Social Distancing

Chapter 1: Ignorance is Bliss

"So nice outside today." I smiled as a cool breeze blew against my cheeks. Today was one of the very few nice weather days I'd seen since I arrived here, and I intended to enjoy every minute of it. "It does not feel the end of February, this is heaven."

"Sure Margaret," my study partner mused with his typical dry, no-nonsense attitude. "Stiff upper lip" it was called over here. He barely glanced up from his microbiology book.

"Aww, come on Will." I tossed him a knowing look, leaned my face up to the sun, and stretched my arms up. "Soak up the vitamin D. You could use it, you're quite pale."

"Can't. Spring quarter papers."

"You can't take a ten minute break?" My hazel eyes implored him. "This would be a perfect day for a run."

"This incredibly irritating thing that you're doing, Margaret." A pair of steely brown eyes glared at me from behind his glasses. "Is it an American thing?"

"What thing?"

"Being so carefree, like everything will magically fluff into place," was the gruff response.

"I thought English people were supposed to be charming." I pushed down his book with a teasing smile at the angry expression on Will's face. His eyebrows pinched together over his glasses and his thin mouth pulled down at the corners.

"Well, you thought wrong." He flapped his book back up to his face. As grumpy as his words were, they still sounded somewhat pleasant as they rolled into my ears. Stupidly, charming British accents were one of the reasons I'd considered studying here. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed from the moment I arrived.

Instead of pinkie raising elegant gentleman, I found... well, Will. His boorish behavior, a ridiculous obsession with drinking and the sport of football, and an incredibly confusing mix of slang that sounded nothing like the English language I thought I'd known shattered my preconceived notions.

We'd met by accident after he almost ran me over in the hallway first week of classes. His brown hair fluttered as he took too many steps and rushed to class. His glasses went flying as we crashed, after which he had the nerve and asked if I was there looking for my father. I initially brushed his comment off and expected to never see him again. However, he'd accidentally grabbed one of my textbooks. And since there weren't many nineteen year olds with epidemiology books in the graduate school, we easily reconnected.

Will and I currently propped ourselves up at a table outside on the campus of the University of Central London, or UCL for short. At the preference of my parents, I didn't actually live on campus but had attended as a full-time graduate student since the fall semester. Since spring exams and term papers were this week, a nervousness hung in the air for most of the students.

I felt anything but nervous.

A smile tugged on my lips as I remembered how excited I felt when I got my first passport stamp. My eyes fluttered from person to person during the six hour flight from LaGuardia to Heathrow, and internally I asked myself silly questions like "Is he British? Is she?" I even hoarded some packages of the cookies, or "biscuits" as they're called here, and kept them on my dresser. I'm sure by now they were dried out and stale, but kept them nonetheless.

"Aren't you going to study?"

"I will," I promised as my chest lifted with a deep, smooth breath in.

"How on earth did you get into grad school, freebird?" He asked.

"You know how," I reminded him.

"Yeah well not all of us are fucking geniuses."

I chucked since it never ceased to amuse me that I heard that word from Will's accent as 'fook-ing.' "I'm not a genius," I reminded him.