Wings & Hearts

“Paavo! Get out of the bathroom, my hair straightener is on in there!” I pounded on the door of the only bathroom in the flat with the palm of my hand; it was nearly seven thirty of my second Monday in Helsinki, and I had orientation at eight.

“Really, Paavo, I have a bus to catch!” With a sigh, I skittered back to my room to grab a navy and gold ribbon belt to thread through the loops of my chino’s; I didn’t really want to listen to Paavo’s wordless grunts and excuses through the bathroom door about why he couldn’t go to class. “Listen veli, just because you don’t recover well from a night of drinking doesn’t mean you’re going to miss class!” I secured my favorite string of fake pearls close around my throat before I began to pound on the door again. How ridiculous.

“Paavo!”

I could have just gone to U. Hel. looking as I did, my hair was naturally straight enough except for a few stubborn little curls along my hairline, but on the first day I demanded perfection; and at that exact moment an extremely haggard-looking version of my older brother stumbled his way out of the bathroom.

“Are you going to class, Paavsi?” I managed, the toothbrush in my mouth made me sound like a retard, but I had to ask. A few passes of the flat iron and I was good to go… except I was missing my sweater. Why did I find it necessary to turn into an unorganized mess every time I find myself in a hurry? I finally found the navy blue piece and pulled it down over the light blue polo I wore; I heard my brother grunt wordlessly from the other room as I filled a pink and green travel coffee container from the kettle I had put on the stove upon waking that morning.

“I guess, it seems I must.” He emerged from his room with an over-worn Svedka Vodka t-shirt slung over his shoulder.

“Wish me luck?” I asked, securing the lid on my cup before I set it beside my book-filled tote bag that lay on the counter. Paavo shrugged and crossed the kitchen to kiss my cheek and ruffle the hair I had just worked so hard to perfect. “Aw, thanks.” Scowling, I lit a cigarette, the first one of the day.

“Good luck,” Paavo said, from where he was hunched over the kitchen sink running water over his face. “Pour me a mug of that?” He added like I was his Good Housekeeper or something; I rolled my eyes and protested, but poured it for him all the same - he had just wished me luck and was going to class, after all.

“Alright, I’m out.” I called, shouldering my bag and sipping my coffee on the way out the door.

The first time I had seen the neighborhood of the flat I had instantly realized why my parents had fallen in love with it all those years ago - when they were still single and hadn’t given birth to my most charming older brother. The old warehouse building was expansive, filled with a community of its own, and beyond that were similar buildings and cure little townhouses which I couldn’t imagine had been present when the area was industrial. Women stood together on the front porch chatting as their unruly children frolicked in the streets, which were always unusually devoid of traffic for some reason - probably because Vallila was so well serviced by the bus companies of Helsinki and the Commuter rail and the relatively new Metro lines. Quite a convenient place for businessmen who didn’t want to go through the hassle of owning a car - aka, my parents when my father worked as a drone for the Nokia Corporation. As a big-shot on the Board of Directors, my parents could afford to branch out into the more remote and quaint locations, which was why Paavo and I had lived in Oulu most of our lives.

Absently, I waved at a woman who was hanging her laundry on a line in her miniscule side yard, she waved back happily as a medium-sized mutt streaked between her legs to greet me happily.

“Hey there boy,” I scratched the top of his red head as he wagged his tail - his owner made one sharp whistle and the dog was off again. Another smile and an apologetic wave, and I continued.

It was all so deliciously quaint.

I had been sipping my coffee delicately in order to avoid scalding myself, but since that didn’t work, I began guzzling the stuff in place of smoking - which I was certain the people on the dilapidated bus with me would detest. I spent the bus ride avoiding conversation with the homeless man beside me (smelly and haggard, I assumed he must have been homeless), only to realize he was in fact a student at University of Helsinki just like myself when he got off the bus and meandered his way to class. Fan-fucking-tastic, college life consisted of ironic facial hair (Paavo’s), Barbie doll men (Eicca, the man from the night before) and homeless-looking grad students!

“Miss Lotjonen?” I was accosted upon entering the City Centre Campus’s main building by another man with ironic facial hair and - gasp! - a beanie hat pulled down to his eyebrows to avoid the cold.

