The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [48]
We gathered ourselves together, put on our most innocent faces, and walked downstairs as a united front. Claudia called us inside on the very first knock.
“Ah, girls . . .”
I immediately relaxed. It was a cheerful “ah, girls.” Not an “I’m going to murder you now with a hockey stick” kind of “ah, girls.” She gestured for us to take a seat in one of her floral chairs. Jazza swallowed so hard I heard it.
“You’re getting a roommate tomorrow,” she said. “Her name is Bhuvana Chodhari. Late admission.”
“Why is she moving into our room?” I asked. “Eloise has a room all to herself.”
“Eloise has severe allergies. She needs an air purifier in her room.”
This was so obvious and outrageous a lie that I almost laughed out loud. Eloise didn’t have allergies. She smoked more than a tire fire.
“Your room was originally a triple,” Claudia went on. “There’s plenty of space. If you have anything in the third wardrobe, you need to get it out tonight. That will be all, I think.”
We returned to our room and shut the door.
“She knows,” Jazza said.
I nodded.
“This totally blows,” I added.
After briefly analyzing the dimensions, we concluded that there was no way this room was a triple. At most it was maybe four feet wider than the rooms around it, and it did have an extra window, but that was it.
“You never know,” Jazza said. She had recovered from the initial shock and was trying to be the ever-bright-and-cheery one. “She may be lovely. I mean, I like having just the two of us in here, but it might not be bad.”
“We’re losing our sofa.”
I looked mournfully at the extra bed we had turned against the wall and loaded down with Jazza’s two hundred cushions.
“We hardly ever use it,” Jazza babbled on. “And it could have been worse. It could have been so much worse.”
But I think she felt the same way I did. This was our room, our little peaceful spot in the universe, and we’d lost it because we’d snuck out. I fell silent and looked up at the sky through the panes of the window. It was getting dark so much earlier. It came on fast here. The trees were black outlines against the dark lavender of the London night sky.
“Crap,” I said.
17
THE NEXT MORNING, WE TOOK A FINAL LOOK AT OUR room as it was before we headed off to breakfast. When I returned to do a book switch-out after lunch, our room had a new occupant. Bhuvana was stretched out on the bed, talking on the phone. She gave me a little wave and a smile and wrapped up her conversation. She seemed fine with the position of the bed and had redecorated it with a huge pink and gray duvet and a stack of metallic silver and pink pillows. There were bags everywhere—suitcases, duffel bags, shopping bags.
Bhuvana was, as her name suggested, of Indian descent. She had very straight, very black hair, with one bright streak of artificial cherry red on the right side. It was cut into a severe line just at the shoulders, and she had razor-straight bangs. Along with the fact that she wore a lot of black eyeliner and long, dangling gold earrings, she reminded me of pictures of Cleopatra. She clearly wasn’t from India, though. Her accent was as British as they come—fast, urban, kind of Cockney, I guess. I could barely understand her at points.
“Aurora, yeah?” she said as she hung up the phone. She bounced off the bed to embrace me and give me two air kisses.
“Rory,” I corrected her. “You’re Bhuvana?”
“Boo,” she corrected me right back. “Only my gran calls me Bhuvana.”
“Only my grandma calls me Aurora.”
So we had that in common. Boo was several inches taller than me. She too had put her uniform on right away, but she wore it with a swagger, her tie slightly undone and jerked to the side.
“Did your parents just . . . drop you off?” I asked, looking at the stuff piled around the floor.
“Well, I live in London,” she said breezily. “I was in Mumbai visiting family, yeah? And I got sick, which is why I’m late for term. So, yeah, got catching up to do.”
Boo’s things looked like they had been hastily packed—everything randomly shoved