“Merethe’s not back,” Colton says as he walks into the room.
It’s 10:10pm. At 10:15pm, the automatic lockdown system would start. At 10:17pm, Sarah Hamilton, our long-suffering houseparent, would unwedge a strategic wellie from between the doors and let the lockdown system finish. I throw a coat over my pyjamas, grab my flip flops, and head out into the snow.
–
Just breathe.
–
I first remember meeting Merethe two weeks after I arrived at boarding school, and from the moment I laid eyes on her, I hated her.
She was ripped out of a John Green novel: her wavy blonde hair; her name that nobody could pronounce right; her soft laughs; her accent learnt over years of watching old English comedies at Christmas; her perfume, vanilla accented, that made my head spin whenever she walked into my room. She was in my room a lot. But most of all I hated her because when I first saw Merethe, she didn’t see me.
She’d waltz past me on her way to visit my roommates, ask them if they wanted to go to lunch. They’d all walk over together, dressed to the 9s in the Welsh countryside, and I’d sit in my pile of dirty clothes and used tissues. One. I’d consider calling my mum for the third time that day, asking her if there was any way I could come home, running my hand over a half-unpacked suitcase. Two. But the good news I want never comes.
Each evening our house has a different activity running in the dayroom, and through one of these a loud American boy forces me to talk to him, then eat meals with him, then hang out with him between classes. Through Colton I meet Pema, a British girl from all over, whose accent and jokes sound just like mine, and her hair’s cut like my mum’s, and she refuses to let me spend any time alone. We talk about books. Three. We hang out on the sofas in the dayroom and drink tea. Four. We have pillow fights and DMCs and talk about everything and nothing. Not the whole story yet, but enough that I don’t have to call my mum quite so often anymore.
One day I walk into Pema’s room to give her a note and hear a familiar laugh. But now there are no tissues in my room, no late-night phone calls, no—well, fewer—dirty clothes.
“You know Merethe, right?” Pema asks.
It’s then, the moment I feel that she’s finally spotted me.
We’re all still sitting on Pema’s bed eating ginger snaps when Sarah comes for check-in two hours later. Five.
–
Breathe.
–
Sometime in second term, Colton asks if we want to take a walk. The three of us: him, me, Merethe. He needs some air. He calls it an adventure. Colton’s full of adventures.
Behind the house there’s a patch of woodland called Sunley Forest, where all the smokers hang out, the orange of their cigarettes just about visible from the house. As we’re clambering over the fence that separates it from the rest of school campus, my new wellies snag on a bit of barbed wire. One. There’s a white groove in them for the next two years, cut in the shape of an adventure. Merethe walks a few steps ahead of me, slipping between branches and dead leaves, as though she might attract Sarah Hamilton’s attention three walls away by stepping too loud.
“Hurry up!” Colton shouts. The mud is thick here. It cakes the side of your boots, an extra weight that you carry with you until you reach the water side. Two.
After the forest comes Sunley Fields, then Sunley Cliffs, and Sunley Beach. Atlantic College is bustling with imaginative names. Tonight we stop at the cliffs. Colton lies down and dangles his head over the edge, cackling. Merethe and I sit a few meters away from the edge. I lace my fingers through the grass, as if somehow it’ll anchor me when the cliffs break away. Three.
He finishes his adventure and moves over to sit with us. In a year we’ll be sat here drinking white wine and laughing about deadlines, exams, university applications, university rejections, what it’s all meant to mean. But for now we look out over the Bristol Channel and try to make out the waves from the patches of white foam that zig-zag across the water. You can see the lights in England from here. We’re as far from them as I am from the city back home; if I squint I can pretend it’s a lake. If I squint I’m home.
Then Merethe shuffles around and I’m back in Wales. “What’s one thing you guys haven’t told anyone at school yet, but something that you wish everyone knew? Like, the kind of thing you wish you didn’t have to tell, or talk about I guess, but somehow everyone was aware of it.”
“Very specific question,” I respond. I already know exactly what to answer. “You’ve obviously got something in mind. What’s yours?”
“I want to hear yours first.”
Back to the waves, deep in thought. I don’t want to be the first—I want to know what level of secret we’re talking here. Eventually Colton goes. He says he’s worried about his sister. She’s two years younger, she’s had some issues, but I’m only half listening. Was it body image issues? Maybe I thought that; she’s a teenage girl, and what teenage girl didn’t go through a phase of prodding thighs and stretch marks, wishing you could melt into the floor, that you could be anything else but the thing staring back at you.
