Page 5 of Leaving the Station
I did everything right, from kindergarten to senior year, but recently something broke inside me. All I can do is stare at my phone and play Tetris. I don’t know what happened, but beingalive feels a thousand times harder than it did last year.
I went to college to be a doctor, and now, less than four months later, I have no idea who I am or what I’m going to be.
But my parents are contributing what they can to my college fund so that I can be Dr. Tauber.
They should use that money to buy a condo in Florida or whatever it is old Jews with disappointing children do.
Day Four of College
It was the third time in as many years that I had been forced to learn about the electron transport chain.
I had a hard time figuring out why I needed to know this. I didn’t think that doctors gave this much thought to basic biological processes. It couldn’t have been relevant to them as they were saving lives or shaving bunions or what have you. Electrons moved, our cells made energy, and none of it mattered.
Once I came to the realization thatnothingwe were learning in Intro Bio would be of any use to me in the future, I stopped paying attention.
It was the second day of class.
The girl next to me bounced her leg under her desk as she carefully transcribed the professor’s every word. Instead of listening to the lecture, I studied her leg. When she was anxious, it bounced faster. When she was focused it was slower. Sometimes, it barely bounced at all.
I recorded my observations in the margins of my notebook. I figured I wasdoingscience, and that had to count for something.I didn’t have a control group or consistency or government funding, but neither did Darwin.
Or maybe he did. I didn’t know.
When the professor dismissed us, I shoved my pen into my backpack and ran out of the classroom. I was going to meet Rex and Autumn and Shelly at Jansen’s Dining for dinner.
I felt decently good about my chance of having real friends. We even had a group chat, called “Tees Have More Fun,” since all of our last names began with T.
Rex:freaking out ...
they’ve got tomato bisque here
Autumn:sending out a news alert rn
Shelly:more like a bisque alert
I smiled down at my phone as I ran out of the classroom.
Zoe:be there in a sec !!!!
Due to an unfortunate asbestos-related incident, my biology lecture was temporarily being held in the student union, nicknamed “the Straight,” (after a dead investment banker, not a sexual orientation, which thankfully I googled before asking anyone) so in order to get outside I had to walk through crowds of people ordering large quantities of coffee or handing out flyers for hyper-specific clubs.
The crowds didn’t matter too much in the end, though; I never made it to dinner that evening.
Because there, in the lobby, was the most interesting person I’d ever seen.
I know that sounds like a nice way of saying he was unattractive or weird to look at, but that wasn’t true at all. This kid was objectively good-looking—even a lesbian could think that about a boy, and I was. Thinking that about him, that is.
And a lesbian.
He was wearing a brown crewneck sweater that matched the color of his hair, which was bouncy and dynamic. He smiled widely at his own jokes in a way that was ridiculously charming, and while he didn’t have a dimple, he had a birthmark on his cheek that changed shape when he grinned.
But it was more than his appearance; there was something intangibly magnetic about him.
I should’ve been on my way to dinner with my new friends, who were bantering about bisque. I reallydidwant to go, but I physically couldn’t pull myself away from this boy.
He was standing in front of a group of people strewn over chairs and couches, commanding the crowd with the expertise of a televangelist.
“So, Dickens, right?” he said to the group, his hair bouncing with each syllable.
