‹ Prequel: Generation Why Bother
Status: Updates on Sundays and Wednesdays! :D

Earth to Me

Skool Daze

God, I’m not good at many things. My drawing skills are decent at best, and I can’t catch someone’s attention right from the getgo. There’s one thing that I’m always the best at, though – and it’s blocking things out of my mind until the worst possible moments.

Basically, I tried to forget about college all summer. Maybe something would come up where I wouldn’t have to leave home and have to continue public education for the next four years. Maybe some big-name animation studio would stumble across my RenegadeArt page and think to themselves, “Wow, this kid has a lot of raw talent – let’s hire him right away even though he doesn’t have an art degree yet!” Or, maybe I’d somehow find a ton of money and it would at least alleviate my worries about all of the student debt I’d inevitably end up with…

Well, none of that ever happened, so I had to face facts: to get a career, I had to go to college, even though degrees were becoming more and more useless. And even though Tegan didn’t seem to be as scared as I definitely was, I tried telling myself that she had the jitters too.

“I can’t wait to get outta the house! We’re gonna have so much freedom, dude,” she told me the night before we were supposed to move into our dorms, sitting around in my room. “We can eat whatever we want, we can go to bed whenever we want – we’ll be meeting people who are just like us! It’ll be awesome! Aren’t you excited?”

I faked a smile and just stuttered back, “Y-yeah, I’m excited.”

Of course I should’ve known that she wouldn’t buy that. “You sure? You don’t sound real excited, Osh.”

“Well, I’m not looking forward to not being able to see my dad every day,” I kind of laughed. (I’m a papá’s boy, shut up.) I didn’t even begin to tell her about how much I didn’t want to wake up to learn about pointless prerequisites, all the while digging myself into debt – not to mention the huge risk of not getting along with my roommate.

At first I thought she’d make fun of me for such stupid reasoning, but her freckled face softened. “Your dad is on Facenook, dude. Just chat with him every night – that’s what I’m gonna do with my mom.” She smiled, though it wavered just a bit for a brief second.

We were in the same boat, Tegan and I. Sometimes I easily forgot, what with her calm attitude towards most everything, and right then, when her smile flickered, I knew that deep down she had the same worries.

So I reached over across her bed and hugged her. There were boxes all around her room, packed up with the things she’d need in her dorm (my bedroom looked the same, and God, I hated packing all of it). Soon enough our dorm rooms would look like our homes, or at least that’s what our folks told us.

I found it hard to believe I would ever get comfortable in what was basically a long-term hotel that cost thousands of dollars.

There was so much room for failure – and even if the entire planet wasn’t at risk because of my potential mistakes this time, it still felt like my little world was on the edge of crumbling.

And if there was a list of everything I never wanted to do, the biggest thing at the top of that list was saying goodbye to the home I’d known for eighteen years. It’s dumb to say that, I know. I was a Chicago kid all my life, and the college I was going to was just gonna be downtown instead of in the suburbs. My dad wasn’t going anywhere, and Tegan was literally just going to be a few footsteps away since we were rooming in the same dorm community.

It was just like ripping off a band-aid. It would hurt like hell and I’d try to get it over with as quickly as possible, yet in the end, I knew I would be fine. But the band-aid was taking a ton of my gross leg-hairs with it, so I remained cautious, knowing that I’d probably end up with a bald spot if I went too quickly.

The wound was still there. It was just a scab, but it was still there.

------

There were plenty of distractions on Saturday, move-in day. From the fact that me, my dad, Tegan, and her mom had to wake up at the butt-crack of dawn to the rain that poured down and made everybody’s move-in efforts a whole lot tougher, it just wasn’t a very good day to try and haul everything into a tiny little dorm room.

Overall, I ended up sweating through my shirt when the worst of it was done.

And just like the endless boxes I had to carry up on a little trolley, the day was absolutely packed.

My crap was shoved into my tiny sedan and my dad’s pickup truck, while Tegan managed to fit all of her stuff into her mom’s SUV. When I got my driver’s license when I was sixteen, I was Tegan’s personal chauffer for a year before she got hers (not that I minded), but since we did everything together anyway, she just decided to not bring a car out to college. We’d go shopping together, I guessed.

