I’ll come right out and say it: I chose my college because of money. Sure, the stellar journalism program that made me look there in the first place helped. The location was right: an hour and a half from home, so it was close enough to grab supplies from the home front but far enough away that my parents weren’t likely to drop in. The campus was pretty in that Dead Poets Society kind of way. But dream school it was not.

 A very enticing financial aid package changed my tune. “You can go to college without drowning in debt,” my banker father said, drawing up a spreadsheet to show me my future loan damage, complete with projected inflation. So, I packed my reluctant bags, and off to a white cinderblocked prison cell I went. With the price tag significantly reduced, St. Bonaventure didn’t look half bad.

 “You’ll love it here,” my parents assured me. Looking around at the beaming faces of my fellow freshmen the first day of school, my stomach churned with uncertainty. These kids looked a lot like the ones at my high school: Coach bags, Lacoste alligators on every chest, blonde highlights zebra-streaking the girls’ hair, the guys hiding behind mirrored Ray Bans. And me? I made my own purses out of duct tape, bought my clothes at Macy’s on sale and dyed my hair burgundy some months, tomato-red others. As for sunglasses, bargain bin all the way. I lost them every few months.

 It was a lot like being a tourist in London. We spoke a similar language, could understand the words each other were saying, and recognized each other from far away. But the innuendo, the slang, the ingrained mating rituals of growing up in that culture? We might as well be from two different planets. At least, that was how it had been with these creatures in high school. I didn’t expect college to be any different.

 But I decided to give it the old college try. I tacked pictures of my college friends to my dorm room walls and thanked the heavens I had opted for a single room as I heard my hallmates shrieking echo down the linoleum hallway.

 Not like I gave the noise a chance to bother me, since I spent the majority of my first evenings looking to drown my loneliness at the on-campus apartments. Beer pong the first night, margaritas the second, test tube shots the third, cocktails the fourth. I could barely remember stumbling home every evening, say nothing of the hosts’ names, the conversations I had, or the classes I attended. Good thing I hadn’t lost my sunglasses yet.

 Every evening, I shimmied into my tightest jeans and a v-neck top that didn’t look too off-brand, covered my eyes in black shadow and masked my nervousness with Maybelline. I hid behind a solo cup like a shield, a come-hither smile warding off meaningful conversation. Every morning, I awoke to blinding sunlight and the realization that I was having the stereotypical college experience the movies had warned me about: booze-soaked, rap-infused and vapid.

 It quickly became clear I wasn’t going to make new friends from the reception side of a beer can, so I decided to look elsewhere. An open mic night was being held in one of the dorms, so I decided to check it out. A guitar player I had met during orientation, a skinny kid with shaggy hair, secondhand sweaters and a voice like crushed velvet was performing, so I gathered up my courage and as much musical trivia as I could muster and wandered over.

 The room was full enough that I could sneak in without being conspicuous. The guitar player, whose name I had forgotten or never learned, smiled at me from the makeshift stage as I sank onto the floor in front of a tattered dorm common room couch.

 “Can I braid your hair?” a voice whispered in my ear a few moments later. I whipped my head around, and came face to face with a grinning boy with the clearest blue eyes I’d ever seen. He was wearing a pink fishnet tank top his chest hair poked through, a studded faux leather wrist cuff, wide-legged jeans with a screenprinted Japanese dragon up the side and sneakers that were decidedly not designer.

 “Do I know you?” I asked, somewhat rudely.

 “No. But you have beautiful hair. My name’s Ron. Now can I braid it?” Without waiting for a response, he grabbed my head in both hands and started yanking my head into a rough approximation of a french braid.

 “Don’t you have a hair thingy? What kind of girl doesn’t have a hair thingy?” He peered around my head, still holding me captive. “Wanna go for a smoke?”

 “I don’t smoke,” I answered cautiously.

 “Well, I have your hair. So. . . “ he trailed off. Before I could protest, he stood quickly, yanking me to my feet with him.

 “You’re a freshman,” Ron said after taking a long, luxurious drag and blowing the smoke full in my face. It wasn’t a question.

 “I’m a sophomore. We’re going to be best friends,” he said. “I’m going to walk you to your dorm, and you’re going to give me your number.”

 Shocked into silence at his commanding tone, I handed him my phone and led him silently back to my dorm building. He grabbed me into a ribcage-crushing hug as he left me to fumble with my keys, his skinny arms stronger than they looked. “Later babe!” he called, skipping back toward the direction we came, his day-glo shirt the last thing I could see as the darkness enveloped him. “I’ll call you!”

