"Okay, well that's the rest of your stuff. You really didn't pack a lot of stuff," Danni tells me from the doorway as I'm unpacking the things that will go on my desk.

"I didn't really have a lot of stuff," I remind her. Even the stuff that I did have at home, I wouldn't want to keep with me. I want to get rid of all of the bad parts of that apartment that I shared with Nathan and my mother, only keeping the good parts with me. That's why the only things that I packed are the good parts and it's not much.

"Well, it made this move in extremely easy," She pipes. "Anyway, I'm starving so I'm going to let you get acquainted with your room while I go pick up a pizza."

"Sure. But... what if my roommate shows up? How do I deal with that?" I ask her, feeling kind of terrified of meeting this girl that I'll be rooming with. I had to get a roommate because getting a single room was a few hundred dollars extra and I didn't want to put that extra burden on my bill. I still had no idea how to live with another person in the same room as me though, so I'm panicking.

"Just say hi and be nice," Danni assures me with a small laugh. "Look, Luna, it's really not a big deal. She's a freshman too so she won't know anybody. Be her friend, find things in common. Talk about roommate things, you know? How late you stay up, how loud you listen to music, stuff like that."

"This is so stressful," I groan but my stomach also groans with me, proving that I'm hungry and I need to let Danni go so that she can pick up our pizza. "But okay, you go get food, I'll stay here and stress about this whole roommate thing."

"It'll be fine," She assures me with another small laugh as she grabs her keys and takes off out the door. It being August, it's really hot and it being move in day, I've been going back and forth outside, pushing and pulling things all day so I'm a sweaty mess. Wiping a thick sheen of sweat from my forehead, I get back to putting everything on my desk.

I have a lot of framed pictures of my friends back home. I have one of Cece and Jules in their new apartment uptown, near Fairmont's campus. The apartments are usually for college kids which means that they're cheap but the neighborhood is good- kids our age just trying to be adults. They're happy. I have a picture of Faith, Grey, and Tasha back at home because they didn't leave. Tasha has to stay with her family. Faith and Grey are content with the city and they're afraid of change. I have a picture of all six of us at our graduation that Danni took, all of us wearing our school colored gowns.

You know how much I love taking pictures. They scatter my desk now, and when I run out of frames, I just start taping them to the wall near my bed. Polaroids of the memories that I keep with me from my life in West Virginia. Not that I need these pictures to remember my friends, because we're going to keep contact even with me so far away but they sure do help. I'll probably go home for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas but both of those still seem like they're so far away.

I get all of the stuff put away on my desk and make my bed. My room is up on a high floor so the windows don't open very far (because apparently, that's how stressful finals week is).

I'm starting to unpack all of my clothes into the dresser when there's a knock on the closed door. I thought that I was ready to meet my roommate but I'm really not. Feeling incredibly nervous, I just wish and hope that it's Danni on the other side of the door with the pizza.

Please let it be Danni. Pretty please.

Opening it, I see neither my new roommate nor Danni. It's Quinn, Danni's brother. Feeling confused about what's happening, I open my mouth to greet him or to ask him why he's here but he beats me to it.

"Hey," He grins at me, inviting himself into my half unpacked room. "Danni said that you were moving in today. Thought I could be of some assistance."

"Yeah," I confirm. "But you're too late—I've got everything moved in, now it's just a matter of unpacking but I'm just going to do that by myself. Thanks though."

"Oh well," He says with a small shrug. "I tried."

I don't know how to respond to that so I just awkwardly nod but then I have to fill the silence so I find myself saying, "If you want to stay, Danni just ran to get some pizza. You can watch me unpack my clothes."

"Sounds riveting," Quinn tells me, still smiling broadly. He's always so smiley. He sits down at my desk as I'm folding my shirts into the dresser. "So how do you like campus so far?"

"It's small, but cute. I like it. I haven't seen much of it yet though, just going back and forth from the car," I explain to him.

"You got a car?" He wonders.

"Yeah, my brother bought it for me," I explain, referring to the five grand that Nathan gave me in the hospital. I held on to it for a few months, expecting him to change his mind and want it back but just after graduation, I decided that he wasn't going to ask for it back so I spent it on a used car so that I could get back and forth from Iowa to West Virginia and around the town on my own. "With his dirty drug money."

