# Chapter 13: University of Alabama
College arrived with the particular chaos of eighteen year olds discovering they could make their own decisions.
Forrest got his football scholarship exactly as Tim knew he would. The four of them ended up at the University of Alabama together — Forrest on scholarship, Tim and Alex on academic merit, Jenny on a partial arts grant that Alex had quietly helped her put together junior year by finding the application and sitting with her until it was done.
Tuscaloosa was different from Greenbow in every way that mattered.
Bigger. Louder. Full of people who had never had to think carefully about anything and were discovering that college was the place where that caught up with you.
Tim found it manageable.
Alex found it interesting.
Jenny found it overwhelming at first and then, slowly, something else.
Forrest found it straightforwardly wonderful and played football with the same uncomplicated commitment he brought to everything.
---
Their first week Tim and Alex walked the campus together mapping it the way Tim mapped every new environment — exits, patterns, people worth knowing, people worth avoiding.
"It's loud" Alex said.
"It'll settle" Tim said.
"Jenny's struggling."
"I know. Give her two weeks."
Alex looked at him.
"Two weeks?"
"She's never been somewhere nobody knows her history" Tim said. "That takes some adjusting to."
Alex thought about it.
"Fair" she said.
She gave Jenny ten days before she found her sitting alone in the arts building at eleven at night working on something and sat down beside her without being asked and stayed until midnight.
Jenny looked up when Alex finally stood to leave.
"You didn't have to stay" Jenny said.
"I know" Alex said.
Jenny looked back at her work.
"Two more minutes?" she said.
"Sure" Alex said and sat back down.
---
Tim's roommate was a boy from Mobile named Davis who had strong opinions about football and very little else and was therefore one of the easiest people Tim had ever shared a space with.
Davis noticed Tim's face on day one and spent approximately forty eight hours working up to asking about it.
"Can I ask you something" Davis said on day three.
"Sure."
"Your face—"
"Yeah."
"It's not—"
"I know."
Davis nodded slowly.
"It's kind of intense though."
"I've been told."
"Like in a good way mostly."
"Davis" Tim said. "Do you want to ask me something or not."
Davis looked at him.
"No I think I covered it" he said.
Tim went back to his book.
---
Forrest was exceptional on the field.
Tim went to the games when he could and watched with the quiet satisfaction of someone who already knew the outcome without knowing every detail. Forrest ran the way he did everything — completely, without self consciousness, with total commitment to the immediate thing in front of him.
The crowds loved him.
Forrest was mildly puzzled by the crowds but accepted their enthusiasm the way he accepted most things.
After one game Tim found him outside the locker room still in his uniform looking at the stadium with the thoughtful expression he got sometimes.
"You okay?" Tim said.
"I was thinking" Forrest said. "About mama."
"What about her?"
"She always said life is like a box of chocolates." Forrest paused. "I think maybe college is like that too."
Tim looked at him.
"Yeah Forrest" he said. "I think you're right."
Forrest nodded seriously.
"You want to get dinner?" he said.
"Sure" Tim said.
They got dinner.
*TBC*
---
# Chapter 14: What College Does
The second year was different from the first.
First year everyone was finding their feet. Second year people had found them and started making choices from that position and some of those choices were not good ones.
Tim watched the campus shift around him with the attention of someone who had spent years reading environments and knew what early warning signs looked like.
Jenny was the one he watched most carefully.
Not because she was doing badly. She wasn't — her art was getting genuinely good, she had friends Tim approved of, she was eating and sleeping and laughing with regularity. But there was something in the air around the campus in 1964 that Tim recognized from knowing the shape of this story.
Things were changing in the country.
The civil rights movement was pressing against everything. The war was getting louder in the background. The particular restlessness of a generation that had decided things needed to be different was moving through the university like weather coming in.
Jenny felt it.
Tim had known she would.
---
He found her at a rally on the quad one afternoon in October.
She was standing at the edge of the crowd listening to someone speak with the focused attention of a person encountering an idea that was reorganizing things inside them.
Tim stood beside her.
"Hey" she said without looking at him.
"Hey."
They listened together for a while.
"It's true" Jenny said quietly. "What he's saying."
"Most of it" Tim said.
Jenny looked at him.
"You don't agree?"
"I agree with the what" Tim said. "I just watch the how carefully."
Jenny turned that over.
"Alex says that too" she said. "That you always watch the how."
"Alex is right."
Jenny looked back at the speaker.
"I want to do something" she said. "I want it to mean something that I was here."
Tim looked at her.
