Two is Company

Alice

When you tell most people that you're going to school in the Caribbean they think island. Beach. Fun. Cool friends and awesome memories. Nice tans and endless beach time. I mean they are pretty right. It was what I anticipated too. I'd done undergrad in the states; I'd always wanted to leave home so now, this was the perfect opportunity.

My name is Alice. I've wanted to be a vet from a very young age. I knew it would be years of hard work and lots of science classes. No one tells you those sciences classes are designed to be weed out classes and that the people who breeze through them with flying colors are just...not normal. I'd always considered myself to be pretty smart. All the way through high school was a breeze – I could've probably done it with my eyes closed. College was different though. I wasn't special. Everyone was smart and many were smarter than me.

Aside from being in a toxic, distracting relationship for the better part of undergrad, I simply didn't know how to study. I had my first semester with no A's, first C, first failed class – the worse. Somehow, I'd still managed to finish in 3 years and graduate at the age of 20, but I still didn't feel very proud. To say less, I finished undergrad with below a 3.0. The average vet school applicant had near a 4.0. It was still my dream though whether I had to apply 8 times and retake most of those science classes.

But, to my surprise, I'd been accepted into 2 schools outside of the country and I gladly took one. I visited both and fell in love with the school in Grenada. There was a medical school there too, and an undergrad. I was going to a full university on a beautiful Caribbean island and I couldn't be happier.

"Are you sure you'll be okay?" my dad asked as he got ready to walk out of my door. He'd flown down with me initially along with my stepmom to get me settled. Most people lived on campus their first semester, but I'd brought my cat with me so I got a get out of jail card. I'd found a rather cheap apartment about a 12-minute bus ride to campus on the campus shuttles.

I shrugged with a nervous smile, "I'll have to be at this point." The taxi driver was waiting in the driveway to take them back to the airport. I wasn't afraid to be alone, but this was the first time I'd truly moved away from home. And once they left, I really had nothing to do.

I didn't know anyone or the island. I knew how to get to campus, but that was about it. I had groceries. My apartment was clean. And I had my cat, Fritz. The only thing to do was to wait till classes started.

School had commenced for the fall semester. Anxious students from late teens to middle-aged adults curiously wondered to their new classes in what was deemed paradise. This had been many of their dreams – to be the face of the newest generation of doctors and veterinarians. For a handful on campus, we'd been lucky enough to be admitted to the school's foundation program.

Well... let's define lucky. We hadn't been completely rejected because the admission's board saw some sort of potential in us, but by the same token, our grades and scores had been subpar and so here we were. Nevertheless if we were successful in completing this program, we were automatically guaranteed a seat in the spring's medical and vet school classes.

To most people's dismay, the sun hid behind rainy clouds on the first day of class. I frantically wiped the water droplets off of my phone's screen as I tried to scan the school map for the building of my first class. I don't know if you know, but Caribbean rain is weird. It can pour or 5 minutes or an hour. And when it rains, it's very rarely light. It comes DOWN. Then it stops. Randomly. The sun comes out and its so hot that all the water on the ground evaporates and its never any evidence that it had rained 20 minutes ago. Sometimes the rain came and went so quickly, it didn't even reflect on the weather app.