Adie was lying in bed with her back to the opened window. Her lumpy, mismatched quilt was pulled high around her ears, with her clammy feet imprisoned in a pair of warm tube socks that her mother had dubbed “grandpa socks.” With her eyes wide open, unblinking, intent upon studying the blank television screen, Adie thought, pondered, considered…

Stacked atop the television were countless numbers of movies. To one side, a tower of empty DVD cases reached towards the ceiling; sprouting from the other corner of the TV set was a shiny column of discs left outside their cases. Adie stared at this cylinder of metallic rings and watched as the tiny dust particles reflected in the beam of street light creeping through the curtains began to settle upon them like powdered sugar. She wondered if it was possible to count each individual dust ball composed of skin flakes and pollen, spores and eyelashes, as it settled itself on what might have been Ice Age 2 or Nightmare on Elm Street. If she left the movies out and never returned them to their cases, would they eventually be buried under piles of dust rising high to reach the ceiling like so much dirty snow? Earlier that day, Adie had attempted to distract herself by living vicariously through the lives (or made up lives) of others. After having attempted to read a few more pages from On the Road, quickly becoming jaded with the same old American adventure story, Adie had begun pulling every DVD from its place in the movie cabinet at her mother’s house and watched them one by one. The year that DVD players had become the new, hip piece of technology to buy, Adie’s mother Ruby had received one along with about forty random DVDs from Boyd, her fling at the time. Ruby, at the age of fifty four, had a way of hunting down lovesick, young divorcees, winning their hearts with her enticing blue eyes and tinkling laughter, then she would destroy their very will to live when she stomped all over their hearts in a pair of stilettos. Never allowing herself to commit, never letting the chance of pain and disappointment to enter her life again, keeping love at arm’s length where it remained a game, Adie’s mother had found a way to avoid the same mistake she had made with her father.

None of the movies Adie’s mother had to offer interested her much. She would shove the disc into the player and either watch her favorite ten minutes of a familiar movie (the part where the fairies fight over what color Aurora’s birthday gown should be in Sleeping Beauty) or would flip randomly to some scene in the middle of a story and try to figure out what was going on (like the scene where Elijah Wood gets zapped in The Ice Storm). Adie was not kidding herself, though. She knew that she did not want to watch a movie. She did not want to read a book. She did not want to do anything. Staring at random clips from a hardly-touched DVD collection was just a way to pass the time. It was another way to make a couple of hours disappear; to bring night and darkness and the return to sleep that much closer.

Lately, Adie had not been waiting for evening and the lonely moon to come out and help ease her into unconsciousness. Earlier that semester, when she had found that classes and work followed by an hour or so of studying had left her with up to three to six hours of spare time before bed, Adie had taken to swallowing tiny little blue pills that allowed her to enter dreamland anytime she liked. Whenever it came to be five o’clock or eight o’clock or even three o’clock in the afternoon, Adie would take out the tiny bottle of Simply Sleep and chase a pair of those merciful, rest-giving capsules with a glass of water or juice or milk or vodka or whatever happened to be handy at the time, and would drift into an uninterrupted sleep for at least eight peaceful hours.

Eventually, though, Adie had begun to need more than a pair of pills to give her release. It sometimes took consuming four of five of her little blue friends for Adie to find rest. Even then, unlike before when she would rest undisturbed, Adie began to be ripped from la-la land by the sounds of a stereo blaring from somewhere above her dormitory room, or the sound of her roommate ripping open a bag of chips, causing the whole dorm room to smell of chili cheese flavored Fritos. Not feeling comfortable swallowing more than a triple dose of something, Adie had given up on her practice of sleeping whenever she liked, and, after working up a dependency on the pills, sleeping at all.

This is what had led to her laying wide-awake and sweaty at two in the morning in her childhood bed in her childhood room in her childhood home.

Regardless of the fact that her pores were seeping sweat, Adie would not unbundle herself from the warm blanket which she had become cocooned in. It was late November in Brighton, a hot November. The open window, though not letting in much cool air, was certainly letting in the sounds that were the outdoors of southern Illinois. Adie listened as dead leaves fell from the trees in her yard and skittered across the shingles of the roof. Somewhere in the distance, a dog was barking, possibly at a murderer trespassing onto someone’s property just before the kill. The sound of thick tires leaving their marks as they glided over the pavement of Illinois 4 passing by her house sporadically reached Adie’s ears. These were the sounds of two in the morning at home. Taking in all the familiarity, Adie sighed deeply, thankful to be there.

