Her Untold Chapters

Cresthaven University sat on a hill at the edge of the city like a promise someone had made and miraculously actually kept. Its red-bricked buildings were draped in climbing ivy that turned copper in October. The jacaranda trees lining the main boulevard bloomed in September in shades of violet so vivid they seemed almost theatrical, as though the campus had decided that the arrival of new students deserved a standing ovation from nature itself. There were cobblestone paths between the faculties that were hell on heels but beautiful in the evening light. There was a fountain at the centre of the main quad that was rumoured, by seniors who told freshers anything to watch their expressions, to have been installed by a heartbroken professor in 1987 in memory of a student he could never have. Serena Whitfield had heard this story three times in her first two days, from three different people, and had not yet decided whether she believed it. But she liked it. It was the kind of story that suggested Cresthaven was a place where feelings mattered where they were not merely tolerated but built into the architecture. She had arrived on a Wednesday morning with two suitcases, a backpack with a broken zipper, and the particular species of terror that only the truly hopeful experience. The terror of someone who wants something badly enough that the possibility of not getting it has become physical a tightness in the chest, a sensitivity in the fingertips, a hyper-alertness to everything. She was eighteen years old. She had never lived away from home. She knew absolutely nobody. Her mother had pressed a Bible into her hands at the bus terminal, both palms flat against the cover as though sealing something inside it. "Find a good church," she had said. "And stay away from boys." Serena had smiled and said "yes, Mum" in the tone she had perfected over eighteen years warm, agreeable, entirely noncommittal. She had thought: *I am not afraid of boys. I am afraid of being invisible.* Because that had always been her deepest fear. Not failure, not heartbreak, not even loneliness in its ordinary form. The specific fear of passing through a place without leaving a mark on it of being the girl people forgot to mention when they were remembering who was there. Cresthaven, she discovered quickly, did not accommodate invisibility for long. The Department of English and Communication Studies her department turned out to be populated by the kind of people who had strong opinions about semicolons and were not afraid to defend them at length. They read things obsessively and then needed immediately to tell someone what they had read and what they felt about it. They were passionate, verbose, occasionally exhausting, and they pulled Serena in within her first week like a warm tide she had not realised she was already swimming toward. She made her first real friend in the department library on a Thursday afternoon. The library was her sanctuary from the first day high ceilings, the smell of old paper, windows that caught the afternoon light in long golden bars across the reading tables. She had claimed a table in the far corner, arranged her things with the precision of someone establishing territory, and was deeply absorbed in a novel when a girl dropped into the chair across from her without asking, set down an enormous tote bag that clinked with what sounded like several flasks, and said: "You look like you know where the good food is. You're coming with me." Her name was Clara Bennett. Her laugh was architectural it physically altered whatever room it entered. She was studying Drama and did not see any reason why the whole of life should not be approached with the same commitment she gave to her performances. She had, within twenty minutes of their first meeting, decided that Serena was her person. Serena, who had been lonely in the polite, well-managed way of someone too proud to admit it, did not resist. Clara introduced her to the rhythm of Cresthaven life: which canteen served food that wouldn't betray you, which lecturers rewarded effort and which rewarded strategic brilliance, which parts of campus were worth exploring after dark and which were best avoided. She introduced her to her circle of friends a loose, affectionate group of second and first-years who congregated on the steps outside the Faculty of Arts on Friday evenings and argued about music with the urgency of people who believe it genuinely matters. And it was Clara cheerfully and without ceremony who first suggested the fellowship. "You seem like a church person," Clara said one evening, as though she were observing a fact about the weather. "What does a church person look like?" Serena asked. "You," Clara said simply. "Come on Sunday. It's actually good. The music alone is worth it." Serena went that Sunday. She sat in the third row of the campus chapel and listened to the choir and felt, for the first time since arriving at Cresthaven, that she was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. There was something about the music full-bodied, unhurried, sincere that got past her defences in a way that surprised her. She was not someone who cried easily, and she did not cry, but something in her chest loosened. Something she had been holding tightly since the bus terminal released its grip slightly. She went back the following Sunday. And the one after that. She joined the midweek Bible Study group that met on Wednesday evenings. She volunteered for the hospitality team, arriving early to arrange chairs and set out flasks of tea, staying late to stack them again. She was useful, and she liked being useful it gave her a place in the architecture of a thing. It was during the third Wednesday meeting, as the group was dispersing into the warm evening, that someone fell into step beside her on the path back toward the hostels. She had noticed him before. It was difficult not to. He led the worship with a guitar and a voice that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his chest a voice that did not perform so much as simply be, which was rarer and more powerful than performance. He was not the most obviously handsome man in the fellowship, but he had a quality of attention that drew people in. When he spoke to you, he looked at you. Fully. Without the sideways distraction of someone who is already thinking about the next thing. He looked at her now. "You're new," he said. "Is it that obvious?" she replied. He considered this seriously, as though it were a real question deserving a real answer. "Only because I make it my business to know everyone here. And I don't know you yet." His name was Adrian Calloway. He was a second-year student. He studied Business Administration. He had been at Cresthaven for a year and a half and moved through the fellowship with the ease of someone who has found his place and settled into it completely. She told him her name. He repeated it once, quietly, as though filing it carefully. "I'll see you Wednesday," he said, at the point where their paths diverged. She walked the rest of the way to her hostel alone, and told herself there was no reason why that brief exchange should have left her feeling the way it did. She was wrong. *And in the weeks that followed, Adrian Calloway would give her every reason in the world to wish she had simply walked faster.*