Linda had promised herself that she would allow herself a true week of vacation that summer. One week without hoisting bags of feed or ringing up long orders or answering the phone or scrambling to position an emesis pan below a patient as they spewed. She stayed on, however, working at the feed store and the hospital right up to the Friday before Fall semester 1977 began.
She knew that the first couple of weeks of class were like a vacation, anyway. No one was going to get serious about school until after Labor Day. Saturday, she packed shipping crates with her clothes, hair dryer, shoes, and knick-knacks she would need for the next sixteen weeks. With her mother, father, and Molly, they had the station wagon loaded by Saturday night and would leave bright and early the next morning for Alexandria.
At the beginning of August, Lauren had called. She was glad to hear from her. Apparently, her failure to join her in the apartment hadn't pissed her off that much. "No, you're just different from me," Lauren had said, when Linda asked her about that. "But you have to go to my housewarming party! It's going to be great!"
Saturday morning, she set off for the three-and-a-half hour drive south to begin her sophomore year. When her father stopped at a diner where they could eat breakfast, an odd feeling overcame her, that the summer had passed by in a flash, that it had seemed like yesterday that she and Lauren had come back from the whirlwind trip to Cincinnati. Summers seemed to last longer when she was in grade school, and her parents would send her for two weeks of summer camp, where they took nature field trips for the entire time.
Now, she was nearly nineteen, with many more things to worry about.
At the campus of Little Egyptian State University, it looked like a reverse exodus.
Parents with station wagons or pickup trucks unloaded boxes and crates onto the sidewalk, where the students would used hand dollies to hoist them inside and onto the elevator. Linda tried to focus on the necessities yet still ended up filling three of the shipping crates her father had brought home from work. They rode with her crates up the elevator to room 929.
When they opened the door, they found a starkly empty room that smelled of disenfectant and seemed cool and clinical, like an empty room at a hospital. "Where's your roommate?" Molly asked.
"She must not be here yet," Linda said. "There's no way they'd give me a private room."