After finding tight parking spots in the sardine-can of a parking lot, getting my parking permit, and checking in to get our room keys, it was time to make our way over to the Hitchcock dorms to see what was in store for us.

Truth be told, I was more aggravated than anything at that moment. I didn’t appreciate not being able to sleep in, and with the weight of education on my shoulders, I didn’t feel like the excited college freshman everybody thought I should’ve been.

So when I opened my door, my dad at my side, and I saw someone else’s stuff already occupying half of the dorm room, my first instinct was to just groan and grumble about how annoying it was going to be to work around whoever got there before me.

But to be completely honest, I kind of found myself incapable of being angry at the person I was destined to be sharing a room with. From the email I got from housing a few weeks prior to that day, I knew his name, but I didn’t know anything else about him. For all I knew, they could’ve paired me up with a serial killer or someone hell-bent on making my freshman year the worst it could’ve possibly been.

I walked through the door and looked around, hoping that it would be enough to capture his attention. Sure enough, it did; my roommate was leaned over an open box, but he stood up straight and smiled directly at me. He had shaggy red hair and a nose ring, along with freckles that ran all over his skin that I could see. From the getgo I had a hunch that we could get along – and it was all because of that super friendly smile.

“Hey dude!” he greeted, jutting out his hand. “I’m Murray. I just…uh, moved in. Just unpacking now. I’ll stay outta your way.”

I shook his hand, but his grip was much stronger than mine. Of course I forced a laugh too, even though nothing he said was actually funny. (Force of habit.) “That’s alright. I’m, uh, moving in. I’m Oshie.”

He cocked his eyebrows, his smile turning into a smirk. “That’s a cool name.”

Behind me, my dad chuckled to himself as if he were taking sole credit for my dumb name. He then patted my shoulder and said, “Come on, mijo, let’s get moving. You brought so much junk that it will take us the whole day to move in.”

“Alright, papá,” I said, rolling my eyes. We were turned to go back out the door and lug up the first load of crap to my room, but Murray stopped us in our tracks.

“W-wait a second,” he urged, holding up a hand.

I looked back at him, my eyes wide – had he already found something to fight about? This year was gonna be horrible, me and my roommate were gonna be at each other’s throats all the time, I was gonna fail all my classes, oh man, oh man.

“You’re…were you in on that Put’emup, Put’emup stunt they pulled a few months ago?” he grinned again, pointing right at me. “The one on New Year where they, like, killed some giant bug?”

Suddenly, relief shot through my arms and legs in a pleasantly warm feeling. Things wouldn’t be so bad after all, maybe.

“Yeah, I was one of ‘em. My friend Tegan was in on it, too.” I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling my face heat up with horrible timing. “She’s going here too.”

Murray nodded and laughed. “That’s cool as hell, man.”

Okay, so I knew that the whole Put’emup, Put’emup world-saving stunt wasn’t just something that only people in the rock music scene had heard about, but it was still cool to hear my actual roommate acknowledge it and say it was cool. I wasn’t the coolest guy on the planet, though it definitely felt nice to hear that I was associated with something that was, indeed, ice-cold.

After that quiet little niceness, though, the hell started. It took me and my dad forever and a day to haul my crap to my room, and that didn’t even count how long it took me to unpack. Murray had finished about halfway through my endeavor, and then when I was hanging up the last of my clothes, Tegan dropped by and griped about how her roommate already seemed like she didn’t want anything to do with her.

Murray introduced himself without mentioning the Put’emup, Put’emup thing (I was honestly a little relieved) and then he laughed and said he didn’t have any friends there so he was hoping I could be his friend.

I’m not even kidding. A human being from the planet Earth said that out loud to me, something that I was terrified I would accidentally say to somebody in my run at UChicago.

At that point, I was thoroughly distracted from the fact that I was about to spend six months not seeing my dad every day. I had pit stains and sweat gathering in my peach fuzz mustache that I told myself to shave as soon as I could, and then before I knew what was going on, my dorm was completely filled with me and Murray’s unpacked stuff.

It was 12:23 PM when it was all said and done. That was when Tegan texted me to tell me she was going out to lunch with her mom, and it was when my dad asked me where I wanted to eat as I caught my breath on my bed.

I just blinked and hesitated for a few seconds before saying, “I dunno.”

