Part 3

My hair has always had a wave to it, but cutting it short last summer made it more noticeable. A few months ago I decided to be creative, and cut it at on angle, leaving it longer by my face and shorter at the back of my neck - which I really liked, not only because it was something different, but also because it was very practical. I've always hated having my hair getting in my way, and it drove me nuts when it clung to my neck in the summer. Barrettes looked really cute in it at this length, which had led to me going on a barrette binge last semester, I'd found a few websites with tons of adorable clips and things, and I ended up with enough to justify dedicating an entire old jewelry box to hair accessories. I was a little embarrassed by it, it felt so girly, but my wardrobe was all about pulling together the most random elements and making something sharp-looking out of unexpected things.
        I bleached the streak into my normally dark brown hair just a few weeks ago - it caught my parents a bit off-guard, but only because it was unexpected, even they had liked it. I'd spread out the highlight a bit, instead of just thin straight lines like most people do - there was a little portion on the right that was lighter than the rest of my hair, and it spread out into a chunk about an inch wide on the left side of my face, with little bits to either side that spread into the rest of my hair. Instead of leaving it that dull bleached-blond color, I'd dyed all of my hair a rich light red, which gave the darker areas a nice warm highlight, and made the streak kind of a strawberry blond. Of course, now I had to adjust the color palette of what I wore just a little, and took things a little more punk where I used to take them a little more '40s, but it made for a nice change of pace. I'd always been a little more grungy in my summer clothes anyway - as a kid I was always running around outside, and that hadn't really changed, I just added a camera into the mix.
        The kitchen was empty, so I poured myself a bowl of cereal and sat down at the kitchen table, facing the large curtained window. The weather was perfect, it looked a little windy but I was getting used to that, so near to Lake Erie. I was really going to have to get down by the lakefront this summer, I'd never actually been down there. There was a state park somewhere along the waterfront I knew, but I had barely explored in that direction from the campus at all. ...I got the feeling that the townies looked down on the college kids a bit, it's so easy to mentally shut yourself into a campus, it's such a self-sustaining kind of place that most of the students rarely leave it to get to know the town they're in, apart from the bars of course. And tanning and nail places maybe, and the omnipresent WalMart. I was as guilty as anyone, I knew, but I was determined to make up for it that summer, I had a hunch I'd really like the town if I spent some time in it. People were much more friendly here than back home in the suburbs...not that people were unfriendly there, but this was the sort of small town where anyone you make eye contact with on the street will say hi and smile at you. I really liked that, I'd actually found myself making conversation with the guy at the post office about the boxes (covered in bright silly stickers) I was sending out to my friends one time.
        When I finished eating, I washed out my bowl and set it in the drying rack alongside everyone else's breakfast dishes. I was just turning to head back upstairs and grab a few things to take with me to work, when I heard the rapid pounding of feet on the porch outside, and the whine-SLAM! of the screen door. The pounding continued, and a blond blur zoomed into the kitchen, flung open the fridge, grabbed a can of pop, and was back out of the kitchen and out the door before I had a chance to say a word. Did I really have that much energy as a kid? I wanted some of it back. I was half tempted to follow him outside, to see what was so important that his snack-break needed to last no more than ten seconds - and wait, shouldn't he have been at school?? - but I wanted to get an early start toward campus, so I wouldn't have to worry about hurrying at any point. I hadn't actually walked the distance yet, so I wasn't sure exactly how long it would take me to get there.

        Half an hour later, I was on my way, a small bag with a notepad, pen, phone, and my digital camera slung over my shoulder. I checked my watch and made note of the time, so I could time out the walk. I had my iPod in my pocket, and let it play through a Rock Kills Kid album - good music to move to, enough energy to push me on and expansive enough to fill the fields around and wide skies overhead. I turned it up probably louder than I should have, but I was walking in the graveled shoulder of the road, I wasn't really worried about traffic out here.
        I let my gaze wander, unable to keep a smile off my face at the warm sunlight. Summer has always made my heart warm and content, somehow it's always been hard to cling to worries and concerns when there's such a welcoming gold in the air. There wasn't really much to take pictures of along the way, one shot of a grape field with some woods beyond it and the sky above was as good as any other shot. I found myself looking at the power lines a lot, but I couldn't really work out a way to get a nice composition out of them, and I really didn't want to spend too much time side-tracked today.
        About half an hour later, I crossed the road and was able to walk on an actual sidewalk, which bordered the campus. I crouched down and brushed some of the dust off my shoes, then looked out over the campus and smiled. After only a year, it really did feel like home. It was an odd feeling, really, especially when I went back home-home to visit, like as soon as we hit the Thruway exit to my hometown, I felt all warm and safe, but then when my parents brought me back down here, as soon as we reached the Thruway exit, I felt that way too. Kind of unsettling, it was one of those things I just kind of accepted without thinking about much, it was hard to sort out.
        I stopped off at the library to use the bathroom, just to check my hair and rest for a minute, catching my breath and getting into the mindset to work. Not that it was going to be difficult, all I was doing was officework over in Admissions, but it was still something new, and I needed to reel my thoughts back in from the summer sky, and bring them down inside the concrete buildings.
        I could have taken the odd little tunnel that ran from the library over to the office building, but it really was too nice out, so I took the outside route. (Anyway I felt more professional walking in the front door than I did sneaking in through a random side entrance.) I thought about stopping by the front desk on the ground floor, just to double-check that I should go right upstairs, but then I remembered from my visits during the year that it seemed pretty compartmentalized in this building, I had a hunch the class-scheduling people didn't know much about the admissions-people and whatever. So instead, I walked around and found the stairs (elevators always made me so self-conscious, like I've always worried that I might be impeding someone who's in a hurry, by making it come to get me), and made my way up to the third floor, where the financial offices were.

        Twenty minutes later, I'd been introduced to the four other people in the department, been shown where the bathroom was, and had my first stack of papers in front of me, all nice and jumbled and un-alphabetical and in need of filing. Such a thrilling summer ahead of me! But I didn't really mind, it was mindless work, so my thoughts could be my own - there was a radio on, playing innocuous pop music, and it seemed pretty quiet and laid-back around here. I'd take boring over stressful any day. It actually wasn't much of a job, pretty much just working afternoons for most of the week (they didn't even open the offices on Fridays in the summer), but at the moment there was a pretty huge back-log of paperwork from the previous semester that needed dealt with, as well as things for the incoming freshmen. I was basically going to be the gopher-kid who did all the menial little tasks no-one else really wanted or had the time to do, but that was all right with me - having a summer of officework on my resume would look just fine, showing I was responsible and could be trusted and whatever. Plus it would be nice to actually know how to work a copy machine - somehow or another, that was one of those generic life skills I'd never managed to pick up, and I felt kind of silly about it.