Heavy Heart

“Welcome to University of Birmingham!”

Daria stood with a rather large group of students in front of a tall, thin man with the beginnings of a beard. They were gathered outside of a building Daria understood to be the dormitory she’d be living in. Her bags were pooled at her feet, none of the students standing to close to each other on account of the orbital resonance of their bags keeping them apart. She overheard the tall man, an RA by the name of David, say that students had been arriving in droves all morning, one wave after another, her wave just one of many.

“You’ll go inside and unpack, meet your roommates, and then report to the points on your schedule. You should have received this in your email a while ago, but if you didn’t or managed to forget to print it off, come see me. Until then, good luck and have fun!”

Daria was overwhelmed by the sea of people around her that rushed the building, grabbing their bags and filing through the doors. Some were shouting to their parents about bringing furniture on trolleys up the elevators, and poor David was swamped with people who managed to forget their itinerary. Taking a deep breath, she collected her bags – containing not much more than her wardrobe and a few trinkets – and followed the masses inside.

The sheer population of Birmingham stunned her, not just the school but the city as well. She knew it was the second most populous city in England, just behind London, but it was such a stark contrast to Middletown. Not quite fifty thousand people lived in Middletown, and suddenly she was thrust into a city of over a million faces and names, none which she had even began to know. She felt exhausted thinking of even meeting her roommate, which would involve more one-on-one conversation than she’d had with anyone other than Carla and her mother since graduating high school.

Finally, she reached her door on the third floor, already finding it covered in papers – artwork, posters, the like, complete with a whiteboard that read “Olivia and Daria’s room” with an intricate doodle around the outside. Daria concluded before even opening the door that her roommate had already arrived, and braced herself.

“Hello?” she called into the room as she peeked her head around the door. It was as she expected. A small girl with the hair the color of maple syrup in waves down to her hips stood on a step stool, tacking a poster onto a wall above an already-made bed. She immediately snapped around at the sound of Daria’s voice, her face lighting up excitedly at the sight of her.

“You’re Daria?” she asked in a thick Irish accent. “Daria Holmes?”

“I am,” she answered, extending her hand to the grinning girl in front of her. “And you’re Olivia McGuiness?”

“That I am,” she chirped in return, taking Daria’s hand and giving it a firm, ameliorating shake. “Sophomore, art history major and creative writing minor. From Downpatrick, which is in Northern Ireland. One brother, two sisters, no job but, but looking! And I also enjoy long walks on the beach and talking about my feelings.”

Olivia finished with a little giggle, almost embarrassed at her outpouring. Daria looked at her dumbfounded, bombarded with information that spilled from Olivia’s mouth. “I figured I may as well give you all the answers to the awkward questions you were going to ask,” she explained without even being asked, hopping up onto what was apparently her bed. “It’s okay if you have to ask again though. Your turn.”

“Can I start unpacking?” Daria asked as though she needed Olivia’s permission. “I just want to get settled in, you know?”

“Oh, of course,” Olivia replied, tucking her knees up under her chest, not quite what to say in response. “You seem like a multi-tasker, am I right?”

Daria nodded, opening one of her three bags to reveal some clothes and an arrangement of hangers. “I always have a lot on my plate, yeah,” she answered, starting to hang items of clothing up in her small closet. “But I guess I can give you the run-down while I get unpacked, if that’s what you’d like.”

She glanced over her shoulder to see Olivia beaming. “That’s exactly what I’d like.”

“Alright,” Daria started, reaching in for another hanger. “I’m also a sophomore, at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, which is also where I’m from. I’m a sociology and philosophy double major. And at home, it’s just me and my mom. I work full time at a bakery.”

“Anything else?”

Daria paused from heaping clothes in the closet to lean up against the wall. “What else do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“Right now?” Daria asked quietly, her overwhelmed state reaching a peak.

“Of course not right now,” Olivia answered. “But I like you, Daria, I can already tell. You have the hands of a writer, you know? With the calluses from holding a pencil. I have the same thing.”

Olivia raised her small hand in front of her to display to Daria, wriggling her middle finger just slightly to draw attention to the small bump on her knuckle. “I never met a writer I didn’t like,” she concluded with another smile. Daria noted that her new roommate smiled a lot, something that was very opposite from the girl with the sad eyes and apparent writer hands.

“I don’t do any creative writing though,” she protested gingerly. “It’s mostly just from taking notes and transcribing them. And stuff like that.”

“Ah,” Olivia chimed as she arranged some of the jewel-toned pillows on her bed around her, lounging on them languidly. “A scholar. Is that what brings you to Birmingham?”

Daria took a breath, deciding what she would tell Olivia to explain herself. She couldn’t exactly tell her roommate that she needed to escape her shell of a home because her mom had completely imploded since her father’s death, to the point where Daria had almost imploded herself. “More or less. I’ve always wanted to get out of Middletown, but Wesleyan liked my scholarship essay so much that they gave me a deal too good to pass up. I figured study abroad would be a good option.”

Her roommate seemed like a sweet girl, already with good intentions. They chatted back and forth for a while, mostly Olivia quizzing Daria on her interests and intents, and Daria answering to the best of her ability. She’d foreseen the awkwardness before she even left for Birmingham the afternoon before – over time, Daria had lost most of her social skills with people her own age, so it would take time to build it up again. In the meantime, it didn’t seem like Olivia would be a bad place to start.

