Sept 1, 1892 - Gryffindor Common Room, Boys Dorm A
Callum wasn’t sure how he was still standing. With all of the excitement and chaos of today, what with saying goodbye to his parents at the station, to meeting all these new people, then being sorted and following the crowd to the common room? It had been one crazy long day and one that Callum needed some time to properly process and digest. He’d been assigned a dorm and as he climbed up into the appropriate space, he noted his trunk and things were already there. Thank goodness; there was only so long Callum could bear to be separated from his notebook and this had already been much too long. Popping open the trunk and rummaging messily around in it, the redhead pulled out a brown leather-bound notebook. It was fat from all the ink lining the pages inside and a scrawny string wrapped around it tethered the thing closed. Callum breathed out a small breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and made to sit on his bed to flip the book open. It was intact. The familiar feeling of the soft pages against his perpetually inky fingertips calmed Callum and the redhead found himself feeling a touch less overwhelmed already. He would scribble something tonight; not a log of the day’s events, just… some prose or funny little poetic sentences. It helped unclog his heart of its weights and didn’t reveal too much of his reality in a way that made the redhead uncomfortable.
As his other dorm mates started to make their way into the room, Callum snapped the notebook shut and wrapped the string back around it. He tucked the notebook under his pillow and went to unpack the rest of his things. He’d just lifted a homemade satchel of treats the cook had packed him, by mama’s direction likely, when none other than Maxwell Beck came trodding into their small dorm. “Oh,” Callum heard himself say. “It’s you.”