Last week, I spent two and a half days at Yale for Bulldog Days. I arrived on a dreary New Haven Monday with my mom and sisters, and promptly lost them in the crowd around the registration tent. Lucky for me, I had some friends from Andover to hang with, so I spent the whole day sort of bouncing around between them, getting lost in mosh pits and meeting second-years larping as pre-frosh (looking at you, Matthew). That night, overcome with the sickness that’d been incubating in my lungs for the past couple days, I shivered under my two blankets on a dingy common room floor. I won’t lie, Tuesday started pretty slow, but by the end of the day, I found myself in the basement of Pauli Murray talking with some strangers until two, maybe three AM. That talk eventually evolved into an absolute fever-dream of an all-nighter involving getting locked out of a building, impromptu language lessons, all sorts of sports, a decent-but-overpriced matcha latte, and talks of evil, anxious, avoidant, and former lesbians (I am not homophobic).

Believe me, I had a lot of fun, but I guess something felt a bit off about Bulldog Days. I’m not the best at handling myself when low on sleep, and I guess the off-ness surfaced at 6AM in the buttery of Timothy Dwight, playing ping-pong and trying not to fall asleep. I was telling one of my newfound friends how much it felt like I’d done all of this before. How, even if everything at Yale was about to be different, maybe it felt as if it’d all be the same.

I mean, it was pretty clear when I flubbed up my Yale interview: I breezed through 15 minutes of easy, albeit dry questions about my plans to pursue academics further, until I found myself caught off guard when my interviewer asked: “moving away from academics, what’s something that you’re excited about getting involved in at Yale?” Ahhhhhhhhh! All prep went out the window. What did I want from college? Think, think: what’s something that Yale’s got that Andover doesn’t have? What’s gonna be different? My mouth moved before my brain had a chance to catch up and think it through: “Well, I think joining a frat would be pretty cool?”

I spent many an hour ruminating on how stupid of an answer that was, convinced that I’d kissed my chances at Yale bye-bye right then and there (especially heartbreaking, as, at least in my opinion, my Yale essays weren’t bad). Of course, at the time, I was far more concerned about how that would’ve impacted my college results, but now, in retrospect, I’m more at a loss at how I didn’t have a better answer prepared, either on paper or in my mind. I mean, come on? A frat? With all due respect, LEO and Sig Chi seem great, but… if a frat was really the end goal, I’d be busy trying to impress the future of Corporate America at IU Kelley with my ability to throw ping-pong balls into a cup. If I couldn’t even come up with an answer off the top of my head with the endless opportunities Yale offered outside of the classroom, something was very wrong.

When I entered Andover, there was so much I wanted to do. I got a campus map from orientation, hung it up on the wall, and swore I’d visit every building on campus. I literally signed up for every single club during the club fair (except for the Phillipian, because, come on, everyone writes for their school newspaper). I wanted to meet everyone so badly, I kept an ever-growing list of names on my wall, complete with hometown and grade. Every night, I’d add more names to my list, repeating them over and over in my head, committing them to memory, then obsessively following them on Instagram. I treated Andover as if it were an AYCE buffet—that is, I gorged myself in the name of “making the most of it” and “getting my money’s worth.”

Of course, Andover is not a sprint, and even though I’ll only ever be here for three years, it 100% feels like my time is up. I’ve eaten my fill, and, in all honesty, I can’t wait to just foot the bill and go. Is that awful for me to say? Maybe this is just the “burnout” I’ve been hearing about, but in a way, it feels like Andover itself has sort of jaded me. I remember getting called in for a chat with my cluster dean about my visiting of various dorms, and I also remember the despair I’d felt when, in the middle of winter term of my lower year, I’d discovered that not everyone was a friendly face waiting to be added to my list of names.

It could just be that I’ve fallen out of love with the school. I really was the biggest proponent of Andover; everything really felt so magical before upper spring. My own revisit days to Andover were ominous—at lunch, I was warned not to come to Andover by my host’s friends. They said, straight to my face, that they were all miserable and sick of the workload, and that I’d be better off going to a school that cared about their students. I was too starry-eyed to pay them any attention—I’d already committed before I came for the revisit. (Side note: as I later found out, they were all members of a racist secret society on campus, so I guess they might’ve been trying to keep the school a tiny bit more white…) Anyhow, my lower year, I was determined to make starry-eyed revisit kids fall in love with the school the way I knew it to be. I took them to all my secret nooks and crannies around the school, and did my very damn best to keep that yield rate high on behalf of the same admission office that had rejected me once before.

