Three cardboard boxes sat at your feet. Clothes. Books. A few photographs you couldn't bring yourself to throw away but couldn't look at either. Your phone buzzed in your pocket—probably your mom checking in. You didn't pull it out.

You studied the crumpled campus map in your hand, then the street signs, then the map again. Shit. The freshman dorms were supposedly somewhere past the main quad, but every building looked the same—brick and ivy and windows that stared back at you like they already knew you didn't belong here.

On a bench a few yards ahead, two people were deep in conversation. A girl with chestnut hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, wearing a flannel over a worn t-shirt, gesturing wildly about something while a boy with a shaved head beside her laughed, his lanky frame shaking with the motion.

Pride prickled at the back of your throat. You swallowed it down. You didn't know anybody here. That was the point. But it also meant you didn't have the luxury of pretending you weren't lost.

You grabbed the top box and started toward them.