Worse, I would now be shoved into some other, unknown module, most likely with Dr. Porter, who wore skinny black jeans and one earring and had pegged me as a Lorna groupie when I'd come for my interview. No doubt he would be teaching something pretentious and incomprehensible, like "The Phonetics of Postmodernism" or one of those other courses that made me sympathize for a moment with my mother's views on studying English Lit.

Spots appeared on the window, multiplying rapidly.

It had started to rain.

I waited until I saw Max and his carefully coiffed hair emerge down below and strike off toward the canteen in search of a consolatory bacon-and-egg roll. Then I pulled on some clothes and walked two doors down the corridor. Checking my watch, I knocked loudly and stepped in.

It was dark and slightly stuffy in Georgie's room. She jackknifed up in the bed, one hand pushing her eye mask up into her blond hair and the other pulling out one of her earplugs and scrabbling for the bedside lamp. When she saw it was me, she sagged back against her pillow with a groan.

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Sorry. But it is midday. And I'm having a crisis."

Georgie pulled out the other earplug. The mask sat across her forehead at a drunken angle, one puffy eye squinting at me. "Oh, hon. Not sick again?"

"Worse," I said. "Heartsick. Been dumped by Lorna."

My first week at college had been a catastrophe in social terms. Barely an hour after my mother had dropped me off with my suitcases, a peck on the cheek, and a brisk look around the room-

"Seems clean at least!"-the cramping had begun. Followed by three days of shivering and sweating out a stomach flu in my room, looking glumly through my window at the clump of students that formed and re-formed around the bar, scribbling self-pitying notes in my journal whenever I could summon the energy.

On the third day, temperature still raging, a fuzz at the edges of my vision, I dragged myself down to the introductory English drinks. Which was when Georgie, wearing tight, faded jeans and silver sneakers, her bleached hair cropped high to the hairline on her long, fine neck, had sidled over to me. "Ugly bunch, aren't they, English students?" she muttered, talking out of the side of her mouth like a gangster as the white-haired dean of studies gave a turgid welcome speech. "Can you believe Lorna didn't show at her own party? A living legend, that woman. Rumor has it she's seeing my supervisor, Professor Steadman." Georgie pointed to a tall, bespectacled man with gray hair. "But that can't be right, surely ..." She paused, looking at me more closely. "Hey, do you know your teeth are chattering?"

Next day, to my delight, she turned up at my door with armfuls of chocolates and sweets that she announced, loudly, were "munchies" ("There's a rumor going around that you've been smoking weed in your room all week. This will fan the flames nicely"); two different kinds of prescription painkiller ("Tuck in, plenty more where they came from"); and a magazine jammed full of photos of horsey-looking aristocrats at parties ("Don't knock it. I'm related to half of them and have kissed most of the rest. Look at this guy, Tristan Burton-Hill. He's so posh he can't actually close his mouth ...").

For the next couple of days, to my surprise, she kept popping by: one day sitting at the end of my bed with a wheel of hard cheese, which she hacked at with a teaspoon until it bent, the next bringing a handful of wildflowers that looked like dirty daisies, which she had picked by the lake on campus. "They're called sneezewort, for your dribbly nose. I went through a stage of pressing wildflowers as a kid. I learned the whole wildflower encyclopedia, which is kind of weird, looking back at it. Amazing what an only child will do to pass the time. Then I got into pottery and made endless shitty bowls. I mean, endless. Got away with about five years of never buying a single Christmas present. Shall I put them in your tooth-mug? How are you feeling today? Still got the shits both ends?"

Excerpted from The Truants by Kate Weinberg. Copyright © 2020 by Kate Weinberg. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.