Chapter one
Picture this… the year after covid, the year after the hell we all endured being locked away in our homes for what felt like an eternity, a bright eyed and bushy tailed young me headed off to university to start my law degree. A version of me that in every way earned the title of being ‘the worst nineteen year old ever’ and let me list for you the reasons why;
I had never been to a club.
I had never been so drunk I have thrown up (maybe that shouldn’t be an aim but it feels like a rite of passage I should have had by now).
I’d never had sex.
And worst of all…
I’d never even kissed a guy!
In my defence I did lose a year of my life being locked away from the world in my tiny bedroom and away from all of the possible options I had out there to kiss, which I use to convince myself my situation is slightly less tragic. I blame films. I really do. I grew up with expectations of heart-fluttering kisses crossing my screen every five minutes where the guy would say the most perfect line of ‘I’m yours always and forever’ which would just make the girl melt (as if the guy’s piercing blue eyes hadn’t already achieved that aim). But no, that is not reality. No in reality the closest thing to Romeo that I have ever come across is being wolf-whistled at in the street. Romance is officially dead and I seem to be the last person in the world to have received the memo. So there I sat, somewhat naively I’ll admit, waiting day after day for Prince Charming to walk through the door and sweep me off my feet before taking me in a passionate embrace but he never did. So hence no kissing for me.
So I do know that sounds like an excuse that ugly girls would probably make but it really isn’t. The truth is I’ve had guys hit on me, tell me I’m beautiful and I have had some who have tried to kiss me (some with a large degree of intention) but I always pull away. Maybe it’s that I get in my head because honestly there is nothing wrong with some of the guys that have wanted to kiss me but in my head ‘nothing’s wrong with them’ has just never been good enough. Anyway returning to the not ugly point I’m guessing you’d like slightly more of a description than what I have given you so far so here you go, I am… average. Probably a six but on a good day I can push it to a seven, I will probably never go over an eight though and I’m fine with that (is it bad that I just gave myself a rating out of 10? I feel like it is but I’m choosing to ignore that point). I may not be skinny but I’m slim and I may not be insanely hot but on some days I do feel genuinely pretty and that’s good enough for me. Well I say good enough for me, at that point it honestly wasn’t and still even now I have major insecurity issues but hey who doesn’t. There is always going to be something, my thighs are too fat, my arms jiggle, my fingers aren’t quite slim enough and I’m sure there are many, many more things that are wrong with me in the same way I am sure that every girl who looks in the mirror will be sure to find at least one flaw in her otherwise stunning beauty.
Okay so now that you know just about every depressing fact about my life including the fact that I spend a large proportion of it simply waiting for it to begin why don’t we get to the good stuff (I’m not a complete pessimist I promise). For starters, I have the best family in the world. I’m not naive enough to think that they are perfect or even to pretend that we are happy all of the time but I honestly could not imagine any version of my life where they aren’t in it. They got me through the last year for starters where truth be told I was depressed for most of it, but who wouldn’t be after spending a year locked away in their bedroom after covid obliterated their travel plans to backpack across Asia. And the second great thing about my life is that I am about to finally go to university. Maybe I am a tiny bit/insanely terrified but the time finally came to pack up the car and drive for hours to my new home. My new home that still sounds weird even now. Despite my panicking there was still excitement dancing behind my eyes, it was a new adventure, a new start, a new place where I might finally have the opportunity to feel like I belonged. I might even be lucky enough to find somewhere where I genuinely feel like I fit and wouldn’t that be something, don’t get me wrong I love my home but there has always been this gnawing feeling at me like something isn’t quite right with me being there, like it’s not the place I was supposed to be in forever and university is my chance to escape and make a play for freedom.
To be honest my move in day was a bit of a blur, I remember my heart pounding in my chest, sounding like a ticking time-bomb as we pulled up outside the university accommodation, being surrounded by people who looked just like me (terrified to be leaving their parents) as my dad made the ten trips from the car to my university room carrying all my stuff while my mum (still mothering me as always) decided to make my bed for me. I remember the sweltering heat belting down on me as we unpacked, which was crazy because I moved in September. I remember crying in the food court where we went to grab lunch after we had unpacked when my father refused to stop talking about how it would be a month until they saw me again despite the obvious tears that were furiously welling up in my eyes (a month was a long time to imagine life without my family seeing as the most I’d ever gone up to that point was just a single week). I also remember crying again later that day when we took the final big step of moving day and my parents said their goodbyes and left. I say I cried, I think saying I sobbed for a good ten minutes is a more accurate sentiment but after talking to my flat mates I gathered that everyone had done pretty much the exact same thing (even if the guys refused to admit it). I remember going to a welcome talk, which was the very first time I appreciated the size of my gigantic university in this lecture hall filled to the brim with students as far as the eye could see.
