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// September 11 [Back to College] 
// Story: Silver Glow's Journal 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
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September 11

When we woke up, Meghan said that her uncle was going to come over at noon, so we couldn't spend all day in bed. And she asked when Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn were going to come by and help me move and I said that I had to call them when I was ready, so she didn't have to worry about them showing up unexpectedly.

So we snuggled up in bed together for a while and then she took the shirt off me 'cause she said that I was meant to be naked, and after I'd stretched out my wings I pulled the covers back and kissed her in the stomach and then I said that we'd ought to get up and start making breakfast 'cause the sun was already over the horizon and we both had a lot to do today.

Meghan chopped up the vegetables again and also chopped up a little bit of hay for my omelet, and we watched the birds eating their breakfast while we ate ours. Then she offered to do all the dishes for me and since I didn't have anything else to do and it was a little bit earlier than I'd thought, I sneaked up behind her and tickled her with my wing and she almost dropped the plate she was washing, and she said I was being bad but she didn't stop me either. She leaned over the sink and I made her forget about the dishes for a while.

Then she chased me to the futon and I let her pin me down, and when we finally got done she looked at her portable telephone and said that we'd better hurry up and take our shower so that she could get back to her apartment.

She got dressed and put away her clothes and said that I ought to hide my stallion toy in something so that my helpers didn't get the wrong idea and I wasn't sure how they'd get the wrong idea, because what else would it be for? But she said that maybe they wouldn't be understanding and I thought that they would be, but I put it in my pillowcase anyway to make her happy. And then we snuggled in the papasan for a little bit until it was half to noon, and she said that she'd better get to her apartment and we'd catch up back on campus.

Me and Peggy were going to be in the same room we'd had before, which was nice. And Meghan said that they'd also gotten rooms in Trowbridge, but they were a floor down and in the farthest-away wing. Still, we'd be close enough that we could hang out a lot.

While I waited for Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn, I took all the blankets off the futon and bundled them up and then I folded up my papasan chair and there wasn't much more that I could do because I didn't have any boxes to put things in and I didn't want to start taking the wires out of my computer because there were a lot of them and I didn't know where they all went.

So I pushed the futon kind of close to the balcony and watched the birds. And I wasn't sure what would happen to my bird feeder. I didn't know if I was allowed to have it outside the dorm, and even if I did these birds wouldn't be visiting me any more.

I could have given it to Tina who lived downstairs, maybe. Although I didn't know her very well—it was kind of odd to think about how we'd shared the same house but hardly ever talked at all. And maybe she didn't like birds. Then I thought that maybe Jeff and Caleb and Lindy and Trinity would like it, so I flew over to their house and knocked on their door and asked if they would adopt my bird feeder and my birds.

Jeff said that he would, so I flew back to my balcony and unhooked the birdfeeder and he was in the backyard when he was done and he decided that there were a couple of branches of the tree that hung over his backyard and he could hang it from that if he had a ladder. I didn't need a ladder, though, so he got me some rope and I went up and tied it around the branch and then we put it down low enough that he could fill it with seeds pretty easily.

By the time we were done with that, Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn had arrived in Sienna, and they helped me pack everything up, which didn't take all that long. And it was kind of sad when we were all done to see the apartment empty except for my futon and my desk and my chair—he said he was going to come back and get them later.

I asked him what he was going to do with it, and he said that the easiest thing would be to just donate them to Goodwill but that the government's accountability program wouldn't let him, and he had to list them as surplus equipment and then any other government office that wanted them could ask for them and it was really kind of dumb but it gave him something to do when he was bored. And he said that he could do the same thing with the bathtub mat and the drain plug and the shower curtain and everything else that I didn't need in the dorm room.

Well, I thought that was nice that everything was going to get to be reused by somebody else. I hoped that they liked it. And then I thought that maybe I could have gotten a bed from them instead of having to buy a new one, and he said that mostly when beds were available they were either left over from a prison or a mental institution and I didn't want those.

