She wasn't normally the kind of person who got things like this done quickly, but she especially didn't want to be stuck doing this when term started- that and she didn't need her new roommate thinking she was any more of an idiot than she already did- which would probably actually take quite some doing, come to think of it.

"Oh. You're here."
Fuck. Speak of the devil.

She looked up from her suitcase to see a surprised roommate framed in the doorway.

"Um. Yeah. I guess I kind of live here now. Look, I'm sorry we got off on the wrong foot yesterday. Hi, I'm Maria. I'm your new roommate. Wanna be friends?"

She held out her hand hopefully. Please don't hate me please don't hate me please don't-

Her train of thought was rapidly derailed by her new roommate reaching out and shaking her outstretched hand and... smiling? It was slightly strained, but it was a smile nonetheless.

"Hi. I'm Sarah Jane Smith. I'm sorry about yesterday; I wasn't extremely keen on losing my single person room, and I've been under some stress recently. I hope you'll forgive me."
"Oh, of course." Maria said quickly, eager to start over.
This time Sarah Jane's grin seemed more authentic, though she still wasn't exactly an open book. Maria latched on to the possible conversational topic as quickly as possible, trying to prevent the newly formed friendship from becoming awkward.

"So, uh. Is this your first year here as well? If you've never had a roommate before. I mean, um."

Her voice trailed off nervously. To her relief, Sarah Jane didn't seem offended.

"No, this is my second year here, but I kind of...lucked out last year and managed to have a room all to myself. It was nice, but I guess it couldn't last."
The smile lighting up her face belied the possible offensiveness of her words. A small silence fell, and Maria looked away, fingers fiddling with the edge of her necklace.
"So... what about you? Why move schools for your final year?"
Sarah Jane continued, obviously reaching a bit. Maria couldn't blame her though; she wasn't exactly a conversation expert either. And she supposed small talk was par for the course when making friends.

"Oh, my dad's job mostly. We move around a lot. And I wasn't super attached to my old school or anything, so...
And I figured it was a good chance to change some subjects. I really hated biology, so now I'm doing English, history, beginners French, and chemistry. So... what are you studying?"

Sarah Jane's expression seemed more open now, and, faced with a civil conversation with her roommate, Maria felt cautiously optimistic. "I'm doing English, psychology, French, and society and culture. I think we'll be in the same French class; not enough people chose it, so they combined them. Maybe... we could study together sometime?"

Maria was tempted by that plan; her French skills could use the practice.
Who was she kidding, there was no way she would be brave enough to practice her French with someone who actually spoke the language.

"Sure. But I haven't done a lot of French, cause, you know, I've been moving around a lot, so you probably shouldn't expect anything like fluency."
Sarah Jane laughed a bit, and Maria smiled too.
Things were looking up.

Maria taped the last picture to her wall and lay back in the bed in satisfaction. She'd printed out a bunch of the pictures that had been on her computer forever to make herself feel more at home at her new school. It felt good to have everything unpacked, with her belongings spreading to fit the space.

Sarah Jane had gone to talk to the head of the science department; apparently there was an issue with her little brother's homework or something. She had left in a bit of a hurry, giving Maria the impression her brother caused a number of problems at the school.

Maria had decided to stay and finish unpacking. Term started tomorrow and she figured once classes started she'd be too busy.
Having unpacked, though, she wasn't sure what to do. She could seek out Rani and Clyde, but she felt like she'd had enough socialising for the day. She briefly considered cracking open the book and starting on the syllabus, but... she really didn't want to. One more day of not studying wouldn't hurt, right?

Maybe she should do some exploring.
She'd passed the communal bathroom on her floor on the way to breakfast that morning, and she knew she'd have plenty of time to get lost on the way to class and find her way around the school when term started, so she decided to explore the dorm room.

Sarah Jane had explained that, because the school building used to be a giant manor house or something, it had a million random little rooms. Most dorms apparently had a cupboard or something at least. A couple of lucky girls even had their own small bathrooms. They were luckyas well, apparently; they had a fake wall that led to what used to be a sitting room. It contained a bricked up fireplace, and a nice big window. Apparently when Sarah Jane first got the room it was gloomy and dusty, but over the course of the year she'd brightened it up and made it her study room.
Maria stood in front of the wall, and laid her palm on the spot Sarah Jane had pointed out. The wallpaper pattern over that spot changed slightly- every other little flower was blue, but this one was yellow. She pushed down, and the wall section of wall slid away.
She grinned in satisfaction; she'd always wanted to find a secret passageway. She put her heaviest textbook into the gap, then stepped through. Sarah Jane had assured her the gap would remain open, but she'd seen movies; she knew those doors had a keen sense of dramatic timing. She and her dad spent many a happy hour throwing popcorn at the telly whenever a horror movie character did something silly like investigate a strange noise or let a secret passage close behind them. Now she was the one living in an old manor house; this was no time to develop bad habits.

