Here’s Everyone You’re Going to Meet at Freshers Week in the UK This Year

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

What are you doing on the internet reading things, you fucking nerd? It's Freshers Week out there. It's carnage. Your mom's taken you for a big shop at IKEA. You've bought a load of face paint and a toga. You've got a bottle of vodka and a box of tins and a big ol' Freshers Fair carrier bag full of condoms, and you're ready to cause havoc.

You are young and you are lithe and you are brilliant. You are smart and you are destined for great things. You are a good two-hour drive from home and, oh god, fuck, you're so alone. Is it too late? Can you go back? "Hello mom, it's me," you want to sob down the phone. "I don't want to do it any more. I don't know how to cook pasta and I'm scared. Some bigger boys want me to do drugs."

Thing is, you're locked in this prison of further education now, so it's probably best you just get acquainted with all the pricks you're going to meet this week.

"Today," he says. "Is going to be the day that they're going to throw it back to you."

He looks down to make sure his fingers are on the right chord, a brief pause.

"Everybody!"

Nobody sings along.

Inexplicably, he goes and does this outside the SU, ostensibly to pick up girls, and doesn't even once get beaten up. University is a different world.

Oh my god stop dressing up as things, Becky; it doesn't make things more fun now that you slightly look like something.

Somehow this dude is in your halls kitchen, and for some reason he thinks you're holding. "Alright?" he's saying. "Yeah: got any? Any ganj? Any coke? Any MD? Any drugs?" He's talking from behind his hand, looking around wildly. It's cold and he's only wearing a T-shirt. "Hook me up, yeah?"

You'll see him, intermittently, every six weeks or so, walking around the quad looking lost and un-high. "Any drugs, lads?" He still hasn't found any. Has he been to any lectures? Has he slept? Has he spoken to anyone beyond potential amateur drug dealers? He has not.

One day, without anyone noticing, he will slip away into silence, and you will never see him again. No one will ever see him again.

The day you move into halls you will be greeted by the firm, no-nonsense handshake of an off-the-peg lad—$150 polo shirt; Sports Direct XXL jogging bottoms; tin of Foster's on the go at 12:01PM; two wallet condoms; stolen bottle of Nando's lemon and herb sauce, the only decorative item on the windowsill in his room—and you'll think: 'This is alright. Lads are alright. They're quite quiet, polite. He keeps doing kick-ups in the kitchen, but otherwise he's OK.'

And then, the first night of sleeping there, you'll be woken up by a kitchen full of lads that he's somehow collected in the past seven hours—Lawro, Dean, Cabbage, Dean, Deaner, Deano, Dan, Jimmy, Fuckknob, Gordy, Wingerworth, Cliff Randy, Miggsy, The Choad—your new cereal bowls filled with the ash of a thousand roll-ups, Miggsy wearing nothing now but a pair of pants made of duct tape, air shagging your new blender.

Don't worry about The Lad. He'll quit his Sports Psychology degree within six weeks and go back home to get his UEFA badges, and all that will be left, whispered on the wind, will be a single word: banter.

Hello, new students and old, and welcome to the prison of paranoia I like to call "the dairy triangle." It goes like this: if you put anything from each of the three tips of the dairy triangle into a shared fridge—that's cheese, mil, and butter—then those items will, like cruise liners in the North Atlantic, disappear. This is something you must accept; must offer up to the dairy gods as penance. You will steal milk and you will have milk stolen from you. You will take a portion of the butter when you wake up and decide you need to bake a cake. You're just as bad as everyone.

Apart from Hysterical Food Girl. Hysterical Food Girl has these special star-shaped Post-It notes that she leaves on her eggs and butter to let everyone know they are hers. Hysterical Food Girl dots all her i's with heart shapes in the passive-aggressive note she taped over the sink. "PLEASE NOTE," Hysterical Food Girl is saying, "THE SCRAMBLED EGG RESIDUE IN THE SINK IS FROM MY EGGS BUT I HAVE NOT EATEN SCRAMBLED EGGS THIS WEEK BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN STAYING AT MY INCREDIBLY DULL VEGAN BOYFRIEND'S HOUSE. PLEASE DO NOT STEAL MY MILK AND EGGS!"

She's on the phone to her mom, crying. "My milk and eggs, mom," she's saying. "They keep stealing it." Little mini-fridge in her room. Can't sleep over the sound of it clanking. Slowly, inevitably, twisting further into madness. She's missing lectures now. Her grades are slipping. You steal another egg.

