Vas and his family pulled up to the far side of central campus dorms and rolled down their window to ask a police officer where they were supposed to park to unload. The man directed them towards what looked like a massive sidewalk in front of the buildings. With each inch the truck rolled forward, the anxiety and tension built.
“You have 15 minutes to unload, starting now! In 15 minutes, you must move your car somewhere else if you need to finish unloading.” A flurry of hands of reached into the back of the truck and pulled everything to the sidewalk. In an instant, the bed of the truck was empty, and the side doors were opened; its contents quickly joined those of the bed on the side as Vas’s mother drove the car off to find parking somewhere else. The same hands that pulled everything from the truck and brought everything up five flights of stairs to the second highest floor in Central. As Vas watched everything that would help him inhabit this chaotic new environment go away from him, he could only hope that everything would end up at the room for which he was now retrieving the key. With an unfamiliar key on his chain and a chest filled with anxiety, he picked up a box and followed everyone else up to his room.
Upon arriving at the fifth floor, he found the hall filled with his stuff, and everyone was gone. There was someone else’s stuff there too: his suitemate. He thought his first suitemate, Logan, wasn’t moving in until an hour later, but it looked like he was already here. Looking at the pile of stuff outside his new home made Vas sick; how is one supposed to get all of this in their room and out of the way of others and arrange it to make it somewhat liveable? Vas had lived in the same house all of his life; he’d never moved or even helped someone move. His girlfriend’s family had moved earlier that year, but even though he offered to help, they handled it themselves.
The answer was: with a lot of help. Upon parking the car and coming up to the room, Kathleen and Nick helped their mess of a son pull his room together into something remotely livable. He could finish organizing the rest later. They had lofted the bed all the way up to maximize floor space and kept everything to one side of the room so that when his roommate, Myles, came in, he’d have room to work and set everything up. It seemed that Logan’s family was following the same process in the adjoining room. While they were setting up, however, the president of the university walked in to “check in and say hi”.