When Lindsey Clark, a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences, first decided to attend Marquette, she didn’t know anyone else from her area in Detroit attending. Yet thanks to happenstance and a small world, she ended up rooming with a girl named Cora Flanagan, now a senior in the College of Nursing. They got in touch through a mutual friend.
“Cora’s best friend since birth is Molly and Molly’s mom is my mom’s roommate from college … (Molly) told me that her best friend was also going to Marquette and put us in touch,” Clark said. “We were texting, but we wanted to go in blind to make it random.”
Clark ended up in Cobeen Hall while Flanagan ended up in McCormick Hall. Clark said she had wanted to end up in McCormick, so she put herself on the waiting list.
What happened next, Flanagan said she considers their “godwink,” or astonishing coincidence, as if everything happened due to fate.
“I was on a family vacation in August, and the Office of Residence Life emailed me saying Lindsey Clark was put in my room,” Flanagan said.
Later that year, Clark’s friend Molly found a picture of Flanagan and Clark together when they were both six months old, contributing even more to the small world in which they found themselves.
A friendship quickly formed between the two.
“We instantly became very close freshman year and we worked well together,” Clark said.
Clark and Flanagan said that they spent a lot of time together, specifically during a period where they felt they were each other’s only friends. They became each other’s confidants.
“She was always my go-to person to be able to talk about anything with,” Flanagan said.
Clark said she has many memories of cute gestures they used to do for each other.
“In the dorms, we’d leave notes on each other’s desk and we’d write one another a note like encouragement,” Clark said.
They ended up rooming together again in Schroeder the year after, and when it came time to find a place to live off campus, they both turned to a friend group they had become extremely close with their first year. Nicole Heyniger, a senior in the College of Engineering, was part of that friend group.
Heyniger remembers living in O’Donnell Hall her first year and how it led her to knowing the girls in her house.
“The first day of freshman year I met two of my best girl friends,” Heyniger said. “It’s pretty crazy that the first day (of college) I met people who I call my family.”
She said though they all came from different dorms, some being from McCormick and some from O’Donnell, they were still able to form a friend group of around 20 people.
When the time came to move into a place off campus, Heyniger said the process of who would live where wasn’t stressful. Nine of the girls, including Clark, Flanagan and Heyniger, decided to move into what they called the “big blue house” on 17th and Wells streets.
Flanagan said it was nice to know there was always someone nearby, just across the hall.
“There’s this overall sense of joy within the house, and it was constant laughing and smiling and goofing off,” Flanagan said.
Heyniger said she liked knowing there was someone close by and always having something to do. She added that she didn’t expect the last memories she had with them to be the last ones of the semester.
“It’s so hard that those last moments as a whole group would define my lasting memories because I never knew that this would happen,” Heyniger said.
Clark said she’ll miss all of the little things that came along with living with nine girls.
“I think I’ ll just miss seeing them every day, and it’s something that I’ve taken for granted,” Clark said. “(It’s) just the small things of going to bed at the same time and brushing your teeth together … that’s what I’ll miss the most.”
Even though it’s hard, Clark said, that just means the time she spent with her best friends in a house was special.
“Knowing that I had made so many friends that makes this so hard is kind of special,” Clark said. “It could be easy, but it’s not because I have such great friends.”
This story was written by Ariana Madson. She can be reached at [email protected].
