You keep discovering new places in Elsewhere University. It’s not like they weren’t there (you think). It’s just they’re in places you didn’t go - soft chairs hidden away on the third floor of the library behind the political science texts (you took the AP course in high school, and wouldn’t be there at all if your dorm room wasn’t occupied by your roommate and her girlfriend), a study room near the zoology labs (you’re a mechanical engineering major and you’re not comfortable with anything so uncontrolled) with mercifully free printing.
There’s a whole gym on the other side of campus from your major (you just go on a walk one day after class is cancelled, and it emerges from the cold fog like a rabbit fun a hat) and a dining hall that’s open at midnight inhabited entirely by haunted-looking art majors with stained fingers (also you, sometimes, and what may be the best mac and cheese in the known universe, on Fridays)
There’s always someone else there. Of course there is. It didn’t not exist when you didn’t know. Somewhere, there’s a jock who hasn’t done anything beyond high school algebra and doesn’t know that there’s a lion statue outside the math building that protects you from failing classes if you offer it greens (sometimes lettuce, sometimes cellophane or bubblegum). Still, it’s odd to think that thousands of people could go to the same school and each walk away with a different campus in their minds.
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