Wednesday, September 4, 2019 // The Statement
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Finntan Storer
statement

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | SEPTEMBER 4, 2019

The scores

DAY ONE
The ever-present Arctic wind bearing 
down on your crumbling, medieval town 
drives people mad. Your hair, once gently 
tousled, turns whip-like, dangerous, once 
the gale from the North Sea hits the St. 
Andrews cliffs, traveling upward, wrap-
ping itself around buildings, pursuing 
you. No coat can thwart the wind’s efforts 
to flush out your warmth. Its familiar 
white noise ranges from a whisper outside 
a windowpane to a bloodcurdling shriek, 
closing in from all sides. When people fall 
from the cliffs, it’s always the wind’s fault. 
The wind urges you to get too close — to 
peer down at the receding tide. It either 
pushes you or taunts you until you find 
yourself on the rocks below.
You hope that isn’t what happened to 
Fraser, but it’s too soon to know. Police 
haven’t found him yet. You’re still cooped 
up in your dormitory, St. Salvatore’s, 
in the main dining hall, awaiting news. 
Refreshing your group chat every five 
seconds to make sure you don’t miss the 
announcement. You curl over on the 
creaking oak bench as if you’re praying to 
the screen.
At the end of your bench, a couple 
of girls are murmuring, holding fast to 
steaming mugs of tea. You try not to lis-
ten to the girls. Their theories are too 
grotesque for so early in a missing per-
son’s case. Instead, you turn your atten-
tion to the window next to you — an 
imitation stained-glass portrait of some 
saint or other, painted hundreds of years 
ago, stolen from an older cathedral and 
added unceremoniously to a glorified caf-
eteria. The paint mostly looks like murky 
browns — dried blood — instead of the full 
spectrum of color it probably originally 
had. You suppress the urge to scrape it off 
with your short, wide fingernails.
The information you’ve been given so 
far is sparse: Fraser went out last night 
to the only nightclub in town. The sur-
veillance system spotted him walking 
towards the Old Course at 11:30 p.m., his 
phone pressed to his ear. He didn’t return 
to his residence hall last night. The uni-
versity pronounced Fraser missing this 
morning.
It’s just local police who’re crawl-
ing through the town, the marshes, the 
beaches. All morning you’d been dialing 

Fraser’s number to no avail, gnawing on 
your torn cuticles with every unanswered 
ring. It’s nearly evening now, and you’ve 
stopped calling.

DAY FOUR
Your residence hall’s Facebook page 
is promoting a community-based search 
in collaboration with the local police 
in their chartreuse vests. One hundred 
other St. Andrews’s residents have indi-
cated they’re joining. The cell phone 
looks accusingly at you, in bed, scroll-
ing through social media. Callum’s and 
Euan’s names pop up first on the list of 
searchers. Seeing the faint outlines of 
your face reflected in the blue light of the 
screen and feeling like a fraud, you click 
the “Going” button at the top of the page. 
Your stomach turns, and your mind cal-
culates the space between you and the 
nearest toilet, though you haven’t eaten 
all morning.
You twist your body underneath your 
two goose down comforters. The wind 
passes right through St. Salvatore’s, which 
was built in the 1930s, but shows no indi-
cation of repair work or renovations in the 
eight decades since. The window panes 
at the head of your and your roommate’s 
twin beds rattle with the Arctic gales, a 
sound you still haven’t grown accustomed 
to. When it wakes you up at night, your 
first thoughts, drunk with sleep, are that 
masked robbers are banging on the glass, 
trying to break into the room.
Your prick of a roommate isn’t here, 
though. Euan, the first-year star of the 
University’s rugby team, rarely is. The 
students, both boys and girls, but mostly 
the American girls, oddly enough, can’t 
get enough of Euan. You routinely dismiss 
his inexplicably tanned, broad-shoul-
dered confidence as a kind of dickishness, 
but somewhere you know he isn’t that 
awful. He’s just smug about getting girls. 
Unfortunately, and rather comically, you 
have the opposite luck. The only time a 
girl appears interested in you is when 
you mention Euan is your roommate. 
More often than not, you get addressed 
by strangers around campus as Jamie, 
Euan’s roommate. Your claim to fame.
The search party’s scheduled to meet at 
noon outside the nightclub/coffee house/
student organization facilities that com-

