My mother didn’t share the sentiment. “You’d better be careful,” she said to me, “walking along here at night. Look, there’s no barrier there. You could easily fall in.”
“Fall in?” I rolled my eyes. “Mam, seriously.”
“I am serious. I’ve seen you fall in our front door after a night out.”
There were eight accommodation blocks for St. John’s undergrads, modern glass and steel structures dotted together in manicured grounds toward the south end of the campus. Although Liz and I ended up in different ones, they were side by side. Block A and Block B.
We were greeted by student helpers in St. John’s T-shirts who checked us off lists and bestowed upon us our electronic keys. We let our fathers carry our stuff up into our new rooms and our mothers make up our beds with new linen, something we probably wouldn’t do in a few months’ time after a single gender studies module convinced us we knew more about the world than our parents had learned from decades of living in it. My mother also insisted on stuffing three bags of groceries into the fridge while my father walked the whole apartment, flicking every switch and making me promise that I’d tell someone about the two dud light bulbs he discovered on his rounds. I posed for pictures (me in my new room, me in my new kitchen, me and Mam on my new couch), waited while Mam had a little cry about her only child going off to college (as if this, after eighteen years, was somehow coming as a complete surprise) and then I shooed them out as quickly as I could.
As the door shut behind them and the apartment fell completely quiet and still, I felt a tremor of anxiety.
I was all on my own now.
In college.
In Dublin.
Thank God Liz was just next door.
She came knocking not ten minutes later, having rushed her parents off as well.
“I think they’re going to get some dinner together,” she said. “On campus, my dad said.” She rolled her eyes. “Let’s hide in here until they’re gone.”
“You hungry?” I nodded at the fridge. “Mam stocked that before she left. Because, you know, they don’t have any shops here at all and there isn’t a subsidized cafeteria less than five minutes’ walk away where we can eat three meals a day on the cheap.”
Liz rolled her eyes again. “Let’s see what we got.”
I went into my room to unpack more stuff, leaving the door open so I could chat with Liz while I did.
“Any sign of your roommate yet?” I asked her.
“No. I hope it’s someone normal, though. You know what I was thinking? We could ask one of them to swap.”
“Is that allowed?” I didn’t want to start rule-breaking before classes had even begun.
“Oh, they won’t know,” Liz said dismissively.
“Yeah. I suppose … Well, we’ll see.”
The truth was I was secretly glad Liz and I had ended up in separate apartments. I wasn’t at first, because it jarred so much with the idea of us at St. John’s that I had replayed over and over in my head. And I was glad now that in this sea of strangeness, on this cliff edge of adventure, a familiar face was just next door.
But in between, I’d found myself a little excited at the thought of there being some distance between us. Liz was my best friend, but she was also prettier, louder, and more popular. I wasn’t quiet, but people seemed to think I was when she was around. I wasn’t shy, but somehow I felt myself acting that way whenever I went to new places with her. So I thought it might be nice to have the chance to meet new people for myself, by myself. To not, for once, come as part of a package where I always seemed to be the bonus material, never the main feature.
“Ali?” Liz called from the kitchen. “Lunch is served. Well, late lunch. Very late lunch.”
She’d found the crockery and cutlery that came supplied, and laid the table with it. From the food my mother had brought, she’d assembled delicious-looking ham and cheese baguettes. Also on offer were a bowl of chips, a tub of prepared mango chunks and cans of Coke.
Seeing the spread, I realized I was starving. We’d stopped for breakfast at motorway services that morning, but it was nearly four in the afternoon now.
We got out my new laptop, set it on the end of the table and put in a Lost DVD to entertain us while we ate.
“What do you want to do tonight?” Liz asked. “In Dublin.”
“We live here now,” I said. “Can you believe it?”
“And there’s nobody to tell us what time to be home.”
“So what’s the plan?”
Liz gave me a look like she was about to say something unpopular.
“What?” I asked. “Just say it.”
“You know what I really want to do?”
“What?”
“Even though this is our first night of freedom, and all that?”
“Go on …”
“I want to go get some greasy takeaway, bring it back here, and watch more Lost.”
I looked at her for a beat, then started laughing.
“That’s exactly what I want to do, too,” I admitted. “I’m bloody exhausted.”
“It’s been way too much excitement for one day.”
“We can be Freshers tomorrow.”
“And we will,” Liz said. “We’ll Fresher hard.”
“But tonight, we veg.”
“Veg and Lost.”
“That could be a crime-fighting duo.”
Liz yawned. “I’m so glad we’re on the same page here.”
“Let’s maybe not tell anyone about this, though.”
“I was going to suggest the same thing to you.”
“If anyone asks, we went clubbing.”
“And the sun was up by the time we got in.”
So that’s what we did. We spent our first night as students in the Big Smoke carrying greasy cartons of Chinese food back to my new apartment and watching Lost on a laptop while sat on my scratchy little couch.
With our whole lives ahead of us, our new lives, waiting for us. Postponed just until the following morning.
That night was like an airlock, a safe passage between the home I shared with my parents in Cork and apartment A3 in St. John’s Halls.
