Authors note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events are purely coincidental.
Thanks as always to my Editor Henry and to Vlad for his translations.
Rutwell College Chronicles: A little off the top
Introduction:
Welcome to Rutwell College.
A place of learning. A steppingstone for all who enter its halls in the great journey of life.
For over two centuries, students at Rutwell have found themselves growing, stretching their limits, encouraged to try new experiences, to embark on paths they never considered before.
In these lecture halls and libraries, this haven of scholarship, the faculty find fresh minds to mold, empty vessels looking to be filled. Youth and experience coming together in creative and unexpected ways with astonishing results.
As the motto of the college says, 'Mens Aperta, Corpus Saturatum'... 'Open Mind, Sated Body'.
Chapter 1:
Alina Tcaci was tired and cold. She felt like she'd been walking for hours, her feet throbbing in her shoes, but the tiredness was as much from disappointment after disappointment than it was the miles she'd covered on foot that day.
She had moved to the US a year before, leaving her small town in Moldova to take an opportunity for an education in an American college. Rutwell college had offered her a partial scholarship and she had leapt at the chance to leave.
Her parents had backed her decision and had given her some money they had saved over the years to help her on her way.
The Scholarship covered her education, a dorm room and a small per diem for food etc. The meagre funds that her parents had provided her with had run out over the course of her first year, the US not being as cheap to live in as her own home country and although she'd been as careful as possible, she had still needed to buy clothes, have some sort of a social life even if it often consisted of going to the cinema alone.
It wasn't that she shunned others in her year but on first arriving she had struggled with her poor English skills to bond with her fellow students. This left her slightly isolated, which in turn slowed her progress at developing her grasp of English and integrating into both college life and the unfamiliar culture she found herself in.
Her depleted finances were the reason that she was traipsing around town. She'd decided that looking for a part time job was her best option, but in a college town there wasn't much available in that line. Alina wasn't the only student in need of extra cash.
Alina had worked weekends in her mother and father's business since she'd been twelve years old. Both her parents had been hairdressers, and while never formally trained, she had spent enough time with both of her parents to be equally comfortable cutting women's hair as men's.
The multitude of hair salons she had applied to during the day hadn't been enthused about her undocumented experience however, none of them willing to give her a chance.
She tugged her woolen cap further down over her ears, tucking a strand of chestnut brown hair back beneath it. Things hadn't been helped by the fact that it was a particularly cold winter's day, a wind blowing through the streets that seemed to pierce through her coat, gloves and hat as if they were paper thin.
Alina spotted a coffee shop and despite being low on money, stepped inside to warm up. Nursing her coffee between both hands as the hot ceramic mug brought feeling back into her chilled fingers, Alina looked out of the shop window and spotted the familiar red and white pole denoting a barber's shop.
Since she couldn't get a part time job cutting women's hair, perhaps she'd have better luck with men.
The sign above the door read 'Mal's Barbers', she pushed the door open to the tinkling of a door chime.
Inside a group of men turned as one to stare at the interloper entering their sanctum. At the sight of four old black men staring at her with flat expressions, Alina nearly backed out of the door with a muttered apology. But retreating wasn't going to get her work and she needed it.
It was a standard looking shop, on one side was a long-padded bench for customers, a coatrack sat one end. Directly opposite it, the far wall was covered in a mirror, three barber chairs spaced along its length, three wooden flat-topped lockers near them.
The lockers had the tools of the trade on their surface and she assumed within them as well. She could see scissors, razors, different blades and a variety of other hairdressing implements.
She stepped further in and one of the men, tall with perfectly neat hair and a goatee beard shot through with white, stepped away from the others to approach her.
Alina could see that she'd interrupted a game of dominoes, a small table set between the men, the white tiles spread out before them.
She pulled off her cap and smiled as the man came to a stop in front of her.
"Sorry sweetie, I don't cut ladies hair. There's a place a block down that will be able to help you."
"No, I not, I am not," Alina still found herself speaking in slightly broken, accented English at times. She was working on it but a year on, while her vocabulary was improving as was her ability to understand, it was her spoken English that was still poor.
"I do not want my hair cut; I am looking to cutting hair for work."
"You want a job? Here?" The man seemed incredulous and looked behind him at his friends as if for confirmation that he'd heard her correctly.
"Yes please. May I speak to the owner?"
"I'm Mal and this is my place, but I don't think you'd be a fit for here. Sorry." He began to turn away but Alina touched his arm so that he'd stop.
"Please, I want only chance. I need work, I am good. I work many years in my father shop."
"Many years? What you workin' when you were a baby? Listen, where you from?"
"I am from Rutwell college, I study there," Alina answered.
"No, no, where you from originally, that aint no local accent you got going on," he said with a gentle laugh.
"Sorry," Alina answered with a slight blush at her mistake, "I come from Moldova."
"Moldova? Never heard of it. You got many brothers in Moldova? Many Black men?"
"No, not in my home country. Not many black."
"Well, that's the problem right there, see my customers are almost all black and if you don't know what you are doing... well I don't have so many customers that I can afford to lose them to you messin' up."