"You live such an exciting life," Quinn tells me. I'm looking away from him to put away my clothes so I can't tell if he's joking or not. I sure hope that he's joking though because he can't possibly believe that my life is just exciting. Maybe my life back in West Virginia was exciting, but not really in a good way. Watching my best friends get arrested or sucking random dicks to prevent themselves from getting arrested. Tripping on hard drugs to forget what lives we lived. It's not the type of exciting that I ever want to experience again.

"Some could say that," I mumble. "It's all over now though. Now, I am just a run of the mill mundane college student."

"We're not very mundane," He argues from behind me. "We have our fun. Okay, let's go out this weekend, I'll show you around downtown where all of the bars and clubs are. I'll show you how we have fun, mundane college style."

"I'm okay, but thanks for the offer," I say quickly, not wanting him to think that now that I go to the same school as him that we're going to be friends. I'm best friends with his sister but that doesn't mean that I want to be his friend too. I appreciate that he's trying to be nice but I'm not interested.

"Well then what are you going to do? Do you have any plans while you're here?"

"Yes," I confirm. "I'm going to work at the library first of all. There's also a chapter of the Garrison's Charity that I'm going to start volunteering with. They help inner city kids learn to be better so I'm going to do that. I'll make my own friends, you don't have to babysit me just because your sister asked you to."

"She didn't ask me to, I'm just trying to be nice," He insists as I'm putting away all of my underwear in the top drawer of the dresser. That's the last of my clothes so I fold up that box and toss it into the pile of empty boxes that need to be taken down to the recycling. "But that charity seems cool."

"Yeah, it is," I agree with a nod. I don't know where to put the rest of the stuff I have so I just shove it all in my wardrobe since that's still empty.

"Well, here, let me give you my address," Quinn insists, taking a post it note off of the stack of them on my desk along with a pen and he starts writing something down. "I'm living in the apartments down the street so if you ever need anything, you know where to find me."

"I won't-" I try to tell him that I won't need his help but, being as stubborn as his sister, he continues writing and then when he's finished, he sticks the sticky note to the side of my wardrobe. I'll throw it away later but to spare his feelings, I'll let it stay up until he's gone.

"Do you have a roommate?" He changes the subject completely as if he just now realized that the other side of the room is still completely empty.

"Yeah, but she's not here yet," I explain, glancing over to the empty side of the room.

"Bummer. Meeting a new roommate is always fun," He says as if reminiscing about his old memories of meeting roommates.

"Right, I'm thrilled," I supply sarcastically as I'm crunching all of the empty boxes down so that they're easier to carry out to the recycling can down the hallway.

"Okay, you know what, I'm revoking you're veto," Quinn tells me. "You're going out this weekend. You're already too stressed about this whole college thing and classes haven't even started yet. You need to relax before you implode or something."

"I'm fine," I say but to be honest, I am stressing. It's obvious that I don't belong here, that all of the people here grew up in middle class suburbs with parents paying their way through school. People like me just don't go to places like this. It's not going to stop me from trying my best but I can't lie, it is incredibly discouraging. I know that I shouldn't care and usually, I wouldn't, but there's just a nagging feeling that nobody here is going to like me because I'm so different. And here I am, pushing away the one person that has already tried to befriend me.

"It'll be fun," He assures me. "Danielle can come too since she's here until Sunday if that makes you feel any better."

I can't be so close minded here. That works at home but this is a whole new world and I have to adapt. "Okay. Sure, we can go out on Saturday night. As long as it's a group thing."

"Yes, it'll be a group thing," He grins and I don't know why he's grinning but to be honest, I'm afraid to even ask. "You have to loosen up, Luna. I know that this is foreign territory to you but you'll adapt. Don't be so nervous."

"I'm not nervous," I object, trying my best not to look nervous. I know that I said that I'm relieved that I'm moved in now and I feel like nothing can go wrong but that was kind of a lie. I am relieved that I got to the dorms but I'm still afraid that I'm not prepared enough for my classes and that I'll just fail. I was good at all of my high school classes but I had shitty teachers and shitty curriculums so I doubt that it was anything compared to what the classes will be like here. I'm incredibly nervous that I won't cut it here but I don't need Quinn to start reading my mind right now.

