August, 1977

If you roll dress shirts before packing them in the one suitcase you're taking to college they come out a little less wrinkled than if you fold them. 
The Complete and Total Loser discovers this on his own on a late August night in 1977, the day before he takes the second plane trip of his life, 400 miles to Ohio, where he'll spend four years in college, wearing the ten shirts he's rolling now for all them. (A poor dresser, he can only imagine adhering to the dress code of his all boys prep school, sans necktie.)
The packing goes well, which surprises the Loser, an inexperienced traveler who has never really lived away from home. He's spent weeks, cumulatively, in hospitals for operations on his crippled leg, but nothing else save one or two stays with friends, none longer than a few days.

College.

He's calmer than he thought he'd be, perhaps because the social milieu he'll enter in less than 24 hours will be so alien to him that whatever may result is beyond his ken.
As of this night the Loser has spent, since ninth grade, no longer than three hours total in the company of girls. He has never been to a party, including his prom. He'll go from interacting with girls when he and they were children to sharing dormitories, eating facilities, and classrooms with young women. An introvert with pronounced body issues, the Loser has no idea how he'll react to this. 
His parents accompanied him to the airport and saw him, their physically and emotionally defective youngest child, off as he boarded. His mother wore a skirt. The Loser remembers ignoring her tears, the little man.
Right now the Loser is aware of the weirdness of writing about himself while his primary thoughts are of her.