Chapter Text
Dorm rooms seemed so empty when you first moved in.
For some people, empty was a good thing, because it meant that they could leave their own unique mark on the room. Of course, they weren’t allowed to paint or do anything permanent to the room, since they didn’t own it and the schools did not look appreciatively on that sort of thing (because some people wouldn’t necessarily like the changes they made and most people didn’t want to do all of that repainting and reconfiguring and etc. before they moved out – and schools liked unity where their dorm rooms were concerned)—
Rose looked at the empty room and saw an empty room. That was all.
It had the same two loft beds with the desk underneath them that every dorm room on campus had, the same two dressers with three drawers each, the same solitary window and singular door leading to an interconnected bathroom. On the other side of the bathroom, the other dorm would look exactly the same, except flipped. Two beds, two desks, two dressers, one window. There was a full-length mirror on the outside of the bathroom door already – a unique feature of this particular dorm that wasn’t found in the one she’d lived in last year (with three roommates and a bigger bathroom). They’d stuck her in one of the corner rooms last year – it had been a special kind of horrible that involved absolutely no privacy whatsoever and a lot of loud interrogations and “roommate bonding” over television shows that she didn’t watch and movies that didn’t interest her and boys that were always unattractive.
Suffice to say that she was not still in contact with her ex-roommates. They hadn’t really gotten along.
Rose heaved a sigh as she dropped the first of what amounted to three large bins in her room. She had three large bins (clothes, decorations, and appliances), two medium sized bins (shoes, bedding), and an assortment of smaller bins (school books, law books, general books, jewelry, etc.); each of the bins fit nicely inside of the others so that she could hide them away in the top of the singular closet (that she had not had access to last year because it had belonged to Sally Forthwright, and as much as she could have won that fight, it simply wasn’t worth it).
The benefit of all those extra hours over the summer and the shift from a bigger, more expansive room to this one meant that she had just enough to cover the costs of buying out an entire room and avoiding the whole roommate situation. It was more expensive. It was definitely more expensive. But it was worth it for her sanity.
Unfortunately, she could not control her neighbors. Hopefully neighbor. The fewer people she had to share the bathroom with – the fewer schedules she had to learn to keep up with – the better. Rose could avoid everyone else in the entire dorm, but she couldn’t avoid her suitemate, as much as she might want to. But they had their own rooms. That would be fine.
Rose looked around the room again, tapping one long finger against her chin, considering. She shoved the first of her large bins into her closet ahead of time; she had some furniture rearranging to do before she started bringing everything else up.
She didn’t know when she expected her new suitemate to arrive.
Suitemate singular – she’d made sure to check the outside of the door when she left for her second bin. They were still in the dorms, which meant that their hall mom (or hall dad, since it was a co-ed dorm) had plastered their doors with a bright and shiny new nameplate made out of cardboard and coloring paper and a little bit of twine. Hers was a picture of one of those stupid cartoon ponies all colored in with the wrong colors and her name written off to the side in a bright, blinding reddish-pink; she had ripped it down as soon as she saw it, and it now claimed the first spot in her trashcan. Her suitemate’s was a mermaid with light brown skin and wavy dark brown hair, with hazel eyes, and a tail of pastel blue and pink scales – and the name Luisa emblazoned along the sun in all caps.
Singular suitemate meant only one schedule to deal with and only one other person to have to keep in contact with at any given point in time who wasn’t someone she’d specifically chosen as part of her study group or major or whatever. It was a good lower common denominator, putting two of the students who didn’t want roommates next to each other. It meant that the school was at least paying attention to who wanted their privacy, unlike last time. That was a bonus.
If she was honest with herself, Rose expected her new suitemate to move in early in the morning, the same as she had. Okay, maybe not exactly the same as she had because she was extraordinarily early, an earliness born of an inability to stay asleep for very long, a certain kind of insomnia that played into her normal desire to wake up early anyway. She might not have been raised in a barn, but she still woke up at sunrise surely as the rooster crowed. Not that there was any crowing rooster on campus – and if there was, it was on the other side of campus with the agriculture majors. Far away from her.
