Taking Up Space by Chelsea Kwakye & Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi

Author:Chelsea Kwakye & Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529119039
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

4

Finding Spaces

Ọrẹ

Before I came to university, I had heard plenty about the infamous ‘Freshers’ Week’. Freshers’ week refers to the first week (or few days) of university, during which a series of social events are planned by student groups to help first years, or freshers, mingle.

I had seen all my brother’s pictures from his freshers’ week at Newcastle, and heard about the foam parties, bar crawls and random fancy dress events. Freshers’ week was sold to me as ‘organised fun’ that would be an interesting yet essential part of my university experience. I expected it to be where I would make my first and best friends, bond with everyone that I lived with, and consume copious amounts of alcohol that I knew I would later regret. Although I was nervous, the prospect of complete independence, with what seemed like no rules, excited me.

Luckily, I had made a few friends before I started university. At my college interview, I had met and befriended Alex, who had also got a place; he became my first friend – and eventually one of my best friends in those three years. We relied on each other for sanity in exam season and lifted each other up when the work got relentless. But Alex wasn’t the only friend I had been lucky enough to meet before university. Chelsea and I have a cute love story too. At a careers event for ‘high-achieving’ black students in the weeks before we started university, I got busy networking with black students headed to universities across the country. On the way home, a group of us girls walked to the tube station together. Chelsea was one of them, and we began to talk about how scared we were to start Cambridge. We swapped numbers, as she was getting on the tube in the other direction, and for the next few days, we made plans ahead of freshers’ week. We planned outfits, discussed where we were going to find plantain and looked for Cambridge hairstylists that could help us touch up our braids during term time.

But five days before I was due to start university, disaster struck. I was home alone in the kitchen. I had made a pot of jollof rice and another pot of chicken stew. After seeing a good deal on plantain outside West Croydon station, I said to myself, why not fry some plantain on the side? I got a bit excited in the kitchen, and whacked the whole pan of blazing hot oil and plantain onto both of my thighs. After waiting two hours for an ambulance, my neighbour put me in a cab to A&E with bad subdermal burns. The doctors ordered that I was to be in and out of hospital for two weeks. I managed to hobble up to Cambridge and into university for my college matriculation photo and a sexual consent workshop. But for the most part, my highly anticipated freshers’ week was cancelled. I was distraught.

As it turned out, apparently I didn’t miss much.

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