My First Day at Hogwarts

On my first day of college, I opened  my schedule and found out my first class took place in four different rooms. One of them was a Friday-only lab, so that was a small comfort. But how could I manage to be in three places at once? At least the room numbers were close to one another. Maybe these were adjacent rooms, with nice sliding walls, and finding one meant I’d find them all.

After wandering around the basement for a while, I located Room B092. I thought, “Well, this is it! I’m officially a college girl!” I held my head high, adjusted my backpack, and pushed open the door.

I’d expected people. The room held a chair, a table, a piano, three normal walls, and the back wall, which was curved. Curved, and moving.

I shut the door and considered my options. Either I was still in seventh grade and having one of those nightmares where you’re an adult and nothing makes sense. In that case, I should try and wake up. Or, I’d arrived at a place I’d dreamt of long before seventh grade.

BYU was Hogwarts.

If that were the case, I was so changing my major from English to Defense Against the Dark Arts.

I wandered around the corner and found another one of the rooms on my class list. This time, when I opened the door, I was assured that BYU was a Muggle school.

The main classroom was an auditorium. At the back, there were merry-go-round sections with additional seats on slowly rotating platforms. I understood now. For large lecture classes, B092 served as overflow for the auditorium. When it wasn’t needed, it could turn around and provide seating for a smaller class.

It seemed a lot less practical than a simple sliding wall, but I decided to roll with it. This was how college people went to class! I decided to show the room I wasn’t afraid by walking right over the moving section.

I kept my eyes up, as if I went to class like this every day and didn’t even notice the ground moving under my feet anymore. But the instant I set foot on the platform, it froze.

The guy at the control panel glared at me. “It doesn’t move when there’s people on it.”

“Oh. Okay.” I knew that, sure.

I sat down in one of the non-moving rows and avoided the merry-go-round seating for months. Next semester, I had a class in the smaller room behind the auditorium, and we had to sit around waiting before each class for our chairs to show up. I always wondered why they built this expensive rotating platform when they could’ve just built a wall of sliding panels.