First-Year Orientation, page 24
I’m surprised by how much I truly mean that.
Before Shelley can respond, his eyes suddenly go wide.
“Oh shit. Olivia!”
I turn around. Olivia is standing right behind me. She must have stopped by our dorm because now she’s wearing a cute little red beret and carrying two drinks.
“Talking to someone again?” she asks innocently.
I glance nervously at Shelley. “Uh, no, no! Just talking to myself.”
“Hmm . . .” she hums in response.
But if Olivia doesn’t believe me, she doesn’t say it. Instead, she simply smiles, and for a moment I swear she’s looking at both of us.
“Should we head out for the concert?” she asks, waving the two cans of juice in her hands. “It’s about to start.”
“Yeah,” I say, smiling back.
Shelley grins and makes a motion to slap my back.
Only this time, I swear I feel it.
“Let’s go!” he says excitedly, racing after Olivia.
I take a deep breath. And I run after them.
Ren slants her eyes down her body, trying to count how many pairs of hands there are on her, holding her up horizontally, her head pulled back by her curly red hair to face the heavens. Ten? Forty? A thousand? There’s such a sea of people around her, all dressed exactly the same, all chanting the same words over and over again, that it’s honestly hard to tell.
“B-A-L!” she hears from the massive crowd on her left.
“MOR-A-L!” responds the mob on her right.
“SHOW THEM WHAT WE MEAN BY HELL!” they shout in unison. Ren feels her lips moving unconsciously along with them. How many times has she been made to chant that today?
Has she really been in residence here only one day?
And now she’s the star of her very own dorm-wide cheer mosh pit.
It would almost be exciting, if she weren’t about to be ritually sacrificed at ceremonial knifepoint to assuage the cursèd spirit of her dorm.
But, you know. Here she is.
This wasn’t exactly how Ren expected things to go when she arrived at her dorm just twelve hours earlier. It felt like a lifetime ago to Ren at this point; but really, it had barely been a day. Time sure flies when you’re being secretly indoctrinated, huh?
Growing up an only child in her small university town, Ren had learned how to entertain herself at a young age—and, frankly, preferred things that way. Other people are, for the most part, kind of assholes. (What? She’s right.) There’s nothing wrong with being comfortable being alone. Ren was coming to realize it made her a lot more well-adjusted than most other kids her age.
You know who never made Ren feel weird about her clothes or the books she read or what she brought for lunch in high school? The star of whatever movie she was watching on her iPhone with her headphones on while eating lunch in a little electrical closet hidden behind the music teachers’ lounge. She’d put little cushions in there and everything. It was perfect.
Ren’s a big movie girl. She’d been planning on a film studies major in the Arts and Humanities department, poring over class descriptions, reading prof rankings on RateMyProfessors.com, scouring used bookstores for textbooks on the cheap all summer. (Seriously, buying those things at the university bookstore? Such a scam.) She’d agreed to go to college in her hometown for one reason, but also on one condition: that she got to stay on campus for her first year. Ren wanted to take full advantage of the tuition break she got since her dad was employed there, but she also wanted the True College Experience, and she was determined to get it—whether she liked it or not.
Self-flagellating? Yeah, maybe! Okay? Ren had seen enough coming-of-age college flicks that she thought she knew what to expect and had been dreading the worst: toga parties, Greek life, bad cafeteria food, close proximity to cis boys. But there was this small part of Ren that had wondered: Could this be the thing she’d been missing all along? Was college dorm life the thing that would make her into A Sociable Person? Would living at home for all four years of school drastically stunt her in more ways than she had already been socially stunted by awkwardness and probably undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder?
Things could be different. They really could! And Ren would never know unless she tried.
Of course, Ren had done her research—not that she even really needed to. Everyone in town knew Balmoral Hall’s reputation; it had been nicknamed “Balmoral Hell” for so long that, despite the administration officially banning the use of the pejorative entirely in the nineties, it persisted to this day. Legend had it that the very first RA had taken a look at one of its floors while still under construction and commented that he “couldn’t help but think of the cages used for laboratory animals being experimented upon. Hellish.” The name stuck because the dorm was notoriously 99 percent party, 1 percent study.
