Orientation Week

Orientation Week is the threshold between Brendan’s home life and his first days as a student at BSU. Its welcome activities, new friendship with Zack, and practical academic appointments give college an exuberant beginning, while Eve’s wait for Brendan’s promised daily messages reveals how quickly that beginning is changing their relationship.

The First Days at BSU

Before classes began, freshmen could take part in a Welcome-to-BSU Field Day on the main quad, with tug-of-war, ring toss, water balloons, and a Slip ’N Slide. Warm weather and the informal atmosphere made room for students to socialize and present themselves: Brendan noticed girls wearing cutoffs and bikini tops, some with tattoos that served as conversation starters, while he and Zack took off their shirts after exercising over the summer.

Those first days also established Brendan and Zack’s close routine. They spent much of their time together, going to the gym and testing themselves at the climbing wall in the Student Center. Both could bench-press 180 pounds, though Zack managed five repetitions to Brendan’s four. After getting high, they tried the climbing wall and could not complete routes harder than 5.6. When Brendan lost his grip about thirty feet up, the auto belay caught him; Zack found the mishap funny. The episode gives their new friendship a teasing, companionable texture rather than making orientation only a sequence of formal introductions.

Advising and Campus Life

Orientation Week also required each student to meet an academic adviser, finalize a schedule, and receive a last round of encouragement about college. Brendan met Devin Torborg of the Anthropology Department. Calling him Professor prompted Torborg to clarify that he was an instructor, not on the tenure track, and that he preferred to be called Devin. Their meeting places Brendan’s excitement within the less polished realities of campus life, where even a routine advising appointment could unsettle expectations.

On the way back to his room, Brendan visited a crowded Activities Fair beneath a large circus tent. Dozens of tables represented organizations ranging from beekeeping, veganism, and athletics to religious, political, cultural, and identity-based groups. The fair presented campus as a place where students could find or form communities around sharply different interests. Brendan, momentarily absorbed by the display, was caught off guard when a girl at one of the tables asked his name.

Eve’s Return to Study

The opening of Brendan’s college life is set alongside Eve’s own return to education. At Eastern Community College, she searched the Humanities Building for Room 213, feeling mild back-to-school nerves but reassured by seeing other students who, like her, were returning to study later in life. In the classroom, she covered crude graffiti on a desk with her new notebook; its blank first page represented the fresh start she had hoped for. Her experience contrasts Brendan’s freshman welcome with the quieter vulnerability of beginning again as an adult student.

A New Routine, and Its Distance

Before orientation, Brendan had promised Eve that he would send at least one text every day, with calls or a Skype session possible if he wanted to be in touch more often. For three days he kept the minimum, sending brief, upbeat reports about how much he enjoyed college. Eve was pleased for him and relieved that he had not forgotten her, even as she noticed the enthusiasm in his messages tapering off.

On the fourth day, a Friday, no message came. Ted had told Eve that Brendan was drunk, which supplied an explanation but did not ease her disappointment: she wanted Brendan to contact her freely, without being prompted. She stayed awake past midnight, playing Words with Friends while waiting, and gradually recognized that he was unlikely to text that night or the next. Orientation Week thus marks more than an arrival on campus. Its excitement for Brendan coincides with Eve’s first painful recognition that his new social life may not include the regular contact she had hoped for.

The Season’s Longer Arc

The surrounding chronology carries the early-fall transition forward. Later in the fall, while attending a public talk, Eve realizes that she has not spoken with Brendan by phone in almost two weeks and that their texts have dwindled to brief exchanges and requests for money. By winter, she describes herself as restless and confined after the freedom of the fall semester, when she had studied, socialized, and explored a life beyond motherhood. The contrast makes the start of the academic year feel provisional: the possibilities opened by returning to school do not erase the strain of separation or guarantee that a new routine will last.

By early September around what would have been Brendan’s sophomore year, Eve is marrying George in her backyard. The wedding falls much later than Orientation Week and belongs to a changed family moment, but it completes the chronology’s movement from Brendan’s first departure into college to Eve’s subsequent life beyond that departure. Orientation Week is the opening marker in that sequence, where independence first appears as both opportunity and distance.