When we got to college, there were lots of cars and trucks parked in the wrong place and people carrying in furniture and boxes and everything else, and we sort of had to work our way through them all. I felt like I wasn't putting in as much work as he and Miss Cherilyn were, 'cause they wouldn't let me carry any boxes, and after they'd taken the first ones up they told me that I ought to start setting up the room the way I liked it.

Peggy's side of the room was empty, and after we'd unloaded everything and I gave Mister Salvatore the key to my apartment (Meghan still had the other one) he asked if I wanted to go out for pizza together or if I'd rather hang out with my friends.

I thought that I'd rather hang out with my friends, but it would be rude to turn him down after he'd spent so much time helping me move, even carrying up a couple of boxes of what was left of my hay bales, so we went together to Bilbo’s.

While we were eating lunch, I asked him if it might be possible to get the tornado team to come to Kalamazoo before they went back to Equestria, 'cause it would be fun to fly with them and I think there were a lot of people in town who would want to see them.

He said that he would have to look into it but he wasn't sure how he could justify it, and then Miss Cherilyn said that it could be educational and she thought he could try to work that angle, and she'd talk to the college administration and see if they could also push for it, and maybe also the airport since I was friends with the airplane directors.

So then I said that we could get Doctor Thomas Thompson to come along and measure things, if there were clouds in the sky, and so he started taking some notes and he said he'd do his best to get the team up here for a weekend but he couldn't make absolute promises because he didn't know what kind of agreements they'd worked out with the National Weather Service and NOAA and however many other agencies they'd had to go through before they'd even gotten permission to come to the US.

It was even more crowded in the afternoon, and a bunch of people who were coming in were staring at me. They were all people that I didn't know, so I guess they must have been new students who maybe weren't expecting to have a pony in their dorm. And after Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn left I went upstairs to see if Peggy was there yet but she wasn't. I could have called her but you weren't supposed to use your telephone when you were driving, and if she knew I was calling she would probably want to.

So I thought that I'd fly to the quad and see if any of my friends were out there, and Luke waved at me and I waved back at him, and I heard a shout as I was getting close to Hoben, so I flew over there to see who it was and Cedric stuck his fist up against the window screen and so I gave him a hoofbump. Then he turned around and told Leon that his marefriend was back and I said that I wasn't his marefriend, and Cedric told me that Leon had been wasting away all summer because he was pining for me and my ears dropped and I felt really bad that I hadn't known, and then he started laughing and said that he was just pulling my leg but that he'd missed me.

I didn't have to use my plastic badge to get into the building, 'cause the door was held open with a brick someone had taken out of the road, so I just went inside and up to their room and sat down on Cedric's bed and we talked for a little bit.

They'd both been back for almost a month, because they had to go to football camp, and they'd already played some games, too. And I asked how they'd done and he said that they'd won the first game but lost in the second by a little bit, and Leon said they'd lost by 54 points and that sounded like a lot. Cedric said it was Leon's fault for not making more touchdowns, and Leon said that he never had a chance to catch the ball because the offensive line was so weak that the quarterback never had time to throw it. But I could tell they were just kidding around, and Cedric asked if I wanted to see their next game and I could cheer them on. It was at Rockford, which was near Grand Rapids, and he said that they had buses that went there for people who wanted to watch.

I said I didn't know yet but I thought it would be a lot of fun, and then I hugged them and said that I was going to see how many of my other friends were on campus, although I felt like I could have spent the rest of the day hanging out with them.

So I flew back to Trowbridge and since I didn't want to go inside if Peggy wasn't there, I flew up and looked through the window, and I saw that some of her bags were on her bed, even though she wasn't in the room.

I went up and over, and only when I was landing on Pebble Beach did I remember I could have just dropped down and gone through the front door. But I was here now, so I opened up the door and went inside, and then upstairs to our room. Probably Peggy had called me when she'd gotten back and I bet she'd laughed when she heard my portable telephone ringing in our dorm room.

