You’ve never seen so many rectangles in your life. Rectangular buildings, rectangular suitcases, rectangular people with rectangular backpacks moving like pixels across concrete. You pause on the walkway, your duffel scratching against your hip, and you feel your toes twitch inside the sneakers your mom practically wrestled you into. They're awful. You're sure your feet are suffocating. Still, you square your shoulders and follow the campus map in your hand, annotated in your dad’s blocky handwriting 'You’ll do great. Say yes to things.'

The check-in tent smells like sunscreen and printer ink. You walk up to the first table, where a guy is handing out dorm keys with the kind of surgical precision usually reserved for brain surgery or space launches. He doesn’t look up at first. Just says, “Name?”

“Hazel O’Malley,” you reply brightly.

He glances up. You see dark eyes, steady hands, a name tag that reads Orion “Briar Hall. Second floor. Room 214. Keycard, map, student ID packet.”