April liked to be alone. Not lonely, that was different, that felt unasked for, unchosen, but alone was fine. Alone had always felt safe. She didn’t know why it felt safe and, in a way, it really shouldn’t have. When she was fourteen she contracted a viral infection and had been sent to one of the Isolation Containment Units that had been built after the big Covid-19 outbreak in 2020; she’d picked up one of the mutations that seemed to surface every couple of years. Sent away to the ICU. Or, the ‘I don’t see you’, as they quickly came to be known. She didn’t feel special, it happened to lots of kids.

When she’d applied for University they’d asked her about it. There were rules around disclosure and changes to the privacy of your medical history, all for the greater good but there was no hiding your viral record anymore. They seemed as interested in how she’d coped with six months on her own as her physical health, lots of questions about how she felt she’d integrate with the student body, how she worked with others, what the experience had taught her. What had it taught her? That she liked to be alone. Was that it? She was savvy enough not to say that, primed as she was through endless rounds of re-integration therapy to talk up the importance of social connections, the work she’d done in remaking friendships, and learning to physically be with people again. We are social creatures. She’d nodded through enough sessions with a succession of earnest counsellors to be able to regurgitate that stuff by rote. Sometimes she’d even believed it. Sometimes.

They couldn’t really turn her down in the end. Her grades were outstanding: they would have been good but six months soaked in syllabus and then, more and more, off syllabus had set off fires in her mind. She’d found it hard coming out but not for the reasons they’d anticipated: she was bored, hemmed back in by a curriculum she felt she’d outgrown. In turn that had just made her withdraw more, retreat back to her safe place to be alone with Shakespeare and Sartre, Plath and Plato, Joyce and Nitetzsche and Austen and all the other dead intellectual heavyweights she counted as friends. She’d heard them whisper round school that she was intense, up herself, aloof, distant, but it wasn’t that. She felt as insecure as the rest of them but held it all inside, looked for answers in the past from people that had thought all this before, not people stumbling around in the present trying to figure it out for the first time. That’s how she saw it then. Now, sometimes, she has doubts. Same as her doubts about the difference between being alone and being lonely.

In the ICU she’d spent long days listening to music and had latched on to a bunch of bands from the 80s that no-one else seemed to remember. The Cure and Bauhaus and Sister’s Of Mercy. Nick Cave. She’d find one band, listen to them on repeat for days, and then the algorithms did the rest, leading her on to the next like a virtual version of an older sibling she never had. It wasn’t fool proof. She listened to so much stuff from the late 80s that her recommendations started to fill up with hair metal and house music. She never understood house until later, feeling it vibrate up through her feet in a club, watching a tangled mess of aloft arms, slack jaws, saucer eyes, from the throng on the floor. It wasn’t music to be alone with. The hair metal she never understood. But it did point her to the New York Dolls and so she always chalked it up as a win.

It wasn’t that she missed it. There had been hard nights, video calling parents in tears, scrawling out angry diary entries, sinking into a withdrawal deeper than being alone, sinking into depression. It wasn’t all literature, music, and a Zen like state of self reflection. She was a kid. A lot of them were. Most of the ICUs were stacked with either kids – Aggressive Virus Spreaders – or the elderly or people with poor auto-immunity. Some of the doctors had started calling them the AVS and the AV nots. She didn’t blame them, it had sounded pretty funny to her, even locked up, but some of the older patients had complained. She’d had a fairly dark sense of humour before isolation and nothing in the experience lightened it.

April was nervous. They’d told her when they’d offered the place that they couldn’t guarantee her accommodation on her own. In fact, she’d had to avoid requesting it, just in case it appeared as a black mark against her application: not adapting post isolation, unwilling to risk placing with other students. It wasn’t that. She just liked being alone. The lack of guarantees had proven prescient.

April hesitated at the door. There was a discrete plate next to the letter box identifying the house as the property of the University of Bristol. She pressed the buzzer, turned her face towards the small, circular security camera and waited. The intercom crackled.

“Hey, you must be April. I see you. Come on in.”