Chapter Text
1. Chapter New Coordinates
𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖔𝖗 POV:
The taxi smelled like pine air freshener and old takeaway, and I'd been staring out of the window for the last forty minutes watching the coastline appear between gaps in the hedgerows like something being slowly revealed. I hadn't said much. The driver hadn't either. That was fine.
My bag was in the boot. My duvet was stuffed into a bin bag on the seat beside me because my mum hadn't had a proper bag big enough, and I'd spent the whole train journey quietly mortified about it. I was still quietly mortified about it now.
Ironcliff Boarding School said the sign at the gate, iron letters bolted to old stone. The taxi curved up a gravel drive lined with trees just starting to turn, their edges going gold, and the school came into view all at once — red brick and tall windows and a stretch of lawn that ended somewhere beyond the buildings in what I suspected was the sea. You could smell it. Salt and something cool underneath.
I got out of the taxi. The driver handed me my bag. The bin bag duvet situation followed.
I stood on the drive for a moment, bag over one shoulder and the bin bag in both arms, and watched other students move around me like I was a rock in a river — groups mostly, people who already knew each other, luggage that was sensibly contained. Someone's parents were taking photos. My mum had cried at the train station and made me promise to text every night, and my brothers had waved from the platform until the train bent away and I couldn't see them anymore.
I didn't know anyone here.
That was fine too. That was the point, wasn't it?
I just had to figure out where to go.
I found the registration desk eventually — a folding table in the main entrance hall manned by two older students with lanyards and the specific exhausted look of people who'd been doing this since eight in the morning. I gave my name. One of them found it on the list, circled it, and handed me a small envelope with my room number and a campus map on a folded card.
Room 14, East Wing.
I was studying the map, trying to orient myself, when someone walked directly into me.
Not bumped into. Into. The collision was decisive. I took a step back and dropped the map, and when I picked it up again, the girl standing in front of me was looking at me like this had been my fault, which, fair enough, I had been standing in the middle of a corridor.
She was Chinese, about my height, with her dark hair pulled back and the expression of someone who had already been awake for too long and was prepared to be annoyed about it. She had a suitcase, a backpack, and a very large tote bag that looked fit to burst, and she was managing all three with a composure that I found faintly intimidating.
"Sorry," I said. "I was just — the map's a bit —"
"You're holding it upside down," she said.
I looked down. I was.
I turned it the right way around. "There we go."
She looked at me for a moment. Not unkindly — just taking stock of me the way you might assess a situation before deciding what to do with it. Then she shifted her tote bag to her other shoulder and said, "Where are you going?"
"East Wing. Room 14."
"I'm in the East Wing." She nodded back the way she'd come. "It's that direction."
"Right." I folded the map. "I'm Conor."
"Meilin." She'd already turned and started walking, but not in a way that excluded me — more like she expected me to keep up. I kept up.
We went through a set of double doors and down a long corridor with tall windows on one side looking out onto the lawn. The sea was visible at the end of it, a dark blue strip past the grass. I almost walked into a door frame, looking at it.
"Careful," Meilin said, without looking at me.
"Is that the sea?"
"It's a beach. There's usually a sea attached."
I couldn't tell if she was being funny or just matter-of-fact. I decided not to push it.
Her room was 12. She stopped at the door, put her key in, then paused and looked back at me — I'd kept walking two more doors down before realising.
"14 is there," she said, pointing.
"Yeah. Cheers." I got my key out. It took me two tries to get it in the lock. I could feel her watching, though when I looked over, she was already going into her own room. The door swung almost shut behind her, but not fully — it sat an inch open, the way old doors do when they don't quite catch.
I got my door open and stood in the doorway of Room 14.
There were two beds. One was already claimed — a dark blue duvet, a backpack shoved underneath, a pair of trainers kicked off by the bedpost. Someone had stuck something to the wall above the desk, though I couldn't make it out from the door.
My roommate was out.
I put my bag on the other bed. Then I stood there for a second holding my bin bag duvet and thought, very plainly, this is fine. This is totally fine.
I opened the bin bag and started pulling my duvet out.
I found the other two at dinner.
The dining hall was large and loud and smelled like chips and something institutional underneath, and I'd been standing with my tray looking for a seat when there was a sudden sharp sound from somewhere to my left — a tray being slammed down, not quite dropped — and a ripple of attention moved across the nearby tables.
A girl had sat down across from a boy at one of the long benches, tray landing with authority, and she was already talking at volume. Nigerian-British, from the sound of her accent, her hair braided back, leaning forward across the table like she was making a point. The boy she was talking to was leaning back with the ease of someone who'd been arguing with people since birth, grinning, arms folded — dark-eyed, a Brazilian accent threading through his English, already talking over her.
They weren't fighting. It took me a second to be sure, but they weren't — there was too much ease in it, the way two people trade insults when they actually like each other, which is a different rhythm than when they don't.
I almost walked past.
Then the boy looked up, caught my eye, and — without any particular preamble — jerked his head at the empty space beside him.
I sat down.
"Rollan," he said, by way of introduction.
"Conor."
"That's Abeke. She's wrong about something."
"I'm right," Abeke said, with great dignity, "and you know I'm right, which is why you're being annoying about it."
I looked between them. "What are you arguing about?"
"Whether you can be strategic at Snakes and Ladders," Rollan said.
I blinked. "...you can't, though. It's completely random."
Rollan pointed at me. "See. He agrees with me."
"He just got here," Abeke said.
"Doesn't mean he's wrong."
I had the feeling I'd walked into something that would take a while to walk back out of, but the chips were hot, and Rollan had already moved on to something else, and Abeke was laughing despite herself, and the dining hall was loud enough that the awkwardness of sitting with strangers had somewhere to go.
Meilin arrived ten minutes later.
She came in, got her tray, scanned the room once, and walked over with a certainty that made it clear she'd already decided where she was sitting before she'd fully looked. She sat down next to me — we were the only two people at the table she'd spoken to, which was apparently sufficient.
Rollan looked at her. Then at me. "You know her?"
"We kind of — I walked into her earlier."
"He was holding a map upside down," Meilin said, opening a carton of juice.
"I wasn't holding it upside down, I was just —" I stopped. "Actually, no, I was holding it upside down."
Abeke smiled. It was a good smile — warm, a little surprised, like she hadn't quite expected me to admit it.
Rollan was looking at Meilin with the expression of someone running calculations. "I'm Rollan."
"I know," she said, which made him blink. "You set off the fire alarm in the east corridor about twenty minutes ago."
There was a pause.
"That was an accident," Rollan said.
"Mmhm."
"I didn't know it was connected to the —"
"I believe you."
He looked at her for a second. Then he grinned — the real one, the one that meant something. "Yeah, alright. I'm gonna like you."
Meilin looked unimpressed, but there was something in the set of her shoulders that softened slightly, just barely, the way someone does when they've been offered something small and aren't sure yet whether to take it.
"Don't push it," she said.
The sea was somewhere on the other side of the building. I couldn't hear it over the dining hall noise, but I knew it was there. It felt, faintly and stupidly, like something settling into place.
I ate my chips.
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