Besides all those memories I think the most important one was meeting my flat mates, all eleven of them, yes you heard me for a year of my life I was to live with eleven complete strangers but now that I have done it I wouldn’t have it any other way. But I am getting ahead of myself here so let’s quickly reverse. Right, so meeting my flat mates, despite what I had heard/read in the long, long, long list of YouTube videos and articles on the matter of what the experience would be like mine was completely different, it was a lot more chilled than perhaps I was expecting. I simply walked in the kitchen, water bottle in hand (pretending to fill it up in the kitchen so that I had an excuse to go in) and there a few of them were, sitting on the oddly positioned sofas that were laid out in the kitchen. Ava and Maddie, curled up on the couch chatting away about something or other so I shuffled up on the black leather sofa across from them and joined in the conversation. Maddie was the one I noticed first, I had said ’hi’ to her in the corridor earlier on one of my many ventures out to the car. She was pretty, her short brown hair perfectly encompassing her face and accentuating its features. Sat besides her on the left was Ava, her hair was a slightly darker brown than Maddie’s and was much longer, she clutched her legs in her arms in an attempt to hide the fact that she had clearly been balling her eyes out for most of the afternoon since she had been abandoned to this new world we were all entering together. Honestly I have no clue what we talked about, something of nothing probably but we were talking and getting on so that was enough. The more we talked the more the others began to filter in, one by one under the pretence of filling up water bottles to join in the conversation on the two tiny leather sofas in the kitchen.
There were twelve of us. Twelve strangers all thrown together who were now suddenly living together in this one flat. Sure we were getting on fine now but what about in a weeks’ time? Would the facade of niceness have fallen by then so that we will all hate each other? Would Cora’s ability to go hyper at any moment begin to grate on my nerves? Would Sophia’s unusual tendency to walk out of conversations mid-way through begin to drive me insane? Now I don’t know about anyone else but I am the kind of person who overthinks everything and will run through the worst case scenario of any and every situation, so despite my efforts to take a relaxed approach to this meeting my mind was working overtime running a thousand miles an hour until he finally snapped me out of it. It was time to eat and on my move-in day they had sent older students to collect the freshers to take them for their meal (yes treating us like children, but honestly at this point I was glad of the help because I was 100% guaranteed to get lost at some point seeing as following directions is not exactly my strong suit). In he strolled with that cheesy smile of his that could just make any anxiety I had melt away along with my ability to communicate which melted out of me into a pile of mess on the floor. Flashing those teeth of his while running his fingers through his light brown shaggy hair, he was cute, but the fact that his face suggested he didn’t know it only served to make him even cuter. This was going to be a problem and I knew it. Only I could develop a slight crush on a guy having been at university for exactly four hours. I’ll say that again just to reiterate how stupid I was, I had been at university for four hours, and honestly most of that time had been spent alone with my parents unpacking boxes in my room. His name was Jack and after a brief walk to the college cafeteria, Jack and Logan (the other older student who had been instructed to guide us around) left us to further bond as a flat.
“Well this food is disgusting” Grace offered in order to break the tension as she chewed down on what had to be one of the worst burgers in all of human history. Honestly it would have been cruel to feed that food even to your most disliked dog. Grace was by far one of the most confident people I had ever met, don’t get me wrong she was probably just as nervous as the rest of us but she never for a moment let it show as she eased from one conversation with strangers to the next.
“I can’t eat this” Kate insisted, turning her nose up at her food while she flung her long blonde hair over her shoulder and headed directly for the black bin that was positioned inches away from the long picnic bench on which they all sat.
“Its free food, you never throw away free food” Bella joked, stuffing her face with the vile burger. It may have been disgusting but we all inhaled it, we were starving and there was no way in hell any of us were being the first ones to use the kitchen that night. We were in an awkward stage, all we had was each other and we didn’t even really know each other at all. It was intense to say the least and even looking back at it now it is still hard to believe that we made it through that stage to get to the hypothetical end of the rainbow further down the line.
After the deliciousness that was our free food the first of the freshers events began. A drink at a university bar. I remember getting all dressed up in a cute dress to visit a place that I have now literally been to in joggers but you know nothing at that point and everyone expects it from you anyway. We got there around eight and after exactly one drink (a drink that we had to queue up for an hour for by the way to collect) we left. The entire event was awkward and weird with everyone just attempting to make polite conversation with each other. Although that night kind of turned out to be okay, it was the last night that any of us would have before freshers flu practically killed us (it got so bad at one point that we were all sat around the kitchen table just taking turns to cough, we were literally living corpses and that isn’t even dramatic). That night there were seven of us all sitting in the kitchen just gossiping and getting to know each other, getting to know the strangers who we would be living with for a year of our lives. The basic questions were talked through first, where everyone was from? What everyone was studying? Nothing too deep but the conversation was pleasant enough and I think after that night we all felt a little better about not being completely alone.
