Spirit Legacy (5 page)

Back in our room, Tia pulled a pair of striped pajamas out of her top drawer.

“So, that was pretty weird, huh?”

“Just a little. What happened after I left?”

Tia shrugged. “Just my reading.”

“She must have said something about practically hurling me out of her tent! Didn’t she apologize or anything?”

“Yeah, she did. She said that she was really sorry, but that your energy was very intense and she couldn’t concentrate on my energy while you were there.”

“Oh.” Well, that was anticlimactic. I grabbed my shower caddy and slid my feet into my slippers. “Well, my energy and I are heading over to the bathroom to brush our teeth. Want to come with us?”

Tia made a sharp intake of breath through her teeth. “I dunno, Jess. I’m not sure that I can focus on my dental hygiene in the presence of your intensity.”

And with that we both laughed and trekked across the hall to brave the terrifying and uncharted territory of common hall bathrooms.

Chapter 4—Enter Evan

Chapter 4—Enter Evan

T
ia and I were fast friends, though in many ways
we were polar opposites. Her meticulously packed belongings and color-coordinated accessories I noticed on move-in day were merely symptomatic of full-scale neat freak syndrome. Her school books were arranged in order by subject on her desk in a maddeningly straight row, like a freshly faced shelf of boxes at a grocery store. She ironed her underwear and organized her drawers by color. She made her bed with hospital corners and had been caught red-handed on several occasions lint-rolling her throw pillows.

My brilliant system of organization involved piles: the book pile; the binder pile; the miscellaneous-papers-I-have-yet-to-organize pile. I had no system for where or in what order I put away my clothes, but at least they were clean and usually not very wrinkled. Luckily, Tia didn’t seem to mind being the Felix to my Oscar.

“I love those boots,” Tia said on the first day of classes, as I laced myself into my favorite knee-high purple Docs—a fifteen minute process.

“You can borrow them if you want. They’d fit you.”

“Oh, please, can you imagine me in those things? I’d look like a moron!”

“Um, thanks?”

“No, no, I don’t mean that
you
look like a moron,” she said, picking up one of my shirts from the laundry pile, a black lace tank decorated with silver studs. “I just mean that I can’t pull off your look. On you it looks so great, but on me … well, I’d just look silly.”

“Okay, if you say so,” I said. I stood up and grabbed my bulging messenger bag. “Well, I’m ready. Let’s go!”

I was taking Astronomy, Introduction to Art History, French III, and Sociology, but the class I was really looking forward to was my first one, Introduction to Shakespeare, which met at 10 AM in Turner Hall. And as luck would have it, it was Tia’s first class too.

Our class was held in a huge lecture hall; there had to be about two hundred freshman in it. Tia had confided in me that she was taking it to get her English requirement out of the way, but I was fully intending to enjoy every minute of that class. We found seats towards the front of the room, though not in the very front row, as Tia would have preferred. I coaxed her back to the third row, where we’d be slightly less prominent in the eyes of the professor. I was fishing my notebook and my Complete Works out of my messenger bag when a melodious voice echoed through the room.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.”

I looked up as our professor took center stage with a flourish. Dr. Trudy Marshall was a waifish little woman whose eyes were magnified to cartoonish proportions behind heavy-framed glasses. Her hair was long, wavy, and shamelessly gray, hoisted into a messy bun by what had probably been the nearest available writing utensil.

“Welcome, everyone. The Bard penned those well-known lines in his comedy ‘As You Like It’. They hold true in this class as in life. I hope that you will all choose the role of the inventive and active learner, rather than that of the reluctant idler. If you do, I promise that we will unlock many literary secrets together. Otherwise, you shall be horribly bored, I fear. The choice, as always, is your own.”

She looked sharply around the room, her eyes sparkling. Tia sat up a little straighter beside me, and I could only grin. I loved this woman already.

The rest of Dr. Marshall’s lecture was as stimulating as the opening. We were beginning with Hamlet, one of my favorite plays. The only downside to her class, as far as I could tell, would be the extra seminar block, which met at the freakishly early hour of eight o’clock on Friday mornings.

After English, Tia jetted off to her microbiology class and I made my way to the student center. I had an appointment at the campus employment office to get the details of my assigned on-campus job. My scholarship covered my tuition, but I had to supplement with a job if I was going to cover my living expenses. Much to my dismay, the only jobs open to freshman were in the exciting world of campus food service.