The day after Lucas died, it should’ve been a revisit day. I’d signed up to host, even though I had my co-prez debate scheduled for the first revisit. Of course revisits were cancelled for the day—no matter how starry-eyed you could be, it wasn’t exactly a good look for admissions to have kids tour around a school where half the adults were crying. Hey, maybe they could’ve gone to Chinese 100; my prefectees told me they still got a quiz that day. Our first revisit day was supposed to be Friday, and the second, the Monday after. Of course, those were cancelled too. It’s too bad about those kids who had to book and cancel flights, right? The Monday after, I sat with one of my friends, a friend who was also close to Lucas, outside of history class for the entire period. I don’t remember if it was he or another guy sitting outside who offered a piece of blue raspberry Airheads gum to me. I took it.

Two or three minutes before class ended, we went back to the classroom, our teacher wrapping up her lecture on the Pan-African movement or something. It’s a miracle I got a six that term, given how I bombed the quiz the class after (4/10) and how dogshit my final paper was. Either way, we got chastised by our teacher for missing all of class. “Where were you?” “Where were you?” I was downstairs, chewing a piece of gum, OK? My friend jumped off of a building a couple days ago, OK? I choose to believe my teacher is a good person, but I also choose to believe that the absence I received for that missed class was unforgivable.

The revisits came maybe two weeks later. You can tell who’s a revisit by their awkward shuffle tagging along with their host’s friends, the blue, yellow, green, and purple lanyards they’re wearing around their neck, and the way they’re a bit too excited to be at the school. I think maybe it’s good I wasn’t assigned any kids that year. I don’t think I would’ve done a good job.

It was maybe two weeks after Lucas died that I no longer reserved the option to go Pass/Fail for the term. Of course, “colleges will demand an explanation,” and I didn’t think that it was worth explaining away Ps and Fs on a transcript, because, of course, if I could get an absence from a teacher I’d built a great relationship with a few days after, how could I be sure that I’d get any sympathy from any of these high-and-mighty institutions months away? Nope. Life must go on. The revisits must come. The class of 2029 will matriculate, albeit maybe with a bit more waitlist input, and, after a few years, no one will even remember when or why they put up nets in the stairwells of every building.

This year, the birds must’ve chosen to stay south a bit longer. Though I haven’t seen flocks coming up north streaking the sky in huge V’s, the doves on Instagram came in droves. Friends, acquaintances, and strangers all came together to send their own “🕊️” emoji to fly on my feed, and I still don’t know if I found that touching for the sentiment, or infuriating that this was how he was to be remembered. Listen, I understand the school can’t memorialize him. The consultants they brought in said so. Fine. Do I have the right to hold Andover responsible for his death and the fallout? Was it just bad luck that it happened while I was here? I wonder if the folks doing the financial models at the Alumni Engagement Office are preparing to tighten spending during the years that the classes of 2024, 2025, and 2026 head into their prime-time for donations. I don’t think I’ll be donating.

So. When it’s six thirty in the morning and my new friends at Yale want to finish the all-nighter because, well, we have to go to the speech, the university president is speaking there! I can’t help but feel jaded. I want to be a little starry-eyed prefrosh, walking around with my tan, crumpled Yale tote bag, having spent the nights asking the perennial “what’s your name” “what’s your major” “where are you from” over and over again. I want to check my phone for the schedule over and over again, saying “I have to go to this talk.” “I can’t wait to sign up for all the clubs.” I want to knock on the door of the dance studio and make some disgruntled second-year swipe their card to the basketball courts, because the shitty revisit cards they gave me don’t have access.

So. I give my spiel about how silly the events are, but still give in, make the trek to spend $8.53 on a matcha latte for the caffeine because, yeah, that’s what being a prefrosh is about. I shouldn’t stop myself from feeling excited, should I? I go to the university address, even if I fall asleep with my eyes open from the sleep deprivation, because I want so badly to care. I wish I could make plans to attend a talk from a professor across campus about bioethics or biotechnology or biomolecular engineering or just plain bio. I wish I could think only about interrogating current students about applying for studio art classes because it might be something I want to do in the fall. I want to have faith in Yale, I want to frantically scribble names on my wall, and I want to do all the things prefrosh do that the seniors roll their eyes at.

I swear it, I’m really in love with Yale.

I just hope I won’t have to fall out of love again.