"Bye mum!" Nineteen year old Samantha Nixon shouted back as she left the house.
"Bye sweetie! Have a nice time and remember to study hard!" Sam groaned in response. She was not looking forward to her first day at University. She had not wanted to go in the first place but her mum had been on at her constantly, insisting she go and get a degree in something and Sam had finally given in and applied to study Psychology with criminology as her second course, hoping she might find it vaguely interesting.
The Uni she had been accepted into was only a half hours bus journey away so she was staying at home rather than living in the halls much to Sams despair. That had been her mothers idea, not hers. If Sam had her way, she would have moved out the minute the room had become available but there was no way she could afford it. She was going to struggle to pay the student loan back as it was without adding rent money on top of that so she had reluctantly agreed to stay at home with her pushy mother and travel to uni by bus every morning.
She got off the bus at her stop and started the short walk towards the uni. She knew exactly where to go thanks to the open days her mother had forced her to attend and the meetings with the head of the departments she will be entering but she was still scared that she would walk into the wrong room and make a fool of herself on her first day.
Lucky for her, she did not and she found her lecture hall with ten minutes to spare. Taking a seat in one of the middle rows, she looked round at her classmates. They all looked just as nervous as her. Most were around Sams age, give or take a few years, then there were some mature students sitting at the front who looked in their late twenties or early thirties. Sam suddenly felt very glad she was one of the youngest. The older students must feel a lot more nervous than her, being surrounded by a lot of teenagers just fresh from school.
Sam stopped focusing on the mature students and eyed the younger people surrounding her. There was a group of students sat behind the older people who caught Sams eye. Most of them were sitting up straight in their chairs, wearing glasses at the tips of their noses, with a mountain of textbooks and notebooks infront of them. Some had their books open and were reading them intently, as though trying to memorise them. "The typical school swots" Sam thought. She had a hard job keeping a straight face as she saw a boy a few seats infront of her, with his nose buried in a book, wearing a hideous tanktop that stood out due to its bright colours. How could he come dressed like that on his first day?
There were also a few fairly normal looking people who Sam thought she'd probably get on with, most of them were also eyeing up the swots. Sam caught one girls eye and had to suppress a giggle as she raised her eyebrow at the boy in the tanktop.
A silence fell over the class as the door opened. A man in his early thirties entered the room. He looked round about the same age as some of the mature students. Sams first thought was: "God, he's hot!"
He was tall, about 5'11, big built but not fat. It was more muscle than fat. His short black hair was tinged with grey which made him look distinguished in Sams opinion. He opened his mouth to speak and Sam immediately noticed how masculine his voice was. It was low, but not so low that it was croaky. Sam thought he was very sexy and judging by the looks on the faces of some of girls around her, so did they.
"Good morning" the lecturer said, looking up at them for the first time. "Welcome to university. I'm your criminology lecturer, Dr Hugh Wallis..."