Madeline needed a shower. She had to replace the sticky film of her flight from Pittsburgh. She threw her robe on and got out her small soft-sided cosmetic bag, unzipping the lid and laying out about 15 shades of nail polish on her dresser. She didn't deliberate long before choosing dark blue - not quite midnight blue but darker than navy. Revlon called it "Twilight Ink".

This was the image she presented when Gloria burst into the room: knees together, leaning forward in her faded red terry robe, her foot contorted at an angle as she applied the last dab of paint to her baby toe. The door swung open, and in strode Gloria, dragging her field hockey stick for a few steps before simply dropping it loudly on the time-stained hardwood floor. You would have expected someone new at Melville to be just a little tentative, but not Gloria; she rolled in like a weather system. Like a hurricane, if you wanted to know the truth.

"Oh hi," said Gloria and walked directly over to shake Madeline's hand. "You must be Madeline. I'm Gloria. So we're room-mates. Just let me get out of this stuff and shower off."

Madeline felt her hand squeezed in the larger young woman's sweaty, muddy hand, her new friend's face flushed red with the exertion of her field hockey, some streaks of mud down the sides of her legs. Gloria wiped the back of her forearm across her brow, then her nose, then took the elastic out of her pony tail and let her long wavy dark brown hair fall messily down her back and shoulders. She sat on the edge of the bed. First, she unlaced her boots and kicked them off, half-way across the room. Then the small shin-guards, similarly discarded. Next she peeled off her t-shirt, blue, with the discreet Melville crest over her heart outlined in white, which she just dropped on the floor between her shoes. She stood up and dropped her pleated skirt in a pool around her feet, not bothering to step out of it but unpeeling her mud-scarred knee socks and leaving them in the centre of the skirt opening, the socks standing up like cloth slinkys. Finally, she reached back and stretched out of her functional sports bra, and tore off the spandex short-tights that she wore under the pleated skirt. All the time, she was breathing pretty hard. Without another word...