“I’m gay,” I say. Asking what you wish people knew is just another way of asking why you came here, what it is you were running away from. What a surprise, you told your parents something and it didn’t go the way you planned. Things were different, wrong, worse after you told them. You thought you could be yourself here. You thought maybe running away might fix it, though you’d never tell anyone that. You knew running away would give you a chance to live it if you couldn’t get rid of it, pray it away, pick it out from under your skin.
Merethe says someone close to her died. Committed suicide. This time I know she didn’t say who. She wanted us to know that much, but only that much. Who wants to be labelled as a dead girl walking in the first term?
This wasn’t a fun game. Somehow the air feels both lighter and so much heavier. It all hangs there, within reach, but we don’t dare touch it. Four.
We know we’ll learn more later. There’s so much time left.
–
Breathe.
–
It’s nearing the end of second term of first year. Colton bursts through the door. This is the first time he does this. It becomes a habit by second year.
Slam.
One.
“You need to come with me.”
I follow him down the corridor and across to Merethe’s room. She’s not crying, but she’s also not breathing right. Half breaths—two—quick, not rhythmic, chaotically pushing their way through her.
“I got here five minutes ago. Adaobi got me from downstairs,” he explains. Adaobi is Merethe’s roommate, but she’s not here now. “I don’t know how long it’s been going on.”
What can I say? Panic attacks aren’t real. They’re what people say they’re having when deadlines loom closer. Like when you say you’re depressed and want to kill yourself every time something mildly inconvenient happens. You don’t get classes in how to calm someone down when they’ve really lost themselves to the spiral.
We sit there with her on the floor for a while, trying to get her breaths under control. I ask her what’s wrong, what’s happening, can she talk, then decide that questions could only make things worse and say that it’ll be okay, that this’ll pass, but empty promises are empty and so then I say nothing. Colton holds her hand and she leans into him but nothing’s changing, and I’m still trying to write the right words in my mind.
Adaobi returns with Sarah Hamilton in tow. Colton and I stay flanking Merethe. Sarah’s a therapist as well as a houseparent, but she’s also fucked up a lot of things in the time we’ve known her. She trades information for information. A small part of me is wondering whether Merethe is panicking because Sarah told a few of us about what happened before she came to boarding school.
Sarah kneels in front of us and tells Merethe to breathe. Sarah breathes loudly, slowly. Merethe doesn’t. Five breaths.
“Name five things you can see.”
Pause. Hurried breaths. “Carpet. Curtain. Lights. You. Colton.”
“Now breathe.”
Slightly slower. Slightly more in time.
“Name four things you can touch.”
Five breaths. “Name three things you can hear.”
Five breaths. “Name two things you can smell.”
Five breaths. “Name one thing you can taste.”
Five breaths. “Name something you’re grateful for.”
We all stay for a while longer, until there’s no trace of the last thirty minutes on her face. When we leave, I hear her pick up the phone. Three.
–
Breathe.
–
11:30pm. Halfway through first term, first year. Merethe and I have been friends a few weeks. The weather in the three months had been uncharacteristically good, but now it was beginning to show its true colours. Torrential rain followed by hail, then ice, then rain, then snow, then sunshine for just long enough to coax you out the door without a raincoat, then rain. And now thunder. On the girl’s floor you can see every strike with perfect clarity through the skylights and feel each second of the wind shaking the foundations of the house to its core.
My laptop sits on the bedside counter and I’m reading a book underneath my covers, which, for the first time since I got here, I’ve bothered to wash. Washing powder is one of those things that is unique to each person and each home; when you leave, you realise that your whole life every cloth you’ve touched and every sheet you’ve slept under has smelt of home. Only now it doesn’t. I keep a small bag of my mum’s laundry powder under my bed, and I never use it. One.
Merethe walks into the room. I’ve known her for a month now, and none of my roommates are here. She’s stopped talking to them so much, and I realise that for the first time since she met me she’s in my room to talk to me.
“Can I sit with you?”
“Sure.”
“What are you doing?”
“Reading. I don’t want to burn out my laptop if lightning strikes.”
“Is that a real thing?”
