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Tali
Early 2000’s
“A little to the left.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Really? It looks centered to me.”
Nina shook her head. “Definitely not centered. Left.”
I shifted my The Killers poster an inch to the left, patted the taped corners onto the cinder block wall, then hopped off my twin bed to check.
“Looks good,” Nina said.
I tilted my head. “It’s off-center.”
She rolled her eyes. “Scoot your bed over an inch and it’ll be perfect.”
This was going to bother me. I hated that it was going to bother me, but I knew myself. I’d rather my new roommate not find out about my neurosis on our first day living together, but since she was also my cousin, she was already well aware.
“I’m moving the poster.”
She laughed and flopped back on her black comforter. “I figured.”
Nina’s side of our dorm room was pretty much all black with Fall Out Boy and Velvet Revolver posters hanging haphazardly above her lofted bed. Straight and symmetrical were not in her vocabulary.
Our room was tiny. Two twin beds, dressers, and desks, with barely enough room to walk between them. The pictures we’d seen must have been taken with a fish-eye lens. I’d been under the impression there’d at least be room to breathe.
It didn’t matter, though. These cinder block walls might resemble a jail cell, but to me, they were freedom.
I climbed back on my saggy mattress and moved the poster to its original position, then joined Nina on her bed, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d stuck to our ceiling. She grabbed my hand and squeezed.
“I’m so excited you’re finally here, Tals. Can’t believe I had to endure a year of college without you.”
I squeezed her hand back. “Endure? Really?”
She snorted. “Endure might not be the right word. But we were supposed to be in this together. Do you know how many shows I had to go to without you? I felt guilty as hell you were stuck at home in New York with the parentals.”
Nina and I had been plotting our escape from New York—notthe city—since we were old enough to know it was a possibility. We’d lay on her bed back home, listening to punk rock, and talk about all the concerts we were going to go to together when we were old enough. We’d decided college would be our only chance to escape, and Nina had picked University of Maryland as our promised land.
I shrugged. “I lived vicariously through you while enjoying home cooked meals and the thrills of community college.”
My parents weren’t monsters, they were just overbearing, old-fashioned New York Italians. They allowed me to go away for college on the caveat I spent my freshman year at home, working and doing my core classes at the local junior college. Watching my cousin pack up for college without me had been devastating. Reading her emails detailing all the concerts she’d gone to without me had made me want to die.
But I was here now. Nineteen years old, I was finally free.
I didn’t really know what to do with myself.
“Now what?” I asked.
She booped my nose. “Now, I introduce you to everyone, and tonight, we party.”
“I saw signs for a barbecue in the quad tonight…”
Nina scrunched her face, like the idea disgusted her. “No. So much no. We’re going off campus. We do not do organized activities.”
“Is that a rule I wasn’t aware of?”
She sat up and smoothed her flat-ironed black hair. “Unspoken. Only freshmen go to those things.”