So, no, she didn’t expect her new neighbor to get there as promptly as she did, as soon as the dorms opened and allowed for students to move in (and, honestly, Rose had been there earlier, sitting on the porch swing just outside of the dorm’s front door, one leg crossed over the other and a book in her hand until they had taken pity on her and allowed her to move in). There hadn’t been any other students at the dorm for at least an hour after she was, and that was the way she liked it.
But noon came around, and there was still no suitemate.
Noon and then one o’clock and then two o’clock and then three and her new neighbor was starting to push the limits of when exactly they were allowed to move in.
Eventually, Rose got tired of waiting – her room was set up to her liking, her decorations, scant as they were, were done, her clothes were put away, her appliances were set up, her desk was set up, everything was where it should be and in its proper place for perfect space optimization – and decided to give in to her rumbling stomach and go find food. The dining halls might not have been great, but they were open, and as much as she would use her own microwave and the basement kitchen to cook her own food, it was nice to supplement that with time-saving already cooked food that she didn’t have to worry about cleaning up after. It was while she sat in the closest dining hall with a cold plate of what was normally not steaming hot but at least middling warm pasta that she got a phone call.
A phone call.
She never got phone calls – not even from the woman who liked to consider herself Rose’s stepmother and who Rose had little to nothing to do with anymore, and certainly not from anyone who might consider themselves her friends. It wasn’t like no one on campus had her number; she had given it out to a few of her study partners so that they could text her for any study session that came up naturally. She wasn’t usually part of the natural conversations, but they knew that she was useful for the minor points of law conversations; she’d made herself necessary, even if she wasn’t the most well-liked person in the world.
Point being – her study partners didn’t call her. They texted her. No one called her.
And yet.
Rose pulled her phone out, flipped it open, and glanced at the number. She didn’t recognize it – her phone didn’t recognize it either, which meant it definitely wasn’t a study partner – but she knew the area code as one of the ones in the nearby counties. Someone around here.
Her lips rolled together, and she answered it on the final ring.
“You have reached Rose Ruvelle’s phone—”
“Fuck, it’s the voicemail.” Then, from further away, so she guessed the girl on the other end was looking at someone else. “I thought you said she always keeps her phone on her?”
And from even further away, “I said she texts back promptly; I didn’t say anything about her always answering her phone.”
“You are supposed to be my—”
“—who am I speaking with?” Rose finally completed, one arm crossing under the other. It wasn’t like she had been struggling to find her voice or anything like that in the slightest – there was her voice, it was right there, but sometimes there was more to be learned from listening to what was going on on the other end of the phone.
“Oh! Rose!” That girl’s voice again, loud and excited and bright, and she was sure if she could see her on the other end she would be wearing a huge smile. “This is Luisa Alver, I’m your new suitemate, and I was wondering when you would be coming back to your room and if you were busy and if you had already eaten or would be up to going out for some suitemate bonding because let’s be real school doesn’t start for another few days so we have all the time in the world to get to know one another. I was thinking maybe drinks? At Miyo 34?”
Rose blinked a couple of times and found herself surprisingly glad that she was having this conversation on the phone and not in person. “How did you get my number?” she asked, as though she hadn’t already heard the conversation in the background and knew she got it from one of her study partners.
“Oh, I’m friends with Susanna and she’s friends with Petra and Petra’s dating Jane so I’m kind of sort of friends with Jane—”
“We’re not friends,” Rose could hear Jane saying in the background in that dry tone of hers, and she could see Petra squeezing Jane’s shoulder to try and get her to change her mind. She hadn’t really spent much time with Petra, but the long-legged blonde had occasionally dropped Jane off at their study sessions or come to tell her it was time to stop studying, that was quite enough studying, Jane and dragged her not exactly kicking and screaming away. She had no clue who this Susanna person that Luisa had mentioned was, but that didn’t matter.
