It was difficult to know where to start. With the bed, she supposed. She pulled the tape off the box labelled ‘sheets’, the contents lovingly ironed by her mother, and made the bed. Then she put her books on the shelves. She took out her speaker and thought about putting some music on, but the idea of picking what she’d be listening to when Zadie arrived was too much to deal with.

There was a knock at the door and the nerves swelled in Chloe’s chest. This was it. Her first meeting with her room-mate. A small blonde girl with thin eyebrows put her head around the door, smiling. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Lissy.’

Oh. Not Zadie. Chloe fixed her face into a smile. ‘Chloe,’ she said.

‘A group of us from the corridor are going down to the pub. Do you want to join?’ She looked around the room. ‘Oh, wow, you’re sharing. Bad luck …’ She paused, seeming to realize that she was being rude. ‘But I mean, it might be fun. Everyone in America shares a room at uni. My cousin lives in Florida.’

Chloe drank in the girl’s jeans, zip-up jumper and trainers – the same outfit everyone back home wore; she even had the same shade of lipstick. She looked across at the unmade bed. ‘That’s really nice of you,’ she said, ‘but I think I’m going to wait for Zadie to arrive.’

‘Zadie?’

‘My room-mate.’

‘Oh.’ The girl smiled. ‘Cool. Well we’ll be at the George if you both want to join later.’ She disappeared, leaving a faint smell of Impulse body spray behind her.

Four hours later, Zadie still hadn’t arrived. The empty bed and shelves stood in stark contrast to her own side of the room, covered with books, fairy lights and posters.

She should go down to join Lissy and her friends. But something inside her recoiled at the idea. Besides, what if she went and sat with them at some sticky table in a pub and they talked about what A levels they’d done and what subject they were studying and if they had boyfriends, the same stupid conversation she’d had a million times back home, and, in her absence, Zadie arrived?

University, it turned out, was a lot like college. Lectures. Seminars. Essays. Girls swishing their hair and not speaking up in case their intellect made them less desirable to the boys, who talked at length about books they probably hadn’t read. Chloe’s conviction that she would be transformed into a latter-day bluestocking with reams of friends who sat around drinking and discussing art was starting to wane.