by E M Kaplan
Josie wasn’t expecting such a heartfelt answer. Her natural tendency was to gravitate toward snarkiness, so she was momentarily taken aback, as were the others, judging by their silence.
Then Sarah said, “I’m from Needham. History major. I’m just here to get a good education and then a good job and not let down my parents.”
“Home-school freak,” Tiffany said as a snarky aside that was meant to be heard.
“Hey,” Leah said, defending her roommate. “You stop it with that Mean Girls act. You may have gotten away with it in high school, but this is a liberal arts university. That shit is not okay. Especially not here.” She gestured to the others in the room with a swirling hand, as if Josie’s room were some kind of safe haven.
Tiffany shrugged, but didn’t apologize, staying true to her tough-girl routine.
Sarah didn’t seem to take offense though her fair skin had pinkened. To be fair, even the simple act of breathing seemed to make the girl turn red as a strawberry. Poor thing.
“Alrighty then,” Josie said. “Are any of you in Professor Sanborn’s classes?”
Two hands went up—Tyshawn’s and Leah’s—which was a great development. As it turned out, both of them were in the professor’s freshman Western Religions survey class, the same one for which Josie had been registered. She’d been hoping she wouldn’t have to go to class at all, but there was no way she could get around it. She wanted to observe the class first-hand. Still, it would be a bonus to have extra sets of eyes there as well.
“Very good,” Josie said, rubbing her hands together in way that suddenly made her feel like a Bond villain. “Has either of you noticed anyone acting obsessive about the professor? Staying after class every time? Acting peculiar?”
“Writing creepy letters,” Leah added, her teeth glinting in her broad smile.
“Getting pregnant with the professor’s unborn love child?” Tiffany’s voice dripped with enough sarcasm to outdo Josie. Almost. All eyes focused on the petite girl. Her silky, dark hair was caught up in a bun and anchored by two pencils in a way Josie would never have been able to duplicate.
“That’s not true,” Sarah was quick to say, and Josie was careful to keep her eyebrows from shooting up at the girl’s immediate defensive tone.
Instead, Josie asked, “You’re talking about the girl from last year who ended up transferring?” A bell had rung in Josie’s head—Alyssa was the name of the student Professor Sanborn had gotten involved with, she remembered, but there’d been no hint of pregnancy during any of Josie’s slipshod debriefing on the stalker issue. Not that she would have heard it from the professor.
“Total rumor,” Tyshawn said with a dismissive wave. “Unsubstantiated hearsay.”
Josie was inclined to agree. If the girl had transferred to another college, it was unlikely she was still pregnant. In addition, the professor had called it an affair of the heart. From what she had learned watching the sappy-movie channel when she was recovering from various trip-related injuries in the past year, that excluded sex.
But it behooved her to find a returning student who’d known Alyssa. Maybe there was more to the story than this. “Does anyone here know someone who knew the girl?”
“I think she had a class with Professor Blaine,” Brandon said. All kinds of awkward scenarios popped up in Josie’s mind involving the Women’s Studies professor and Brandon, so instead of encouraging him, she simply gave a single nod.
“Okay, let’s stick to the facts, gang. Try to weed out gossip. Professor Sanborn’s life may be on the line.” Josie addressed Sarah in particular. “Some of you are in perfect position to hear and see things the rest of us can’t. That’s what we need to know. If you’ve heard anything at all about the stalker. Any hints as to her identity—we need to know that.”
“Aha,” Brandon said, triumph ringing in his voice. His over-sized body was flopped across the head of her bed. Was his butt on her pillow? Seriously? “So, you’re saying the stalker is a her.”
“We don’t know that for sure, but the odds are good based on the handwriting.”
“Hold the phone,” Leah said. “You’ve seen the letters? Will we get to see them?”
Josie made a snap decision and turned in her chair. She slipped the top letter—the first, almost innocuous letter out of the drawer without revealing the others. “They gave me one.”
Yes, it was a half-truth, but mostly for their safety. She didn’t want them getting too riled up and wanting to chat with other students. That was the last thing she needed.