pose the St. Andrews Union. You shift to 
look at the school-issued clock on your 
bedside table. It’s 11:00 a.m.
Callum is already out by the Union 
when you arrive, clutching a large black 
coffee and shivering. He reminds you of 
a willow — sinewy, tall, and in constant 
motion. His eyes dart from person to per-
son in the crowd, no doubt feeling anxious 
at the thought of being unsociable. You 
decide not to startle him this time.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Jamie. I thought 
you weren’t coming,” Callum says when 
he catches sight of you, his black hair and 
dark eyes severe against the pallor of his 
skin.
“Right, well, this is important,” you 
reply, eyes downturned and voice low.
“Are you hungover, mate?” Callum asks 
you, a smile tugging at his lips.
“Not even close, you wank stain.”
You try to stand a little straighter, 
unfurrowing your brow, worried that you 
look disheveled in your Barbour jacket 
and sweatpants. Callum’s height and 
angular limbs only magnify your slight 
baby fat, how you’re only taller than the 
short girls in your classes.
You hear Euan’s booming voice some-
where to your left, comforting one of the 
pretty field hockey girls who’s crying soft-
ly. Despite the tears, she still looks beau-
tiful with her long blonde hair and full 
lips. His arm around her, Euan’s pulled 
her close, as if he’s protecting her. Several 
other girls in the crowd eye her greedily.
“Isn’t that Anna?” Callum asks, gestur-
ing towards Euan and the girl.
“What?” you pretend to just now see 
her. “Oh, yeah. It is.”
Callum raises his eyebrows at you, but 
you look away, trying to appear unboth-
ered.
“This isn’t about Anna.” 

DAY ELEVEN
The search party ended with mud and 
sand and salt from the North Sea caked 
all over everybody’s shoes. Your favorite 
green wellies kept getting lodged in the 
marshy wasteland. After falling twice, 
you’ve still got a yellowed bruise over your 
ribcage.
Night descended quickly, it being mid-
March. Dusk was gathering its fragments 
of light long before dinnertime, and the 

search party was forced to retreat into 
the dark wooden sanctuaries of pubs. Not 
even the moon brought any relief from 
the impenetrable dark. You’re so far up 
the coast it’s possible for the Northern 
Lights to touch your ruined citadel of a 
town, briefly, before disappearing behind 
the heavy clouds of Scotland for months. 
You’ve never seen them, but you know 
some nights they’re up there, dancing 
above the claustrophobic sky.
Scotland Yard quickly stepped in and 
took over the investigation after the 
unsuccessful search. The citizens of St. 
Andrews apparently hindering the efforts 
of the professionals, they were asked to 
stop organizing. The day after Fraser’s 
disappearance, construction crews ini-
tiated their scheduled excavation of the 
centuries-old leaky storm drains. Today 
Scotland Yard’s ordering the crews to dig 
up the old drains, freshly-filled with con-
crete, on the possibility that Fraser might 
have drunkenly fallen into one of them. 
You know if that’s true, he would’ve been 
buried alive. You try not to think about 
that. 
You’ve plunked yourself down in the 
alleged site of Will and Kate’s first date, 
a coffee shop-turned-reliquary dedicated 
to the budding romance of the two roy-
als. A sun-bleached poster in the window 
boasts their smiling faces, a cartoonish 
red heart drawn between them. It’s now 
become a sort of campy pilgrimage site 
for obnoxious royal superfans, but the 
tea’s still cheap and decent, so you haven’t 
written the place off entirely. Mindlessly, 
you scroll through Fraser’s old Instagram 
posts and neglect your too-hot black tea. 
“Miss u,” “hope you’re safe,” and “come 
home” litter the comment sections below 
each picture.
You pause at the picture from the St. 
Andrews Charity Fashion Show show 
last month. Fraser and Euan, along with 
a host of other good-looking students, 
served as models for the annual event. 
Both Callum and you bought the over-
priced tickets to ogle at and mock the dis-
play of extravagance: the designer gowns, 
the expensive champagne, the exclusive 
seats by the runway selling for upwards of 
300 quid. In reality, though, you suspect 
you just wanted to see Fraser up close. It 
didn’t hurt that he was shirtless for the 

BY EMILY PINKERTON, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR

ILLUSTRATION BY SHERRY CHEN