“No clue,” I say. She laughs. “Do you want tea?” I gesture vaguely towards the kettle that we keep in our dorm. An act of teenage rebellion against arbitrary school rules. It’s still warm from a few minutes ago.
“Sure. I’ll go get a mug.”
She leaves. I search through my drawers and find a teabag, my hands brushing over a post that reads “Happy Birthday 16th banana girl – M”. She returns, chocolate bar in one hand, mug in the other.
When thunder strikes again she jumps a little, pushing her feet slightly further under my duvet. I put the book down and ask if she’s okay.
“It’s never been a problem before, but I didn’t want to worry my roommates because it seems silly, and I figured you were one of my only friends who’d still be up. Is that okay?”
“Sure.” Friends. There’s a first for everything.
“Will you plait my hair?”
“I’m shit at plaits.”
“That’s fine, I’m shit at dealing with thunder.”
She leaves once the storm’s gone and I lie back down under my covers. Only now, everything smells of vanilla perfume. Two.
Maybe this too smells like home.
–
Breathe.
–
The summer after we graduate I visit her in Sandefjord for a week. I’m ill on and off the whole time, and she’s working at a retirement home changing adult nappies every day, so she comes home exhausted and grumpy, and I stay home exhausted and grumpy.
But one morning I go for a walk to the end of the fjord, an hour each way by foot, to see some WWII bunkers—concrete shells with gaps in them for artillery. The water in the fjord seems so still compared to the Bristol Channel, which gunned against the walls of the school grounds on a daily basis. The path that rolls down to the water goes through soft grass, near fluorescent in the sun’s glare. I consciously take a breath and sit down. I pull out a sandwich I made that morning. One.
In Wales, the land drops straight down into the ocean. The cliffs, jagged and cruel looking even on the best of days, claim lives in a myriad of ways. Some trip walking the coastal path. Sometimes they’ll be on the cliff when it breaks away, and sometimes they’ll be on the beach beneath it. Some just throw themselves off the night after prom, leaving a note, a hundred questions, and a story that’ll be passed down as a warning to each new year that arrives, a ghost that haunts us, those that never met him.
That story never worked as a deterrent—it just kept the concept in the front of our minds. Every time someone broke down crying in the corridor, every time someone said they couldn’t do it, forcing you to catch your breath and stop your thoughts from running wild because they didn’t mean it, surely. But if the cliffs were a temptation, they were also a release. Merethe used to go to the seafront and let the sound of the waves mask her screaming until she’d tired herself out whenever her shit got too much. If it was raining, she’d go to the dance studio. The trick is to drown your thoughts in sound.
I don’t talk about school much anymore. Not because I’m traumatised, or I’m ruined, or I’m scarred for life. But because to explain those many moments of simple happiness, you have to explain some of the rarer, darker times. The times we realised we needed each other, that we all loved one another without question. Without that unapologetic and undemanding frankness, the happier times are all too simple, skin-deep and plain. We have a saying at school: “the cliffs follow you.” It means the darkness is always with you, but so are the calmer times. Drinking on the cliffs with your legs dangling into the void, thinking you’ve got all the time in the world. Talking about everything and then nothing with people who meant nothing and then everything to you. We’re always running from the cliffs, but we always run back again.
The day after I got to Norway, Merethe’s mum drove me around and pointed out the various landmarks of Sandefjord. The docks. The shipyard. The whaling museum. The town square fountain. The graveyard where Merethe’s dad was buried. And the WWII bunkers, mostly unused, a relic of a time Norway rarely talks about.
–
Breathe.
–
I walk into the dance studio. 10:20pm. Check-in’s passed already. Merethe’s back is turned to me. She’s doing some modernist move that I don’t quite get, to a song I don’t know. Arms up, a single leg out. Then arms come down, just above the waist. She turns. Stops.
“We need to head back, we’re late,” I say.
“I know.”
I sit on a table to the side. “Do you want to talk?”
She turns away and starts to dance. A minute passes, and the music starts to fade. She sinks to the ground. The song ends and she’s lying on her back, staring at the neon ceiling lights.
“Let’s just wait a bit?” she asks.
I nod, and lie down next to her. The lights hurt. The door opens and Colton comes in. He joins us on the floor without saying anything. After ten minutes we’re all spooning, talking. After twenty we’re crying. Thirty we’re laughing. Forty we’re back at Sunley house, checked-in, ready for another day.
One.
Breathe.