“You can’t be up at this hour.”
Somehow, Pete must have awakened his roommate. There was no other way Larry would be up by 4:50 a.m. Often, Larry wasn’t even in bed by then. Larry thought classes that started before 10:00 were something from the Soviet gulag.
“Uh, yeah, I’m up,” Pete answered. He sat on the edge of his bed, but his heart still galloped in his chest. As usual, his dream had seemed very real. Great on the pleasant ones. A downside on the nightmares. He took a deep breath to relax. “Another early start to the day.”
Larry rotated in his bed just enough to clear his mouth from the pillow. One bleary eye reported the resounding success of last night’s keg party.
“You are nothing but early mornings lately,” he rasped. “What’s with that?”
Pete hadn’t shared his dreaming gift with his roommate. Pete wasn’t going to reveal to Larry, who he’d known two months, something he still hid from his parents.
“Just a little academic anxiety,” Pete said.
Larry rolled another quarter turn.
“No doubt, dude.” Larry’s eyes closed to welcome a return to sleep. “I’d seriously stress if I had your grades…”
Pete didn’t need a reminder that high school’s B’s were coming up college D’s.
“I’m going for a run,” Pete announced.
“Great idea,” Larry muttered. “I’ll go with you.” His bed sheets lay still. Larry started to snore.
Pete put on his shorts and running shoes. He pulled a faded sweatshirt over his curly, black hair. The sweatshirt enveloped his slight frame. He’d always been a bit shorter than average, and his newfound penchant for running had just made him leaner. He thought about hunting down a pair of sweat pants but decided to feel the cold.
Exercise usually cleared his head. If he went now, he’d have the campus to himself. No big change there. Mentally, the past few weeks he’d been feeling more and more as if he was alone on campus.
He’d never expected to make it to college. Elementary school had been one interminable frustration. Even with total concentration, reading was almost impossible. He withdrew socially as his classmates acquired with ease what constantly eluded him. He endured countless eye exams and disciplinary tactics, until he had finally been diagnosed with Visual Processing Disorder. What he saw out in the world often got scrambled on the way to his brain.
His parents signed him up for rigorous tutoring and therapy. He performed a miracle and finished high school in the top third. So, against all odds, he became one more student number joining the thousands of others in line to become an enlightened Ithaca College business graduate.
But college wasn’t high school. The items he had the most trouble processing, maps, charts, graphs, were everywhere. Economics was impossible. Calculus might as well have been in the original Greek. As the months passed, he had more and more trouble focusing. All the coping mechanisms that helped before—digital audio notes, color coding, extensive outlining, all began to fail him. The world was slowly reverting to that dark, lonely place he’d inhabited as a child. He was most comfortable in the place the rest of the work-study students despised, his part time job washing dishes in the cafeteria.
Leaving the dorm, he entered the cool fall darkness. It was the end of October and he could already see his breath steam. The last of the summer’s dying leaves held a tenacious grip on near-barren limbs. This year the fall colors had not happened. The foliage had gone from green to brown as if someone hit a switch. Just one more thing that was a little off this semester.
He jogged across campus. He had to stick to the loop, especially in the dark. Visual Processing Disorder and land navigation never mixed well. On the loop, eventually, he’d end up back at his dorm.
The effects of the mansion-dream-turned nightmare subsided, replaced by the worries of the real world. The Accounting mid-term today was reputed to be a bitch-and-a-half. The idea of columns of numbers made his stomach churn. Hundreds of numbers, all over the page, scattered like unpenned sheep. He was in way over his head.
He jogged past the student union. A sign posted on a metal stake by the sidewalk caught his eye. It read:
KING
The odd sign was only a few hundred feet away and, even in the streetlamp lighting, he could read it clearly. The block red letters were in the lower right corner of an otherwise blank sign.
He wondered what it could mean. Then the rest of the lettering darkened into place. The sign said:
NO
PARKING
“Hell, no!” He jerked to a stop. This couldn’t happen. Not today. Not with something as familiar as a street sign.
The last two weeks his VPD had offered this new manifestation. Instead of complete confusion, certain words leapt out from the page. Sometimes they bounded off the computer screen, cutting ahead of their systematic left-to-right presentation. Other times, such as now, certain letters would parse themselves out of larger words, as if some syllables passed the finish line first, and the remainder pulled up the rear. The words were frustratingly unrelated, though yesterday had a theme. Any words associated with the sea screamed off the page at him. Ocean. Fish. The last syllable of thouSAND. He’d finally thrown his textbook across the room in frustration.