Resignedly, I sat down on a bench in the main lobby to fill out my paperwork. I’d only written my name and room assignment when a sudden knocking caused me to look around.

The guy I’d nearly tackled in my rush to get away from Madame Psycho, grinned at me from behind the plate glass window of the gift shop. I waved awkwardly and returned to my paperwork. I was probably the world’s worst flirt. I don’t think I’d ever flirted on purpose, and if I’d tried, I don’t think it would have been interpretable as such by any male member of the species.

Knock, knock, knock.

He was still looking at me, and his face lit up when our eyes met again. He gave a casual wave. I couldn’t help it. I looked behind me. There was no way this guy was waving at me. Had Gabby showed up behind me? I turned back around, my face red now. He nodded as if to say, “Yes, I’m waving at you.”

He pointed down at the piles of t-shirts in the display, which he’d apparently been examining. He pointed at a grey one with the St. Matt’s crest emblazoned on the pocket. He raised his eyebrows quizzically.

I must have looked confused, because he picked up the shirt and held it up in front of his chest, as though modeling it.

I smirked in spite of myself.

He tossed the shirt aside and picked up a second shirt, a blue one bearing “St. Matthew’s College” across the front in silver lettering and modeled that one, too. Then he held one shirt in each hand and raised and lowered them like a scale. He raised his eyebrows again. His question was clear: “Which one?”

He raised the grey one. I shook my head and made a face. He raised the blue one. I gave him a thumbs-up and a nod of approval. He grinned and mouthed, “Thank you!”

“Here’s your schedule,” said a rather sharp voice.

I spun around, startled. The woman from campus employment was hovering over me, waving a yellow piece of paper in my face.

“Oh, um … thank you,” I said.

“Are you finished with that form yet?”

“No, sorry. Just a sec.” I scribbled in the rest of my information and handed over the clipboard. She thrust the schedule at me and disappeared into her office. I looked over the information. I would be washing dishes and serving breakfast in a hairnet three mornings a week. Hot.

I shoved the schedule in my bag and turned to go, glancing again into the gift shop. The attractive window shopper had left, apparently having decided to give up on our silent conversation through the plate glass. Who was this guy and, more importantly, would I ever get to have an uninterrupted conversation with him?

The next couple of weeks passed with what I could only describe as clichéd quickness. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays I worked in the dining hall, which was about as miserable as I’d expected. Sam stopped by a few times over those first few weeks, occasionally with Anthony in tow. They provided an amusing insider’s tour of the campus that included a secret entrance into the clock tower and the best hills for sledding on cafeteria trays when the weather got colder. Anthony didn’t grow any more charming with time, although I had to be impressed with his persistence and his extensive collection of cheesy pick-up lines. I also noticed that Tia made extra passes with the lint roller when she knew Sam was stopping by.

We stayed friendly with Gabby and Paige, though I could only take the former in small doses. Gabby’s soap-opera-style romance with her high school sweetheart lasted all of two weeks before she broke up with him for good. She then began the mysterious college ritual of “hooking up,”for which I could only ascertain the sketchiest definition; but in Gabby’s case it seemed to involve a lot of drinking, making-out, and awkward, hung-over phone conversations. Watching the cycle repeat itself was all the encouragement I needed to stay well away from it. Not that I needed any other reasons to stay away from alcohol, having spent half my life cleaning up my mom.

Tia only really took notice when Gabby bragged of “hooking up” with Sam in mid-October. This changed Tia’s tone from mildly reproving to downright acidic, and we didn’t hang out much across the hall after that, though Tia was much more inclined to be charitable when she heard that it hadn’t worked out.

§

All in all, college was in many ways what I’d hoped it would be. The only times when I felt really sad were in the evenings when Tia called her parents. I never could catch much of the conversation, which was carried on in rapid, often exasperated Spanish, but I could still sense the warmth and affection in her voice for her “Papi” and “Mami.” It made my heart ache.

I knew it was only a matter of time before my own parental situation came up in conversation with Tia, and I braced myself for it. She finally asked me about it in our third week of rooming together.

“So, um, are your parents not around, or …?” Tia fumbled, not sure which version of her question would be the least offensive to ask.