I remember thinking, This is it. This is what being happy feels like.
And, It’s only going to get better from here.
* * * * *
I was awake with the dawn the next morning, energized by the novelty of waking up in a new place and terrified that my new roommate would choose to arrive at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday and meet me for the first time just as I fell out of bed.
She actually arrived just after nine. Claire from Sligo who was going to be studying International Law, and after introductions I stayed out of the way while a guy who I guessed was her boyfriend helped her move her stuff in.
“He’s going to Trinity,” she explained after he’d left. “He’s in his second year there. He’s not back until next week so he’s driving back up home now.” She stuck her hands in her pockets, rocked on her heels. “I don’t know, like, anyone here.”
“Well, you know me now,” I said. “And my friend Liz is in the block next door, so soon you’ll know her too.”
I hadn’t heard from Liz yet this morning. I thought about sending her a text but then, emboldened by the fact that I was here, meeting new people without her, I suggested to Claire that we go for a stroll around campus. Liz was probably still sleeping anyway. She wasn’t a morning person.
“My mother filled the fridge before she left,” I said, “but didn’t leave any tea or coffee. Are you up for going to find a café somewhere?”
But there was nothing, seemingly, happening on campus at this hour on the Saturday before Freshers’ Week. Aside from a few more early move-ins, the place felt like a ghost town. The coffee kiosk beside the library building was closed. We wandered ou
t onto the expensive residences of Haddington Road, walked past its imposing church, in the direction of Baggot Street. I logged all the street names, labeling the map I was building in my head.
I spotted an adorable little coffee shop with a white picket fence resting uneasily on the paving slabs on the footpath outside.
“How about there?” I said to Claire.
She nodded. “Sure.”
We’d only been in there five minutes when Liz sent a text, asking if I was up yet. I told her where I was and said she should come meet us.
The door to the café was behind Claire’s back, so I saw Liz before she did. And I knew right away that she was pissed off. She didn’t even look at me as she approached the table—she was looking to her left, out the windows of the café—and when she plopped down beside me, all I got was a cold, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I said. “Did you find us okay?” I didn’t get a response to this. Liz just picked up the menu and started studying it intensely. “I didn’t want to wake you,” I added lamely.
I knew why she was mad. If I’d woken up and discovered that Liz was already off having coffee with her new roommate and had gone without asking me to join them, I’d have been upset too. The difference is I wouldn’t have let her know that. I wouldn’t have thrown a tantrum, or got odd with her. It wasn’t in me. I couldn’t do it. But Liz, she could put on a bad humor with the flick of a switch.
Claire probably didn’t notice because Liz launched the full charm offensive on her. She asked her millions of questions and cooed over the pictures of her boyfriend that Claire had on her phone. They were soon laughing and joking like old pals and I could see the little sliver of advantage I’d had with Claire, the half-hour I’d been able to bank with her before Liz showed up, steadily diminishing.
I talked to Claire, Liz talked to Claire, and Claire talked to us—and I hoped we all did that enough for Claire not to notice that Liz barely acknowledged me at all. She didn’t even speak directly to me until we were back on campus, and parting ways.
Liz had said she’d unpacking to do, and I’d lied and said I did as well.
Then she turned to me and said, “I don’t think I’ll be going out tonight.”
We’d made plans to make the acquaintance of the campus bar, a place nicknamed the Haddy.
I knew what my next line in this scene was. We’d rehearsed it plenty. I was supposed to try to coax her out, giving her an opportunity to decline again. Or maybe I was supposed to say, “Fine, I won’t either,” and commit myself to staying in with her, to keep her company, while she sulked.
But I couldn’t bring myself to. So instead I told Liz to call me if she changed her mind.
When we got back upstairs, Claire asked me how well I knew Liz.
“Very well,” I said. “We’ve known each other since the first day of primary school. So for like, what? Thirteen years now?”
“Are you two good friends, then?”
I nodded. “Best friends.”
“Oh.”
Claire was frowning, confused.
There was a defense of Liz on my tongue. The way she was this morning? She’s not always like that. That’s not what she’s really like.
But then I thought, Let Liz make her own first impressions.
That night, Claire and I went to the Haddy. I left my phone at home.
* * * * *
The next morning, Liz was all smiles again. She’d knocked on the door of our apartment early in the morning and had a cup of bad instant coffee with Claire and me. She didn’t ask me how I’d spent the previous evening, and I didn’t volunteer any information. It was as if yesterday had just disappeared into the past, swallowed up like a stone by the sea, leaving the surface smooth and unbroken again.
She did have news, though: her roommate had arrived. Liz had Claire and I captivated as she dramatically doled out little drops of the story. She’d woken up this morning to discover a suitcase sitting in the living room even though she hadn’t heard anyone come in. Next thing the door to the other bedroom opens and out walks this girl, dressed head to toe in black and with piercings in her cheeks. (Liz showed us exactly where, more than once.) The girl picks up the suitcase, hauls it into her room and closes the door again without saying as much as a word to Liz.
