Just before the lips pull apart, I think, possibly for the first time, of how old this will be, how I know just how all of this is going to unfold. My life not being a perfectly timed episode of Grey’s Anatomy, the elevator remains closed for a few moments after that thought, comforting and discomfiting both, fades away. I don’t think anything else in that pause, but concentrate on that softly edged vertical line.

And it is familiar, disconcertingly familiar.

In the office, where I discover, somehow not to my surprise, that the VISA number that I gave over the phone to a girl in a US call centre has not been used to register me in the class, I am tempted to ask the boy behind the desk if he went to Queen’s, because the sight of his pale face and shockingly orange hair, his large eyes and hyperactive mouth catch me off-guard and for just a moment I am transported to a dimly lit auditorium spotted with people who bewilder me. But I don’t ask him – I sign my cheque, collect my cardboard box of books and hurry back to the elevator and the second floor.

The box, sturdy and deceptively taped, is addressed to someone else. It has his name and his address clearly marked on it, written in shaky, thick handwriting. Short, wavering letters. His name is not on any the flyleaves of the books inside, but he’d written notes beside the first multiple choice exercise. The instructor uses the same phrases, the same words he’s written down when she explains the answers. She’d given us five minutes to read the passage and told us not to answer the questions. But the five minutes stretch into ten and though I feel like I’m cheating, what with his notes there guiding me, I dash the requisite letters. It’s not just cheating, though. It’s a fairly simple exercise and the answers are pretty obvious. But I know, answering the questions while the instructor does paper work, that I am setting myself up for a familiar pattern of dismissing simple instructions. This is all old hat to me: the spelling out of small steps, the pauses at the end of sentences while she waits for someone to fill in the right word, the chairs arranged in neat rows facing her, the podium, the unsatisfied silence. University kindergarten.

So he’d come for the first class, jotted down some notes with a mechanical pencil, and then returned the books. I wonder who he is and whether he decided to forgo not just the classes, but also the exam. I realise later how entirely appropriate it is that I receive these books, these specific, returned books in this box with his name on it.

Late, I take a front-row seat, spill the contents of my bag around me, and settle down to a class on how to write essays for the exam. How many sentences to devote to how many topics in how many paragraphs. What to say, what examples to provide, when to provide them. It’s all here. We’re aiming for a very specific tone of knowledgeableness, a detached sort of objectivity. Coolness and sterility, distance and impersonality – all those stereotypes you will find here in the mind-boggling essay topics and the trite, comfortable responses. I smile, sudden and hard-edged and ugly, when someone on the other end of the room puts his hand up and asks if, given that the exam is American based, whether the examples we provide will have to be of American politics.

The boy who asked that question is the only person in this room who is unfamiliar to me. But even he, eventually, settles down into a type in my mind. He’s the only one in that particular box, but I do manage to find a box for him.

The others I have met before. I know them, these people whose names I have not bothered to remember, whose faces are echoes of faces I saw across cadavers and test tubes. There is the row of six who sit, shoulder to shoulder, giggling and whispering throughout the class. They planned to take this class together, have been to school together, will study and take the subway together and may not pass together. For now they are a casually formidable block of friendly rivalry, a world unto themselves in that grey room.

There are the three girls sitting across from me. They are more obviously studious than the six behind them. They have pointed, exact questions and reserved, determined faces. They don’t realise how similar they are to the giggly six behind them. Or maybe they do. Of the twenty five or so people in these room, those two groups and the boy with the politics are quite clearly the most determined to pass the exam with flying colours, to get into med school and to live the dream.

The rest of us are singles, accidentally arranged by virtue of the spindly furniture into awkward pairs and trios. Over the next few weeks, we’ll reveal ourselves and our types. For now, for me it is like sitting in the past and I don’t try very hard to be different now from what I was then. I stretch out in my paraphernalia of novel and notebooks, camera and limp pencil case, making myself and my bravado at home.