"Okay, well that's a lie but I'll pretend to believe you because the pizza is here," He motions toward the door where Danni is now walking in with a pizza and some garlic bread and then when she sees Quinn sitting at my desk, she asks him why he's here.

We eat the pizza and I try to forget about all of the negatives that I'm feeling. I might not fit in here, I might fail all of my classes. I focus on the positives. Quinn is here and he's nice. I actually made it here in the first place and everybody at home is rooting for me. I'm smart. I can do this.

If I could fight my way through a childhood of an absent father and a drug-induced abusive mother, a cold hearted brother and a sex-crazed best friend, I can make my way through college. It won't be easy but really, is anything ever actually easy? Of course I'll have to work for it, like everybody has to work for anything worth getting. My mom will be sober someday but she has to work for it. Cece and Jules had to defy everything that they learned about the falseness of romance and they found love in each other and they definitely had to work for that. And now, they are so happy.

If my brother wanted out of his drug dealing lifestyle, he'd have to work for that too, and I know that if he did, he would be so happy. Maybe meet a girl, have a family of his own in a suburb far away from the danger of the city.

Just like I worked hard to get out of the city, I will work hard to stay out of it. And then, when I have a stable job and an income, I will go back to the city. I will find a way to make it a better, safer place to raise children. Just because I left doesn't mean that I'm going to abandon those who are still stuck in places like that. Like Tasha's family.

I think that that's the driving force behind my terrified determination. I have to go through with this college thing so that I can go back to that rundown city and I can help those kids that need help, I can help those druggie mothers that need to get clean. I will make my imprint on this world, I know that I will. And really, isn't that what everybody is trying to do here?

Once the pizza is gone, Danni and Quinn help me take the boxes to the recycling and then we go back to my room to relax in the air conditioning for a while. I want them to stay with me at least until my roommate gets here so that it's not just me. While we're hanging out though, I take the seat at my desk and pull out a piece of notebook paper to write something down, listening to Danni and Quinn arguing about what we should watch on TV in the background of my buzzing thought process.

Dear Nobody,

I did it.

Before today, I was convinced that something was going to go wrong. My loans or scholarships would fall through or the college would change their mind about me, that they realized what a horrible mistake they made by letting me attend their fine institution.

But I did it.

Today is move in day at the college in Iowa and all of my stuff is moved into the dorms. My classes are scheduled and they start on Monday. I'm really doing this. There's no going back. I said goodbye to all of my friends at home this morning and then I took the road trip to Iowa (a very long drive by the way) by myself. Since Danni lives in Iowa during the summers with her family in her hometown, she met me at campus and helped me unpack. Unfortunately, she's going back to Fairmont on Sunday but we have a few days to spend together before she leaves which is nice.

I'm looking around now, and I see so many opportunities. I'm going to take them. I'm going to be the best me that I can be and I cannot believe how cheesy that just sounded but it's true. I don't want to disappoint all of the people at home that are rooting for me. I hear Danni and Quinn laughing about something that was apparently funny and I can't wait to laugh like that, to meet new friends here that make me laugh like that. I'm looking around, and I see a new beginning for me. Not that I'll forget my old story, but I really am eager to start this new one.

Anyway, the dorm looks astonishingly like a dorm room. A typical, what-you-see-in-the-movies type of dorm room with two wooden bed frames, two desks, two wardrobes, two dressers. Typical. I absolutely love it. Most people probably don't want to feel typical but I just love it.

I am sad to say though, that I think that this will be the last letter that I'll be sending to you. I hope that you don't get offended, it's just that I started these letters out because I wanted to talk but I didn't want anybody to listen. I told myself that nobody cared, that nobody would be there for me. But now, I realize that I don't have nobody. Danni cares, my mom, my friends at home, they all care. Even Nathan cares in his weird, awkward ways. I have people around me that love me and that I love back and if I want to say something, all I have to do is put a return address on the envelope and somebody real will listen.

But I must say that I'm very grateful for the time that I've spent talking to you, nobody. I've enjoyed our time together, but all good things must come to an end, right? Especially when an even better, greater thing is about to begin. Wish me luck.

Sincerely
Luna Rose

The End