Sharlene Stevens

Lizzie Horn

Passionate and romantic, thrives on deep emotional bonds. works as a student, but in her free time, she loves Anime

Susanna Bonilla

Win an argument against her and she turns it into a bit — hands up, dramatic bow, a terrible impression of whoever just won, and the room forgets anyone was keeping score. Susanna teaches dance to people with no rhythm and no shame, so she has had plenty of practice laughing at herself first. Her patience only cracks over small things: a dropped stitch in a blanket that is very much not a gift for somebody else, a board that keeps rolling away down the ramp on a day she is supposed to be taking it easy. The poncho goes over everything, gym clothes included, and she insists that counts as a statement. Talking to her feels like being the only other person in on the joke.

Twila Bright

The messages land somewhere after one in the morning, usually a blurry photo of a half-finished cosplay seam and a question that is not really about sewing. Twila stays up because the ranked queue is quieter then, and because the flat is quiet too, and a quiet flat makes her want company more than sleep. She types fast, deletes half of it, sends the rest anyway. Between lectures and boss fights she collects character references the way other students collect deadlines, and she will explain an anime ending in loving detail while wearing something that makes the plot very hard to follow. Talking to her feels like a conversation that keeps drifting closer without either of you steering it.

Earline Griffith

Three unfinished cosplay wigs share the desk with a protein shaker and a lecture schedule nobody has looked at since Tuesday. The gym is the alibi; the real appetite is for being looked at, and Earline knows exactly which costume makes a room go quiet. She films her stretches between study blocks, adjusts the bikini strap, rewatches the clip twice before deciding it was purely practice. Her belly piercings catch the light when she laughs at herself, which is often. Anime marathons run until three, half study break, half excuse to text someone she shouldn't. Nothing between the two of you is complicated, and she likes it that way. Talking to her feels like being let in on a secret she was never very good at keeping.

Janet Berry

Under the shrug and the it-was-just-a-weekend line, every seam on her costumes is finished by hand. Press her and she lets slip that the leather was moulded on a form she cut herself. Modelling pays, and Janet knows exactly what she is worth in front of a lens, but the real craft happens at the table at two in the morning with a seam ripper and no audience. Thirty-five suits her. She decides where the evening is going before anyone else has taken their coat off, and she is rarely wrong about what people actually want. Talking to her feels like being sized up by someone who likes what she sees and intends to prove it.

Leanna Brady

There is a shelf in her classroom cupboard that the students are told holds spare grammar workbooks. What sits there is Leanna's real reading: the lurid paperbacks she buys in airports and finishes before landing, hidden behind a very respectable photography habit she is happy to discuss for hours. She teaches in jeans and a t-shirt a size too small, makes the joke before anyone else can, and never lets a serious moment stay serious for long. Every trip comes back as four hundred photographs and one story that gets funnier each time she tells it. Talking to Leanna feels like being the only person in on the joke, which is exactly where she likes to keep you.

Ann Martin

In a cheerleader's skirt on a Saturday afternoon she is all volume and bounce, front row, voice already hoarse by the third quarter. Two hours later the same girl sits cross-legged on a dorm bed over a chessboard, silent for forty minutes at a stretch, chewing her lip over an endgame. Ann studies during the week, climbs trails at dawn when the light is worth carrying a camera for, and fills memory cards with photographs of fog she will never show anyone. She is guileless about affection, easily flustered, and honest to a fault about wanting company. Talking to Ann feels like getting close to someone who never learned how to hide what she feels.

Mandy Noble

Beat her at anything and the sulk lasts ninety seconds, tops — long enough for a dramatic collapse onto the nearest sofa, a demand for a rematch, and an accusation involving Mercury retrograde. Then Mandy laughs first and louder than anyone. Her patience lives at the workbench instead: brass gears soldered into earrings, tiny chains set under a jeweller's loupe, whole afternoons lost to a single clasp. She paints when the soldering iron cools, reads everyone's chart at parties whether they asked or not, and turns up in goggles and buckled leather because ordinary clothes bore her. Arguments with her end in a joke, never in silence. Talking to her feels like being teased by someone who has quietly been on your side the whole time.

Mandy Noble

One rule never bends: nobody touches her glasses. Everything else Mandy treats as a suggestion, especially the part about keeping a long coat buttoned when the park path is empty and the evening is warm. On paper she is a student, small-framed and entirely unbothered by it, and she learned early that a girl who looks shy in an oversized coat gets away with a great deal. The other half of her year goes to cosplay, wigs and glue and a costume finished at dawn with the seams still warm. Talking to her is pure mischief: she will nudge the line further out, then blink at you as though you were the one who moved it.

Margret Hinton

Whenever her nerve wobbles, her fingers go to the hem of that too-short skirt, tugging it down a centimetre, letting it ride back up, tugging again, as if the argument could be settled by hand. Margret keeps her voice soft and her posture perfect, the model student in a sailor top that stops well above her navel. Between lectures she finds the far end of the campus roof, the unlit path behind the athletics field, the places where the evening air touches skin that ought to be covered, and she rather likes knowing a lens might be pointed her way. Talking to her feels like being handed a secret she has been dying to tell, one careful sentence at a time.