365days between us

Chapter 4

The results came on a Tuesday, though Elsa would later swear it felt like a Sunday. The kind of stillness that only precedes something enormous. Her hands trembled as the browser loaded, the small circle spinning like it was deciding her fate on purpose, taking its time to torture her. Then the page opened.

“PASS”. written boldly in the column beside her name.

She stared at the word until it blurred, until Bella and Tessa’s screams behind her drowned out the ringing in her ears, until her mother came running from the kitchen with flour still on her hands, asking what had happened, half-panicked, half-hopeful. When Elsa finally turned around, tears already sliding down her face, she didn’t need to say anything. Her mother simply pulled her into her floury embrace and whispered, “See, my brainbox. Didn’t I tell you?”. They had always believed that Elsa would pass any exam. The confidence is always strong. “ My first daughter can pass any exam she wants to pass” her mom will always say to her friends. “I trust my child, she is a brain-box, once it concerns academics and brain works, leave it for my child.”

Three weeks later, admission letter in hand, Elsa stood at the gates of a university she had only ever seen in pictures, tall, iron, imposing, with students streaming in and out like the gates themselves were breathing. Her heart hammered with the particular terror of new beginnings, the kind that makes even brave people feel very, very small.

She didn’t know, as she adjusted the strap of her bag and stepped through those gates, that somewhere just a few feet ahead of her, another girl was feeling the exact same fear.

“Excuse me, is this the line for course registration?”

Elsa turned, and there she was. A girl with warm brown eyes and a smile that seemed permanently installed on her face, clutching a folder so tightly her knuckles had gone pale.

“I think so,” Elsa said. “I’ve been standing here for twenty minutes and the line hasn’t moved an inch.”

The girl laughed, a full, unguarded sound. “At least I’m not the only one suffering. I’m Julie, by the way.”

“Elsa.”

And that was it. That was the whole beginning. No thunder, no fireworks, just two nervous girls in a slow-moving line, both equally lost, both equally terrified, both equally relieved to have found someone else just as lost as they were.

What followed was a day neither of them would forget. They moved together from office to office; the bursary, where they stood in another line that wound around the building twice; the faculty office, where a stern woman scolded them both for filling a form in blue ink instead of black, as though it were a crime against the state; the ID card unit, where their photos were taken back to back, Elsa’s hair slightly disheveled from the heat, Julie’s smile so wide the photographer had to ask her to “look serious, this is not a party.”

By the time they reached the hostel allocation office, they had already shared snacks, complained about the sun, laughed at a boy who tripped over his own portmanteau, and exchanged enough life details to feel like they’d known each other far longer than six hours.

“Please,” Julie said at the desk, hands clasped like she was praying, “can we be assigned to the same room? She’s the only person keeping me sane today.”

The woman behind the desk barely looked up, stamped two forms, and slid them across. “Room fourteen. Both of you.”

Julie turned to Elsa with a triumphant grin, and Elsa, for the first time in weeks, felt something in her chest loosen.

Room fourteen was small, the paint peeling slightly at the corners, two bunk beds pressed against opposite walls, a ceiling fan that groaned more than it spun. But when Elsa and Julie walked in together, laughing, bags in hand, finishing each other’s sentences already. Other two girls have already settled inside, Chiara and Debby. They stopped mid-conversation and stared.

“Wait,” chiara said slowly, eyes narrowing between them. “Are you two twins?”

“No,” Elsa said, setting her bag down.

“Sisters, then?” Debby pressed. “You came in together, talking together, laughing at the same time, or am I lying?.”

“We just met today,” Julie said, grinning as she began unpacking.

“Today?!” Chiara’s jaw actually dropped. “Ah ah. So who’s older? Who’s the senior one?”

Elsa and Julie exchanged a glance, quick, silent, electric and something passed between them, some understanding that needed no translation. Without a word, they both simply smiled and turned back to unpacking, leaving Chiara and Debby staring at each other in bewildered confusion.

“Same school back home, maybe?” Debby tried again.

Another glance, another smile, no answer.

“Okay, this is not normal ” Chiara muttered, shaking her head, but there was a laugh buried underneath her words.

They unpacked together after that, folding clothes into the same small wardrobe, arranging their books on the same reading desk, moving around each other with an ease that felt rehearsed, though it wasn’t. By evening, when the heat had softened into a cool orange dusk, they grabbed their notebooks and walked to one of the empty lecture halls to read because Julie insisted “first day energy shouldn’t be wasted.”

They sat by the window, the setting sun spilling gold across their pages, and it was there that the laughter finally broke free.

“Are you two twins,” Julie mimicked, pitching her voice absurdly high, fanning herself dramatically.

“Who’s the senior one,” Elsa added, imitating Chiara’s narrowed eyes so precisely that Julie doubled over the desk, wheezing.

“I nearly told her we were separated at birth,” Julie gasped between laughs.

“You should have! Let her carry the confusion to her grave!”

Their laughter echoed through the empty hall, bouncing off walls that had heard a thousand different stories before theirs. And it was in the middle of that laughter, that golden, easy joy, that Elsa’s phone buzzed against the desk.

She glanced down absently, still smiling and then the smile froze.

The screen read: UNKNOWN NUMBER, - 1 missed call, 3 messages.

Julie noticed the shift immediately. “What’s wrong?”

Elsa’s thumb hovered over the notification, her heart suddenly loud in her ears.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t recognize this number at all. I’ve ignored this message for sometime now but it keeps coming”

“Maybe it’s time you find out who exactly sent them. Dont you think so?”

“No. I won’t” she said still staring at the screen of her phone.