“So I’m living with a psycho,” she declared. “You two might have to let me move in here.”
I knew Liz was joking, but my laugh was to make sure that Claire did too. A shadow of something had crossed the girl’s face at the suggestion.
St. John’s Halls had an entertainment committee made up of and voted for by student residents, and the last responsibility of the outgoing one was to organize the orientation program for incoming freshers. Most everybody had arrived by now and a huge tent had been set up on the lawn to house us all. We sat through some boring presentations on things like health and safety and budgeting for food, and then after that, outside, the fun began. There were ice-breaking games, challenges, quizzes, “speed-friending,” and a five-a-side football game. A barbeque was laid on for lunch. We were all given stickers to write our names and courses on, and encouraged to wander around striking up conversations with anyone and everyone we could.
Normally, this would’ve been the kind of thing that would’ve made me want to curl up in a corner in a ball of dread and shame. I considered myself sociable, but I wasn’t exactly the stranger whisperer. Liz usually paved a path for me. But there was a leveling aspect to this day that somehow made things easier. After all, we were all new. We were all first-years. We were all wandering around, blinking in the light of this new world, away from friends and family, very excited but also a little unsure.
We started collecting people. We met Lauren, who had never met Claire but it turned out they shared a mutual friend they could bond over. She was studying art history and lived in the apartment next to Liz. We met Ray, an American who’d turned down the chance to go to Harvard for a chance to come to Dublin (we all thought he was bonkers, and told him so) and whose smooth, TV accent we couldn’t get enough of. We met Daisy, a fellow English literature student who was dressed like she’d been in a teleportation experiment gone slightly wrong. All her clothes seemed to be patchworks of other bits of things, pieces of material jaggedly and inexpertly sewn together in some sort of Frankenstein’s monster–style couture. She introduced herself by saying she did PR for Essence, which I think we were supposed to know was a club in town, and that she could get us on the guest list for tonight if we wanted.
Someone said, “Let’s go,” and one by one, the rest of us fell in. I felt like I was being swept away on a wave, but I wasn’t entirely unhappy about it. We split to go back to our rooms and change, with a plan to reconvene under the arch at the entrance in an hour’s time.
Liz came to our place to get ready. Claire produced a bottle of Smirnoff and made us all vodka and Cokes.
“I brought something for you,” Liz said to me. She reached into the bag of clothes she’d brought with her and pulled out a gorgeous silk shirt. It was silver with a spray of green and purple flowers up one side and it wrapped around, tying with a large purple ribbon at one side.
It was absolutely gorgeous. I owned nothing like it. I’d been planning to head out in jeans and a plain black top.
“Oh, Liz,” I said. “That’s beautiful.”
“It’s a bit big on me,” she said. “Do you want to try it? I’ll probably just dump it in the charity shop otherwise.”
A bit big on me.
I ignored the dig because there was no way I wasn’t wearing this top, even though it was a little big on me too. (“No,” Liz said, adjusting it for me. “It fits great.”) I put on a white string vest to counteract the way it gaped a bit at the front, and pulled the ribbon as tight as I could to stop the extra material from bunching too much around my waist.
“That looks amazing on you,
” Liz declared when I was done. “You have to wear it out tonight.”
I turned in front of the mirrored wardrobe door. “I will. I might never take this off.”
It turned out, of course, that by “did PR for,” Daisy meant stood on the street and handed out leaflets, and that by “get you on the guest list,” she meant pay twenty euro and win the bouncers’ approval and, yeah, okay, we’ll let you in. But the club played good music, we saw plenty of faces from Halls and a good time was had by all.
Until just after midnight, when I felt someone tug at the ribbon around my waist, and then the entire shirt start to loosen and fall.
Some drunken idiot behind me had untied the knot.
When I turned around to confront him, he reached out his hands and pulled me in, and suddenly his vile breath was all I could smell. I tried to wriggle out of his arms, but he just pulled me tighter. I was about to bring my knee up as hard as I could between his legs when I felt him move away, and then realized he’d already been pulled away, and now this other guy was standing between the two of us, squaring up to him, staring him down.
“What are you doing to my girlfriend?” he demanded.
I looked up at him—up, because he was at least a foot taller than me. He had unruly blond hair, left natural, messy with no gel, and his skin was tanned like he’d just come back from the beach. He was wearing a bright white T-shirt which only accentuated this, especially in the dim lighting of the club. I could smell him, the scent of some cologne or deodorant or something, musky and masculine, not the Lynx Africa the spotty boys at home liked to indiscriminately douse themselves in.
The drunk idiot was looking him up and down. “Girlfriend?”
This must have sounded like a challenge, because my defender reached out and took my hand.
“Yeah,” he said. “Girlfriend. So you better apologize to her, and then you better piss off.”
The drunk idiot hesitated for a second, then did as he was told.
“Thanks a lot,” I said after he staggered away. “I was just about to knee him in the balls.”
“Oh, no, were you?” The guy turned to look over his shoulder. “Should I go get him? I can hold him in place for you.”
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