Balmoral was absolutely massive—it housed over a thousand students—and had the cheery, welcoming look of an ill-kempt juvenile detention center. Ren had listed Doheny as her first choice (those big rooms! that cafeteria!) and Balmoral Hall in dead, dead last.
So naturally, Ren found herself pulling up in front of Balmoral on the first day of first-year orientation. A few hours later than she was supposed to be there, sure, but there nonetheless. Behind the wheel herself—having tearfully hugged her parents goodbye just fifteen minutes ago in their driveway—Ren turned away from the end of the long line of tearful-parent drop-offs out front to find her allotted parking space. She looked up at the tall, featureless brick building in front of her. Flags and streamers hung out dorm room windows; music blasted so loud from speakers (where, even? everywhere?!) that she could feel the bass through her floorboard. Ren closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
“You can do this.” Ren repeated the mantra she’d been using all summer, after having watched Pitch Perfect one too many times (exactly enough times?): “Be a Chloe, not a Beca. Be a Chloe, not a—”
“BALMORALLLLLL!”
“Holy shit!” Ren’s eyes flew open at the voice blasting through her driver’s-side window, only to find her Subaru door already being pulled open. She was yanked out of the relative peace and safety of her car into what she could only describe in the moment as complete, absolute chaos.
“WELCOME, FROSH!” the same voice came screaming through a megaphone far too close to Ren’s face for comfort. “NEW BLOOD!”
She was surrounded on all sides by people who couldn’t have been much older than she was, all dressed exactly, disconcertingly the same: white T-shirts under bright red overalls. All of their outfits were painted over in different ways, with inside jokes and bright symbols, and they each had nonsense names emblazoned on their backs: RING POP, FINAL DESTINATION, ELMO. One of them held a Bluetooth speaker in the air; two of them were riding around on the backs of red shopping carts, red-and-black BALMORAL flags streaming behind them. The rest of them were dancing and laughing. In the distance, Ren could hear other red-overalled people yelling out cheers: “B-A-L! MOR-A-L! BALMORAL, BALMORAL, WELCOME TO HELL!”
“We’re so happy you’re here!” said one of the pack with thick black hair pulled up into space buns as his friends danced around him to the music. (Was that . . . Phil Collins playing? This was all kind of wild, but Ren could at least get down to the Tarzan OST.)
“Yeah, hi,” Ren offered, smiling hesitantly. Wasn’t this all a bit . . . much? “I’m—”
“Irenka, right?” The guy grinned, stretching the red-and-black face paint across his cheeks into a kind of grotesque parody of a smile. His friends were already pulling Ren’s belongings, packed loosely into milk crates, out of her trunk. “We have all your information from your license plate. Everything about you is already in our database!”
Ren’s smile got tighter. “Cool?”
“So cool!” The guy grabbed Ren’s hand and pulled her off toward the residence’s front doors, propped open to accommodate the stream of students, parents, and overall-wearers flooding in and out. “I’m Veganaise, and I’ll be one of your sophs this week! Let’s get you up through the SHEL and into your board—it’s almost time for Rez Racket!”
“Veganaise?” Ren repeated dazedly, allowing herself to be pulled through the beige lobby—the SHEL, or the Shitty Elevator Lobby—and into an elevator, her shopping cart full of belongings rolled in behind her.
The elevator doors bounced shut, muffling the noise and separating Ren from the crowds for a blessed minute, her only company the perky condiment dude still clamping onto her hand with a death grip. Ren’s hand was getting sweatier by the minute.
“Yeah! When you move into Balmoral, everyone gets a new name,” Veganaise said matter-of-factly, as though this made perfect sense. “We’ll pick a new one for you tonight! You know, based on what you do today. It’s so much fun!”
Ren blinked at him. Great. She couldn’t wait to have SWEATY-HAND emblazoned on her dorm room door for the rest of the year, or whatever. Off to an amazing start.
But Ren took a deep breath, reminding herself to stop being so cynical and to give this a chance. It’s why she was here, after all.
