As soon as Elsa made her way out of the cafeteria she stopped and inhaled the breath of fresh air. Her heart was beating roughly against her chest. No matter how hard she tried to maintain her posture and pretend to be cool around crowds, crowds always had the ability to scare her.

She was grateful that she was finally out of the cafeteria. She hated the traffic congestion of bodies pressing, pushing and shoving forward in that small cafeteria hurrying to god-knows-where. She detested the smell of humanity; the smell of fried fish, chips and cooking oil; the loud voices screaming in disunity as if competing for attention.

Attention was one thing that Elsa didn’t like. She was not used to it; it made her blood run cold.

She was never one worthy of attention, nobody ever cared about what she thought or felt. She had always been the outcast. She wasn’t one of those girls in high school in their little cliques who got attention from the sporty guys.

She didn’t even get attention from her parents. They were hardly ever at home, always working for so she could have a better life. Elsa hated how her quality education in one of the best school in the province, took away her parents.

No one cared about her. The boys in her street in the township called her a ‘coconut’ because she went to a private school.

She has always been a lonely misfit; an eternal outcast. The isolated bookworm whose only friends were those in distant lands she read about in his father’s well-furnished study room.

No one understood her. No one tried to understand her, except her high school friend Lisa. But she had moved to Cape Town to study at CPUT. She hated growing up. It drove friends apart, she often said.

Elsa missed her friend terribly, and their friendship was already showing cracks because they hardly spoke nowadays. Elsa sometimes wondered if they would ever be the same as before, she had read too many stories about strong relationships weakened by distance.

She had met Theresa, her roommate, and that was where the association ended. Theresa was an out-going, bubbly party animal. She always had somewhere to go and something to do. University was a lonely new environment for Elsa.

She needed some quiet time, to read. She was surprised to find Theresa in the room, usually she was out.

She mumbled a greeting and sank in her bed. She immediately took out her books and was getting ready to study.

“You’ve got the personality of a dead duck, you know that?” Theresa said, pouting and smiling in the mirror, preparing for yet another night out. That was the thing about her; she didn’t mince her words. She didn’t sugar-coat anything. A dead duck was a dead duck, and that was it. You don’t like it, lump it, she would say.

Elsa was taken aback by her roommate’s words. She was a dead duck, and there was no denying it. She wanted to say something to defend herself, but words failed her.

Words often did that to her – they escaped her mind, just when she needed them most – and she detested those moments when she failed to make an early comeback when something mean had been said to her.

I’d make a bad lawyer, she thought scolding herself. I can’t think on my feet.

Silence reigned supreme, as her roommate was expecting a defensive response and her mind chose to switch off. The silence was so bad that Elsa could hear the brush sound as it painted Theresa’s nail crimson.

“You need to get out more and learn to mingle. Stop behaving like a hermit locked in this room all the time,” Theresa gestured with her hands pointing at the four walls of the room. But she did it in such a sophisticated way that the nail paint won’t smear against anything.

“I like it here. I like my own space, it gives me time to think,” Elsa explained herself sounding clumsy, knowing it was a useless thing to do, nobody understood her.

“I am not surprised you are very strange, never kissed a boy, have you?” she was now standing by her wardrobe taking out her clothes, and her pink toiletry bag, she was going to take a shower.

I shouldn’t have told her about me never kissing a boy, Elsa thought ruefully.

“You will probably be content with dying a virgin too,” Theresa had said, laughing. She banged the door and walked to the showers, her voice echoing down the corridor, leaving with Elsa with the scent of nail polish for company.

“Personality of a dead duck… Die a virgin,” Elsa repeated the words as she scribbled them down on her notepad. She couldn’t study now even if she tried. The truth in Theresa’s words was what haunted her more. Sure she has never kissed anyone; there was no one who ever showed interest in her.

And then there was that group of boys in the cafeteria who had showed interest in her, but she had dismissed them. Could I have blown my only chance of ever finding love? she asked herself.

And suddenly the door opened. And there stood Theresa in a beautiful blue dress, she looked breathtakingly beautiful.

No wonder so many boys showed interest in her, Elsa thought enviously.

***

Tell us: Do you think Elsa will find love? Are you more like Elsa or Theresa?