She still wasn't in the room when I opened the door, and I looked and saw that I'd gotten a call from her. So I told my telephone to call her back and I heard it ringing out in the hallway, then she came in the door and dropped her bag and hugged me.

I helped her bring up her last bags, and then the two of us spent the rest of the afternoon putting away our things and catching up. She thought that the boxes of hay were really funny and said that it was okay with her if I had them, so long as they didn't attract mice. But she was pretty sure that mice couldn't get in to our dorm room anyways since all the walls were big cement bricks and the ceiling was plaster.

I thought about washing my laundry before we went to dinner, but I decided that I could do it later, either tonight or tomorrow. Peggy said that there probably wasn't anybody else on campus who'd brought dirty laundry back with them, so there wouldn't be much competition for the washing machines.

We sat down at our usual table and dinner took a really long time because everyone including me kept getting up and saying hello to their friends as they got back. And I got lots of hugs from all my friends, and gave lots of hugs and nuzzles, too and it was really good to be back on campus and have all my friends around me.

It was kind of stressful, too, 'cause a bunch of different people were all having parties in their dorm rooms and invited me and I couldn't be everywhere, but Peggy said that it was okay to show up for a little while and then move on somewhere else. So we went to visit Christine and her friends in their suite first—they weren't in the same place as before, but when we got inside their room arrangement was the same. And we sat around and talked for a bit, and Peggy showed some pictures she had on her portable telephone of when I was in Colorado Springs with her.

Amanda had been in New York City, and she'd taken lots of pictures of it. Some of them were really pretty and others of them were really gritty and dirty but they were all interesting. There was even a picture of her sleeping on a stack of cardboard boxes and she said that her friend Grant had taken that one, and she really liked how it had come out even though he was normally a terrible photographer.

Christine had pictures of New Orleans, and it was really pretty, too. I wish that I'd had time to go down there and visit her, and I wish that I'd taken some pictures of my own, although I did have some movies and I knew how to find them, so before we left I had Christine find the YouTube movie of our team fighting the tornado. And Sean noticed that it had over twelve thousand comments, which was a lot.

I thought that we were going to wind up staying there all night, so I asked Peggy if she minded if I went and visited with Meghan and Lisa and Amy and Becky and she said that she didn't mind, and she was going to go hang out with Rebekka and Cat and Ruth, who were all in DeWaters this year. So we walked together up through the quad and stopped partway across 'cause we ran into Gates, and he congratulated me on my YouTube videos and said that he'd known that they'd be popular, and he said that if I wanted to make another one with him where we had filming on the ground and in the sky that would be awesome, so I said maybe we could do one with me catching a cloud and bringing it down.

Then I hung out with the girls for a while and I could have spent all night with them but I hadn't seen Aric in a while and maybe he was back. He'd be happy if I waited for him at his house, but then maybe Peggy would be lonely so I didn't know what I should do.

If everyone still wanted to play Durak on Monday, then I'd go to Aric's after that, or even if we didn't play. And I'd stay with Peggy tonight, 'cause that was fair, and it would also give me time to figure out the shower schedule in the morning. So I hugged everyone and went back to our room and I sat on my bed and sent a telegram to Aric.

He answered back a little bit later and said that he was somewhere in Indiana and he wouldn't be back for a couple more hours at least because he'd finished up in the the theatre late in the afternoon and at least he'd had the foresight to have all his important stuff in Winston already but he had to go back and pick up another load. And he said that I shouldn't wait up for him because there wasn't a bed in his room anyways, that was in Winston. So I told him that I'd see him tomorrow after Durak if I didn't see him sooner during the day, and then I put my portable telephone away and lay down in bed.

It took a while to get to sleep, though, 'cause it was noisy in the dorm with everyone still talking and being social, and I was also kind of eager about my new classes and seeing Aric tomorrow night.