I first came to visit Wesleyan four and a half years ago. It was a random gray weekend in November, and the campus was a maze of impossibly complicated shortcuts and ugly buildings. Everyone called me a prefrosh, and I assumed it was some sort of patronizing insult, but I took it anyway, thinking that somewhere in the graceful leap from high school to college these older students had reached a level of maturity I couldn’t begin to comprehend.
I stayed with two really nice girls in a double in the Butterfields. They had a tank with two baby snakes, except one was missing. They laughed, and I sort of laughed too, and then we went to see Charlie’s Angels at Destinta. Afterwards we looked at pictures of their boyfriends and talked about coed bathrooms. To me, these girls were women and I was still a child with so much to learn. They said if I felt like it, I could smoke weed with the boys down the hall, but I said no thanks—thinking that the last thing anyone needed was for me to get paranoid and lock myself in the coed bathroom staring in the mirror—so we all watched Crocodile Hunter until bedtime. The next morning when they got up for class I pretended to be asleep so they wouldn’t be forced to talk to me.
After I left Butt C, I wandered around campus for a while, I think, but I have no recollection of this. All I remember is that it was raining, and I walked all the way down to the bus station on Main Street without a jacket in the cold drizzle, struggling with my bulky red sleeping bag.
The bus station was empty except for a homeless man and myself. I sat down in one of the orange plastic seats and, shivering, clutched my sleeping bag to my chest. The homeless man sat down behind me and leaned forward, breathing onto the back of my neck. “Would you like some chips?” he asked me.
“No, that’s okay. Thanks though,” I said, leaning forward. He leaned in further so I could smell his urine and body odor.
“I like you,” he said. “I do.”
“Uhhhh,” I said, looking around for someone, anyone, but there was no one.
“I like you. I like your ponytail,” he said, and caressed my hair.
“Whoa, whoa,” I said, leaning so far forward that my head was pressed against the back of the plastic orange seat in front of me. Then I thought, what the hell am I doing? and I got up with my sleeping bag and moved to another seat, another aisle. He followed. Eventually I moved outside to wait in the rain until the bus came.
On the bus back to Boston I went to sleep, but was soon awakened by the crunching sound of gravel and sand under the bus’s tires. I blinked my eyes and looked out the window to see heavy forest and a silent, moonlit lake. We had come to a halt at the end of a sandy dirt road by the side of a lake somewhere in New England, and the other passengers and I started to wonder what was going on. Muttering grew louder and angrier until a man in one of the front seats stood up and addressed us irritably.
“Everyone, be quiet. We’re training a new driver and he has to figure this out his self. I don’t want any of y’all telling him where to go. He needs to figure it out his self. I don’t want to hear a word from y’all.” We stared at one another, incredulous, as the bus started a lurching, tortured ten-point turn to get us turned around on the tiny dirt road next to the spooky lake. During the layover in Hartford I called my mother from a payphone to tell her I would be late, but that Wesleyan was definitely the school for me.
What I remember most vividly about actual Wesleyan, though, was how nervous I was. I spent the whole time gauging how smart the students around me looked and whether or not I would get in. Not to mention the other kids on my tour—I sized each of them up, imagining our future lives together. I wondered if that girl with the fancy jeans and pretty hair would make fun of my sweatpants, or if that dude with the duct tape shoes and hemp necklace would say stupid things in class, or if that girl with the thin blonde braid and droopy eyes would be a good roommate until halfway through the year when she’d flip out and OD on some drug I never heard of and I’d assume she was sleeping but really she was in a coma and then I’d leave for class and by the time I got back she’d be dead.
Come to think of it, I’ve spent a lot of time at Wesleyan afraid of what people would think of me. It’s why I hate the outdoor lunch scene, why I hate talking in class, and why I considered dropping out of school after I fell down the stairs at a party.
But here we all are, some of us four or five years removed from our first Wesleyan visit, looking back, remembering what exactly it was that made us come here. For me, it was a combination of things that mean nothing to me now, yet I guess it all worked out in the end. I always sort of regretted never hosting a prefrosh, but I just never wanted anyone in my room for that long.
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