This was the fork in the road. Not a dramatic one. Not a single moment. Just the beginning of the direction things went.
In the original story Jenny went looking for meaning in places that cost her everything.
Tim chose his next words carefully.
"It will mean something" he said. "The question is what you're willing to pay for it."
Jenny looked at him sharply.
"What does that mean?"
"It means the cause is real" Tim said. "And there are ways to serve it that build you up and ways that take everything you have." He paused. "You get to choose which kind of person you want to be in it."
Jenny was quiet for a long time.
"How do you always know things?" she said.
"I've been around" Tim said.
Jenny almost smiled.
"You're eighteen" she said.
"Old soul" Tim said.
Jenny looked at the rally. Back at him.
"Okay" she said slowly. "So what's the right how?"
Tim looked at her art bag over her shoulder.
"You're an artist" he said. "You always were. Use that."
---
Alex found out about the conversation that evening.
She sat across from Tim in the dining hall and looked at him with the evaluating expression she'd been giving him since before either of them could talk.
"Jenny told me what you said" Alex said.
"Okay."
"It was good."
"Thanks."
"Don't let it go to your head."
Tim ate his dinner.
"She's going to be okay" he said.
"I know" Alex said. "I've known for a while." She paused. "Since the roof actually."
Tim looked at her.
"Senior year" Alex said. "When she said she wanted to go everywhere. She said it like someone going toward something." She pushed food around her plate. "That's when I knew."
Tim nodded.
They ate in comfortable silence for a while.
"Three more years" Alex said.
"Then what."
She looked at him with those eyes that had always seen him clearly regardless of what face either of them was wearing.
"Then we figure out what this world needs from us next" she said.
*TBC*
---
# Chapter 15: Graduation
They graduated on a Thursday in May.
The ceremony was long and the sun was hot and Forrest fell asleep briefly during the commencement address and woke up when Tim elbowed him without missing a beat.
Afterward they stood on the lawn in their caps and gowns while someone's mother took photographs and Tim looked at the four of them assembled there and thought about a dirt road in Alabama twelve years ago and two people walking toward a farmhouse with nothing but memories and powers and the knowledge of how things were supposed to go.
Things had gone differently.
Not completely differently. Forrest was still Forrest — the same clear eyes, the same complete commitment to whatever was immediately in front of him, the same quality of being entirely himself without apology or effort. The world would still find him remarkable for it.
But Jenny was different.
Not unrecognizable. Still Jenny in every way that counted — still the particular quality of attention she brought to things, still the way she moved, still the laugh that Alex had coaxed back into regular use years ago.
But the damage that should have accumulated hadn't.
She was whole in a way she hadn't been in the original story and wouldn't have been without the last twelve years and Tim looked at her standing in the May sunshine laughing at something Alex had said and felt something settle in his chest that he suspected might be permanent.
---
Mrs. Gump had driven up for the ceremony.
She stood with them on the lawn afterward and looked at the four of them with the expression of a woman who had assessed a situation correctly a long time ago and was satisfied with how it had developed.
She looked at Tim.
"You're going to be alright" she said. Not to all of them. Specifically to Tim, in the particular way of people who say things that mean more than the words.
"Yes ma'am" Tim said.
She patted his arm once and went to find Forrest who had gotten separated from the group by approximately forty people who wanted to talk to him about football.
---
That evening the four of them sat on the steps of the building where they'd had their first shared class four years ago and watched the campus empty out around them.
Forrest had an envelope in his hands.
"I got a letter" he said.
Tim knew what letter.
"What does it say?" Jenny said.
Forrest read it carefully with the focused attention he gave to written things.
"It says I've been drafted" he said.
The word landed on the steps between them.
Jenny looked at Tim.
Tim looked at the envelope.
He'd known this was coming. Had known it the same way he'd known about the football scholarship and the rally on the quad and every other thing that the shape of this story contained.
He'd also known for four years what he was going to do about it.
He looked at Forrest.
"You're not going alone" Tim said.
Forrest looked at him with those clear eyes.
"You don't have to do that" Forrest said.
"I know" Tim said. "I'm doing it anyway."
Alex looked at Tim across the steps. He met her eyes.
She nodded once.
*I know* those eyes said. *I knew you would.*
Jenny was very still.
"Come back" she said quietly. Not to Tim specifically. To both of them. To the evening. To whatever was listening.
Forrest put his hand over hers.
"I will" he said with complete certainty. Because Forrest Gump said things like that and meant them and was usually right.
Tim looked at the campus one last time in the fading light.
One chapter closing.
Another beginning.
*TBC*