But everything felt like a whirlwind as Ren was whisked off the elevator onto her floor. She was rapidly introduced to another red-overall soph (a girl inexplicably and proudly labeled “DILF”) and about thirty other first years—sorry, “frosh”—who would be her neighbors this year. All were wearing matching BALMORAL! T-shirts artfully vandalized to varying degrees. Before she knew it, Ren was shoved through a door with a number she didn’t even have time to take in, her milk crates tossed onto the floor behind her, and then—she was alone in her dorm room. (Sorry, her “board.”)
So maybe dorm room was giving it too much credit. Cell might have been a more appropriate name for this sixteen-by-eleven-foot tunnel made of beige cinder block. There was just enough room on each side of Ren for a single bed, a desk, a dresser, and a sad-looking chair. One small window was set into the end of the room/tiny hallway, barred off so no students could drunkenly unalive by yeeting themselves through the screen and into the waiting abyss. “Hell,” indeed.
The right side of the room was still completely bare, and Ren slowly sat down onto the flat little mattress. The left side of the room had been claimed—her roommate must have already been here. Photos of a smiling blond were blue-tacked up onto the cinder block, trophies littered the shelving over the desk, and the bed was piled with so many pillows over and under the comforter it was hard to tell where the bed stopped and they began.
This was it.
This was her new home, Ren realized.
And it really, really fucking sucked.
“No. I’m Chloe, not Beca,” Ren repeated to herself, blinking back overwhelmed tears. She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes to stop herself from completely breaking down. “Chloe, not—”
“Oh my god, your name’s Chloe? I thought you were an Irene!”
Ren ripped her hands away from her eyeballs just in time to see the pile of pillows on the bed across from her go tumbling to the floor, filling up the single foot of space between their beds. From the debris jumped the tiniest, sturdiest girl Ren had ever seen. She couldn’t have been more than four ten with dyed blond hair and bright brown eyes. The girl was all muscle, built like a Dorito: huge, buff shoulders, thighs that could crush a watermelon, and an eighteen-pack, all crammed into her tiny frame. She was wearing a big bow in her hair, a pleated skirt emblazoned with an owl, and a long-sleeve crop top that read ROLLAND COLLEGE POWER CHEER.
“Oh, no, sorry, I didn’t realize—” Ren tried to recover from the shock quickly. “It’s Irenka, actually. Ren.”
And then she was actively being embraced, pulled into the strongest, firmest hug she’d ever felt. “I’m Gabrielle, but we’re boardmates so obviously you can call me Gabi!” She pulled back and looked Ren dead in the eyes. “What’s your shoe size?”
What?
“What?” asked Ren
“Your shoe size.” Gabrielle repeated as she walked into the little shared closet next to the doorway. Her voice muffled as Ren watched her dig through an open plastic bin. “You know, for shoes?”
“Seven and a half?” Ren offered, still confused.
“Oh,” Gabrielle said with disappointment as she popped back out from the closet. She had a gym bag strapped across her front that matched her uniform. “Bummer. I’m a seven, but maybe we’d still fit? Anyways, I gotta run to cheer, but I’ll see you at the Rez Racket! Don’t forget your froshiform!”
And then Gabrielle whipped out the door as quickly as she’d appeared, leaving Ren in her wake.
Ren stared out into the hallway, the cacophonous noise from her other boardmates moving in and getting acquainted and being, like, normal and sociable and stuff, unmissable even over the dulcet tones of Phil Collins and the cheers of “AT BALMORAL WE’VE GOT GREAT CANS! WAY BETTER THAN ROSECRANS!” floating through her window.
She flopped back onto her rock-hard bed. “What the fuck is a froshiform?”
Ren is ready to go home.
You know how people on social media throw around the words gaslight and dissociate until they no longer hold meaning? Ren is certain she’s being both gaslit and girlbossed into dissociation at this very moment.
After a long, long day of orientating and chanting-learning and soph-name-memorizing and concert-going, Ren’s standing on the Balmoral front lawn with nearly fifteen hundred other frosh and sophs—WIKIPEDIA! RED TV! FROZEN PIZZA!—for Rez Racket, and everyone around her is clearly, without a doubt having the best time of their lives. Sophs in red overalls stomp their feet and clap their hands and wait for mirrored responses from the sea of first years, all in matching T-shirts: the aforementioned froshiforms. Ren watches tiny-skirted figures being flung wildly into the air behind the sophs, performing perfect spins, and landing safely in the arms of the bases. She figures Gabi must be one of those fliers.
