*n.b. Please don’t do what I did in this story. It’s extremely stupid and either you or one of your friends will probably drown.*
My second year of university drew to a close and, as I remember it, I was in a perpetual bad mood. I’m sure that I was no longer mired in self-loathing over how things had ended with [Lucy](https://old.reddit.com/user/itsonlycharlotte/comments/i3qb94/the_lucy_links/) by now, but I liked studying and disliked long summers, and no doubt I was fed up over some other romantic or sexual entanglement which had gone south.
I had been sharing a house with three other people; two of them had already left for the summer, and only Rosie and I remained. Rosie was—and remains—an exceptionally lovely person, by far my favourite of my housemates. She was a fellow English student with an earnest love for Harry Potter, an infectious smile, and a mild demeanour which people often mistook for shyness, but was more of a genuine, polite-to-a-fault fascination with others and what they had to say. And, I suppose, for the purpose of this story I might as well add that she’s very pretty in an understated way, a kind of soft-skinned, wavy-haired and (she wouldn’t mind me saying this, I’m sure) chubby cuteness, with smooth and gentle curves which, more often than not, she kept hidden.