room ten-oh-nine

The first time I see him is at a party. A friend introduces us. I stare.

The second time - a drum and base night for students. He's wearing a white t-shirt that looks fluorescent under the blue lights. He dances like a crazed person, eyes closed. I wonder if he's on drugs.

The third time is at a meeting for creative writers.

"Write for Tallulah and see your work in print," says the flier in my pigeon-hole.

I'm 19, one month and a handful of days.

I'm 19 and I want to be a writer.

I'm 19 with all my hopes intact.

I tell my roommate I'm going to a meeting of writers. I tell her I'm going to get published.

I wear pink shiny trousers to the meeting because I don't know any better.

Because I'm only 19.

The meeting is in a stuffy room at the end of a labyrinthine corridor. Outside it is raining and the floor on one side of the room is cluttered with wet umbrellas. The air is damp and sticky, and smells vaguely of body odour. The bottoms of my trousers are muddy, my hair streaming. My broken umbrella is in the bin by the door, locked with someone else's in a spidery embrace.

There's a fat girl with pigtails at the front of the room talking to a small group of earnest-looking students. I didn't know writers could be so unattractive, and for a moment I'm caught off-guard. Then I remember the newspaper photograph of Margaret Atwood hanging on my dorm room wall. She does not look anything like the other women who crowd my walls - Liz Hurley, Elle MacPherson, Natalie Portman, the doe-eyed brunette in the Magnum ad.

But fat?

I decide now would be a good moment to choose substance over form. I avert my eyes and try to listen.

She talks an awful lot about creativity. About releasing inner energies. About 'finding space inside to nurture one's self-expression'. She is breathless in her enthusiasm and often trips on her words. Someone near the front sniggers, but her look of hurt bewilderment stops them.

And then a phone rings.

It is the pink panther tune, and it comes, loudly, from the other side of the room.

The girl keeps talking, undeterred, while the phone rings on.

I crane my neck. At the back I see a bowed, blonde head.

It's him.

He doesn't notice me looking as he switches off the phone.

After the meeting, people are invited to mingle. I find myself cornered by an American exchange student with shiny skin and acne scars who has decided to tell me his life story while scrutinising my tits. I cross my arms over my chest and he continues to stare. I'm slightly cowed by his persistence. And confused - aren't Americans meant to be prudish?

I leave the meeting with an armload of brochures. I already know they'll end up in the recycling bin together with the archery, rowing, sailing, swim club, football, and various religious groups' pamphlets I continue to zealously collect in a bid to become part of the university community, only to lose interest after each introductory meeting.

It's fine, though. Because I saw him while I was talking to the American. And he was looking straight at me.

I'm 19 and it's enough for a guy to look at me - for a guy to look like he's looking at me, for it to not to matter that I have no idea how to 'unleash my creativity' -

that I'm not sure I have an aura I want to explore -

that, let's face it, I'm not going to get published thanks to "Tallulah" -

that I have the attention span of a gnat.

I'm 19 and I'd rather be the subject than to have to look for one to write about.

I'm 19 and I'd rather be looked at than look.

I'm 19 and I'm dying, dying, dying to be seen.