<div class="floatleft">(http://www.palzoo.net/file/pic/user/JoshHartnett.jpg)</div>Tony Daniels was nearing the end of his rope. He sighed a bit and pulled the hood of his hoodie up and over his head, tugging on the drawstrings to tighten it around his face, to shield himself from the cold autumn Chicago wind. His freshman year at Northwestern, and he was one step away from giving up, and he'd barely been at the school two months. It wasn't as though Tony was a bad student - far from it, as he was getting straight A's in all of his classes. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that he really didn't know anyone. He glanced across the quad, the autumn leaves blowing across it, as the wind from the lake blew through the campus. He shivered, huddling up a little bit in his hoodie. He had to head off campus to go see his sister, who'd been on campus three years longer than he had. She'd managed to find time to get both a social life and her school work together, so maybe she'd have some advice for him. He glanced back at the ten-story dorm building he'd just walked out of, and could see a couple of students partying up on the second floor. His dorm was coed, alternating floors, so it wasn't uncommon to see boys and girls mingling in any given window. It looked like they had beers in their hands, too, which wasn't supposed to happen on campus, but hell, it's not like anyone ever really called campus police. He'd tried once, a few weeks into the semester, and the campus police had told him they'd 'get right on that.' He'd never seen them, of course.<br/><br/>He had a dorm room to himself, not by request, but attendance was down a little this year, so some of the rooms just had one student in, so there wouldn't be empty rooms on any of the floors. The housing administration also got to charge those single tennants more to keep their income up. It was a bullshit scheme, that they tried to soften by telling him that he didn't have to worry about roommates bringing home girls in the middle of the night and waking him up. He still got that from the neighbors, considering the walls weren't all that thick, and it meant he really didn't have anyone to talk to regularly. And it wasn't like he was bringing people home. He'd tried making friends in a few of his classes, but he was terrible at approaching people, and half the time he talked himself out of even saying hello. Most of his human interaction this semester had been restricted to talking briefly with his Residence Administrator (who came by, like, once a month, to make sure he wasn't dead), a couple of students he'd been given group projects to work on with (who mostly just met up, did the work and then took off) and his sister. He'd tried asking the pretty asian girl who worked at the desk on the ground floor of his building out, and she'd sized him up quick and said she was seeing someone, although his gut told him she was lying. He'd also tried asking the redheaded exchange student from Ireland who lived a few floors down to a movie, and she had, believe it or not, given him the 'washing my hair' excuse. He was starting to feel like the campus leper.<br/><br/>He turned away from the building in time to see the cheerleading team jog by in their sweatpants and sweatshirts, every color and flavor of girl bouncing by as they jogged past him, nearly knocking him down as they raced right past him, never giving him a second glance. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, hispanics, asians, blacks, even a native american girl. It was like a parade of temptation that he wasn't allowed to so much as say hi to. He was going to go out of his mind at this point. "Hey, nerd," a gruff voice from behind him said, "stop staring before they have me come kick your ass." A junior in a letter jacket gave Tony a shove as he pushed past him, almost knocking him down. "Dweeb." It was just like the worst parts of high school all over again, except that in high school, the freaks and geeks found a way to bond together, because it was easy to identify each other. Here in college, though, they all mostly kept their heads down and didn't interact with each other. It was as if they just wanted to get through it. So they didn't really mix with him.<br/><br/>Ten minutes later, he was at his sister's loft apartment off campus, banging on her door with his fist, trying not to break down and cry. "C'mon sis, open up," he sighed, "it's Tony. I called and told you I was going to come over, so open the fucking door." He tugged down his hoodie, letting his shaggy brown hair out from under it, unzipping his leather jacket. He leaned against the door for a minute or so until he felt the heavy steel start to shift as the bolt lock behind it was undone, opening up for him.