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The St Andrews campus was rambling and confusing after the four neat towers of the school. It was easy to get lost, and Sally missed more than a few of her first week's classes, and stumbled in late to others.
Malory Towers hadn't been a small school, but in comparison to the university with its thousands of students, the classes of no more than twenty seemed intimate. Sally missed knowing the names of everyone else in the class. She missed Irene and Belinda, off learning their respective crafts. She missed sweet little Mary-Lou, nursing at the great children's hospital. She even missed Felicity and June, the two third formers -- now in the fourth -- who had at times been the bane of their lives.
She still had Darrell, of course. Each girl was the other's stalwart for all of their six years at school: together they had been through the thick and the thin of school life. They were still together, sharing the same lodgings, attending many of the same classes, studying the same subjects in the evening, and joining the same clubs and societies. Darrell, as always, was the gregarious one. Her door was always open, and other girls from their lodging house would be in and out, gossiping and drinking tea made on Darrell's little gas-ring. At times they would even discuss their classes, and the conversations could stretch late into the night.
But when Sally and Darrell needed privacy -- when they wanted space -- they would go instead to Sally's room. Here they could curl up together on Sally's bed, reading from the same book as they studied. They could talk into the night, turning off the light and lying down together, talking quietly until they drifted off to sleep in each others arms.
Sally lived for those nights. When it seemed as though she and Darrell were growing apart; when days would pass without her seeing her special friend other than in the corridors at the lodging house; when Sally began to feel lonely, she would long for Darrell to slip into her room just after the corridor lights went out.
There had been a time in fifth form when very few of the girls of North Tower slept in their own beds. Bill and Clarissa had started it, of course. Darrell, without the constraint of being head girl -- that honour having gone to Moira Linton -- had felt few qualms at following suit, and thus had followed a month or two that were unlike anything Sally had ever experienced. Sally did not like breaking the rules. But waking up in the middle of the night to find Darrell's arms around her was one of the sweetest things she'd known. When Darrell was appointed head girl in Moira's place, after a scandal Darrell had never fully explained, the girls felt obliged to go back to their own beds. The sense of abandonment when that happened triggered Sally's old jealousies, but she had been better able to control them.
Now Sally again felt abandoned, as days passed without Darrell's smile to light up the world, without Darrell's lively influence and wild ideas to spirit away the time between lectures and studies. Sally could see herself -- could feel herself -- growing darker and moodier. She flinched at the sound of her own voice at times: snappish and petulant. Feeling lonely, she retreated even further into her own world, spending all her time in her room, and eating early or late if at all, with as few of her fellow students as possible.
And then one day, in a quadrangle on the far side of campus, she bumped into Darrell. Head down, watching her feet, she had walked into her best friend without even seeing her.
'Steady on, Sally!' exclaimed Darrell. 'You aren't late for anything, are you?'
'Darrell,' Sally stammered. 'No -- I'm not late. I was... I was going to the library.'
'That can wait,' Darrell insisted. 'I haven't seen you in days. Please come with me and have a cup of tea. Honestly, dear, you look all in! Have you been eating?' she added, with concern. 'You haven't been in the dining room, and you look terribly thin.'
'I'm fine,' Sally lied. She relented a little: enough to say, 'I've missed you.'
'I'm only down the corridor, you goof!' said Darrell, linking her hand in Sally's and drawing her out of the quad. 'You're always welcome. More welcome than any of the others.'
Darrell's straightforwardness made Sally regret her own reticence to say what was wrong. She her pride and said what she felt. She said it so softly Darrell had to ask her to say it again. 'I want you all to myself, Darrell. Not all the time, but a little each day. The way it used to be at school.'
Darrell looked back at Sally in amazement. 'You think I've forgotten about you. Sally, I could never do that. Never.' And in the middle of the lane, with students wandering past them, Darrell reached out and gathered Sally into her arms. Sally leaned against Darrell in wonderment, but then pushed back.
'Not here,' she said.
'No one cares!' said Darrell dismissively.
'I do,' Sally replied. Part of the sweetness, the preciousness of what she had with Darrell was the privacy, and the fact that it was theirs and only theirs. Sally turned away but Darrell caught her arm and pulled her aside into a doorway.
'I am sorry, dearest. But I can't have you thinking I don't care. I do,' she said, urgently. 'I love St Andrews,' Darrell continued, looking around her before she turned back to Sally. 'I love my classes, and all these new people. I'm starting to believe that maybe I really can be a writer someday, and I get caught up in the rush and the thrill of it all. But,' she lowered her voice, 'I love you more, Sally. I truly do.'
Sally blushed. Such a declaration required a response, and she had never been as good with words and phrases as the eloquent Darrell. So, she took her courage, and Darrell's face, in her hands, leant forward, and kissed Darrell softly on the lips. For one brief moment she didn't care about who might see or what they might think; she thought only that she had to convince Darrell of just how much she cared. Darrell's arms went around her once again, and when Sally broke the kiss, she leaned her head on Darrell's shoulder and whispered, 'I care more than I can possibly say.'
Darrell hugged Sally tight. 'I know.'
It was as though the sounds of the world broke into a bubble of silence that had surrounded them. Suddenly Sally was again aware of the passing students. No one was paying any attention to them, and Sally breathed a sigh of relief as she and Darrell stepped away from their hiding place and rejoined the throng.
They went on to the tea room, where Darrell repeated her belief that Sally was too thin, and plied her with tea and sweet buns. They parted with a kiss on the cheek, and Sally went to the library while Darrell went to a meeting of the University Dramatic Society.
But that night, Darrell slipped into Sally's room after the lights had gone out, and they spent the night squashed together in Sally's bed. In the days that followed, Sally made more of an effort to get to know Darrell's friends, and to join the friendly parties in Darrell's room.
As Darrell said late one night, they had to use her room for something.