“Sinikka,” I grasped his forearms in an altered, awkward version of the European greeting that he must have made up just to make me feel even more awkward about my first day at U.Hel. He introduced himself as Olli-Pekka and proceeded to tell me everything I never wanted to know about U.Hel before I even asked - he even told me which rail line I should take to the Kumpula Campus - which was nearly four kilometers away from the City Centre Campus. The conversation dragged on as he drove me the four kilos in his horrible little Saab (I clutched the door handle and my seat belt was locked for the entirety of the trip) and then abandoned me at the Faculty of Chemistry half an hour before my first class of the day without any knowledge of the building because he was actually a Mathematics student. And I was out of coffee.

So I went in search of caffeinated beverages and found that there was only one reasonably priced café across the street from the main buildings of the campus.

“Black coffee please? And can I convince you to put it in this?” The barista was quite understanding being a Law students at U.Hel herself (a totally different campus, I was told) and filled my travel mug until it was bursting. “Kiitos, honey. Thank you so much.” I handed her a few marks and left - I wandered until I found a cute little bench on the lawn of the Chemistry building and settled in to people-watch for the remaining twenty-five minutes until classes began.

The people of the Faculty of Sciences were quite diverse, I found as I observed and sipped my coffee. A cig sparked itself to life as I watched students scurry between the buildings between their classes (or during class? I wasn’t quite certain what students would be doing on campus between classes unless they had no life like me - quite a possibility). I observed everything from a redheaded woman in a lab coat running from one building to the next as if she had forgotten a) where she was or b) where she was supposed to be, to a gothic-looking tall man with shoulder-length, dyed black hair and an extremely hefty Chemistry book under one muscled arm. I even caught a glimpse of one man with a Mathematics book balanced on one arm with a sheet of paper atop it, and a Rubik’s Cube and a pen in the other hand - he was writing down algorithms to solve the cube between mixing it up and solving it himself, with perfect recall on his equations.

“This is going to be ridiculous,” I was already on my third cup of coffee and fourth fag of the day as I proceeded to class with a fresh batch of caffeinated brew. The people here were bound to be smarter than I - I had been at the top of my class back in Oulu, but that meant nothing here as U.Hel was known for taking only the best and the brightest of students into their Science programmes (plus me, apparently). There was no way in hell I could contend with the likes of lab-coat girl, shy gothic boy and Rubik’s Cube man. Shy gothic boy, who sat down two rows behind me in what could only be called a “Seminar room” just as the professor walked in, decked out in brown tweed from head to toe.

Two hours of copious notes about Organic Compounds later, I found myself being whisked away with the small group to the second period we must have shared - Lab. Classes, I found that day, were going to be a breeze - they all dealt with my major (Organic Chemistry) in one way or another, all had to do with mostly metals, although a I had one class which studied plants alone.

A week or so later I found that I had settled into (read: had been sucked into) the Chemistry department at U.Hel, the trials and tribulations barely fazed me. While most people considered me strange, I discovered that the people in my classes were downright odd. Like the man with the thick-rimmed bifocals who was fascinated by his mucus in lab class (he was constantly happily looking at his snot under the high-powered microscopes when he thought the teacher wasn’t looking) or the woman in the lab coat - who wasn’t even in a lab class this semester! I thanked God or whichever deity had kept me from being lab partners with the man obsessed with bodily fluids, and from the black-haired man. He infringed upon on my nerves with his fucking well-rounded-ness; from two stations away in Lab I could see him drawing cartoons like fucking Aunt Kylli in his notes, doodled song lyrics or poetry -I couldn’t decide which, and could solve the toughest mathematical equations without a calculator, which had been my one point of pride before he stole it away from me. He was cute, too; obviously, he worked out and dyed his hair, and I absently found myself wondering if he had a cute boyfriend as well.

With a sigh, I collapsed into the same bench on the lawn as I had on that first day, pink and green coffee mug and smoke in hand, my canvas tote in the center of the bench. Finally I had finished the last class of the week - Analytical Chemistry 102 - and it was twenty until seven hundred hours, but I just couldn’t force myself to get back on the Metro and go back to the apartment to face yet another boring weekend at home enduring Paavo’s cello practice regimen. I had planned to have all kinds of fun with my brother - the heart-to-hearts I had planned where he would reveal to me that I was his favorite person in the world and that the songs he wrote for cello were for me and his anonymous gorgeous model girlfriend whom I had yet to snag him - and all of it had gone down the drain because he had to practice constantly in order to stay afloat at Sibelius Academy and I had boatloads of homework every night in order to keep up with the pace of U.Hel’s Faculty of Chemistry.

