1. Falling in Love with Nitasha


    Date: 9/22/2016, Categories: First Time Author: Lisaga, Source: LushStories

    For six months I blamed the army, and this is why. My dad was a major and had taken a position overseas, dragging us with him. A year later he reckoned a British school would provide better qualifications. It was a train of thought that led, on the day of my 16th birthday, to my mother tearfully hugging me goodbye at the gates of a boarding school in the north of England on the first day of term. All I had with me was couple of heavy suitcases. But over the next half-term it was misery that weighed me down. I was pathetically tearful, regularly sending emails home pulsing with emotional blackmail. After growing up in a loving family, I was spending my time with people, both of my age and adults, who didn’t care what happened to me. A strict housemistress valued tidy studies and good behaviour above personal happiness. I had no-one to confide in, other than my diary. Aside from being ripped from my family, there were other things to adjust to. The big thing at any boarding school is the lack of privacy. There was, literally, no space to yourself. Showers were pretty much communal – yes, there were curtains, but they were always pulled back – so now I’d strip off in front of almost complete strangers at least twice a day. I hadn’t thought myself self-conscious before, but for a time I was painfully so. But while my body was nothing special – my apple-sized boobs were smaller than I’d have liked – at least I was slim and there was such an array of body types shamelessly on show ...
    ... – fat, developed, undeveloped – that I soon became resistant. And I’ll say this about boarding school: it condenses relationships. It pushes you together. Proximity finds friends and enemies quickly. Our rooms in our boarding house filled two roles: study and bedroom. While there were three desks, there were only two beds. On rotation, one girl out of the three spent a term in a dormitory, monitoring girls from the bottom year. That meant I had two roommates. One, Nitasha, was Pakistani, the daughter of a doctor who lived abroad. She was exotic: slight, with light brown skin, chocolate eyes, curling, shoulder-length hair, a little taller than me. She was self-conscious about her roman nose which she had broken years before when it was hit by a ball playing hockey. I thought it made her look fragile. She was the friend. I also shared with Suzanne, dumpy, mousey-haired and bellicose, on a Wagnerian march to become a school monitor. She was the enemy. Suzanne ruled our study autocratically. She knew the rules and saw it as her job to interpret them. I found this out on one of my first nights there. We had to spend a couple of hours in our study each evening doing homework and I put my iPod headphones on as soon as I sat down. Suzanne leaned back in her chair, jabbed her pen in my direction and glared. “No music during homework hours.” I pulled out the headphones immediately, glancing over to Nitasha, who raised a sympathetic dark eyebrow. I felt like crying. I wanted home. After ...
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