“No, actually. I’ve never met my dad and I lost my mom this past summer.”

“Oh my goodness, I am so sorry.” Tia was always saying quaint things like “Oh my goodness” and even in the awkwardness of the moment it made me smile a little.

“Me too.”

“So then, Karen is your mother’s sister?”

“Yeah, her twin, actually. But she and my mom didn’t talk anymore, so I’d never met her while my mom was alive.”

“They weren’t identical were they?” Tia whispered.

“No,” I said quickly, stifling the image.

“Oh, good. Because that would have been a little too weird, don’t you think?”

“Definitely.”

“Are they alike in other ways?”

The bitterness in my laugh surprised even me. “Not even remotely. Karen is so put-together and my mom was … well, she was a mess, actually.”

“Oh. We don’t have to talk about this, Jess,” Tia said.

“No, it’s okay,” I replied, suddenly feeling the need to unload it all. “My mom drank a lot. She was always screwing things up and then trying to make a fresh start, and that usually meant uprooting our entire existence every six months or so. I think I’ve lived in every major city in the U.S.”

“That must have been tough, with school and everything.”

“Well, it wasn’t easy, but I got used to it. I always felt like she was running from something, you know? Not just with the moving, but with the drinking, too. There were things she just didn’t want to deal with, but she never could get far enough away from them, whatever they were.”

“How did she … I mean, was she sick, or …”

“It was an accident. She was drunk and she fell.” Tia didn’t need the details. I was sure she’d come to the same conclusion as Karen, and I didn’t want her to, not when I knew it wasn’t true.

“Is that why … well, your nightmares, is that why you have them?”

Damn. Apparently I hadn’t done as effective a job as I’d thought in hiding that particular detail of my existence. She’d be bound to notice occasionally, sleeping six feet away from me, but I hadn’t thought I’d been that obvious.

“Yes. They’re getting better though,” I lied. “I’m not keeping you up with my thrashing, am I?”

“No. I just noticed you were … restless,” Tia said. Then she mercifully changed the subject.

I was hoping that the distraction of school would help get rid of the nightmares, but they’d only gotten worse. Though none could match that first one in their capacity to terrify me, all were vaguely disturbing. Sometimes, I could hear frantic voices calling my name out of the darkness. Other times, I would find myself lost in a strange cloudy landscape, struggling to navigate my way out. Still other dreams revealed me walking down a long, subterranean tunnel, drawn toward a light that both fascinated and frightened me. Without fail, I would wake up feeling jittery, sick, and unable to go back to sleep. If it kept up, I would have to start taking coffee intravenously just to get through my classes.

§

In the two weeks following Halloween, I saw my book store crush twice more. The first time was, naturally, in the last place on campus I would have wanted to see him.

I dragged myself out of bed the morning after Halloween, squashing an impulse not to hurl my alarm clock across the room, settling instead for smothering it with a pillow. A quick glance in the mirror confirmed I did not need to bother with make-up—I’d fallen asleep with it on, after a late night of horror movies and junk food with Tia and Sam, and it still looked surprisingly intact.

I smiled as I remembered Tia, wrapped in two blankets like a burrito, only her forehead and eyes visible, shrieking and cursing me for talking her into this movie night. I had chosen a couple of obscure Japanese films for the occasion, low in the blood-and-guts department, but chock-full of psychological scares. By the time we finished the second one, she hurled the entire bowl of popcorn at me, then spent the next half hour cleaning it up with a dustbuster.

I braided my hair quickly, the purple streaks playing peek-a-boo in the plaits, and brushed my teeth as I slipped on my black Converse sneakers. I was careful not to wake Tia, who despite the promise of permanent trauma, had slept pretty soundly. My footsteps crunched on some rogue popcorn kernels as I snuck out the door. I left a note on our whiteboard for her: “Forgive me, roomie?” with a sad face. I taped a bag of Skittles, her favorite candy, beneath it as a peace offering.

I arrived just on time for my shift, and checked the message board for my assignments. Left buffet line, cereals and condiments. Could have been worse, I noted as I pulled on my gloves and greeted Paige, who also worked this shift. At least I wasn’t scraping dishes this morning.

“What was with all the screaming from your room last night?” Paige asked. “I almost called res-life on you guys.”

“Ah yes, the Japanese horror movie-fest. Tia was a little underprepared for the content.”