Aries: The year will change like a woman in the dark like an angel inverting into the opposite of God and there are men who will not be able to help but break the skin of it with their feet, a metaphor an English major is already analyzing for a JP somewhere. You will think you see the shadow of someone crying on the inside of the moon. As if it is Dean’s Date already. Take your coat out of its hamper. The Indian summer will not come. – Cormac McCarthy

Pisces: The castle will stretch four stories in the air, the balustrades all lit with the army stars. You will see a man lean out of a starless window and behind him the air is bright with music from the acts who didn’t come to Lawnparties. Good music. You will want to know his name, but your friend will pull you by the hand and ask why you take so long to walk on the nights when the air gets cold, so instead you accompany her to the party. You will want to know his name for the rest of your time here, or at least if he’s in Triangle Club. In your younger and more vulnerable years, you will try to lie to yourself about the state of your family affairs and bicker Ivy. – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cancer: The topical social illness of the month is about to devastate your family. – Jodi Picoult

Virgo: You will go to Ivy with a friend. The bouncer at the door will look at you strangely but let you enter. Everything will be strange these days. The war changed things. But you won’t think about that now. Someone hands you a glass half-full of shitty Street beer. You will look at your friend with a forgettable name. “Women,” you will say, and drink. “Women,” he will respond, nodding. – Ernest Hemingway

Libra: “This reminds me of my singular distinguishing trait,” he will say. “The fact that I’ve memorized every seventeenth-century typesetter’s birthday and use it to symbolically explain everything in my life.” So he’s a Tower boy, but that’s alright. You will break into St. Anthony’s pregames and the roof of Little, and the entire time he will be waiting for that one sentence that will describe you in terms of the universe. – John Green

Aquarius: “Hope you can carve a bow,” your precept partner will begin. – Suzanne Collins

Leo: “There are no grades on this world,” your alien guide will say, leading you out of your rapidly disintegrating ship and into the world you have been assigned to for the next four years. The city is a castle, lousy with dorms, and the church has migrated to the edge over the years. You will think your guide looks like a B student. You will adjust to MAE life hard. – Ursula K. LeGuin

Taurus: We won’t talk about the rules no one understands. Make a small paper bird and call it an expression of love, then crush it in your hands. The curtain ripples against the sky, framing something you think you should run to but won’t. You will never call your mother. Besides, the career fair is soon and you can’t be late. – Kazuo Ishiguro

Libra: Babies are not mailed to people, and this was one of the things you were shocked to learn in Physics for Future Leaders. You will cut class with a reflexive guilt to go to Petey Green, and afterwards dip your toes in the lake where the rowers sail past. You will think you could almost catch one of the fish with your bare hands, slow green scales sliding through the mass of light, and you will, because for reasons you’ll never understand, today the rules of your childhood stull apply. – Harper Lee

Sagittarius: “The Khaleesi is kind, but she is not forgiving,” Eisgruber will slowly say. – George R. R. Martin

Capricorn: The professor is never late nor early; he’s exactly on time, even when he shows up at your dorm room at 7 PM on a Thursday. There’s no way you will go abroad to study. You got in here by playing the cello for eight years and you and your sensible parents and your large and sensible and extremely large extended family don’t care for adventure. The professor will knock one more time. – J.R.R. Tolkein

Gemini: You will hope to thoroughly unpack and explore – with all the true benefits of careful consideration such a nuanced phenomenon deservedly requires – the precise list of absolute and yet finite reasons why you’re always late to class. They have to do with the way women were treated in the text, which was interesting. – Writing Seminar Student