New Beginnings

Vera had always imagined her first day of college would feel like the opening scene of a movie and in a way, it did. Just not the genre she expected.

It was Meher who’d convinced her to apply here. “Trust me, V,” he’d said, dragging her through the admission process with the same stubbornness he used to drag her into his half-baked schemes. “Engineering, together. We’ll survive it side by side.” And Vera, who had never been able to say no to him, had signed up without a second thought.

She hadn’t expected, though, that “together” would only last until the auditorium doors split them apart.

Her course smaller, oddly specific, the kind nobody quite knew what to do with when she mentioned it had been seated in a completely different hall for induction. Meher’s course, packed with a hundred-plus students, filled the main auditorium with noise and energy. Vera’s was tucked away in a smaller room down the corridor, with maybe thirty students who all seemed to already know each other, clustered in little groups like they’d been friends in a past life.

She sat alone for the first twenty minutes, phone in hand, texting Meher updates he barely responded to because he was too busy, as she’d later find out, making “friends” of his own.

By lunch, Vera had drifted back toward Meher’s group out of sheer habit. It was easier to be the extra person in a group she semi-knew than a stranger in a room full of people who already had their circles drawn. Meher introduced her around “this is Vera, we’ve been friends since forever” and for a while, it worked. She laughed at jokes she didn’t fully understand, learned three new names she’d forget by evening, and felt, if not at home, at least not alone.

Then Meher leaned over, dropping his voice like he was about to share government secrets. “Okay, that girl. The one in the blue kurti. Get her number for me.”

Vera blinked. “We just met her ten minutes ago.”

“So?” He shrugged like that was irrelevant. “You’re good at this stuff. Just talk to her, mention me, casually. You know.”

This was not new. Meher had been doing this since eleventh grade pointing out a girl, expecting Vera to play matchmaker, fully convinced that between his family’s money and his admittedly decent face, every girl he looked twice at was one conversation away from falling for him. What made it worse was that he never seemed to actually like any of them for more than a week. It was a game to him. Vera had stopped questioning it a long time ago and just learned to dodge the requests, but on a day when she was already feeling like a guest in someone else’s friend group, his whispered demands felt heavier than usual.

“Ask her yourself,” she muttered, and turned back to her lunch, ignoring the way he sighed dramatically beside her like she’d personally ruined his love life.

It set the tone for most of induction week.

Each day brought a new set of clubs and committees set up on tables across the lawn — music, dance, literary, robotics, a dozen others all vying for fresh recruits with flyers and forced enthusiasm. Vera walked past the dance committee table on day two and stopped, just for a second, watching a senior demonstrate a quick footwork combo to a small, delighted crowd. Something in her chest lifted.

She used to dance. Not competitively, nothing serious, just in her room with the door locked, in front of a mirror that never judged her. The idea of doing it here, in front of actual people, with actual eyes on her...

She kept walking.

Maybe next semester, she told herself, the same lie she’d tell herself a dozen more times before the week was out. By the time induction ended, her name was on zero committee lists. She’d tell herself it was because she was still settling in, still finding her footing, still too new to commit to anything. The truth, the one she didn’t say out loud even to herself, was simpler and harder to admit: she was scared. Scared of being seen, of being bad at something in front of strangers, of standing out in a place where she still felt like she was borrowing someone else’s spot.

So she stayed in the audience. She clapped for other people’s courage instead of finding her own.

It was on the third day, during a mind-numbingly long orientation lecture about library timings and academic integrity, that Vera finally found her.

She’d been separated from Meher’s group for this session course-wise seating, apparently, was non-negotiable and found herself wedged into a row of her own classmates for the first time all week. The girl next to her had been scribbling something in the margin of her notebook, not notes, but a small, surprisingly detailed doodle of the speaker at the podium, complete with an exaggerated frown and stick-figure arms crossed.

Vera laughed before she could stop herself.

The girl glanced over, caught red-handed, and instead of looking embarrassed, grinned like she’d been waiting for someone to notice. “He’s been saying ‘attendance is mandatory’ for eleven minutes straight. I’m keeping count.”

“Twelve now,” Vera whispered back, glancing at the podium.

“I’m Anika,” the girl said, sticking out a pen instead of a hand because both of theirs were full. “Please tell me you’re in this course too and not just visiting to suffer with me.”

“Same course,” Vera said. “Vera.”

“Oh thank god,” Anika breathed, dramatically slumping in her chair. “I’ve been sitting here for three days thinking I was the only person in our batch who didn’t already have a friend group. I was two minutes away from adopting a random senior.”

They talked through the rest of the lecture in hushed whispers, notebook margins slowly filling with commentary instead of notes, and when the session finally ended, neither of them moved to leave. They sat there another twenty minutes, trading class schedules and hometowns and the kind of nervous, over-eager honesty two strangers only share when they’re both quietly relieved to have found someone.

Vera didn’t know it yet wouldn’t know it for a long, long time that the girl doodling stick figures beside her would become the one constant across the next four years. Through everything that was coming. Through every version of herself she hadn’t met yet.

That evening, walking back to her hostel with Anika’s number saved under a laughing emoji, Vera felt lighter than she had all week. Meher texted her twice asking about blue-kurti-girl. She ignored both.

She had no idea, that night, scrolling through the day’s photos and feeling something close to belonging that this was the calm before everything. That somewhere in the weeks to come, a name she hadn’t heard yet would walk into her life and rearrange it completely.

She just didn’t know it yet.