The first thing that struck her was how bright the room was. She knew Sarah Jane had cleaned it up, but she hadn't expected it to this extent. She suspected a little procrastination had gone into this, but maybe Sarah Jane was just that organised.
The wall to her right had a large bricked up fireplace, at least a metre and a half across. Maria wiped a hand on the brick edge, and noticed a surprising lack of dust. The whole room was lit up by a large square window, taking up most of the opposite wall. The morning sun shone into the room, illuminating the small layer of dust stirred up by Maria's presence. No matter how tidy Sarah Jane kept it, it seemed even she couldn't completely eliminate the decades of neglect.
A long corner desk took up the rest of the room. It was covered in textbooks and random ornaments. Here, as well, Sarah Jane had pinned up random articles. Headlines like 'Little green men? Aliens throughout history' and 'Aliens? In Downing Street? It's more likely than you think' jumped out at her from the walls. She stepped into the room to look more closely.
It wasn't a massive room, and the desk took up a surprising amount of space. As did the bricked up fireplace. Still, she was pretty excited. A real live secret room! It was one of the coolest things she'd ever seen. Definitely what she'd hoped for when she first saw pictures of the school.

She picked up a strange pink shell and rubbed along the edge. It was strangely smooth, even for a shell. The deep shade of pink and spiral caught her eye, and she leaned over the desk to see it in the sunlight. The longer she studied it, the more detail she could see. It seemed to have flecks of white, and an almost pearlescent sheen. She turned it in her hand, and the spiral seemed to move independently. She looked closer, admiring the light reflecting off the shell, turning the room around her pink. The light drew her in, and she couldn't look away. Deeper and deeper, she fell into the spiral. She felt like there was something under the surface, like an illusion, and if she just looked a bit closer she would see it. Just a little closer...

Beep beep! Beep beep! Beep beep!
An obnoxious beeping broke her concentration, causing her to fumble the shell. For some reason, she felt her heart racing, like she'd just run a marathon, and her palms were damp with sweat. Feeling shaky but unable to put a finger on why, she put the shell back on the desk. As she did so, she noticed a modern lamp, obviously put there by Sarah Jane for nighttime studying. It was weirdly nice to see. If not for that it could seem like this room hadn't been touched by humans for years. Looking more closely, she saw a number of papers with writing on them, obviously Sarah Jane's writing. A few obvious study materials were scattered around- a list of French verbs, a maths formula, an essay with a 20/20 across the top in red pen. Other things were more unusual, presumably personal research- a list of dates that didn't seem to correspond to any sort of world events, a spiral of words not in a language she recognised (though Maria would be the first to admit she wasn't a language expert by any means), and a small pyramid shape made out of a shiny purple metal that seemed to emit a weird buzzing noise. Maybe Sarah Jane had done a lot of travelling? She had an amazing variety of papers and objects from faraway places. While Maria didn't recognise some of the things she saw, she was pretty sure that string of symbols were Arabic, and those were...some sort of strange...headphones, maybe? with Chinese letters.
This seemed like such a nice room; hopefully Maria would be able to convince Sarah Jane to share some of it. She quite liked the idea of having their own room, that only they could use. It was kind of like a clubhouse, except with more studying. She was pretty excited for this year, now; she'd always wanted a secret clubhouse. She wondered if it would be too soon to try and organise a secret handshake with Sarah Jane...

"Hi Luke, please turn off the Bunsen burner."
Sarah Jane was on her laptop, talking to her little brother on Skype. The same brother who'd had an issue with his homework. Maria was half asleep, curled up in her bed, listening with half an ear. She'd assumed Luke, Sarah Jane's brother, had the usual sort of problem nine year old boys do with homework- not handing it in, or doing it badly, or something.
Apparently she was way off the mark.
"Yes, I know Miss Glass asked you to research a science experiment, but she didn't want you to recreate Tesla's death ray... yes, I'm aware that she asked you to look to history for examples... no, that doesn't mean you should try to recreate the most dangerous experiments you can..."
Sarah Jane sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingers.
Maria got the distinct impression she'd had this conversation before.
All the way over on her bed, she could only hear one half of the conversation, and she had to admit she was curious about the source of her roommates annoyance. It had taken Sarah Jane over three hours to discuss her brothers science situation with his teacher. Apparently her brother had some objections to the way she'd handled it.
Maria wasn't really an expert on child geniuses, but it did seem like trying to recreate one of the largest and more terrifying innovations of the 20th century with the contents of a primary school science lab (and almost succeeding) was a bit extreme. And she would have thought taking such a dangerous thing away from the child was reasonable, but said child seemed to disagree.
"Yes, Luke, I know you found Tesla's journal... and that he claimed it was perfectly safe... but he was not nine years old at the time, Luke."
Sarah Jane's voice softened.
"No, I'm not angry. You just have to be a little more careful. Don't take unnecessary risks. Take care of yourself, and I'll see you tomorrow."
She paused, listening to his response and Maria saw her smile affectionately. Clearly she wasn't too upset with her little brother. Maria was glad about that for some reason; the kid seemed to have good intentions.
"Goodnight, Luke."
And for the first time Maria heard a reply; a little boy's voice.
"Goodnight, Sarah Jane."
She fell asleep with a smile on her face, looking forward to the next day.

AN:

Okay, I'm really sorry about the wait time on this! Real life got crazy and hasn't slowed down till now, basically. Now though, my final exams start next week and after them I'm done, so I'll have more time to write. You can thank Poppy, who I think is a guest, for reviewing and guilting me into continuing this story. I swear (especially after my exams, which finish mid-November, I'll have more time to write. This story is still in progress! Thanks for reading and not giving up on me!