BRIANI
MARCH 14, 2020
Bin Drama
Briani stood in the line of students at Hartley Hall, sweating in her oversized button-down shirt and jeans. Her flight was first thing tomorrow, and her room was only half-packed.
But this wasn’t just anxiety sweat; this was four-alarm-fire sweat. Not because of the invisible and highly contagious virus sweeping the city. No, Briani was sweating because she couldn’t find her moving bin.
The World Health Organization had just declared Covid-19 a pandemic. As a result, colleges across the country were shuttering their campuses and kicking out their students. Including Briani.
But the moving bin, which she needed to physically remove her belongings from her dorm room, was only free for the first two hours. Return your bin late, and you had to pay Columbia Housing $70 a day. Lose your bin, and you had to pay them $350.
Briani did not have $350.
Another student might think, This sucks, but worst case, I’ll ask my parents for help.
Briani didn’t know if her parents could spare $350. But it didn’t matter. She would never ask them for that kind of money.
She reached the front of the line. “Hi,” she said to the lady from Residential Life. “I’m sorry, but I misplaced my bin.”
Was it even worth explaining that it wasn’t her fault? That in any other circumstance, Briani wouldn’t have left $350 worth of anything just sitting around? But she lived on the fifteenth floor of John Jay Hall—the only floor without an elevator. And at her meager 5'3", she couldn’t exactly pull a 120-gallon bin up the flight of stairs to her room, let alone get it back down again, piled with everything she owned. So she’d left the bin by the staircase on fourteen.
Only when she returned with her first load of boxes, the bin was gone.
The housing woman looked at the line of students behind Briani, eager to keep things moving. “If it’s signed out to you, then it’s on you,” she said.
SHIT! Briani ran back to her dorm. She was seriously freaking. She jumped on her floor’s group chat and put out an APB for the bin on Instagram.
Her friend Monroe was kind enough to rent her a second bin, because Briani still had to move out. Finally, hours later, she got everything out of the dorm. She looked at the pile: eleven boxes representing the six most momentous months of her life, unceremoniously sitting on the sidewalk. It was not the ending she’d imagined for her freshman year of college at Columbia University in the City of New York.
Briani’s aunt Titi Jackie was there, wearing a mask. She was too afraid to enter the building and had been sitting outside for more than an hour. Together, they pushed the bin to the street and called an Uber. Briani counted herself lucky; Titi Jackie lived in Washington Heights, many blocks north of campus. She’d be storing her niece’s things for however long school was closed.
But when they packed the Uber, the car only had room for a single passenger. “I love you Titi, but take this. Bye-bye!” Briani gave her aunt a hug. She felt terrible, sending Titi Jackie away in the car by herself. But what could she do? They weren’t going to pay for two Ubers. And anyway, she still needed to find the missing bin.
Briani checked her phone. Someone said they’d seen a bin over on frat row, so she ran over. Nothing. Her phone was about to die. She was frustrated, upset, about to lose her mind. She rushed back to her dorm.
Her side of room 1513 was barren, like she’d never even lived there.
She plugged in her phone, sat down at her desk. For once it wasn’t a mess of books and highlighters and mugs of cold tea.
Someone knocked on the door. It was a kid from her floor, short, always quiet, nobody she knew well.
“Hey,” he said. “I heard you were looking for your bin?”
Briani nodded, hopeful.
“I took it to help somebody. I didn’t know it was checked out. I can return it when I’m finished. I’m so sorry.”
Relief swept through her. God bless. She wasn’t out a small fortune.
* * *
It was past midnight, and she needed to be up before dawn, so she pulled on her comfy plane clothes: baggy overalls and her baby-blue Columbia University sweatshirt. Her sheets and blanket were packed, so she curled up, her cheek pressed to the bare mattress.
But she couldn’t sleep. The room was too quiet, like she could feel the campus slowly draining of life. She’d worked so hard to get here. And not just her but her family.
Her father had trekked across the Mexican border at fourteen.
Her mother had left the Dominican Republic to forge a new life in America.
They’d poured their sweat into the family restaurant.
Her mother had waylaid her own college dreams to provide for the family.
Briani had spent years studying and building her résumé, praying and serving the community, pulling her weight with after-school and weekend jobs—all to make college possible.
When Columbia accepted her, her joy had been the purest kind.
Now, as she lay there, Briani’s relief turned to anger. Because she was getting kicked out of school, obviously. But also because of that stupid moving bin. Because every single bin was signed out to a specific person. The kid from her floor knew it, and he took hers anyway.
He hadn’t thought for a second about the panic he’d caused her. Or what would have happened had he lost her bin and left her on the hook for $350. It had taken months, but she’d finally found a home here—no, built a home here. And yet even in leaving, she was reminded of the gulf between herself and so many other students. They all lived on the same campus, but they didn’t live in the same world.
Now Briani was being thrown back into that world, everything upended. And for how long?
Nobody knew.
Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Miller