She wallpapered part of the room, seemingly her part, with artwork, band posters, and a few strings of pure white twinkle lights. The room was small, especially for two teenaged girls to be living together, but Daria didn’t mind. She had never needed much, and after her father passed, she couldn’t afford much more than the basics. His life insurance had been enough to cover things for a while, but with time it ceased to run wide and began to trickle, only covering the most important of costs. It didn’t take much time for Daria to be completely unpacked, all her clothes lined in her closet in order by color, and her collection of study material tucked safely in her desk.

At the bottom of her last suitcase, she had stored the most important item she brought along to England. With careful hands, she withdrew the box, just slightly too big to fit in her hands, placing it on her bureau.

“What’s that?” Olivia asked, rolling over to lean on her elbows. Her light brown eyes had a sparkle to them, the same way her smile did, and the little diamond stud in her nose. Everything about Olivia seemed to have this spark that Daria noticeably lacked.

“It’s a Japanese puzzle box,” Daria explained, her eyes trailing over the wooden box. It was covered in intricate designs, from patterns to artistic scenes of Japanese landscapes, and divided into sections that moved at the slightest touch.

“What does it do?” Olivia questioned, clearly intrigued.

“You move the sliding pieces on the sides of the box until it eventually opens,” Daria delved. “It won’t open unless you slide the pieces in the right pattern. When you do, the top will come off and there’s a secret compartment inside. Sometimes two, if you’re lucky.”

“Neat,” Olivia chirped, sitting up and folding her legs beneath her like a knot. “Can I try?”

Instinctively, Daria whipped out a hand and placed it protectively over the box, but when she realized what she’d done, she immediately removed it. Olivia had her peaked eyebrows raised as high as they would go, obviously surprised at Daria’s sudden outburst.

“I’m sorry,” Daria mumbled embarrassedly. “It’s just, this was a gift. And I haven’t figured it out yet. When I do, you can definitely give it a go. Okay?”

Olivia’s face calmed, returning to its normally cheery state. “Sure, I understand,” she hummed, jumping down from her bed. “I have to get going anyway, there’s a meeting with the printmaking club in a bit and it’s quite a walk to the place. I’ll give you some time to get settled in. You must be exhausted.”

Daria nodded, thankful for the opportunity to just be alone for a heartbeat. She’d been on the road since the day before, the flight excruciatingly long, suddenly tossed into a world she only knew on paper, through facts and statistics and a handful of pictures. But as she watched Olivia gather her belongings and head to the door, a pang of emotion struck her like a bell, loud and clear.

“Hey, Olivia?” she called as her roommate was slipping through the crack of the doorjamb. The petite brunette turned to her, mauve bow lips tied into a slight circle. “You can bring back some more prints from your club, if you want. I don’t have much to decorate with.”

It was true – shipping things to decorate with from the States was much to expensive for her to afford. The school had provided her with the standards, which included plain, rumpled white bed linens and an alarm clock-radio. Aside from the things she brought, that was all she had to her name. Perhaps, most of all, she wanted to be friends with Olivia but she didn’t quite know how, and that was the best she could come up with.

“Definitely,” Olivia replied with a grin, before disappearing like smoke in the corridor.

With a sigh, Daria collected the puzzle box in her trembling hands, wrought with exhaustion, and climbed into her bed. She pressed her face against the cool, dark wood, as if all the answers would enter her mind through osmosis. It was an uncomfortable feeling for a person like Daria, someone who was used to having all answers, or at least being able to find them in a textbook. No one had ever written a textbook on what she was going through.

The puzzle box was a gift from her dad, the one person who encouraged her to feed her unusually quick mind, above all else. He picked it up on business in Japan, just weeks before his death. In her young age, she hadn’t been able to figure it out. And after his passing, she couldn’t bring herself to press on the wooden slats to figure out their order, knowing that the last person to submit the correct combination had been him. Even after she’d become numb to that thought, she hadn’t been able to figure it out.

The worst part of all was that when she shifted it in her hands, something slid around inside. There was something tucked inside the secret compartment from her box, something from her dad, something so close and yet so very, very far.

“I’m on my way, Dad. I’m going to figure this out, I promise.”

After a moment, she dug her phone out of her pocket; dialing one of the two numbers she had memorized anymore – the other of which being the bakery. She couldn’t help but worry about how her mother was doing, this having been the longest Daria had been away from her. The phone rang and it rang, over and over, intoning the fact that Georgia Holmes was not about to pick up her phone and forgive her daughter for leaving her. When she reached the voicemail, Daria left a simple message.

“Hey Mom, just wanted to let you know I’m in my room and getting settled in,” she murmured into the phone, absently playing with the buttons on her shirt. “I miss you so much already. Please call. I love you.”

A few hours still lay between that moment and her first appointment with the study abroad office at Birmingham. So she felt no remorse in curling her body around the box, on top of all her standard-issue bedding, and falling into a light, unsteady sleep. She dreamed of her father in his best suit, holding her hand as they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge.