Victoria Sees It by Carrie Jenkins (love letters to the dead TXT) 📕

wear thin pink sweaters, and she was flat-chested enough to look good in them. Even her twinsets somehow never quite looked over the top. Her hair was all the My Little Ponies I never had: dead straight, pure blonde. It was so shiny she always seemed to be wearing a little crown of light. At the front, it flopped cutely over her eyes. She was everything I wasn’t and she didn’t have to try.

I didn’t really like Deb, not at first. We just ended up doing everything together. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning I would find her—still unfeasibly disoriented—outside the back of the College, and we’d walk over to the raised building behind the brick library (which, by week three, we’d dubbed Big Willy) to our lectures. In the evenings we’d smoke and watch TV in the JCR. It smelled of spilled beer and stale cigarettes in there, which made it easier to talk. It bothered Deb that she was addicted to smoking and I wasn’t: I could take it or leave it, but if there was money left at the end of the week, I’d take it. I liked how it made my lips feel, like they had a point. Deb used to say that if that’s what it was about for me, then I was a non-smoker. I said fine, then I was a non-smoker who smoked. She said she liked her name shortened, so I started calling her Deborah-reborah. Then Deborah-reborah-reborah. Then Deborah-reborandeveramen.

She didn’t have a middle name. Apparently, her mum had hated her own middle name so much that in protest she’d given Deb no middle name at all. That made no sense to me. But Deb said it wasn’t about making sense. It meant they were connected. I told her my mother and I had the same birthday but even so we weren’t connected at all.

“You never talk about your mother,” she said, and I agreed. It was several weeks into the term before we started to ask each other real questions.

“Why are you always sad?” she said once, out of the blue.

I frowned. “I’m not.”

“You are. You don’t laugh at anything. I watched you the other day in the Humberton lecture and you never laughed once.”

The frown furrowed itself in deeper. “It wasn’t funny,” I said. I’d honestly assumed the other students laughed out of awkwardness. Or perhaps in hopes of ingratiating themselves with him.

“He’s pretty sharp,” Deb said.

“Dr. Bumberton,” I replied—and I unashamedly admit that we both found this hilarious—“is about as sharp as a six-minute runny poo.”

We were still bent double with laughter when two guys burst in and changed the channel to watch the football.

—

When I went up to Cambridge, I stopped visiting my mother in the home. It was too far. I couldn’t afford to take trains across the country all the time. So I stopped telling my half-bullshit stories to anyone. Almost my whole life I’d been spouting a running commentary into the dead air of the home, and now it went quiet. I would phone my aunt sometimes, but she only wanted to exchange platitudes and tell me how the weather was or what she and my uncle had eaten that week.

I wonder if my mother noticed the silence. I didn’t, really. I had started talking to Deb. We liked to play with language, especially the Cambridge Latin. If you failed an exam, you were allowed to apply for an aegrotat, which meant you were ill on the day. We’d fantasize about getting an “I grossed that” by showing up for exams covered in putrid boils, or flesh-eating worms, so that the invigilator would have to send us away and all the other kids would vomit onto their scripts.

It took me a while to understand why Deb spoke slowly, but it was because her mind had gone on a three-mile hike between each word. I rush my speech because I want to get the talking over with, end the awkward social interaction. But Deb wasn’t afraid of people. She was a still river with a killer undercurrent. I suppose people have a social speed setting, and connecting with them means you have to know the right setting. Deb’s setting was slow but that didn’t mean anything, except that’s where her dial was set. When I meet people I do try to find their setting. It’s better than giving up on a connection right away. It never seems to work though, not like it did with Deb.

One day I taught her a line from my old school chant: Domino deo nostro serviemus. She said it slowly back to herself: “Dom-in-o de-o nos-tro…serve me a moose?” and we crumpled into painful laughter that hardly paused long enough for us to eat or drink for the next forty-eight hours. Neither of us knew what sort of noise a moose made, so we experimented with a range of awful bellows and grunts. Nobody else found this funny, especially at night.

Sometimes when we talked until very late, Deb would curl up on the floor of my room. We didn’t sleep much those nights, we just talked and laughed. Then, as the sky began to lighten, each of us would tell the other we were worried about her: she was not getting enough sleep. And we’d laugh at that until it was time to get up.

Breakfast would be a bleary meal of eggs and fried bread, watched over by a huge full-body painting of Henry VIII which dominated the Hall from the north end. Eating in Hall could be awkward, especially if you were wearing a skirt. The Hall seating, for members in statu pupillari, consisted of long wooden benches and long wooden tables, in straight parallel lines, perpendicular to the High Table. The benches made it incredibly hard to sit down in a skirt without showing the world your knickers. The College may have caved to the pressure to admit women students, but it drew the line at giving us opportunities to