It seemed strange to her that just yesterday, she had been at the university, in her dormitory, packing her clothes away for Fall break after a long hour and a half of lecture on Shakespearian tragedies. She had fluttered about her bedroom, stuffing her dirty clothes into a bag, her books into her backpack. Jeanie, her roommate, was out, thankfully. Adie always felt awkward around Jeanie and had a feeling that she made Jeanie feel even more awkward. Whenever her obese, smiley, rosy-cheeked roommate would come into the room, she would always greet Adie with a friendly “hello,” followed by an attempt to rip the details of Alice’s day from her. Her efforts were always in vain. Adie did not dislike Jeanie. In fact, she found her roommate to be an incredibly nice and interesting person. She very much wanted to be friends with Jeanie and entertained fantasies of the two of them going out with big groups of friends to the campus bowling alley, renting movies, getting ice-cream and other things like that. Things that good friends did together. However, she could not find it in herself to make the effort to talk to Jeanie because every effort of Jeanie’s seemed to come from pity for Adie, not from a true desire to be friends. When Jeanie asked, “How was your day?” Adie heard, “I’m so sorry that you have no friends and you probably desperately need someone to talk to. However, though I am asking you this question out of politeness, I don’t really care about your day or about you at all and would prefer it if you quickly replied with a short, monosyllabic answer so we can move on and go our separate ways.” And though Adie’s make-believe Jeanie was right about her having no friends at school, regardless of the fact that she had attended the same university for three years, Adie always muttered that she was fine and went back to reading, or watching television, or staring off into space.

School was an unhappy place for Adie. No, she thought, that was not true. School was once an unhappy place for Adie, but now, she had grown used to the constant solitude and feelings of alienation which came with attending university. Having always been a bit of a solitary being except for a few distant friends in high school (who she was convinced had probably forgotten about her existence by now), Adie was always comforted by the fact that she would be going to college someday. College would be her salvation. She would attend a university, participate in all the programs and extracurricular activities, and maybe even join a sport regardless of the fact that she almost failed physical education twice in high school. She would join student government and make straight “A’s,” impressing her parents and all of the friends she would make. She would become best friends with her roommate and the two of them would be inseparable, doing everything together. They would keep in touch for years after college, never letting their deep rooted friendship be torn apart after graduation. And, when Adie married the young, handsome, intelligent, and funny medical student she would meet in college, her new best friend would be her maid of honor and all of her other friends from university would come to her wedding and wish her luck and tell her congratulations. They would call each other at least once a week and reminisce about the good old times, reliving adventures they had had, laughing at inside jokes, understanding everything said and unsaid. Her husband would love her dearly and would shower her with gifts and rub her feet before bed every night. They would live in a little yellow house in the country with a white picket fence and two point five children…

This is not what happened, obviously. Upon arriving at the university on the first day, sent with her mother’s “friend” Jerry instead of Ruby due to the fact that Ruby could not afford to miss work that day, Adie found herself immediately faced with the evidence that college would not save her, that nothing probably would. She had stood in the entrance hall with Jerry, a thirty five year old something or other (what his occupation was, Adie could never find out in the four months that his relationship with Ruby lasted). He had had a penchant for wearing leather members-only jackets regardless of the fact that the eighties had been over for almost twenty years. Jerry had helped Adie carry her belongings into the first floor of the dormitory she was to be living in where she discovered that there were lines of people standing at booths, all minus their bags and baskets of belongings. She stood for a moment next to the man smelling of cigarettes and oil who was practically a stranger, staring at these masses of people who all seemed much more confident and happy in their being there than she was. They truly seemed like they belonged there, all laughing together, getting acquainted with one another, quickly finding friends and making plans to meet up that night. Adie knew that she did not belong and had already drawn attention to the fact that she would never belong as she hovered about the entrance carrying a laundry basket full of rumpled clothing, a few books by obscure authors, a pink teddy bear her father had given her sitting atop the mess.

“You’re in the way.”

A voice was suddenly in Adie’s ear and she turned around to see a young man in a collared shirt with a silver plate name tag pinned to his chest staring down at her. “Nathan.” Nathan was tall and skinny with gelled, blonde hair, narrow womanly glasses and a face covered in pock marks from the apparent acne that had eaten away at his flesh since puberty.

Adie stared into his face thinking that he reminded her of a skinny boy she remembered from grade-school who had been a constant magnet for torture. Eventually, he had moved away. Maybe this was the same person, she thought. Her eyes were glued on the face of this authority amongst the students, studying his quite un-handsome features. She had forgotten that to stare was not only rude, but creepy.

