around. This was my home, now. Durham. It was like a town out of a Dickens adaptation. All of the buildings were tall and old. Everything seemed to be made of lumps of stone. I could see myself walking down the cobbles and into the cathedral in my graduation gown already. This was where I was supposed to be.
They both hugged me. I didn’t cry, even though I really, really wanted to.
‘This is the start of a big adventure,’ said Dad.
‘Maybe,’ I mumbled into his jacket.
I couldn’t bear to stay and watch them walk away down the road towards the car – when they turned to go, so did I.
Back in my room, Rooney was Blu Tack-ing a photo to the wall, right in the centre of her posters. In the photo was Rooney, maybe aged thirteen or fourteen, with a girl who had dyed red hair. Like, Ariel from The Little Mermaid hair.
‘Is that your friend from home?’ I asked. This was a good conversation starter, at least.
Rooney whipped her head round to look at me, and for a moment I thought I saw an odd expression cross her face. But then it was gone, replaced by her wide smile.
‘Yeah!’ she said. ‘Beth. She’s – she’s not here, obviously, but … yeah. She’s my friend. Do you know anyone else in Durham? Or are you here all alone?’
‘Oh, erm, well, my two best friends are here, but they’re in Castle.’
‘Oh, that’s so nice! Sad you didn’t get into the same college, though.’
I shrugged. Durham took your choice of college into consideration, but not everyone could get their first choice. I’d tried to get into Castle too, but I’d ended up here. ‘We tried, but, yeah.’
‘You’ll be OK.’ Rooney beamed. ‘We’ll be friends.’
Rooney offered to help me unpack, but I declined, determined to at least do this one thing by myself. While I was unpacking, she sat on her bed and chatted to me, and we learnt that we were both studying English. She then declared that she’d done none of the summer reading. I’d done all of it but didn’t mention that.
Rooney, I was quickly learning, was extremely chatty, but I could tell that she was putting on some sort of happy, bubbly persona. Which was fair enough – I mean, it was our first day of university. Everyone was going to be trying really hard to make friends. But I couldn’t get a sense of what sort of person she really was, which was mildly concerning because we were going to be living with each other for almost a full year.
Were we going to be best friends? Or were we going to awkwardly put up with each other before leaving for the summer and never speaking again?
‘So …’ I scanned the room in search of something to talk about, before landing on her Much Ado poster. ‘You like Shakespeare?’
Rooney’s head snapped up from her phone. ‘Yeah! Do you?’
I nodded. ‘Um, yeah, well, I was in a youth theatre group back home. And I did a lot of the school plays. Shakespeare was always my favourite.’
This actually caused Rooney to sit up, eyes wide and sparkling. ‘Wait. You act?’
‘Um …’
I did act, but, well, it was a bit more complicated than that now.
When I was in my early teens, I’d wanted to be an actor – which was why I’d joined the youth theatre group that Pip already went to and started auditioning for the school plays with her. And I was good at it. I got top marks in drama class at school. I usually got a pretty solid speaking part in the plays and musicals that I did.
But as I got older, acting just started to make me nervous. I got more stage fright the more plays I did, and eventually, when I auditioned for Les Misérables in Year 13, I was shaking so much that I got relegated to a role with only one line, and even then, come showtime, I threw up before every single performance.
So maybe a career in acting wasn’t for me.
Despite this, I was planning to continue with acting at uni. I still enjoyed figuring out roles and interpreting scripts – it was the audiences I had problems with. I just needed to work on my confidence. I’d join the student theatre society and maybe audition for a play. I needed to join one society, at least, if I was going to branch out and open up and meet new people.
And find someone to fall in love with.
‘Yeah, a bit,’ I said.
‘Oh. My. God.’ Rooney clapped one hand to her heart. ‘This is amazing. We can go join the DST together.’
‘The DST …?’
‘Durham Student Theatre. They basically run all of the drama societies in Durham.’ Rooney flipped her ponytail back. ‘The Shakespeare Soc is literally the main society I wanna join. I know most freshers do the Freshers Play but I had a look at what plays they’ve done the past few years and they’re all kind of boring? So I’m at least gonna try and join Shakespeare. God I’m praying they’ll do a tragedy. Macbeth is literally my dream …’
Rooney rambled on without seeming to care whether I was actually listening or not.
We had something in common. Acting. This was good.
Maybe Rooney would be my first new friend.
‘Oh, wow!’ said Jason later that day as he and Pip stepped into my – well, my and Rooney’s room. ‘It’s the size of my garden.’
Pip stretched out her arms and did a twirl on the spot, emphasising the unnecessary amount of empty space in the room. ‘I didn’t realise you’d joined the college of the bourgeoisie.’
‘I don’t understand why they couldn’t just … build a wall in the middle,’ I said, pointing at the gap between mine and Rooney’s sides of the room, which was currently only occupied by Rooney’s aqua rug.
‘How very Trump of you,’ said Jason.
‘Oh my God, shut up.’
Rooney had left a while ago with a group of people she’d befriended on our corridor. They’d invited me, but honestly, I needed some down time – I’d been trying my best to say hi to new people for most of the day, and I really, really wanted to see some familiar faces. So I’d invited Jason and Pip to come hang in my room for a bit before this evening’s freshers’ events at our separate colleges, and thankfully, they’d both finished unpacking and didn’t have anything else to do.
I’d already told them a little bit about Rooney – that she liked theatre and was generally quite nice – but her side of the room was a much better summary of her personality.
Jason surveyed it, then looked over my side. ‘Why does her side look like an
