It’s different up here. It could be peaceful, the old walls softening the constant activity downstairs into a comforting buzz, and my chair has been positioned opposite a window that looks out onto the river. Thursday’s weather is a lot more sanguine than Tuesday’s, all the rage worn out of the rain and out of me. Tall trees sway with the wind, their copper-coloured leaves sailing away to paper the campus in fall colours. Itcouldbe peaceful. But it isn’t. I’m supposed to be here to fix my anxiety but I’ve never felt so nervous in my life. I didn’t sleep at all last night and this morning, I couldn’t eat a thing. How is this supposed to make me feel better?
‘Mia?’
The door next to the window opens and a young woman stepsout. Even though she said my name and I’m the only one here, I still look around the empty room, just in case.
‘That’s me.’
I stand and follow her into the office, heart hammering, throat tight, stomach sour. This is not how I imagined my life at Hemden. This is not it at all.
‘Take a seat, anywhere you like.’
The woman waves a hand around the compact office then drops neatly into her own chair, a big, square-looking thing with a metal frame and squishy navy blue cushions. It looks out of place with the rest of the university, too modern, too much of a contrast. My choices are another wooden chair like the one outside, a tiny sofa littered with mismatched pillows or another square chair, just like hers. The wooden option looks more like it’s there to hold bags than humans and the thought of the sofa makes my skin itchy. How many people have laid on that thing, stared up at the ceiling and waded through the depths of their trauma? So I take the matching blue chair, almost knee to knee with the counsellor, tucking my legs in as tightly as I can.
‘I’m Billie Huang,’ the woman says as I rearrange myself, tugging the sleeves of my sweater over my hands, crossing my legs at the ankle, then at the knee, then at the ankle again. ‘It’s great to meet you, Mia.’
‘Thanks?’
She’s younger than I thought she would be, much closer to my age than I’d have guessed. All my school counsellors at home were a lot older and as far as I know, tattoo and piercing free. Billie hasstuds running all the way up her ear and when she pushes up her sleeves, I see intricate, colourful tattoos on both arms.
‘I think you’re the first person I’ve ever met from South Carolina. You’re a long way from home.’
‘Four thousand miles.’
‘I was only four hundred miles away as a student and it felt very far.’ She has an accent but it’s soft and I can’t place it. ‘And Falkirk to Hemden felt a lot farther than that when I found out my phone didn’t work here.’
‘You were a student here?’
‘Yep. I graduated six years ago.’
She looks younger. I glance around, checking the room for all possible emergency exits. Just the one door and two windows. Hopefully this won’t go so badly I have to barrel-roll through a pane of glass and jump two floors down to the ground.
‘Do you want to start or should I?’
‘I don’t mind, whatever is easiest for you,’ I tell her, bright and breezy so she knows there’s nothing really wrong with me.
I thought it would take longer to get an appointment but when Alice dragged me into the medical centre to sign up on Tuesday, I must’ve looked worse than I felt because the front office managed to find an open spot first thing on Thursday morning. But I’m fine, really. Tuesday was a bad day. I feel better now. Clearer. If anyone should be in this office, it’s Ethan, but I haven’t seen him for two days. I have no idea where he is or what he’s doing and maybe that’s for the best.
‘Why don’t I start by telling you what I do and how I might be able to help.’ Billie leans forward, combing long, silky black hair behind her pierced ears and resting her forearms on her knees. ‘Like I said, was a student here, psychology student, then, afterI got my master’s degree in Edinburgh, I came back and set up the counselling programme. When I was here, I often felt like there was a lot of pressure on me to perform at a very high level but there wasn’t really anyone to talk to about it.’
‘What about your friends?’
‘My friends were great but they had their own stuff going on and a lot of them couldn’t necessarily relate to my problems. I went to a state school, I didn’t come from money. I really felt like getting into Hemden was such a privilege and if I didn’t ace every assignment, every time, I was letting myself down.’
‘The standards are high,’ I mumble back, pressing my left thumbnail into the pad of my left forefinger. ‘I guess if you can’t keep up, you don’t deserve to be here.’
She sits back in her chair, crossing her legs underneath her. ‘That’s what I thought too. The first time I got a bad score on an essay, I went back to my room and started applying for jobs in my hometown because I was so sure I was going to get kicked out. Luckily, I had a really great professor who saw me struggling. Living away from home for the first time, balancing my uni work with my job, my feeble attempt at a social life, it was a lot. If it wasn’t for her, I don’t think I’d have made it through the first year.’
‘Freshman year is tricky.’
‘Very,’ she agrees. ‘But I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to take all those same pressures and add on the stress of moving to another continent.’
Billie’s office is small but cosy, the tiny sofa and two square chairs taking up most of the room. There’s a desk tucked under one of her windows and bookshelves taking up every other available inch of space. I scan the spines of the books, lots of psychologytextbooks, biographies, self-help books, and a surprising amount of fiction. Who knew a psychologist would be into shifter smut?
‘That’s not why I’m here,’ I tell her, running my finger back and forth across the top of my thumbnail inside the sleeve of my sweater.
Leaning back, she examines a loose thread hanging from the sleeve of her shirt then nods.
‘How have the first few weeks been?’