 I neither saw nor heard of him for the next week, as I fell back into the ceaseless, faceless parties that had become my routine. Although he wouldn’t have fit in with the perfectly-coiffed, polo-shirted crowds at the frat houses I frequented, I couldn’t help but see Ron’s face float into my mind as I drifted off into the no-man’s land between drunk and hungover. I wondered if he had ever made anything out of duct tape. My new “friends” would have laughed at the idea. Somehow, I didn’t think Ron would.

 That Saturday, I was on my way out when my phone rang. I could hear traffic in the background. “Where are you?” a scared, shaking voice asked me. My heart sank.

 “I’m just walking over to south side. Where are you, Ron?” I asked.

 “I’m scared. I got separated from my boyfriend, and I don’t know where I am,” he answered. “Come get me.”

 “How can I come get you if you don’t know where you are?” I asked, panic rising in my throat. Even if I had only met him once, I instinctively knew Ron wasn’t the sort who should be out by himself.

 He hiccupped loudly in my ear. “I’m over the bridge. In some guy’s carpark,” he answered.

 I sighed. “Okay, I’ll come find you,” I trudged over the bridge separating campus from the next town over, a half mile or so away. The bridge was raised above campus, and at the peak, I could see campus nestled in the manmade valley below. Looking down, it twinkled merrily, like a toy village under a Christmas tree. Traffic whizzed by toward the town on the other side and I imagined the bridge created a divide, a barrier of sorts between this collegiate bubble we lived in and the wide world outside. My stomach turned over and I was instantly homesick. It was beautiful, quaint, and unspeakably foreign. I doubted if I’d ever feel differently.

 Immediately to my left as I stepped off the bridge, a skinny shape stumbled from someone’s driveway. He had been hiding behind a stranger’s car, smoke drifting from the cigarette he was holding precariously close to his hair. “Lizz!” he shrieked as he fell into me, throwing his weight onto my shoulder. “You came!”

 Stumbling back to my dorm room took twice as long as the walk there. Ron was heavier than he looked, complicated by the fact that he kept dragging his feet, ragdoll-like over curbs and small bushes. After what seemed like an eternity, I dumped him unceremoniously on my floor, where he immediately passed out and began snoring heavily.

 “I’ll be damned if I let this kid die on my floor,” I said out loud, staring at the man flopped crucifixtion-style on my brightly colored rug. Grabbing an empty Snapple bottle from my trashcan, I filled it with water and thrust it into his face. Some of it splashed onto his cheek and he spluttered, blinking at me as if seeing me for the first time.

 “Best friend,” he slurred, grinning drunkenly. 

 “Whatever. Drink this. And when that’s gone, you’re gonna have more,” I said sternly. My best impression of my mother when I was misbehaving.

 “You have great eyes,” he answered. I cut off the last word as I lifted up his flopping head and poured the bottle into his mouth, spilling more than a little down his skintight white undershirt. At least it was opaque this time. Sort of.

 We repeated this charade four times, until I was confident he was hydrated enough not to expire right then and there. I climbed into bed fully clothed, pulling the covers over my head without even brushing my teeth. Ron snored like a chainsaw, and as I stared at his sleep-blank face, trying to drown out the racket, it occurred to me this was the first night I hadn’t been lonely in weeks.

 The next morning, I woke up to the smell of coffee and aftershave. Ron was sitting shirtless at my computer, humming tunelessly, two cups of coffee waiting on the desk next to him. “Good morning, beautiful,” he said. “Thanks for saving my ass last night.”

“You’re welcome,” I answered groggily. “How did you know how to use my coffeemaker?”

“Babe, if there’s one thing I can do, it’s make coffee. You wanna go have a cigarette?”

That was the first morning I woke up to Ron, a cup of coffee and a cigarette, but it would not be the last. As the weeks went on, his first promise to me proved more than accurate. I may have spent most of my first weeks at college looking for friends, but I never expected one to stumble out of the darkness and find me.

 With Ron, I learned I preferred gay bars to frat parties, bad wine to cheap beer and thrift stores to designers. He taught me how to French inhale, how to sing Spanish pop songs and how to make the most of a school I didn’t love by finding people that I did.

“You know how I knew we were going to get along?” he asked me one day, months after our first night together. “The way you did your eyeliner. The other girls draw it all the way across, but you stop it in the middle. It’s different. And different suits you.”

It did. Still does. And so does he.