Narrowing his eyes, Nathan said, “You need to move. Are you even supposed to be here?”

“Yes…I think so at least…” Adie had said, shaking herself out of reverie and back into reality. Suddenly, at that question, she found herself wondering if she really was meant to be there. Maybe she had gone to the wrong building by accident and did not even realize it. Maybe there was another dormitory where she belonged where all of the students were as weird and quiet and socially inept as she was. She had a chance to fit in after all!

“What’s your last name?” this boy asked, pulling out a clipboard from God knows where.

“Adair.”

“Your last name.”

“Oh…sorry…uh…Langly.”

“What’s your first name?”

“Adair.”

Nathan scanned what was apparently a list of the students living in Lincoln Hall, peering through his narrow glasses.

“Langly…Langly…Here you are.” Nathan’s voice betrayed his regret at finding her name on the list, “Get in line so you can register yourself and get the key to your bedroom and mailbox.”

Adie muttered some sort of apology and dragged her basket to the first line of students, falling in behind two boys who obviously either knew each other from high school or had very quickly become close friends. Jerry followed behind her and set the boxes he had been carrying next to her, saying, “I’m gonna go out to have a smoke.” Without considering that he was the only being in the entire building that Adie could almost consider a non-stranger, regardless of the fact that Adie was pleading to this man with her pathetic eyes, asking him not to go, Jerry walked through the glass doors and out of the building without a second thought.

Dragging her belongings behind these two boys, Adie listened to their conversation. Both were wearing base-ball caps, one with a large cannabis leaf on the front and both were wearing those ridiculous tee-shirts with writing on them that said things like, “I’m not drinking anymore. Then again, I’m not drinking any less.”

“We are so going to rule this school!”

“Yea, I know man. This is going to rock!”

“Hey, did you know that there is a party at Panther Point tonight?”

“Hell yea! We are going to get so wasted!”

These people had been at college for only a few hours and were already going to a party? At Panther Point? Adie did not even know what Panther Point was. In fact, it was not until two months into the semester that Adie discovered Panther Point to be a little row of student apartments surrounded by a lake on the outskirts of the university.

A girl with platinum blonde hair, a deep orange tan, and shiny pink lipstick came up to one of the boys and wrapped her arms around his neck. He returned the loving gesture by reaching his hand past her skinny waist and pinching the bare skin of her ass that was hanging out from her ridiculously short shorts. After this girl arrived, the conversation continued much in the same direction. Every once in a while, this tall, skinny super model would glance back at Adie and raise her perfect little lips into a smile of contempt, obviously finding the girl wearing blue jeans and a sweat shirt in the middle of August, carrying loads of knick knacks and clothing through the registration line, the girl with no make up, no boy friend, and obviously not a friend in the world, to be a source of amusement. Even though Adie pretended not to see these looks, she found herself becoming less and less confident about her very existence in this world. She found herself realizing how ridiculous she was. Even though she thought this girl was a bitch and the two boys were obviously not people with whom she could carry on an intellectual conversation and none of the three people standing in front of her were anything like the friends she had imagined for herself, Adie found that she was wishing they would turn around and start a conversation with her. She wished that they would invite her to their drunken escapades. She wanted to go to that party at Panther Point. She wanted to be their friend. Yes…This was just like high school.

Waiting in line for almost twenty minutes, avoiding the glances from the fake and bake girlfriend in front of her, trying not to listen to the excited and ecstatic conversation coming from those around her, Adie finally reached the front of the line. Dragging her basket behind her up to the desk, Alice was greeted with a friendly “Hello there,” followed with the question, “Last name?”

“Adair.”

“Last name.”

“Oh…sorry…uh…Langly.”

“Langly?”

“Yes…” That was her last name, right?

The girl at the desk sighed.

“Well, Langly starts with an ‘L.’ Therefore, you belong at the desk with the l

little sign in front that says ‘L-S.’ Next.”

The girl tapped the sign scribbled on construction paper that was taped to the front of the desk reading, “A-G.”

Not even attempting to find the other line in which she was supposed to be standing, Adie dragged her boxes behind her, past the front desk where Nathan was now chatting with other people in collared shirts and name tags, through the glass doors, and out to the sidewalk. She had sat down on top of her belongings wishing to go home, melt into the pavement, to disappear completely. There was no sign of Jerry anywhere.