“Right.” Elliot’s forehead crinkles slightly. “I suppose that’s everything, then.”
“Good.” I reach for my folder. “I’ve got to get a drink before the tutorial. I’ll be right back.”
I flee before she can see me cry.
“That’s terrible!” Holly exclaims. We’re sitting in the corner of the crowded Raleigh bar that evening — her with a white wine, me with a Diet Coke (my teetotal pledge still working) — and, at last, I can vent. “What did you say?”
“What could I say?” I shrug off my sweater and raise my voice to be heard over the loud rock song on the jukebox. The bare stone walls of the bar are adorned with old oars and sports photos, and it’s full with students crammed around small wooden tables. “She already thinks I’m a moron. I should have just taken the easy option; now I’m stuck with her hard-core assignments and I can’t take it back.”
“You’ll be fine,” Holly assures me, and even though she has no idea about my scholastic inaptitude, I let myself believe her. “It’s always hard at first. It took me a whole year to get my head around the format for my organic chemistry essays. I had to retake my exams.”
I don’t have a year, but I figure I’ve been moaning long enough. The last thing I want is to be a drag and risk boring my only friend. “What about you?” I have a drink and try to make my voice happy. “What’s up?”
“Nothing new,” Holly muses, biting her bottom lip. “Aaron is still calling me. He doesn’t know about . . .”
I pat her shoulder. “And you don’t have to tell him.”
She nods. “I know, but I still feel bad.”
“Don’t. He was the jerk who got you into this in the first place.” Not that I’m bitter and jaded when it comes to guys.
Holly seems to pick up on my tone. “Have you ever had a scare like that?”
“No,” I admit thankfully. “But even if I needed to get Plan B or whatever, I wouldn’t feel guilty. That’s just screwed up, like you should be sorry for having sex.”
Holly grins. “See, now I know you’ve been taking Professor Elliot’s classes.”
“No way, really?” I laugh. “Tell me if I get as bad as Carrie — she’s impossible. Everything’s a freaking male conspiracy to, like, keep us in the bonds of submission or something.”
“Umm, I know!” Holly exclaims. “Last year she kept the JCR meeting running three hours talking about how we shouldn’t subscribe to the Sun.” I look blank. “This newspaper,” she explains, “they run topless models on page three.”
“Weird.”
“The paper or Carrie?”
“Both! Seriously,” I say, “what’s with her? I mean, she gets so angry over everything.”
“I don’t know.” Holly sighs, taking a sip of her wine. “But there are tons of people like that here, campaigning over everything. It’s a breeding ground for future politicians.”
“Egalitarian,” I quip. Morgan or Brooke would have teased me, but Holly takes it for granted that we both know what I mean.
Holly brightens. “I nearly forgot, there’s a European Affairs Society ball this weekend — you should come!”
“A ball?” I see visions of chandeliers and string quartets.
“They’re so much fun,” she promises, eyes wide and eager. “It’s a great excuse to dress up, and there’s a dinner. We could go shopping.”
“Will it be stuck-up?” I hedge. Dealing with the preppy brats around Raleigh is enough for me.
“No more than usual.” Holly shrugs. “Anyway, balls are part of the Oxford experience. You can’t come here and not go to one.”
She sounds so bossy, I grin.
“OK.” I’m already thinking of the perfect dress I have, the one I wore to my senior prom. I never usually do formal gowns twice, but this one is Gucci and gorgeous and took three weeks of begging the stepfather before he buckled. “I’m in.”
“Great!” Holly beams, before a group of students in scarves and coats bundle around our table and loudly greet her.
“You know we’ve got practice at six tomorrow?” A guy with pink cheeks and floppy brown hair throws his coat on top of mine.
“And Milton says we’re doing weight-training all next week,” adds a petite redhead, almost spilling her beer.
“He’ll kill us all!” Holly groans. She turns to me. “Everyone, this is Natasha. Ellen, Alex, James.” She nods at each person in turn. I wave, and they offer assorted hellos.
“So where are you from?” asks the guy crammed next to me. Alex, I think it is.
“L.A. originally.” I smile, glad to be buried in the middle of a crowd for the first time in what seems like forever. “But I go to school just up the coast.”
“California!” The redhead sighs longingly. “Beaches, sunshine . . .”
“Surfing,” Alex adds. “What on earth are you doing here?”
I giggle. “It’s cool to have a change.”
“Bloody freezing, you mean.”
“Yup, the weather does suck,” I admit. “But Oxford is amazing — all the old buildings, the history . . .”
“. . . the sadistic rowing instructors.” Another guy arrives at our table in time to finish my sentence. “Did you hear what Milton wants us to do next week?”
And with that, I’m buried in the middle of a raging debate on rival crew teams and Raleigh’s chances of success. As their enthusiastic conversation surrounds me, I feel a glow of warmth that has nothing to do with the overheated room. Professor Elliot is wrong — I’m not here for the easy way out. I can do this. I know I can.
8
After my mini-breakdown at the beach, I don’t accept any more of Morgan’s invitations. As much as I want to get along here, I can’t bear the thought of that panic or uncertainty again, so by the end of my third week, I’m back in a perfectly structured routine, every hour from eight until five neatly accounted for — thanks to my wall-chart organizer. Morning runs, library sessions, classic film watching, and, of course, classes; if I ever get lonely or start to question what I’m doing here, all it takes is a quick glance above my desk at the daily schedule to calm myself down again.
In addition to Professor Lowell’s screenwriting session, Natasha is also signed up for a range of core curriculum and film modules. The core material is a breeze: the sort of basic education requirements I could complete in my sleep, but to my surprise, the film work is actually interesting — full of ideas and concepts I’ve never come across before, everything from the business side of the industry to sociological readings of performance and script. Throwing myself completely into the work, I can almost see why someone would voluntarily choose to study it.