I felt someone sit next to me, but my head was leaned back and my eyes were closed into the glorious summer sunlight (which was about to go behind a bank of clouds for the entirety of Autumn and Winter and only emerge again in mid-April or even May!) as I took periodic drags of my cigarette, so I didn’t say anything. Really, if the campus had been more closed, I would have had a towel out and a bathing suit on in order to go sunbathing and cause some ruckus among the geeks at the Faculty, but it was not to be so.

“Hey,” My eye snapped open and I found myself sitting bolt upright and regarding the man beside me with a look of horror. The black-haired man himself sat beside me on the bench - I suddenly felt very small because of his Paul Bunyan-esque size and found myself wondering weather he had a giant blue ox like in the American Fairy Tale.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” He had obviously read the alarm on my face and therefore moved backwards a few inches as I took a draught of my coffee and a breath of my smoke in an attempt to calm my gasping heart. “I just haven’t ever seen you here this late, and I was wondering if you hadn’t any plans for the weekend?” Linnankivi’s (I only knew his last name, as our surnames were what the teachers referred to us as) voice was a face-melting bass, and it flowed peculiarly from one word to the next in a very musical manner. I hadn’t known because he didn’t speak much in class; it seemed that he already knew all the answers to any question he might have asked, a stark contrast to the interview and debate I had a habit of instigating after every class.

“Oh, no, I just didn’t expect conversation. I thought for certain that you were Hesso and were content to sit beside me and inspect your mucus.” I finished the last of my coffee and stashed the cup away as Linnankivi laughed uproariously. “I’m sorry, that was cruel wasn’t it?”

“No, well yes, but it was funny as fucking perkele!” His full-bodied laughs were contagious and before I knew it, I was giggling along with him at my own joke, something I never ever did. “I’m Jyrki, by the way. I never did catch your first name, Lotjonen.” His smile was broad and charismatic, and those ice blue eyes melted the frostiness I had been clinging to desperately.

“Sinikka Helle Lotjonen, at your service.” We leaned over my canvas bag for the traditional greeting of friends - air kisses to each cheek and a good ole hug. Normally, I was a lone wolf kind of person, but in Oulu I had always had my family to make up for not having friends - here I didn’t have much of that. I guess if fucking booger man had been Jyrki, I would have talked to him just as cordially. The thought made me laugh inwardly.

“Sin Hell, good old English meanings,” Jyrki’s icy blues crinkled at the corners as he laughed.

“Oh, don’t give me that line, it’s the worst! Finns all think they’re so clever because they know the words ‘sin’ and ‘hell’ in English. Give me a break!” I laughed, and glanced at my watch. “Oh, shoot, I have a train to catch!” I shouldered my bag and stood, and noticed Jyrki’s sad look. “Walk with me?” He brightened and stood, and I found I almost had to jog to keep up with his long-legged strides.

“Going to Vallila, are you?” I nodded dumbly in reply, adding a stupid question of how he knew. “Last train out there is at seventeen hundred. I’ve had to catch it once - for an entire semester, I had to leave my last class five minutes early.”

“Lord, that’s horrible!” Nervously, I adjusted the navy blue headband that simultaneously held my hair out of my face and matched my high-waisted, navy and light blue plaid pleated skirt. I realized I looked like a Catholic schoolgirl from the ‘50s with my white polo and saddle shoes, probably the only reason Jyrki was talking to me. Guys dug the whole schoolgirl fantasy.

“What are you doing at around twenty hundred hours tonight?” Jyrki flashed a lopsided grin at the professor in tweed who rushed across campus before us as we drew level with the train stop.

“Absolutely nothing,” I sighed.

“Good! Come to my apartment and hang out with us - we’re going to Tavastia tonight.”

“And I’m supposed to get to your flat on my own dime? Will you buy me a drink for my troubles?” I asked impishly as Jyrki pulled a blue pen from his pocket and began to scrawl his address across my arm in the most beautiful cursive I had ever seen.