Good thing about bullying—and, you know what, bullying gets a bad rap, sometimes, right?—is it creates a strict hierarchical schoolyard structure where everybody knows their place. It's very animal kingdom, very class system: nature finds a way of imposing these hierarchies onto everything we hold dear. And then you go to university and there is no one there to flush nerds' heads down the toilet, so they all get an inflated sense of self-worth.

Someone doing all their required reading and then being proud of it isn't right, according to every universal law that there is. And yet they skulk around, these proud readers, in their Jack Wills hoodies, going resolutely un-beaten up. They are a walking reminder that university is a bubble. Do not make friends with them.

There is a 90 percent chance this guy is called Rory.

Hey, what does this Rorschach card look like to you? *Slowly lifts a solitary middle finger in front of a folded piece of A3*

"Haha, hey," he's saying, in the corner of the SU bar after all your new friends go to the toilet at once, his virginity so firm and in place that you can smell it as he sidles up to you, black short-sleeved shirt still ironed flat from when his mom packed it, going, "Heh, the girls in here, man—they are just letting loose, you know?"

This is the guy who is going to hide a camera in his shampoo bottle in the shared showers. Do not be friends with him, or he'll yell your name out pleadingly when the police march him out of your applied maths lecture.

You see her on the first day and she does a tight little nod and hello—normally a mature student, this one, mature students of course being adults who didn't quite make it as adults, sinking back into the warm blanket of further education because the real world is full of responsibility and high winds and council tax—and then she grabs an extremely large bowl of food and slinks back to her room, never turning her back on you, walking backwards and smiling still.

And then the whispers start: did you meet the mature student yet? Most of you do not even know there was a mature student. Only three of you admit to having seen her. The person in the dorm next door swore the room was empty. "There are no sounds," they say. "There are no sounds coming out of there."

And then, one day, the door is open, the room empty and immaculate, the mature student just a ghost now, lost to the sands. Did you imagine her? Was she ever real? How come you never see her around campus? Are you even real? Look at your hands. Open and close them. Maybe it's time for a nice weekend at home, yeah? A nice roast and a tummy rub off your mom.

"Hi guys! Name's Si, but everyone calls me Si-cho, 'cos I'm a psycho! Just joking. Yeah, I always wear this Dappy hat: sort of my thing. Back home in Kingston everyone used to call me 'Dappy hat.' Oh, these bracelets? It's really cool, actually: I did a sort of placement fortnight in Rio. Beach holiday? Haha: no thanks. No, actually, these really appreciative street children weaved them for me as a gift, and presented them to me through the cab window while I was stuck in traffic outside the airport. Anyway, peace out! Hook me up with your dope dealer!"

"Look at that baby, yeah. Subwoofer. Can you hear the bass coming through that?" Your skull shakes in the skin of your head. "Yeah. Big sound, like. Still got to buy all the other bits—speakers, tweeters, an actual amp, more than one CD because I've only got them Ministry albums for now—but yeah, when it's done: pussygeddon, mate."

He's spent his entire loan in one day. He has to eat plain oats until January because he can't afford any other food. He puts that one Duke Dumont song on so loudly your genitals thrum. "Naughty!" he's shouting, indistinctly, arm bobbing slightly out of time. "NAUGHTY!"

On the phone to her mam the first night, sobbing. Dad's halfway up the A1 to fetch her before she's talked down. Three-hour-long Facetime chats in the shared kitchen to her boyfriend back home, where all either of them seems to say is the word "baby" in a child's voice. Home every weekend on a $60 train for a roast. All her back-home mates turn up in full night-out garb and seem petrified by the concept of electric light, and they all sit there hitting WKDs until one of them cries, rivulets of fake tan streaming down her face, until they decide to just watch a Disney movie while laughing in her room instead.

Oh, he's got a girlfriend back home, or something, so they can't fuck, but then they do all the pre-fucking stuff—they have playful water fights with each other and spoon under the covers in her room with the door open watching movies—and everyone is like, 'Are they going to fuck, or what?' and 'This is like watching—and I understand the gravity of what I am about to say here—an especially bad episode of Hollyoaks.'

One time on a night out she gets off with someone else and they have a big argument, and then three days later they make up and fuck, and then there are two ways this goes: either these two end up getting married, distantly and in the future, saying things like, "Our origin story was incredibly dull! We really did settle! I'm so happy with the inevitable mediocrity of my life!" or the fallout is really weird and they stand silently in the kitchen on opposite microwaves, passive-aggressively warming up soup and taking them to their respective rooms to consume in silence and alone. With you in the middle. Just trying to make some toast.

Lol @ you

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