She is short and her stature shrinks from her poor posture. She laughs at a joke robotically as she clutches her cup of coffee. I can tell by her darting eyes that she is jittery; she has probably never been out of the country or stepped into a J. Crew for that matter.

I imagine her stuffing her senior teeshirt into the garbage bag going to Big Brothers Big Sisters, but her favorite teddy bear managed to make it into her suitcase.

The girls she is sitting with look at her expectantly. "I don't really know," she said as she flung her coffee a little too close to her lips. The other girls laughed at an inside joke from orientation while she notices she managed to catch a boy's eye. Her smile fades when she sees his friends, clad in prep school shirts, pointing at a huge coffee stain that made her bra visible through her white tank top. She blushes as she dabs it with a napkin.

I overhear her friends talking about a party. Apparently, it is "gonna be lit." and her friends have already found her the "perfect boyfriend." The girl nods wordlessly, and her deer-in-the-headlights baby blue eyes widen. She played with her hair and took another sip of her coffee.

Her friends bid their farewells and head in the direction of their dorm. The girl sits there for a couple of minutes before getting up to throw her coffee cup in the garbage. She looked around for a bit until she met my gaze. In a timid voice she asks, "Do you know where Flannery is?"

I nod. "I lived there as a freshman. Follow me."

We engage in small talk until she is close enough to figure out where her dorm is, but all I could think about was the party. I wanted to say:

"Don't go if you don't want to," but I just said goodbye, and walked towards my dorm, remembering how it felt to see it all my first day.