He grunted. “Come on, I’ll take you wherever you want to go, alright?”

We ended up eating at McRonald’s (a lunch of champions) and I could hardly even stomach my burger when I realized that the face in front of me wouldn’t be in my line of sight for a while. It hit me like a ton of bricks, in the same exact way I realized that I hadn’t seen Put’emup, Put’emup for a few months before going to that get-together, and in the same manner I realized that I would have to keep the world from being destroyed from a giant pillbug.

I’ve never been good at making eye contact with people, but I found it especially hard to look my dad in the eye at that meal, and on the ride back to my dorm, I hardly even spoke. Dad pulled up beside a sidewalk before putting the car in park, sighing, and saying, “Well, here we are. Eighteen years in the making, right?”

I tried to smile, but all I managed was a twitchy grimace.

Ayyy, dios mio,” he groaned long and loud, rubbing his face. “I told myself I would not cry, not today.”

Oh god, Dad was teary-eyed. I’d only seen him cry a few choice times in my life, and when he pulled his hands away and wrapped one arm around my shoulder in the car, I caught a glimpse of his red face and just saw misty eyes. He wasn’t full-on crying, at least not in my company.

“It’s only for a few months, and plus I’m gonna visit,” I reassured him. “I’m still in the same city, Dad.”

He pressed his lips together and said, “It is still hard to say goodbye to my only flesh and blood, mijo.”

I didn’t have anything to say, so I just nodded.

Saying anything else would’ve hurt too much, and the last thing I wanted to do was hurt my dad, especially when he was on the verge of bursting into tears. I was horrible at consoling people while they were crying; the night that Andy discovered his guardian power, I was assigned to be the one to calm him down from his agitated state, and all I did was stand there.

So I just looked down and tried to ignore all of the uprooting going on in my life. Dad unbuckled himself and opened his door to get out, so I got out too, and then before I was even fully out of the car, Dad had pulled me into one of the tightest hugs he’d ever given me. I was nearly suffocating, my mouth and nose buried in the sleeve of his Chicago Bears t-shirt, but he didn’t say anything.

I teared up, but I didn’t break down crying, and for that, I had to be at least a little proud. I may have been a big baby about plenty of other things, but I had managed to keep it all in for just a bit longer.

Dad let go and looked me in the eye, saying, “You’re gonna do great this year, mijo. I’m not even an hour away from you, so do not worry about me. I will call you and talk to you online whenever you need me, okay?”

I bit my lip. There were tear trails all over his face that physically hurt me to look at. “Yeah, I’ll be on Facenook every night, Dad.”

He smiled genuinely, absolutely beaming, and then his voice cracked as he said, “My baby is finally going to college. This is…this is a day I tried to forget about all my life, and yet here it is.”

“Papá, I’ll be fine,” I assured him, my own voice giving out a bit.

His smile flickered, breaking into weakness for a brief moment, and then he told me, “Okay, I should probably let you go before I keep you here all day.”

That warranted a tiny laugh from me, and I hugged him again, trying to milk out the heartache for just a little while longer. I wanted to cry more than anything in the world at that moment, but there was too much going on for me to just focus on one thing to cry about, and so I buried it deep within me to save for a time when I would be alone.

Dad said goodbye one last time, and as he got back in his truck and drove away, I waved at him as he pulled out of the crowded parking lot back onto the busy Chicago streets. A part of my life was leaving, and all of a sudden, I was forced to be a grown-up – something I had literally no experience with.

I always felt like he had more faith in me than I did. In a lot of ways, it was nice, knowing that someone thought you could make your way through the bullcrap and survive, and yet in other ways it was the worst feeling in the world, knowing that someone expected you to avoid screwing up altogether.

Still, I knew I could at least try. For Dad, at least, and for Mom, who probably would’ve said the same things to me if she were still alive.

--------

When I got back up to my room, guess who was there? There are no wrong answers. In fact, you’ll probably get it right.

Tegan was standing in front of my door, wiping her eyes and checking her hands to see how much eyeliner was coming off. She looked around and caught sight of me, breaking into a smile and waving without a word.

I gently elbowed her. “You okay?”

She just sighed. “Yeah, you know my mom. She said goodbye like twenty times before finally leaving and then it just got to me.”

