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If there was one single thing Trent would change about the residences at the ballet school, it would be the bathrooms. Or possibly the whole sharing a room thing - that wasn't so great either. But mostly the bathrooms. Oh, you got clean, and even in the mornings, with everyone needing to get showered and down to the dinning room for the same first class time, you mostly only had to wait ten minutes or so to get a shower. It was just that the shower rooms always made him think of a really posh gas chamber, with those big round ceiling showers, and the only place to put your towel was over the door of the cubical, so it always ended up damp. Plus there wasn't anywhere to put your wash bag, and if you wanted to shave in the shower - which Trent normally did on the grounds that it was easier to get rid of all the foam stickiness that way, and that it meant he got less razor burn - that was a whole heap of bottles and tubes you were trying to balance around the edges of the shower tray.
You could spot the first-year students : they were the ones who still had opaque bottles for their shampoo and stuff. One or two soaking wet dashes back two flights to a bedroom for the new bottle was normally enough to teach them that you wanted to know *exactly* how much shower gel you had left before you got in the shower. Trent had gone as far as dumping the hunter-green wash bag his mum had brought him, and lugging everything back and forth in a clear zip-lock instead. You got clean, but that's about it. You didn't get unwound or any of the other things normal people with real bathrooms got to feel in a shower. There wasn't a whole lot of privacy, and there was almost always someone else showering across the room, or waiting impatiently for you to get done and gone.
If you were really lucky the other guy had no idea you were also trying to shower, and you got a free selection of Broadway tunes. Russell did that once, in his first year, and the older students had hummed the theme from Fame as he passed for weeks. The first time everyone, Trent included had though it was the funniest thing, but after a while seeing his roommate getting reamed over and over got - uncomfortable. He couldn't help but notice that it was getting Russell wound up, and while he wasn't best buddies with the guy when it got so Russell was skipping breakfast so as not to deal with it, Trent started picking up an extra yoghurt, and a couple of bananas he wasn't going to eat just to make sure he wasn't going to do himself an injury over it. Vo spotted him sneaking the extra food straight away and demanded an explanation. She'd had a word with some of the other girls in their year, and poked Trent into speaking to Saul and Kamir, and for a solid week half the students in their year sang in the showers, and in the end the joke kind of faded out under too many people, too many songs.
The shower rooms were split up on the ground floor, along side the changing rooms for the students who didn't live in, so Trent had never gotten to hear Vo belting through 'Like a Virgin' although she had offered him and Russell a private concert in their room once. The single bathrooms - the literal rooms with bath that sat alongside the non-literal bathrooms at the end of each floor - were pretty much a free-for-all. Most of the week, no one much had time for them, and the sterile white boxes didn't exactly invite long soaks, but sometimes the idea of floating in hot hot water and having a locked door between himself and the rest of the world won out.
Someone - he assumed it was one of the girls who regularly colonised the bathroom on his floor if a lot of them were going out together - had gifted the room with one of those novelty plugs : a lily pad plug with a long chain holding on to a blue cartoon frog who bobbed around on the surface. They'd also painted intricate geometric patterns in delicate shades of pearl nail varnish on the side bar of the shaker chair that sat alongside the bath. He wondered sometimes what would happen if he borrowed some of Ru's black and added to the designs. He'd never quite shaken his indoctrination that it was A Bad Thing to read in the bath, so he'd gotten to know the little details in the room pretty well. It wasn't like there were a lot of them - just 36 tiles across and 44 from the top of the bath to the ceiling, and the blur and buzz of the extractor fan, and the frog, and the patterns.
You could spot the first-year students : they were the ones who still had opaque bottles for their shampoo and stuff. One or two soaking wet dashes back two flights to a bedroom for the new bottle was normally enough to teach them that you wanted to know *exactly* how much shower gel you had left before you got in the shower. Trent had gone as far as dumping the hunter-green wash bag his mum had brought him, and lugging everything back and forth in a clear zip-lock instead. You got clean, but that's about it. You didn't get unwound or any of the other things normal people with real bathrooms got to feel in a shower. There wasn't a whole lot of privacy, and there was almost always someone else showering across the room, or waiting impatiently for you to get done and gone.
If you were really lucky the other guy had no idea you were also trying to shower, and you got a free selection of Broadway tunes. Russell did that once, in his first year, and the older students had hummed the theme from Fame as he passed for weeks. The first time everyone, Trent included had though it was the funniest thing, but after a while seeing his roommate getting reamed over and over got - uncomfortable. He couldn't help but notice that it was getting Russell wound up, and while he wasn't best buddies with the guy when it got so Russell was skipping breakfast so as not to deal with it, Trent started picking up an extra yoghurt, and a couple of bananas he wasn't going to eat just to make sure he wasn't going to do himself an injury over it. Vo spotted him sneaking the extra food straight away and demanded an explanation. She'd had a word with some of the other girls in their year, and poked Trent into speaking to Saul and Kamir, and for a solid week half the students in their year sang in the showers, and in the end the joke kind of faded out under too many people, too many songs.
The shower rooms were split up on the ground floor, along side the changing rooms for the students who didn't live in, so Trent had never gotten to hear Vo belting through 'Like a Virgin' although she had offered him and Russell a private concert in their room once. The single bathrooms - the literal rooms with bath that sat alongside the non-literal bathrooms at the end of each floor - were pretty much a free-for-all. Most of the week, no one much had time for them, and the sterile white boxes didn't exactly invite long soaks, but sometimes the idea of floating in hot hot water and having a locked door between himself and the rest of the world won out.
Someone - he assumed it was one of the girls who regularly colonised the bathroom on his floor if a lot of them were going out together - had gifted the room with one of those novelty plugs : a lily pad plug with a long chain holding on to a blue cartoon frog who bobbed around on the surface. They'd also painted intricate geometric patterns in delicate shades of pearl nail varnish on the side bar of the shaker chair that sat alongside the bath. He wondered sometimes what would happen if he borrowed some of Ru's black and added to the designs. He'd never quite shaken his indoctrination that it was A Bad Thing to read in the bath, so he'd gotten to know the little details in the room pretty well. It wasn't like there were a lot of them - just 36 tiles across and 44 from the top of the bath to the ceiling, and the blur and buzz of the extractor fan, and the frog, and the patterns.
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[Things change so fast once the story proper starts, I feel like I need to get the foundations in.]
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and i love "You didn't get unwound or any of the other things normal people with real bathrooms got to feel in a shower" - he really does think he's living in a bubble, doesn't he.
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