He turned from the sign that had revived his disorder. He sprinted back toward his dorm. That impulse to escape surfaced again. The recurring compulsion to leave campus ran white-water fast, trying to push him to somewhere, anywhere, else.
The big brown information sign ahead grabbed his attention. It read:
A
C
E
Then slowly turned to:
← Arts and Sciences Building
→ Campus Store
← Exit to Ithaca
Pete screamed in frustration. He broke into a dead run for the half mile back to the dorm. He burst into the empty hallway. Collapsing back against the wall, he buried his face in his hands, eyes closed. He didn’t want to read, he didn’t want to feel, he didn’t want to think. Every moment on campus had all the comfort of standing on hot coals. Adrenaline pumped sweat off the back of his neck and down his arms.
“Screw it,” he whispered. “Whatever this is, it wins.”
Pete slipped into his room. Larry rumbled like a rutting hog on the other side. Pete grabbed some clothes and a towel and went down to the showers. He returned clean and flicked on the light by his bed. He packed some basics into a backpack.
Larry snorted as if avoiding asphyxiation. His eyelids admitted a painful sliver of light.
“Oh, give me a minute, dude,” he mumbled, lifting his head inches from the pillow. “Let me get my Nikes. We’re going running.”
“Go back to sleep, dude,” Pete said. Larry’s head dropped back on the pillow like Pete pulled his plug.
Pete slung his backpack over his shoulder. With weekly laundry, he could live with what he packed indefinitely. Whatever it was he was supposed to do, this would have to be enough to carry him through it.
He briefly considered calling his parents to tell them he was leaving. But he didn’t know what he was doing, why he was doing it, or where he was going. He knew his parents. They’d send police combing the state for him with a straitjacket. He’d call them when he had some answers for their inevitable questions. By then, maybe he would also have some answers for himself.
He picked up his phone from his desk. One-way communication would be better than a call. Texting. The world loved it and his VPD made it nothing but a chore for him. He typed in a message to his parents:
I’m fine. I’m taking a break from school. I’ll call you soon. Do not worry.
He hit send. They wouldn’t see the message for hours. By then he’d be…wherever. He went to put the phone in his pocket, but instead returned it to his desk. Whatever this journey was he was about to take, he was going to need to be off the grid. He could feel it.
He left his dorm and started down the steep hill into town. Normally, a wander into the unknown would be nerve wracking. But as soon as he left campus, his anxiety started to dissipate. The muscles on either side of his neck uncoiled like overwound clock springs. The urge to leave had been building in him for weeks. He had been struggling against it, swimming slightly harder each day as the current increased. Only when he surrendered did he appreciate how much he’d been fighting it.
A rosy dawn broke over the hill behind him and cast sweeping shadows onto the town below. Ithaca was half in light and half in darkness, and so was he. Other than knowing he had to start moving, he had no idea how or to where. He had no car and only a few hundred dollars in his bank account. He trekked past the old, red brick buildings that dominated the small college town. He wondered if he was just supposed to keep walking. He crossed the railroad tracks at the foot of the hill and saw his answer to the left.
The peeling blue and gray logo of the Greyhound Bus Lines covered the side of a small white building. The lit OPEN sign burned in the window. The current he rode channeled him inside.
The small, empty waiting room was a testimonial to an industry in decline. Worn linoleum tiles buckled up off the floor. Years of sunlight had faded the wall posters to ghosts of their former selves. A solitary, rough, wooden pew sat in the center of the room, ready to make any passenger appreciate the relative comfort of bus seating. The far wall had a single ticket window. Behind it, an older gentleman squinted through half-glasses and organized the day’s clerical necessities.
Pete walked over to a route map on the wall. Great. A map. Worse than useless.
“Well, VPD, where am I supposed go?” he whispered.
A web of colored lines connected nameless colored dots on the map. Only two dots seemed to have titles. The first, in big bold black letters, was ITHACA. Below it and to the right, in arresting red letters, one dot read ATLANTIC CITY.
Yesterday’s ocean themed words. Today’s KING and ACE. Other words and phrases that seemed unrelated from previous weeks (JERSEY, CHIPS) fell into place. Atlantic City. The anxious feeling that had plagued him for weeks vanished.
Pete stepped over to the ticket window. The man peered over his glasses at him. Pete slid his debit card through the window slot.
“One ticket to Atlantic City. One way.”