Chapter 5
FIVE
Ellen had never met anyone as cool as Lucy in her whole life.
It had taken days to decide what to wear for her first day at college.
She was desperate to wear something that would portray her as the person she wanted to become.
Not the bookish, quiet girl who hadn’t had a proper boyfriend and had only been abroad once on a school trip to France.
Remade with contact lenses and a pair of jeans she’d had to work a month to afford, this was her opportunity to be confident and outgoing and make a huge group of friends who would be in her life forever.
Having missed the first couple of days – her beloved Nan’s funeral coinciding with the middle of induction week – Ellen had been worried that it would be difficult to fit in.
Both parents had made the trip to drop her off.
Though her mum had tried to hide it by rummaging in her large baggy handbag for a packet of Polo mints, she’d cried when her dad had shepherded her out of the door so that Ellen ‘could get herself settled’.
It was either that, or her dad’s quick dry kiss on her forehead – ‘see you soon then, love’ – that’d made her stomach lurch with the realisation that they were leaving her here, alone.
What’d felt like the beginning of a new life – and adventure – now felt scary and bigger than she could manage.
Two minutes later, there was a knock on the bedroom door and she opened it to find a girl wearing a sheepskin jacket over a white shirt and pair of washed-out jeans.
A cigarette hung from her bottom lip and her bitten-down nails were painted black.
‘Hi. I’m Lucy. We’re going to the bar. Do you want to come? ’
Gratefully, she’d grabbed her bag and followed Lucy and the two other girls she’d picked up on the way.
All of them spoke like they’d just been out riding their horses so Ellen kept her conversation to a minimum, remembering her English teacher mother’s admonitions to enunciate the ends of her words, in the hope that she wouldn’t stand out as different.
‘Let’s head to the SU. I think the boys said they were going there.’ Lucy was clearly the leader of this little group already and Ellen was more than happy to fall in and follow to whatever the ‘SU’ was.
It turned out to be the Students’ Union Bar. A huge cacophonous space full of Doc Marten boots, tartan shirts and baggy jeans. Everyone seemed to be drinking from pint glasses. The air was damp with the smell of spilled beer and body odour.
‘I’ll get a round.’ Lucy was already halfway to the bar. She hadn’t even asked what everyone wanted to drink.
Ellen shuffled from foot to foot as she listened to the other two girls discussing the places they’d been that summer – their parents’ houses in France or Spain – and the schools they’d come from – private and expensive – and the people they knew who’d been to this university or others.
Her cheeks had burned when she admitted she’d spent the summer working in a department store, had attended her local state school and that she was the first person in her family to go to university at all.
It was a relief when Lucy came back holding two brimming pints of beer, followed by a guy she’d corralled into carrying the other two.
Ellen hadn’t drunk a whole pint of beer before, she wasn’t even convinced that she even liked the bitter taste of it, but she accepted it gratefully and tried not to care when the hapless boy slopped it over her fingers.
Lucy held hers aloft. ‘Cheers, everyone. Here’s to a great first term.’
Over the next few days, Lucy took Ellen with her wherever she went. Whether it was to sign up for societies at the Fresher’s Fayre, or to register for their library cards or just to the bar to meet up with the new friends that she seemed to acquire as easily as breathing.
Everyone loved Lucy, including Ellen. How could you not?
She wore her beauty easily and could make a second-hand shirt and her latest boyfriend’s jeans look suitable for the front cover of a fashion magazine.
Ellen was dazzled by her. In a group of wealthy, confident – sometimes arrogant – students, she wasn’t scared of anyone.
And she frequently told Ellen how she should be the same.
‘Who cares what school they’ve been to or what their daddy earns. You are just as good as they are.’
It was easy for her, of course. Because she was one of them.
She didn’t have to suffer the snide comments they made about some of the other – perfectly nice – students on their courses or in their accommodation.
Ian, in particular, liked to make comments about the ‘state schoolers’ and how inferior he found their depth and breadth of knowledge on his chemistry course.
Like Lucy, Ellen was studying biology. Having been at the top of her class – of her entire year – at school, it was a hard lesson to realise how she was just another bright kid here.
Worse, because her school had – albeit successfully – taught to the exam, there were whole sections of knowledge to which those students who’d been to grammar and private schools had already been exposed and which she knew nothing about.
She hated it when Ian said that a private education was ‘just better’, but she couldn’t argue with it.
They weren’t all like that, of course. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have stayed friends with them. Lucy wasn’t like that. And nor was Robert.
She hadn’t really noticed him at first. He didn’t push himself forward like Ian and some of the others.
Though he moved in the same circles – he played rugby, had been to a well-respected boys’ school and spent every winter skiing in France – he also had a softer side.
He sang in the choir and had spent a month of his summer volunteering at a school in Kerala, India.
One day, it must have been in the spring term of her first year, some of the louder members of the group were taking part in a drinking competition and he’d rolled his eyes at Ellen over the top of their heads.
From that moment, she’d got a funny feeling in her stomach every time she saw him.
Not that they got together in that first year, though.
There wasn’t time for that with Lucy taking her here, there and everywhere.
She had mentioned to her once that she was attracted to Robert, but Lucy had shaken her head.
‘You can’t go out with someone from the group.
It’s rule number one. What would happen if you broke up? ’
It’d made sense. The last thing Ellen wanted was to end up on the outside of that friendship. So she’d stuck to the rule for the whole of the first year.
Even when Lucy didn’t.