Saturday 27th Jan 2018

I was understandably dejected over the lack of answers from the university office, which might go some way towards explaining the slight hint of extravagance in my subsequent supermarket visit.

What sort of extravagance, you ask? Let’s say I returned to Shane’s flat like a harvest goddess in full glory, arms overflowing with the finest fruits of the Sainsbury’s ready-meals section.

Shane glanced up from his laptop. “Sophie, you brought dinner! Who’s this?” he frowned at the man who staggered in behind me, arms loaded with plastic carrier bags.

“My devoted and humble disciple,” I proclaimed. “Thanks mate, you can dump it there.” I held out a twenty to the man who abandoned the bags where I pointed, grabbed the money and disappeared.

“Humble what?” Shane stared after him.

“That was the taxi driver, idiot. I had to bribe him to help me bring it all upstairs since you weren’t answering your phone.”

His cheeks turned red. “Oh. Sorry, I was chatting with Jade.”

“Oh that’s nice. Is she mimsy like the borogoves and the mome raths?”

There was a few seconds’ pause before he looked up again. “What?”

You can see why I had to give up the attempt at conversation, Dear Diary. Far be it from me to place any obstacle in the way of such burgeoning love. After a silent microwaved lasagne that Shane gobbled down still glued to his Messenger page, our evening was claimed by the television and Shane’s second love: Football.

I watched it with him, not entirely out of choice. Shane has never managed to succeed in passing on his love of the beautiful game to me (not for want of trying). But due to the fact that the couch was my bed, I was obliged to enjoy the match (and the post-match replays and the post-replay discussions) for as long as he did. As Shane reminded me, I’d be homeless without him, so beggars can’t be sport-haters. Eventually I was saved by the return of Jade, who promptly assumed her rightful position at the top of Shane’s list of priorities and dragged him off into the bedroom. I stuffed my ears with the cotton wool I’d stocked up during my shopping extravaganza. It didn’t help much.

Weekend Plans: find new place to stay.

True to form, Jade made several (hundred) trips to the bathroom during the night. The last of them was early enough (or late enough) for me to justify dragging myself off the couch and fleeing the lovebird retreat in the hopes of finding a coffee shop that was already open (or still open). Or, as actually happened, a bakery whose staff took pity on me, allowing me to sit indoors while they carried on with the day’s pastries. I’m currently assaulted by the achingly good smell of cornish pasties. I wish I’d thought to scarf a couple of those Sainsbury’s sausage rolls before leaving. I bet Shane and Jade are feeding each other on them right now…

No, forget that. To work, Sophie! You’re here to try and figure out this mystery.

So far I’m not doing very well in my detective work. If I had coloured pens, I’d draw a pie chart labelled “Things Sophie doesn’t know”. Actually, I’d only need one colour.

I just made myself giggle and now the bakery workers are eyeing me. They’ve been nervous since I made the mistake of asking whether they had any spinach & rhubarb pasties. I’ll have to leave a big tip when I go. You’d think that losing my student status would have a favourable effect on my cafe bills but no.

Let’s try again:

Things Sophie doesn’t know:

- Why she was kicked out of uni

- Why her student record disappeared

- What to do next…

An impressive list if I do say so myself. You can tell I’ve been to university and learned to think analytically with a list like that.

If I was a real detective, I’d probably point out to myself that the first and second items are probably connected. Let’s say that my student record disappeared first, and then the office somehow became aware of it and took steps to eject a person that they saw as a trespasser. Perhaps they even had a tipoff. I mean, why else would Witchface & Co have taken it in into their heads to check the files on a random student in a random dorm room?

So if we go on the assumption that this wasn’t all just a huge computer error, it leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that someone must have done this deliberately. Which means that I, Sophie Dayton, have an Enemy…

Or else someone is playing a horrible trick on me. The smirking guy from yesterday has just jumped back into my head. As the TV detectives say, there’s no such thing as a coincidence. And there was something about the way he was looking at me. He really seemed like he knew something, Dear Diary. And I’m almost certain that that’s an objective assessment and not just my smitten teenager brain talking. Maybe I should find him again? If it turns out he doesn’t know anything about my expulsion I could at least ask him what kind of shampoo he uses to get his hair so silky and soft-looking.

