The Last Time I Saw You Read Free Page B

to see Sally watching it all from the window, blue eyes darting around so she wouldn’t miss a thing.
    It wasn’t that I’d stopped being scared, if anything I was more scared, but at least now I knew I was in the right place. Or at least I thought I was.
    She was as good as her word. An hour later she gave a cursory knock, and then came crashing through my door, quickly taking in the room. There wasn’t much to see—so far my illustrious university career had consisted of hanging my backpack of clothes in the utility closet and arranging my toothbrush and toiletries on the narrow shelf above the gray, speckled sink, all to the soundtrack of Carole King’s Tapestry. It was my favorite album back then, probably because I overidentified with the soulful girl on the cover, wistfully looking out with only a cat and a guitar for company.
    “What’s this shit?” said Sally, laughing, and bobbing her head along to the music. It was “You’ve Got a Friend” that was playing, at least until I’d scrambled across the room to my stereo and turned it off. “ Tapestry ,” I said, slightly pompously. “It was one of the best-selling albums of the seventies.”
    “That’s great and everything, but there’s a vodka and tonic with your name on it going begging.” She paused. “I know this’ll sound stupid, but what is your name again?”
    “Olivia. Livvy.”
    “Which is it? No, scrub that, I can’t call you Olivia. O-liv-ia,” she repeated, in a faux posh voice. “No, definitely Livvy.”
    I bristled a little: surely it was my prerogative to give her permission to use my nickname, but I let it pass.
    “What course are you doing?” I asked.
    “English.”
    “Me too!”
    “Great minds . . .” she said. “I heard we only get about three tutorials a week and there’s study guides for the rest.”
    “Quite.”
    Not quite. I loved English, loved the books but also loved the writing. I’d had a tiny article published in a newspaper the year before, and I’d nearly died of pride.
    “Come on then,” she said, impatiently shaking my parka at me and setting off down the stairs.
    A few of our new housemates were waiting on the doorstep for us; there was Phil, a pimply engineer, a girl called Catherine, and Lola, a chubby, smiley history student who reminded me of the kind of friends I had at home. A couple more people arrived, and I tried to remember everyone’s names, but it was only Sally I could really hold onto. We set off in a gang, but she firmly interlocked her arm in mine, declared us a huddle.
    When we hit the dingy, neon-lit student bar she looked around with wide-eyed disdain and I suddenly saw the world through her eyes, even though our worlds had collided less than two hours before. Everyone looked so young and green, their nerves palpable, their bodies straining forward like coat hooksas they fought to work out who they were going to be, what territory they should colonize.
    “Dunno about you, but I reckon this is a double-shot scenario,” she said. “Back in a flash, don’t move.”
    I didn’t even really like vodka—I’d only been drinking for a couple of years, and I tended to go for gin and orange because it disguised the taste—but there was no time to tell her that, and even if there had been, I’d never have done it. We’d already laid down some silent laws, and I was following them to the letter. I turned back to our housemates, by now engaged in an earnest pissing contest about their relative A-level grades, then turned away. My learning had already begun, but it wasn’t about renaissance poetry: thanks to Sally I knew that it wasn’t cool, that it was faintly tragic, and I was invisibly spiriting myself away. I wish I could go back in time and swivel myself back around—let myself be naive and young and full of pride at my hard-won two A’s and a B—but instead I shifted from foot to foot and counted the minutes until Sally reappeared. She was mercifully fast, having