“Okay, so we’re not friends,” Luisa continued as though it didn’t matter what Jane said, and Rose could imagine the girl rolling her eyes, even though she couldn’t imagine what she looked like at all – not quite a frat girl, she didn’t think she was a frat girl, “but the point is I got in contact with my contacts and they got in contact with their contacts because I wanted to get a hold of you before I went out because I thought you should come with me so we could get to know each other, since we’re going to be spending so much time being neighbors and everything, and it’s always nice to go out together to do that sort of stuff instead of cold, clinical conversations in our rooms about schedules and who uses the bathroom when and rules and all of that rigid—”
“I happen to like rigid,” Rose interrupted, rubbing her forehead with one hand. She took a deep breath. Already she was beginning to consider finding a way to switch rooms around with someone. If her suitemate was this talkative, she might need to find somewhere else to live. Luisa already felt worse than all three of her other roommates last year, and she was sure when she got to know her that she would just want to talk about whatever super attractive guy she was dating or try to pick up guys at the bar if they went drinking and she wasn’t interested in that.
Of course, Rose was not going to explain over the phone in public to a veritable stranger why she wasn’t interested in that. She didn’t want that sort of thing to get out if it didn’t have to. (There were other rumors about her. Whispers of things. Well, she was fine with those. They made people uninterested in her. Which was mutual. She wasn’t interested in them either.)
“Oh.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone, as though Luisa were waiting on Rose to continue or explain herself. But she didn’t. Rose didn’t feel like she needed to explain – or defend – herself at all. She stared at her plate of pasta and slowly began calculating the cost of additionally trying to go out and get dinner with her new suitemate just to fix all this out.
No. Not worth it. She needed to save the money.
“So,” Luisa finally continued, breaking the silence, “when are you going to get back?”
“I’m in the dining hall,” Rose admitted, twirling some of the pasta around her fork and staring at it. It wasn’t like it was any good. But, then, who expected good when they went to the dining hall? Probably the same people who hoped it was sushi day. She hated sushi day. In point of fact, she made sure to avoid sushi day. “I’m eating. It might be a while.”
“Oh.” There was a pause before, finally, “Which dining hall are you in? We – I – can come join you. And then we can go from there! I just thought, you know, first day back, you might want to eat somewhere else, but of course you’re the sort of person who goes to the dining hall. It’s cheaper, right? And some of that stuff is pretty good for cheap food. Are you at Carlisle Hall?” she asked before waiting for Rose’s response. “That’s the closest one, isn’t it? You probably went for close, yeah?”
“Yeah, I’m at Carlisle, but you don’t have to—”
“Alright, girls,” Luisa said, and her voice grew muffled as though she were covering the phone with one hand, “we’re going to go meet Rose at Carlisle Hall. She’ll be waiting for us there. She’s already got us a table and everything!”
“Wait, I didn’t—”
Rose could hear the groan in the background, and she knew that one well enough from their study sessions to identify it as Jane. “Luisa, I don’t have a dining plan, and that can get expensive for food that isn’t worth it.”
“I’ll pay for you, don’t worry, I don’t have one either.” The muffled sound faded, and then there was Luisa’s voice, chipper as ever. “We’ll be there in a few minutes! Just hold down the fort, and we’ll see you there!”
“Wait, wait, wait, Luisa, what do you mean we—?” But the sound cut off before Rose was finished saying anything. She scowled as she flipped her phone shut and shoved it into her back pocket.
So that was what her new suitemate was like.
Rose took a deep breath and stared at the seat across from her. She didn’t even know how many people we was. Luisa and Jane, apparently. If Jane was coming, Petra was probably coming with her. And Luisa had mentioned that Susanna woman, so she guessed that there would be four more joining her, maybe. That was more people than she wanted to eat with. She liked eating alone, unless she was studying while eating. There were study sessions like that – but those usually involved pizza and spending time in someone’s apartment, not…whatever this was going to turn out to be.
Her stepmother would tell her it was essential for her to actually find another table before the rest of them got here. They certainly couldn’t fit five people around one of these small little date-sized tables, could they? No one would have enough room for their food. They would all move to another table instead of sitting with her, and that would make her a horrible host.
But Rose stayed where she was. If they sat somewhere else, then they sat somewhere else. She hadn’t wanted them to come eat with her in the first place. Already she could feel herself begin to despise her suitemate.
Bad first impression. That can be worked through, Rose. You’ve made some bad first impressions yourself. In fact, you’re all bad first impressions. That’s very intentional. Maybe this girl is just like that.
Somehow, she doubted that.