Page 2 of Leaving the Station
Because I made it out.
College hasn’t exactly been “great.” I would struggle to characterize it as “fine.” “Steaming pile of dog shit” is about right, though not entirely accurate, seeing as dog shit can be cleaned up.
No one on the train knows about my first months of college, though. They don’t know what I’ve done.
On the train, I’m not Zoe Tauber, fuckup to end all fuckups.
I’m just a passing nuisance who bumps into infants and makes unpleasant conversation with strangers.
I’m free.
Day Two of College
“Oh my god, he’s even creepier in person.”
“I thought we didn’thavea mascot.”
“His face makes me want to puke.”
Everyone clapped half-heartedly as our school’s mascot appeared out of nowhere. He was an ungodly, bearlike creature who looked more like taxidermy that had escaped a natural history museum than a proper mascot.
He stumbled onstage and raised his hands like he was ready toparty; no one else was.
I turned to the three people next to me, who I’d been seated with by virtue of our alphabetical adjacency.
“What happened to the costume? I remember the bear from the brochure being... cuter. At the very least his eyes were pointing in the same direction.”
They all stared at me, and I was worried I’d said the wrong thing until they started laughing.
“You’re so right,” the person farthest from me said as they extended a hand. “I’m Rex, they/them, undeclared but thinking of majoring in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies or French.”
I held my hand out and we shook, which would’ve felt overly formal if Rex wasn’t wearing a blazer.
The three of them arrived at this event together, laughing and moving with ease as if they’d known each other all their lives. Maybe the hours it had taken me to work up the courage to leave my dorm and come down to today’s orientation activities were crucial friendship-making time that I would never get back.
Next to Rex was Autumn (“she/they, Architecture”), and Shelly (“he/him, Fiber Science”).
When it was my turn, I didn’t know what to say. They all seemed so sure of themselves, and I was not. Nearly all the introductions I’d made since arriving the day before had involved pronouns and majors, and I didn’t feel confident in my choice of either.
“Zoe,” I told them finally while the haggard bear did a poorly choreographed dance to “Low” by Flo Rida.“She/her. Biology.”
They were all satisfied with that answer, so, for the time being, I was too.
The previous day, when my dad had left me on my own in my freshly unpacked dorm, I’d felt almosttoofree.
We’d just left a premed reception, where he was on his worst behavior.
“You should talk to the professors,” he’d told me through a mouthful of sharp cheddar. “The other kids will mingle among themselves, and then you’ll have a leg up when it comes time for med school recs.”
My parents had always had high expectations for me, and those expectations increased tenfold when college was involved.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be premed or go to med school or be a doctor. I wanted those things desperately. Or maybe, more accurately, Iwantedto want them.
My brain naturally worked in the way someone’s needed to in order to be good at science. I didn’t have to try all that hard, and for that, I was rewarded with constant positive external validation: high test scores, Science Olympiad trophies, acceptances into my choices of premed programs.
But from the second I’d set foot on Cornell’s campus, the forward momentum that had propelled me from competition to competition, test to test, application to application, had vanished.
I’d been planning my grand entrance into college life for a while. The academics didn’t matter, but the aesthetics did. Leaving for Cornell meant I’d get a chance to present more masc, to figure out what being a lesbianmeantto me, when it had previously been put on the back burner.