Ren feels a jab in her left ribs, right in her BALMORAL! exclamation mark. She looks over into the expectant face of the guy next to her, who she vaguely recognizes as one of her floormates. Ethan? Mason? Gavin? It doesn’t matter, but he looks put off.
When Ren’s confused glance doesn’t do it for him, between stomp and repeats Aidan hisses, “You’re not chanting. That’s not very dorm spirit of you.”
Oh my god. Really?
Why did the sophs insist everyone leave their phones back in their rooms? Ren is desperate to text her parents to ask if this is normal Day One behavior.
“Sorry,” Ren mumbles back. On the next “B-A-L! MOR-A-L” call, Ren yells back half-heartedly, “EVERYONE FROM DOHENY SMELLS!”
Her head starts to spin. There are so many people—it’s been such a long day, and she’s so far away from everything she knows. Something just doesn’t feel right about all this—the forced belonging, the ostracization if you’re not Balmoral enough, the froshiforms, the chants . . .
Between chants, Ren leans over to Hayden. “Are you, like . . . into all this?”
Austin looks at her like she’s on a different plane of existence. “Hell yeah, Balmoral fucking rules! Balmoral fam!”
“But . . . we just got here.” Ren frowns. Is she the only one who isn’t loving this right now? “We don’t even know each other, and we’re expected to be best friends just because you’re like . . . on my floor?”
Devin shrugs. “Why the fuck are you acting so weird?”
“It’s just . . .” Ren’s aware she’s drawing attention to herself from the closely pressed, matching crowd, so she leans in toward him a bit and lowers her voice. “Giving people new names, establishing an ‘us versus them’ against other dorms, weird code words for things that already exist.” Now that Ren’s ticking things off her fingers, she can’t stop. “Thought-terminating clichés about not having enough spirit, sleep deprivation, love bombing, uniforms, losing everything if you opt out . . .
“Bro . . .” Ren takes a deep breath, watching possibly-Gabi go flying up toward the stars again, untethered from the Earth. “This shit’s a cult.”
That, it turns out, is the wrong thing to say.
Ren realizes this an instant too late as the entire crowd falls dead silent. Every single one of them—every white-froshiform-wearing newbie, every red-clad, glitter-bombing, slatted-glasses-rocking soph turns slowly, in unison, to face her.
“IT IS HER!” shouts Veganaise through his megaphone. “SHE IS THE ONE WE MUST SACRIFICE TO APPEASE THE GHOST OF BALMORAL HALL AND STAY THE CURSE OF THE BOARDS!”
Ren starts to think that being a couple hours late this morning, she might have missed something very important at first-year orientation.
And the next thing she knows, they’re on her.
Hands grabbing her from all sides, hoisting her into the air. Stomps and chants and claps echoing over the quad. Ren screams, but she can barely hear her own voice over the cacophony.
“B-A-L! MOR-A-L! PREPARE YOURSELF TO ROT IN HELL!”
It’s ridiculous, but all Ren can think about in that moment is movies. She thought she was going to get Pitch Perfect if she was lucky—Animal House, at the very worst. Right?
Instead, she’s smack-dab in the middle of Midsommar. Not Chloe, not Beca—just the asshole in the bear suit, burning to death in a tent.
She shoulda fuckin’ known.
But she refuses to go down like this. Not like this. Not on her first day of college.
With a roar, Ren rips her head free of the hands in her hair, thrashing out with her legs and arms all at once. She needs to get free—has to get free—but nothing’s working, there’s too many of them and they’re too strong . . .
And then Ren sees something falling from the sky.
About to land. Right. On. Top of her.
Ren shrieks again as the thing slams into her stomach at full velocity, sending her crashing down onto the ground, scattering the clawing crowd around her. Ren feels her head hit the pavement with a crack, but she is already trying to get to her feet as she shakes the stars from her eyes.
Amid the cult’s confusion about the apparent comet strike that just happened, Ren takes one second to get her bearings—and discovers the thing that hit her from above wasn’t a space-born object at all.