“My dad was the same way,” I snickered. “I’m too tired to cry, though.”

“Oh, you’re so tough, Osh,” she rolled her eyes jokingly. “Teach me your ways.”

“The key to keeping calm is repression.” (That…had more truth to it than I would like to admit, and she probably could tell.)

She hip-checked me and said, “Shut up. I’m all unpacked now and I just wanna hang out in your room, since my stupid roommate is spending her day catching up with all of her friends.”

I shoved my key in the door and unlocked it, holding it open for her. “So she’s already ignoring you? That sucks.”

“Basically. I mean, I know you don’t have to be best friends with your roommate, but jeez, it’d just be cool to actually talk to her, I guess,” she said, looking at the floor as she trudged in.

Murray was sitting on top of his lofted bed, his laptop on his legs, and he waved at us as we walked in further. Brushing the hair out of his face, he asked, “Did your parents leave already?”

“Yeah, we’re on our own now,” Tegan grunted with a smirk.

“I know! Isn’t it awesome?!” Murray gushed, putting his laptop down and hanging his feet over the edge of his bed. “Freedom!”

And debt, and homesickness, and flopping around like a dead fish on land, but yeah, freedom was always nice.

“My mom left a few minutes before you got here, Oshie,” he told me. “She didn’t cry but I could tell she wanted to. ‘Rental units, man.”

I forced a smile up at him and leaned against my not-lofted bed, right as Tegan just took a seat on it without even asking.

Murray scooted off his bed and landed with a thud on his freckled feet. “Hey, did you guys wanna hang out later? Maybe get dinner somewhere?”

Tegan and I just looked at each other; she shrugged, and so I shot him a nod. “That sounds good. Better than being stuck here tonight, at least,” I laughed.

He smiled yet again and gave us a thumbs-up. “Awesome. Might as well try out our meal plans, right?”

God, and the fact that the school made first-year students sign up for a meal plan was so dumb to me. I’d never heard anything good about any meal plan for any school, so this one was bound to be awful. I shoved my hands in my pockets and just said, “Yeah, it’s worth a shot at least. We’ll at least learn what to avoid.”

“I don’t trust anything these people make for me,” Tegan groaned from my pillow, still checking her hands for smeared eyeliner.

“Well, our education is in their hands now, so if the food sucks, then everything else will probably suck too,” Murray added.

I didn’t know him for a hole in the ground, and I sure didn’t know anything about him at that point, but at least right then, one thing seemed to be looking up. Time would tell whether or not I’d eventually be able to call Murray a friend, though at that moment, I was perfectly okay with calling him a good roommate.

-------

The dining hall wasn’t far from Hitchcock Hall, but it did require us to walk across a street to get there. Tegan had gone back to her dorm after our chat in order to hang up some posters and organize some stuff, and I took the time to sort out my schedule and print it out, along with a map of the campus, as if I needed to look like as much of a freshman as possible.

By the time we set out at around six PM, the sun was setting and the air was cooling down. Murray was even wearing pants, black skinny jeans that wouldn’t look out of place on a scene kid in 2009. (I couldn’t say anything, though; most of my shorts were khaki and my jeans were all blue.) He seemed content in our presence, which was a load off my shoulders.

His hands in his pockets, Murray was beaming against the sunset, while Tegan was squinting at the light. I didn’t know what I looked like, but I knew I felt like a used napkin, worn and dreading my eventual fate.

There was a line at the dining hall, probably full of other kids who had the same idea as us, kids who either didn’t have their parents to help move them in, or they already left. It took forever for us to get our cards swiped, breaking in the fresh meal plan that was sucking the funds out of our measly financial aid. By the time we got in, got plates full of mediocre-looking food, and found a seat in the corner of a packed room, we had killed half an hour.

Tegan started the meal with a long groan that other people definitely heard. “God, I’m not looking forward to actually waking up in the morning.”

Murray looked amused as he sipped his pop through a straw. “I never asked – what are you guys’ majors?”

We didn’t even look at each other; we just both said, “Visual arts” at the same time.

As an afterthought, though, Tegan added, “I might do cinema studies, though. Depends how things go.”

