Upon finishing our morning routines in the bathroom, we all agreed to meet for breakfast in five minutes in the basement dining area. Approaching my bedroom as quietly as I could, I opened the door a crack, poked my head in and found Annie still asleep. Holding my breath I tip-toed in, dropped off my belongings and went out as quietly as I’d come in. I took the stairs down two at a time and located my new friends at a table at the east end of the basement.
A food cart had arrived at 6:30 am delivered by a hospital kitchen staff member who remained there with the cart to serve us our breakfast. The cart was to be taken back to the kitchen at 8 a.m. On the days they were scheduled to work on the hospital nursing units, our Big Sisters had to have breakfast before reporting for duty at 7 am. We first year students had the luxury of a late breakfast as classes didn’t start til 8. Regardless of our schedules, we all had the same breakfast choices: oatmeal, eggs, orange or apple juice, not very crisp toast, and milk, coffee or tea. The eggs were boiled in the shell and warm; the oatmeal, also just warm, brought to mind Oliver Twist’s plaintive cry for more.
This breakfast routine would be repeated daily for the next two years. On that first morning we didn’t know the whole story. We were so naive. Our Big Sisters, however, would revel in the telling of the details for us over the next few days. Neither the procedure nor the menu would change on any single one of those next six hundred mornings. Lunches and dinners would not vary and we’d learn very quickly to bring care packages from home to sustain us. Maybe Annie was on to something.
Having eaten, we had just enough time to hurry back to our rooms, pick up pens, three ring binders and paper, and get to class on time. I was just leaving the room as Annie walked in. Too close to my face, she smiled broadly and asked if I was heading down to class. Well, of course I was but stepping back a foot or so, I said that yes, I was. “Wait for me” she said, and reluctantly, I did. She was very friendly, very talkative, and I tried half heartedly, to make small talk with her. As we walked out into the hall and down the stairs to the classroom, a number of other students joined the procession so I took the opportunity to fall back leaving Annie with the others.
I’m not proud of my behaviour. My only defence – although I didn’t know it that morning – is that her eccentric snacking habits, the unbearable odour of which permeated my room, continued on almost every evening for weeks thereafter. Teenage girls that we were, we made fun of and shunned the odd one, the one who didn’t fit within the group. Making new friends quickly, I rarely spent an evening in my own room with Annie. Except for sleeping, I was always down the hall in a friend’s room. Annie’s family lived in Windsor so as the weeks went by, Annie began spending more and more evenings out of the residence at her family home. To most of us, but to me especially, her absence was a relief. Not surprisingly, when Annie didn’t return after the Christmas break and all her belongings were gone, no one regretted her absence. The gossip circulated that she’d failed most of her exams, so we were able to convince ourselves that she wasn’t cut out for nursing anyway. The passage of time and the heightened awareness that came to me of the use of social media for bullying and shaming ‘others’ has made me remember poor Annie. My complicity in what must have been her misery is shameful to me now. I wonder if we eighteen year old girls couldn’t have handled the matter of Annie in a kinder, gentler way.
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