I fall asleep with the radiator burning holes into my dreams and the word on my back. ‘Ordinaire‘ standing out in white cake-icing script on a black T-shirt. On the front it says ‘100% Extra…’ I pulled this T-shirt from my wardrobe with my eyes shut this morning. All day I have felt clingy eyes sticking to my chest, drilling pupil-sized holes into my back.

This room in which I fall asleep is where I came to escape two drowning smiling people clinging ferociously to each other. Like happy doomed limpets. Occasionally I catch them chewing each other’s lips. They are backward-stalking me. I turn up somewhere, there they simper. I hurry with downcast eyes in the opposite direction, they get there first. I walk from one class to the next: she has his head cupped in her hands, as if holding a football, runs her fingers through his limp strands of sandy hair. His body is twisted at a painful, obtruse angle, bending himself backward for her. They are blocking the corridor.

I buy an apple from the canteen. His fingers scrabble at her armpits and her sides, and she backs into me squeaking breathily, a too goddamn sexy in love to allow nose to spread across face laugh. I drop my apple. It stops rolling at her black converse shoes. When I go to pick it up I concentrate very hard on the bedraggled shreds of denim trailing from the bottom of her grey jeans. This does not work; one large foot hooks the left ankle, reels it in, and suddenly I am eye level with a passionate tangle of four feet and double the number of bedraggled denim shreds.

I stand outside, by myself in the rain, and analyse my distaste to death. And suddenly, THERE THEY ARE. Backward-stalking combined with wet-foliage frolicking in the drizzle. More squeaking. My distaste springs back to life.

So I hide in this room, the Silent Study Room, behind A.J.P. Taylor’s dry genius. On the wall above me a stick girl with one stick finger pressed into her stick lips peers down at me. She watches my apple crunching display disapprovingly. In the bubble coming from her mouth it says ‘SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, the last two H’s escaping from the bubble. Taylor’s words are strangely hypnotic, when read in time to Tegan and Sara’s Sweet November, and I challenge myself to finish the last two pages of the chapter before I let my eyes stay closed when I blink. Every blink slower than the last.

You are sitting with your back to the wall. I turn your office chair with the palm of a hand. It creaks to a halt, twenty times slower than it would take your real life chair to complete one full real life turn. You have ants crawling from the corners of your mouth. I say no thank you very politely when you offer your lips, and feel guilty yet disgusted when you look at me with large hurt eyes.

In a line up of stunning people, I am the token ordinaire.

I wake up to five male faces hovering very close to mine. All of them are sniggering. Wakey wakey, they jeer. Stare stare. From behind them come sporadic little slurpy noises. This is how we look when we sleep, I want to snap. I stop myself when one of them gives a genuine sparkly smile. They shuffle from side to side, and in shuffling reveal the happy doomed limpets, performing mutual mouth-to-mouth lip chewing.

This is how we look when we sleep, I snap, and pull out my false moustache glue.