I gathered my things in the dark so I had to spend as little time as possible with Sandy. I was just trying to sleep. I inhaled and opened the door, closing it quickly so the vacuum sound wouldn’t carry into what used to be my sanctuary. The second she saw me, she was done cleaning. The vacuum cleaner went off and she put it away.

“Get any calls last night?”

I let my heavy eyelids fall over my eyes. Everyone knew that Sandy had a radio at home and kept it on every second of every day. She knew we had cleared our call two hours ago.

“No,” I said. I wasn’t going to give her the pleasure of gloating. “Have a great day.”

I walked out the door and ran when I knew the door was closed. She was like a bad cold. As I walked back to my dorm, I watched everyone rushing towards the library. It was almost time for finals week to begin. I wished I could be responsible and follow them, like a trained dog, but I knew that I would act like a volatile sun, and either collapse or explode if I didn’t get at least a few more hours of sleep.

My phone vibrated and my heart fell. It was early morning. It could only be one person. I considered ignoring it but last time I ignored her calls, she ended up making a trip and bringing my father.

“Hello, Mother.”

“I was trying to figure out when you were coming home for winter break. Have you bought your bus ticket yet?”

I hesitated. I hadn’t expected to confront the subject at that point but I figured I had to say something. “I was thinking of staying here for break, catch up on some school work. Make sure everything is good for the start of next semester.”

The other side was so silent I thought I had lost the connection. “You don’t want to come home.”

“I do, I do. I just thought this might be helpful considering how hard this semester was for me.”

“What you need is to come home. I’ll buy your ticket.”

She hung up, the Queen of Communication. I resolved to look for ways to come back early so I wouldn’t have to spend an entire month sitting in the house with my parent’s expectations. I couldn’t be there when my grades were posted. They would know and they would get it out of me. Sometimes I wondered if my mother knew when I was weak, if she could sense it. How could she have known that I was exhausted and awake early in the morning? If my mother could bottle her predatory sense about weakness, the government would make her a rich woman.

She didn’t even know when my finals were. She would buy me a ticket and I would be on it. And that’s the way things were.

I collapsed onto my bed, hoping the soft oblivion would swallow me up and keep me there forever. I loathed the fact that no one on this campus valued sleep. It was a competition to see who had pulled the most all-nighters in a row, to see who was the most overworked, and that they were taking the hardest classes. I had spent four months here and I was exhausted by it. The problem was that while everyone was running around complaining about how much they had to do, they would take on a new activity or commitment in the blink of an eye. I couldn’t tell what was real.