After being gone for a number of hours yesterday, I arrived back at my room around 7:30 PM. Apparently I’d had visitors while I was out, for my roommate left a short note for me on my desk:

Nick came to see you.
So did someone else, but didn’t recognize her and she didn’t leave her name.
She was a blonde, looked young.

Naturally I was intrigued, for several reasons. One, I am always curious when someone tries to contact me, is unable to do so, and doesn’t leave any information. I have Caller ID at school, and many times, people call from a phone number I do not recognize, but do not leave a name and/or message on my voicemail, and I have to track them down. I like knowing who is trying to contact me.

Secondly, the “blonde, looked young” part got my attention. Why would a young blonde girl be in my room? That never happened during high school, when I wanted it to, so why should it happen now? My roommate was watching a movie (and talking to his girlfriend, of course), so I said, “Mike, when you say ‘young’, how young are we talking here?” He said, “Probably about fourteen, I’d say.” Now that really got me wondering, because I don’t know too many (if any) fourteen-year-old blonde girls, and none that knew where I live on campus or would bother coming to my room to visit me.

My first conclusion was that my friend Anna must’ve stopped by to say hello, so I called her up. No dice—she said she hadn’t stopped by. That really threw me off. What other blonde girls do I know?

Then I remembered that my friend Amanda had stopped by the campus for the weekend. She’s leaving for Australia on February 5 and had returned to Bucknell for a brief visit before her trip. I thought she must’ve already left, but I could only conclude that she had stopped by to say hello.

There was the small issue that Amanda is twenty-one, not fourteen, but I figured I could chalk that up to bad guesstimating on my roommate’s part.

Unfortunately, I had no way to get in contact with Amanda, but with the help of a friend of hers, I managed to track her down. As it turned out, she had, in fact, stopped by. She was the mysterious fourteen-year-old blonde girl. Only she wasn’t fourteen. But that’s okay. (Probably better, in fact; it would just be awkward having fourteen-year-old girls coming to my room.) Evidently she has had something similar to his happen before, because she was less than ecstatic at being described as fourteen. I, of course, saw more humor in it than she did.

Anyway, I was quite glad to see her before she left for the Land Down Under, seeing as how it took some clever detective work to find her, given that false lead. Life at Bucknell will certainly be dull without her around, but she’ll no doubt have tons of fun (not too much fun, I hope), and come back from Australia with plenty of exciting new stories to tell. Ah, the joys of traveling abroad—even if I am doing it vicariously.