My new roommate did nothing to alleviate the fear that I wasn’t good enough to be at Carvell.
When I first met Alice Wolfe, she was stacking leather-bound editions of Sartre and Foucault and Nietzsche on her desk, wine-red hair flipped over her face in a defiant wave. She wore a silver septum piercing and an unreasonable quantity of winged eyeliner. She was almost insultingly beautiful, albeit in a satanic sort of way.
Shortly after our scratchy first exchange, Alice left to go to the library, despite the fact classes hadn’t even started yet. I fought back tears; I was already so out of my depth.
As I hugged my dad goodbye, I felt an overwhelming tug towards home; an inexplicable franticness. I didn’t want to be left here. I was suddenly very, very afraid, although I couldn’t say of what, exactly. Something about the place felt innately hostile. The air was too cold and dry in my lungs, and that supernatural pulse was suddenly more unsettling than intriguing; a shadowy presence in the middle distance that vanished whenever I tried to look at it head-on.
It seemed completely impossible that just this morning, I was sitting having a birthday breakfast in my favourite Sevenoaks greasy spoon before Mum had to go to work. She’d been to the jewellery shop on the high street and bought me a new charm for my bracelet: a little silver bumblebee. That’s what they’d always called me. Their little bumblebee.
Now it dangled against my wrist, warm to the touch.
It had always been the three of us, and things would never be like that again. Sure, they’d always be my parents, and Sevenoaks would always be there for me to return to. But I had loved my friends, my school, walking my dog, having breakfast with my mum and dad every morning. It had all been so easy, so safe, and now it was gone. The thought was so profoundly sad that it knocked the breath out of me.
‘Dad,’ I mumbled into his broad chest. He smelled of home, and of our grey-bearded labrador. ‘I . . .’
He gripped my shoulders and pushed me up off his chest, a certain ferocity in his gaze. ‘Just say the words, Lottie. Just say the words and we’ll go home.’
From the look on his face, I could tell he was thinking of Janie, of how she’d pleaded with her parents to come home, and how they’d forced her to stay. He wouldn’t let history repeat in the same way.
I was tempted. God, I was tempted. But Carvell is what I’d been building to every moment of the last year. Every gruelling hockey practice, every hour of mind-numbing exam revision. Every tear-filled fight with my parents about this decision.
Swallowing every irrational fear lodged in the back of my throat, I convinced myself that I was just being childish. There was no such thing as a supernatural pulse, and a place couldn’t be innately hostile. My university experience would be what I made of it. All I had to do was approach my time here with the same passion and positivity I did everything else. My mum had taught me that raw enthusiasm can make up for almost any other deficit.
‘Dad, it’s okay.’ I smiled. ‘I promise.’
Shifting his weight from one foot to the other, I could tell my dad wanted to say something but didn’t know how. I busied myself lifting books out of the box and on to the little writing desk. They suddenly seemed horribly juvenile compared to Alice’s neat leather-bound stack.
‘Kiddo, I . . . I found your scrapbook,’ he said, trying and failing to sound casual. My stomach tilted to one side. ‘The one with all of Janie’s newspaper clippings. Is that why you’re really here?’
Stacking my Raymond Carver paperback collection beside a deep groove in the wood, I decided on a half-truth. ‘Kind of. I mean, I heard about Carvell because of her. But it’s notwhyI’m here. It’s an amazing university. One of the best –’
‘- in the world for literature. I know.’ He sighed. ‘Please, just . . . I know you, Lottie. You’re braver than I’ll ever be. But don’t go looking for trouble, okay? Don’t go digging around in old mysteries. Keep your head down, focus on your work. Try to forget about Janie.’
From the pain on his face, I knew he was thinking about her. I think he always was, in a way. And now it was all too easy to imagine me meeting the same fate.
But that waswhyI wanted answers. To give him and my mum – and Janie’s family – the peace they’d been robbed of for so long. I was doing it for them. For Dad. To take some of that pain away. And call it hero complex, call it main character syndrome, call it whatever, but I genuinely believed I could do it.
‘I’ll be safe,’ I said, but I knew from the worry in his eyes that he didn’t believe me in the slightest.
The tears didn’t come in full force until he left, and I was alone in the bedroom I’d be sharing with a girl who had loathed me on sight. I hated to admit it, especially when I’d stubbornly told my dad I was absolutely fine, but this all felt wrong – not because of the historic murders or my capricious roommate or the strange, too-dry air, but because of me. I wasn’t cellos and dark windowpanes, I wasn’t leather-bound Sartre and wine-red hair, I wasn’t Carvell. Everyone was going to sneer at me like Alice had.
Just as I was about to call my dad on the cheap Nokia he’d panic-loaded £100 of credit on to, to tell him to come back, come back, I’ve changed my mind, I noticed the view from our dorm-room window for the first time.
My breath hitched in my chest.
We were directly opposite the North Tower.