and stuff, rocking their respective instruments, trumpets blaring, drums beating, cymbals crashing, the school mascot in his big green pine tree costume zooming around like a crazy man, a bunch of half-dressed, partially glowing students jumping and bumping and whooping and laughing. It’s incredibly dark, like they’ve turned out the streetlights for the occasion, but I search for Angela and spot her looking supremely annoyed, standing next to two blond girls—her roommates, I assume. I weave my way over to them.
“Hi!” Angela yells. “You have bed hair.”
“This is insane!” I shout, combing through my hair with my fingers, with little success.
“What?” she screams.
“Insane!” I try again. It’s so unbelievably loud.
One of Angela’s roommates gapes and points behind me. I turn to see a guy wearing a Mexican-style wrestling mask that covers his entire face. A shiny gold wrestling mask. And nothing else.
“My eyes, my eyes!” Angela shrieks, and we all start giggling hysterically, and then the song is over, and we can hear again, and they’re telling us to run.
“Run, little freshmen, run!” they scream, and we do, like a herd of confused, stampeding cattle in the dark. When we finally stop, we’re at the next dorm over, and the band starts up again, and pretty soon another crowd of bleary and baffled freshmen begins to filter out of the doors.
I’ve lost Angela. I look around, but it’s too dark and the crowd is too big to find her. I make out one of her roommates standing a few feet away from me. I wave. She smiles and pushes her way over to me like she’s relieved to see a familiar face. We bob halfheartedly to the music for a few minutes before she leans over and yells next to my ear, “I’m Amy. You’re Angela’s friend from Wyoming?”
“Right. Clara. Where are you from?”
“Phoenix!” She hugs her sweatshirt tighter around her. “I’m cold!”
Suddenly we’re moving again. This time I make it a point to stay close to Amy. I try not to think about how this feels eerily similar to my vision in some ways, running around in the dark, not knowing where I’m going or what I’m going to end up doing. It’s supposed to be fun, I know, but I find this whole thing a bit creepy.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” I pant out to Amy the next time we stop.
“What?” She can’t hear me.
“Where are we?” I yell.
“Oh.” She shakes her head. “No clue. I’m guessing they’re going to make us run all the way across campus.”
I remember how on the tour they told us that Stanford has the largest campus of any university in the world aside from one in Russia.
It could be a long night.
There’s still no sign of Angela or the other roommate, who Amy tells me is named Robin, so Amy and I stick together and dance and laugh at Naked Guy and shout out a conversation the best we can. In the next half hour here’s what I find out about Amy: we were both raised with single mothers and little brothers, we’re both thrilled that tater tots are served at breakfast in the Roble dining hall every morning and horrified at how tiny and claustrophobic the shower stalls in the bathrooms are, and we both suffer from annoyingly unruly hair.
We could be friends, I realize. I could have made my first new friend at Stanford, just this easily. Maybe there’s something to this making-us-run thing.
“So what’s your major?” she asks as we’re jogging along.
“Undecided,” I answer.
She beams. “Me too!”
I’m liking her more and more. But then disaster strikes. As we come up on the next dorm, Amy stumbles and falls. Down to the pavement she goes, all flailing arms and legs. I do my best to make sure she doesn’t get trampled by the ever-growing stream of scrambling freshmen, then drop to the sidewalk next to her. It’s bad. I can tell just by looking at her white face and the way she’s clutching her ankle.
“I stepped wrong.” She groans. “God, this is embarrassing.”
“Can you stand up?” I ask.
She tries, and her face gets even whiter. She sits back down heavily.
“Okay, that’s a no,” I deduce. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”
I mill around looking for someone who seems even a little bit helpful and miraculously spot Pierce at the edge of the crowd. Time to put his “dorm doctor” skills to good use. I run over to him and touch him on the arm to get his attention. He smiles when he sees me.
“Having fun?” he yells.
“I need your help,” I yell.
“What?” he yells.
I end up taking him by the hand and dragging him over to Amy and pointing at her ankle, which is starting to swell. He spends several minutes kneeling beside her, gently holding her ankle between his hands. Turns out that he’s premed.
“It’s probably a sprain,” he concludes. “I’ll call someone to give you a ride back to Roble, and we’ll get it elevated and put some ice on it. Then you should go to Vaden—the student clinic—in the morning, get an X-ray. Just hang in there, all right?”
He walks off to find somewhere quieter to use his phone. The band finishes its song and moves on, leading the crowd away from us in a rumble of feet. Finally I can hear myself think.
Amy starts to cry.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, sitting down next to her.
“It doesn’t hurt that much,” she sniffles, wiping at her nose with the back of her sweatshirt. “I mean, it hurts—a lot, actually—but that’s not why I’m crying. I’m crying because I did something so totally stupid like wear flip-flops when they told us to put on shoes, and this is only the first week of school. I haven’t even started classes yet, and now I’m going to be hopping around on crutches, and everyone’s going to label me as that klutzy girl who hurt herself.”
“Nobody will think less of you. Seriously,” I say. “I bet there are plenty of injuries happening tonight. It’s all pretty crazy.”