Begin Again | ongoing

thirty-five

After too long in the dingy back office, Sunny's forgotten how nice a day it is until she bursts out onto the sun-soaked seafront. The rain has gone at last, after a couple of dreary weeks in a row, and there's warmth in the rays that have made it ninety-three million miles from the surface of the sun to graze her cheeks. It's the kind of day to be spent outside, reading on the beach or bargain hunting in Black Sands' winding lanes, not stuck inside the library. But stuck inside the library is exactly where Sunny plans to be.

Black Sands has a half decent library, with a couple of computers and at least ten shelves, but that is not where Sunny plans to go. No, by far the best library belongs to the university five miles west of here in a stunning Gothic building that has featured in the background of many a moody, darkly academic film. Cromwell University boasts a vast, ancient library harking back to the seventeenth century that houses thousands of books on every subject from international law and social policy to crime fiction and cookbooks. The campus doesn't belong so close to Black Sands: it is so grand, so majestic, so much better suited to somewhere like Oxford or Cambridge than this quiet, salty little city on the northeast coast.

A home bunny at heart and with Cromwell on her doorstep, where her mother taught, no less – and still teaches to this day – Sunny never considered anywhere else when she applied to university. She has not strayed far from Black Sands in her almost twenty-five years and she has no regrets: what if she had gone to London or Edinburgh and been deprived of Ravi and Fraser and Delilah? That does not bear thinking about. It is fate that she stayed close to home, and it is fate that despite being so close to home, she chose to stay in campus accommodation, and she met three people who mean the world to her.

The third floor in Cromwell's impressive library boasts a relatively new instalment: several banks of cubicles outfitted with the latest Acorn computers and plenty of desk space for students to spread out their work and hunker down for a day of intense studying. Sunny and her friends spent much of their degrees in here, commandeering a row in varying states of distress over deadlines and essays and relationship crises.

Half an hour after leaving Vinyl Countdown, Sunny hops off the bus at the top of College Avenue and takes a moment to appreciate the view. The university is a couple of miles inland but it's higher than Black Sands, high enough that she can see the sea from the bus stop and she knows that from the top floor of the physics building, she can see the pier on a clear day. It's May, which means the academic year is drawing to an end and the majority of Cromwell's students are entering exam season, and Sunny's tummy flips at the memory of cramming for tests, never quite sure what she was doing.

She tries not to make eye contact with any of the students, who rush across campus with bulging bags on their backs, bulky laptops in their arms, takeaway coffees in their shaking hands; she bypasses groups of first years who cluster around the campus clock in the hopes that good luck will be bestowed upon them if they're standing under it as it chimes midday.

The library has a specific scent that both comforts and disconcerts Sunny. Old books, new books, coffee going cold and dust collecting on the shelves. It reminds her of a period of her life that was so stressful, yet it's a time she looks back on fondly, wishing she could do it all over again because the passage of time diminishes the pain. Four years ago she was regretting ever deciding to get a degree. Now she yearns to be eighteen again. She likes to think she has a better grasp on life now, though that's debatable. Especially right now. Granted, everything she thought she knew about life in general has been shaken up recently.

A handful of computer cubicles are empty and Sunny slips into one, wiggling the mouse to wake up the screen and input the username and password her mother gave her access to after her university credentials expired – another perk of a faculty parent. While the library isn't locked and no student ID is required to enter, it is technically for Cromwell University students only, and a valid Cromwell-issued login is required. Sunny is soon on the system and impatiently double-clicking the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop. She may not be the most computer literate, but she knows what she needs to know: open the internet, type a name, see what happens.