What happened next is, in retrospect, exactly what should happen when a floor of strangersbecoming-friends is faced with something none of them signed up for. They didn’t panic. They didn’t gossip. They gathered. Hassaan, in his role as Residential Leader, called reception. Twenty minutes, they said. We’ll be there in twenty minutes. In those twenty minutes, the noise of the situation drifted through the floor in the way that noise always does in a residence hall – through thin walls and open doors and the particular acoustics of curiosity. One by one, other residents emerged, and one by one, they were quietly brought up to speed. By the time K was gently brought out of M’s room and into the kitchen, there was a small, unlikely gathering waiting for her: a floor’s worth of people who had known each other for barely a week, presenting a united front they hadn’t rehearsed. They offered her water. Hassaan put fruit on the table. They sat with her, asked about her situation, and listened – genuinely listened – because underneath the discomfort, the fact remained: K was a person who didn’t have a room. 1:00AM Residence team arrives and hears the full situation. A solution is sought. 1:30AM An unlikely room is found: Menzies Annexes – a space ordinarily reserved for visiting dignitaries. K is given access. 2:00AM K is escorted to her new, rather grand, temporary accommodation. The kitchen lets out a collective breath. 2:05AM K knocks on the door again. She has lost her phone The Residence team had, after thirty or forty minutes of coordination, come through. The room they found was, admittedly, a peculiar one – Menzies Annexes, a building ordinarily kept for the kind of visiting guests who arrive with entourages – empty, a little ghostly, but equipped and available. It wasn’t a dormitory. It was, by campus standards, closer to a VIP suite. K was escorted there as Tower 1 finally, genuinely exhaled. Hassaan started on the dishes. The kitchen was down to the original three again – the same three who had sat down to dinner what felt like an entire era ago. Goodnights were being said. Then came the knock. It was K. She had lost her phone. She was almost in tears. Let it be said that they were kind. They were tired – Semester 1 was six and a half hours away – but they were kind. They called her number. They retraced steps. Nothing turned up. Hassaan suggested she walk the route back to the Annexes; she might have dropped it somewhere along the path. And then, with all the grace they could muster at two in the morning before the first day of university, they said goodnight again, and this time it held. K found her phone. As it turned out, she eventually found her room too – she was placed in one of the towers near Chisholm not long after, her accommodation situation finally, properly resolved. And Tower 1? Tower 1 went to bed. Late, wrung out, a little wired from the adrenaline of it all – but somehow more itself than it had been at dinner. Because there is a particular kind of bond that forms not over shared meals or icebreaker games, but over the moments when something unexpected happens and you find out what the people around you actually do. That night, a floor full of strangers from half a dozen countries found out. They showed up. They made fruit plates. They stayed until it was resolved. Not bad for the night before Semester 1. THE GIRL WHO KNOCKED TWICE BY HASSAAN KHURRAM A FICTIONAL SHORT STORY 16
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