The Blueprint by Marcus Bryan Read Free Book Online

a rung
down the social ladder; I’d dropped off it entirely. In the space
of a day, I’d become, well… a nothingness, really. A blank
slate.
    It was about
the time that I heard a gaggle of voices echoing down the corridor
outside that I began to panic. Why didn’t you just go and
introduce yourself to someone when you first got here? I asked
myself with regret and bitterness. Why don’t you just go out
there now? It’s not like anyone’s going to say, ‘Fuck off; don’t
want to know you.’ In my brain, I knew these things to be true,
but it didn’t change the fact that something in my bones was
preventing me from going out there and giving the owners of the
voices a cheery ‘ hello! ’ The more time went past, the more
impenetrable this mental roadblock became. I’m aware that this
might all sound a bit pathetic - and it is - but you’ve got to
understand that asking me to go and start an unsolicited
conversation with a group of strangers was a bit like me asking you
to go up to a group of shaven-headed teenage lads on a bus and say,
‘Sorry guys, do you mind if I have a quick look at one of your
cocks? Y’know, for comparison.’
    The sight of
the sun going down, which brought with it the realisation that they
were soon going to be heading off for the first night of freshers’
week, leaving me here on my own, was what finally dragged me,
kicking and screaming, into action. I made a quick check of my hair
in the mirror, which inevitably turned into a lengthy staring
contest with my own face, and then slowly, cautiously, opened my
door and followed the sound of laughter down the corridor, towards
what turned out to be the kitchen.
    Throughout my
reluctant approach to party central I was trying to come up with a
witty line with which to introduce myself, and preferably one that
also explained why I was turning up so late, but all that escaped
my throat when I rounded the corner was an abortive ‘ Ah!’ Thankfully, no-one heard my first failed attempt at communication,
because the kitchen door was shut. A pair of rather tall men were
leaning with their backs to the glass pane, blocking out any sight
of me, so I just stood there for a moment debating between knocking
and opening the door myself. I went for the knock.
    The big guy on
the right looked around himself as though he couldn’t work out
where the sound had come from. I’d already embarked on another
internal debate - more angrily argued, this time - about whether to
chance a second knock or go back to my room when the door suddenly
swung open, and the tall bloke’s head was there in the crack
between the door and the wall. He’d hunched himself down, trying to
get down to my level and not quite managing it. I could smell the
Sambuca on his breath. The bottle hung in his hand. His expression
was quizzical.
    ‘Alright mate,
can I do summat for ya?’ he asked.
    ‘Ah - um -
I…I, um…’ I replied, as eloquently as I could. My frantic gesturing
somehow managed to convey the point that my vocal chords couldn’t,
because he suddenly assumed a penny’s-dropped kind of face, and
exclaimed:
    ‘Oh, are you
on our floor? Sorry, I thought we were all here already! Come in,
fella, come in. What’s your name? What course you doing? I’m Tim,
by the way.’ I stutteringly answered both of these questions,
squeezing in and finding myself a free spot in the toilet
cubicle-sized kitchen. The only such spot available was wedged
between the freezer and the wall, near enough out of sight.
    ‘Cool, man;
don’t think we’ve got any of them in our collection yet,’ Tim
replied. ‘Dom’s a medic, James is a mechanical engineer…Rob’s a -
sorry, what are you doing again? - oh, yeah, linguistics…’ He went
through the names and courses of the twelve guys packed into the
tiny kitchen, and pointed the corresponding face out as he did so.
I tried to keep up, but it all quickly turned into a soup of
disconnected syllables and mental passport photos,