Course Registration

The 13A rolls up more or less on schedule, and the driver behind the wheel is surely one of the grumpiest men you have ever met. He barely glances at your ticket before waving you through with the enthusiasm of a man doing you a personal favor he resents.

You find a seat near the back and spend the ride watching the city slide by, grand and slightly self-satisfied, all wedding-cake facades and trams that run so precisely on time it starts to feel like a personal challenge. It's a quiet ride, the kind that gives you too much time to think, and you find yourself, unhelpfully, replaying the loud American from the bakery, the one you'd very deliberately not gotten involved with. You wonder if you should not have just helped her.

The university comes into view eventually, sprawling and grand and faintly intimidating, and you step off with a small knot of other students who all seem to know exactly where they're going in a way you very much do not.

The registration office turns out to be a masterclass in a country that apparently still considers photocopiers cutting-edge technology. There's a website, technically, you'd tried to register online the night before and been met with a login portal that demanded a PIN mailed to an Austrian address you don't have, for a system that then, once you'd finally gotten in, redirected you to a PDF form you were meant to print, fill out by hand, and bring in person anyway. You've heard rumors that some faculties are better; political science, apparently, is not one of them.

The registration office turns out to be a masterclass in a country that apparently still considers photocopiers cutting-edge technology. There's a website, technically. You'd tried to register online the night before and been met with a login portal that demanded a PIN mailed to an Austrian address you don't have, for a system that then, once you'd finally gotten in, redirected you to a PDF form you were meant to print, fill out by hand, and bring in person anyway. You've heard rumors that some faculties are better; political science, apparently, is not one of them.

And now you were experiencing your first full taste of any foreigner in central europe- Burocracy. Switzerland had given you a rose tinted view of germanic effiency, but clearly, Vienna is clearly not Geneva.

The office itself, filled with desks and fax machines, several computers that were clearly built in the last century, is small and mostly empty when you find it, a stroke of luck, given the horror stories about queues you'd braced for. Only one other student is ahead of you at the counter: a young woman with a sharp bob of red hair and the kind of unhurried, effortlessly put-together look that suggests boarding school, or at least the aesthetic of one. She's arguing, politely but firmly, with the woman behind the desk about a course code that apparently doesn't match what the (equally unhelpful) website told her, and doing it in the clipped, precise English of someone who has simply decided German isn't worth the effort today. Her voice is clearly english, and incredibly posh. She might be a side character in Downton Abbey or the Crown.

You catch a glimpse of her registration sheet over her shoulder while you wait, several of the same course codes you're here to sort out yourself. Same courses, then, another political scientist. You'll be seeing more of her, presumably, in lecture halls for the next several months, which strikes you as reason enough to at least introduce yourself before the semester swallows you both into anonymous rows of seats. She's thin, and her outfit elegant and well put together, if a bit stuffy. *After you're done here*, you decide. No sense fumbling an introduction while also trying to remember your own student ID number.

Except she finishes first, sorted, apparently, with considerably more efficiency than the system deserves and is gone, sheaf of papers in hand, before you've even reached the front of the queue. By the time the clerk finally stamps your own forms and slides them back across the desk with the enthusiasm of someone who has done this ten thousand times, several precious minutes have passed.

You hurry out into the courtyard, scanning. There, off to the left, disappearing down a path toward what you're fairly sure is the main library, red hair catching the light, unmistakable even at a distance and moving with no particular urgency, like she has all the time in the world and simply prefers not to waste it standing still.

You could catch her. You're fairly sure you could catch her.

And then, off to the right, near the fountain, a loud, familiar laugh cuts across the courtyard, and it takes you a second to place it before you do: the blond curls, the sundress, and wonderfull tits, unmistakably the same young woman from the bakery this morning, apparently already holding court with a cluster of other exchange students who look faintly overwhelmed by her energy.