Priority no. 1: Find Smirk Guy

Priority no. 2: Find the town’s chief nerd

I know what you’re thinking, Dear Diary, and it’s not because I have a hankering to put them in a cage together and watch a sex-god vs nerd-king fight-to-the-death (although I admit that would be interesting).

No. Priority two seems logical because if my uni records were deleted then there must be an electronic trail. All the best spy films talk about those. I need to find a competent hacker who could access the uni computer system and help me figure out who deleted me and how. Not to mention why.

It should be easy to find a hacker, right?

I have no idea where to look for hackers.

Where would they hang out? Behind their computer screens, of course. Well that doesn’t help me very much.

Note to self: cultivate a broader and more useful selection of friends.

I’ve just heard the bakery staff discussing their plans for the evening and it’s given me an idea. My new plan is to wait for evening and then go to the town’s dodgiest nightclub because that’s where you find the scum of the earth. And everyone knows that scum gets everywhere. So the lowlifes I meet there will be people who know people who know people. You get the idea. One of them will help me to find a hacker!

I have nothing appropriate to wear in such a place, so now I’m going shopping for a slutty outfit. Until later, Dear Diary!

Later…

The list of mistakes I made in that nightclub, Dear Diary, would fill a saga. For convenience’s sake, I will list only the most significant ones here.

Sophie’s blunders:

1. I arrived at The Blue Zone far too early. The advantage was that I got in without paying a cover charge (a mercy, because my new slut dress didn’t have any pockets for superfluous things like money). The disadvantage was that it meant I was forced to mingle with the young professionals and other losers who had assumed, like me, that the club would be jumping by 11pm. We were all wrong.

2. Compounding my first gaffe, I had failed to bring an escort. Any woman, arriving so early, unaccompanied, and dressed as I was, must surely be a prostitute. I could see the wheels turning as my unwanted bar-mates tried to figure out whether I was the type who would only accept cash or whether a nice dinner and free taxi ride would do it. I manfully (make that womanfully) resigned myself to being a sounding-board for thousands of terrible chat-up lines, most of which didn’t even deserve the response: “aww bless”.

3. Once the club started filling up, I should have taken advantage of my position as an early-arrival and carried on talking to people. Instead, I assumed that time was getting short, panicked and started wandering around like a lost puppy, asking random people whether they could help me find someone. This was unfailingly interpreted as a request for drugs. The house dealer must have been sick of the sight of me by the time the third person had dragged me over to make introductions. I tried asking him whether he knew any nerds, but he took it to be a fancy name for ecstasy and offered me a bag of pills. Unhelpful.

4. If I’d given in and accepted any of the alcohol or hallucinogenics I was offered during the night, then perhaps it could have excused my final and worst mistake:

I was standing at the edge of the dancefloor, pondering my next move, when something made me turn and look towards the entrance. There, in an unaccountably clear patch of floor, standing motionless, was a very familiar figure. Or rather, let me say an unfamiliar figure wearing a very familiar smirk.

My brain stopped functioning for a moment as I stared at him. Was it really the guy from yesterday? What was he doing here? Was he following me? How did he know I’d be here? Then, just as he had done the previous day, he turned on his heel and walked away. Straight out of the club’s main door and into the night.

My mistake was not that I allowed the sight of him to distract me from my purpose for being there. After all, he was my priority number one. (It says so in this very book.) Oh no, Dear Diary, my mistake was the idiotic dithering that I indulged in for a good few moments before I rushed after him.

And it was all for nothing. By the time I got out of the club, he had vanished into the blackness….

Wait, maybe that’s a bit too dramatic.

He’d vanished into the well-lit and lively urban streets. Whatever. Anyway, the point is that he was gone. Not there. Unpresent. Dissipated. Missing. Nowhere-to-be-seen. Removed. Decamped. Departed. Lacking. AWOL. Astray.

Note to self: Add online thesaurus to list of restricted sites.