I wasn’t sure what to expect on my first spring break alone, but this certainly wasn’t it.
I sat alone in my college amphitheater, poking at my fries. A crisp breeze rustled the branches overhead, just chilly enough to remind me that winter had only barely dissolved into spring. The blizzard of '05 was still fresh in my memory, and if I closed my eyes I could still imagine snow piled up around the trees.
My fries had gone cold, so I started eavesdropping on the students sitting around me discussing their Spring Break plans. Many of my classmates were wealthy kids from private schools in the Northeast, and I listened as they casually rattled off their swanky plans.
I had no spring break plans, and I'd been trying to dodge conversations about it for days. Truthfully, I couldn't afford to go anywhere, even if I wanted to. With just a single semester of college under my belt, I was still trying to figure out what it meant to be "on my own," and I was discovering that "on my own" meant poverty, essentially. Flying home to Montana for the week was out of the question, so my plan was to stick around the dorms and try and get better acquainted with Boston. At that point I had a pitiful lack of knowledge concerning the city I lived in, save for "doesn't have any Taco Bells" and "the Orange Line is gross, don't go on the Orange Line."
Besides me, the only other person in my dorm who was staying behind was Darla, a quiet, intense girl with dreadlocks who, up until that point, I'd never so much as spoken to. My first (and only) interaction with Darla had come late one night the week before break. Sometime after midnight I'd ventured downstairs to the the student lounge to grab a soda and found Darla bent over the sink, chopping off her dreads with a pair of scissors by candlelight. She jerked her head up, seemingly annoyed that I'd intruded.
