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in her life, and in fact scaring away any new friends she seemed on the verge of making, he sensed it, and offered her some weak branch of hope that he might actually feel something for her too. She was hooked again. The previous year he had changed his surname from Woodfood to Curse for the devilish connotations. I don’t need to say ‘wanker’, but I will.

      I shared my room with Joleen, not through choice, but through a complete lack thereof. I had requested a smoking room, and I had got hers. This was America, after all; they weren’t all lighting up down the corridor. We were a grim novelty at the end of the hall, hippies or beatniks or freaks or arseholes, depending on who you asked. Smoking was our badge, and we wore it like a cloud of smoke around our heads at all times. Nobody had a single room; they were like gold-dust. I was obliged to stay in halls of residence and I had nowhere else to go. It was a battle of wills, mostly. I didn’t realize she was a fruitcake on day one. Maybe day three, when all my pictures got mysteriously smashed during dinner. It was about the same time that Dale started to make advances towards me. He was in our room twenty hours a day and I literally had to ask him to step outside while I changed my clothes, which he found amusing more than inconvenient. I broached it with Joleen.

      ‘Dale’s here a lot, isn’t he?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘What’s his roommate like? Don’t they get on?’

      ‘He’s a moron.’

      ‘Who, Dale or his roommate?’ I laughed, but Joleen didn’t get the joke.

      ‘His roommate of course.’

      ‘So do you think he might mind not coming round if neither of us is here – I don’t know, it just makes me feel uncomfortable if you’re not here and I come back, and he’s already hanging out here.’

      Joleen stopped sorting her socks, and was completely still. I seriously thought she had slipped into a coma. Or was suffering some minor epileptic fit at least.

      ‘Joleen?’ I edged forward.

      ‘He’s got nowhere else to go.’

      ‘What about his room? He could hang out there, I mean, until you got back at least.’

      The conversation was starting to make me fell uncomfortable. Joleen was not being as receptive to my feelings as I anticipated.

      ‘Joleen?’ I asked again, as she fell silent.

      ‘Dale stays.’

      ‘Oh come on, don’t you think you’re being just a little unreasonable?’

      ‘Fuck off.’

      ‘Sorry?’

      I heard her the first time. I shouldn’t have asked her to repeat it.

      She leapt up from her bed, dumped the basket of freshly washed clothes on the floor, screamed ‘Fuck off’ at me again, and left the room. I was a little shocked if I’m honest.

      I stayed, because it was my room too. In this land of democracy, I wasn’t about to surrender my rights. But mostly, and despite my political high-mindedness, I stayed to prove I could. I should have asked for a transfer in week one, but some weird sense of determination and fairness kicked in, and I decided that I would not be driven out by a fruit loop and her twisted sidekick – Batmad and Dobin.

      Whether Dale was actually attracted to me was up for debate, but he feigned it regularly and I admired his persistence at least. I could see it was about Joleen and not me, but this was unfortunately only clear to the sane. He just delighted in pushing her to the edge, and she hated me for it. As is often the case, instead of naming her enemy ‘man’ she named it ‘woman’. On the third day of my stay at the University of Illinois, about an hour before dinner, as the sun sank like an American football behind our halls, Dale sat in a chair in the corner of our ten-foot by fifteen-foot room, and Joleen sprawled across her bottom bunk. They were both seemingly transfixed by a re-run of The X-Files on TV, as I attempted to put the cover on my duvet. Is something really out there? They were hoping it was their mother race. But I noticed Dale staring at me, giving me sideways, strange, twisted smiles, and pointing his winkle-pickers in my direction. I pretended not to notice. But Joleen noticed. Eventually, as Mulder and Scully took a break for the adverts, he piped up,

      ‘Nicola, can I do that for you?’ Dale gave me a nonchalant sneer accompanied by a nasty twinkle in his eye that he labelled ‘mischievous’.

      ‘No, I’m fine thanks,’ I replied, attempting to deflect his attention back to the TV, and simultaneously ignore the scowl that was threatening to make Joleen the ugliest woman I had ever seen, as opposed to just one of the top ten. She was scrawny, and ratty-looking, with dyed black hair and brown roots, curling and kinking in the strangest, driest places, and with a front tooth significantly more brown than the rest. She was pale in that unwashed way: she looked like she needed to be taken outside and hosed down with disinfectant.

      ‘Nicola, I’d really like to do that for you though.’ Dale continued to leer and Joleen’s face morphed into rage.

      ‘Why, Dale?’ I asked, feigning innocence.

      ‘So that I can say I’ve at least done something in your bed.’

      ‘Funny guy.’

      I looked away and carried on struggling with my duvet, Dale turned back to the TV with a grin, and Joleen broke a cigarette in half. After another ten minutes had lapsed, and I had finally dealt with my bedding, I jumped down and admired my handiwork. I was wearing battered old Levis that I had triumphantly paid thirty dollars for and an old T-shirt that said ‘Cuba’ across my chest – I was dressing the part of an American student. I turned to pick up the discarded packaging and Dale muttered, just loudly enough for us all to hear,

      ‘Hmmm, Cuba, I’d like to go there.’

      I ignored it, but Joleen couldn’t manage the same restraint, and kicked over her Coke can with a scream. The room went silent, and then we all carried on as normal. I headed for dinner in the canteen pretty much straight away, and it was only when I returned to our room that I found my pictures, previously hanging innocently on the wall, smashed on the floor with glass everywhere. Joleen and Dale were top and toeing on the bottom bunk, seemingly asleep. There had been no effort made to clear up – my mum and dad, my sisters, my friends, all covered in shards of glass on the floor.

      

      It got steadily worse from then on. I tried to talk to Joleen about the fact that his advances towards me, which went so far as trying to lick my shoulder after I’d had a shower, were not genuine affection, but a twisted theatre on her behalf. But again she would hear none of it.

      And her fury only grew.

      

      The room itself was the usual testament to the authorities who believed that if they treated us like kids we’d act like them and not have sex. We had bunk beds.

      The beds were ‘debunked’ upon my request – they were too high to jump down from, particularly if, like me, you have weak netball ankles caused by a thousand sprains from the ages of eight to eighteen. Besides, I just don’t think bunk beds are dignified at twenty-one, especially if you have an overnight guest. The likelihood of serious injury during any kind of sexual experimentation is increased at least tenfold. Joleen grudgingly agreed. My bed was still higher than hers, as it was the top bunk, the one with the longer legs, the one that would have suspended me six feet in the air given the chance. Now I could jump easily down to the floor by putting my foot on the wood of the end of her bed. This was the piece of wood where the metal rod would slot in a hole in the centre to connect the two beds when they were in their naturally ‘bunked’ state. This was the hole I stepped on nearly every day with bare feet as I climbed out of bed. This was the hole that Joleen chose to put an upright compass in, without my knowledge, which I missed by a fraction, and at the very last minute, one day while she was at lectures. I don’t need to say the word ‘freak’, but I will.

      I tried to talk to Dale about it as well. One afternoon, early in my stay,

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