“That’s awesome!” he said, his eyes popping open. “I’m doing art history, so I’m basically gonna study what you guys come up with.”

“Oh, God, I hear that’s suicide. I’ll pray for you,” Tegan laughed.

“Yeah, isn’t it all just memorization?” I asked. At orientation, when they went over all the different majors in the art department, art history as a major was viewed as one of the toughest. I never wanted to dabble in it anyway, and that definitely set me straight.

He waved his hand. “Yeah, but I’m cool with it. I get to stare at pretty pictures and learn about the people who made ‘em.”

“That’s an optimistic way to look at it,” Tegan said, smirking. She took a bite of the cardboard-esque pizza and shuddered. “So, are you from Chicago?”

He covered his mouth to finish chewing on his French fries, and then he answered, “Nah, I’m from Aurora. Not as bad as a drive as it could’ve been, but it still sucks.”

Aurora? That’s where Chance was from. “Do you like it here so far?”

“I haven’t seen much of it yet, but me and my mom used to visit here all the time when I was a kid, so a lot of it is nostalgic for me,” he sighed, a dreamy look on his face. “Are you guys from around here?”

“Yeah, born and raised in the suburbs,” I told him.

“You don’t have the accent, though.” He finished off his fries and moved on to a piece of fried chicken.

Tegan snorted. “I get it when I’m mad, but yeah, we hide it well.”

I’d only seen the horribly exaggerated accent in movies, though her mom had a tiny twist in her words. Andy had the slightest bit of the accent, too.

For a few seconds, none of us said anything. We recognized the silence and knew it was awkward, and although nobody spoke up and said, “Well, this is awkward!” it was still painful even if it was just a common occurrence when trying to break the ice.

Murray was, of course, the one to speak up again. “So, if you don’t mind me asking…” (Right when he started with that, I knew where he was going.) “How cool was it to work with Put’emup, Put’emup with that stunt they did?”

We were used to that question from our peers and relatives, and although it got annoying after a while, Murray was proving himself to be anything but obnoxious. So I just said with a smile, “It was awesome.”

“It had to have been like a dream, right? Doing that stuff with them? ‘Cause that’s so fucking cool to me, not just being able to meet them, but being able to actually do something that goes with their live shows,” he went on, folding his hands on the table and leaning forward.

“Yeah, it was cool as hell,” Tegan said slyly, eating some pasta. “They’re just some of the nicest people out there. We worked with them for a few weeks, getting it all together, and now they’re famous for it, which is still sort of funny to me.”

Murray nodded. “They seem like good people. I’m glad they’re not assholes like half the people in their genre, at least.”

(Amen, dude.) “It’s a hit or miss with a lot of bands, really,” I shrugged.

“Dude, totally! Some bands, I love their music, but I can’t stand ‘em as people,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It’s always a relief to find out that good bands are also nice.”

I was already starting to like this kid. From his Dance Gavin Dance t-shirt to the good movie posters hanging up on his half of our room (underneath his Christmas lights), I had a distinct feeling that we were gonna get along that year. I even felt sorry for Tegan, since her roommate already ditched her, although if we ended up as a three-piece deal, I wouldn’t have had any problem with it.

We finished up our dinner and waddled back over to our dorm, where we said goodnight to Tegan and waited for Sunday to start. After Sunday came the first day of our classes, where all the habits I picked up in high school would come back to haunt me, and for that, my heart wouldn’t calm down from its nervous flutter.

I joked with Murray about it; I said I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night or Sunday night, and he smiled and told me to relax. He told me he had four older brothers who also went to UChicago, all for different degrees, and that if I ever needed help getting around or with any resources, he’d be there to help me out.

Maybe he was just being nice as a first impression to make sure I didn’t maul him from the getgo. Whatever. I didn’t care, just as long as he kept being nice and we kept from sitting on opposite sides of the room in complete silence.

I couldn’t sleep that night, though. No matter what he told me, I couldn’t shake the distinct feeling of sinking, knowing that my life was about to begin again and that the next few years would decide my whole entire life – my career, the money I’d make, and even the friends who would stick by me for the rest of my days.

It was all cold sweats and pounding heartbeats that night, and it went beyond the simple homesick-blues.
♠ ♠ ♠
Whew! Well, here's Murray - he's pretty important. ;)