She passed the page to Tyshawn, who was the closest to her.
He read it and pronounced the grammar full of suck. “Is this the caliber of student Bader is admitting these days? Because I feel like my acceptance has been cheapened now.”
“Whatever, Full-Scholarship Boy,” Tiffany said, picking at her cuticles.
“Right back at ya,” he told her.
Tiffany glared at everyone through her narrowed, heavily made-up eyes. “We’re here because we made it in. Not because we’re ethnic minorities.”
Both Leah and Brandon raised their hands in surrender, unwilling to touch that topic. Sarah looked like she was going to say something, but changed her mind. Smart girl. While there may have been some salient points to make, it didn’t seem wise to bait Tiffany. Especially in such a small, confined space. A few sharp elbows and someone might lose a spleen.
Josie soldiered ahead using her best substitute teacher voice—neither loud nor authoritative enough. “Develop a profile of the writer for me based on that letter.” The first stalker note had made its way around the room until it reached Brandon, whose shorts-clad behind was indeed resting on her new pillowcase. Lovely. She made a note to flip her pillow over as soon as he left.
“How much time are you going to give us?” Leah wanted to know, groaning as if Josie had just given them a pop quiz.
Checking the clock by the bed, Josie said, “I’ll give you fifteen minutes.” After all, it was getting late, and she had class in the morning.
Chapter 12
Josie slept fitfully, waking twice in the night thanks to noisy, amorous yowling. She pounded on the cinderblock despite not yet having met her neighbor to her immediate right and yelled, “Use protection.” Her protest shut down the porn noises for the rest of the night, even though she wasn't able to drift back to sleep afterward. She gave up the fight near dawn and lay with her arms crossed over her head, rehashing her latest and greatest lapse of common sense.
Her Scooby gang—her rag-tag band of misfits—after their allotted 15 minutes had jotted down what they thought were characteristics of the stalker:
— freshman or sophomore? definitely underclassman
— female
— loner
— most likely an undeclared major
Their list of the basics was no polished FBI profile, but it was a decent place to start, as far as Josie was concerned. The group had been undecided on ethnicity, but the majority thought the stalker was Caucasian.
“This is a total white-girl play,” Tiffany had said, digging through a carton of dumplings. But she didn’t provide any points to back up her argument.
“Who cares what her race is,” Tyshawn had said. “Crazy is crazy.”
Josie was inclined to agree. They were going to find the letter-writer based more on her actions than her appearance anyway.
After developing a rough plan for the Scooby gang to follow the professor—and to watch for suspicious characters— admonishing them to keep their eyes and ears open in general, Josie had dismissed them.
“Don’t get distracted in your classes, though, and check back in with me if you learn something new,” she’d told them, feeling like Patton riling the troops. Then she’d shooed them out of her room and locked herself in with the rest of the letters.
The fourth letter was a doozy.
You stupid ass. I’ve given you ample opportunity to notice me, engage with me, choose me. But time and ti
me again, you fail. YOU FAIL ME. And when you fail me, you fail yourself.
Notice me, Joshua. Let nature run its course. Let love win. Because if love wins, we both win. And I really need a win right now.
Josie read it several times, hunting for contextual clues and hints. This letter was more aggressive than the previous ones, for sure, and contained what seemed like sports or coach-speak, jargon about winning and losing. It also had a whole lot more obsessive language.
Lying awake in the dark, her mind wandered to the members of the Scooby gang—and to Leah in particular. All of them, except for Tyshawn, who was on full scholarship, were in the work-study program.
Tiffany spent a few nights a week at the suicide hotline desk. Sarah worked food service shifts in several of the cafeterias, including the dean’s swanky lunch hall and the general slop-line that Josie had suffered through for dinner. Brandon worked in the mailroom. And Leah manned the desk at the student athletic center.
The win-lose terminology hinted at Leah but also Tiffany, the blackbelt—and both males, who played sports, if Josie were including males as suspects. A boy stalker in this case seemed unlikely, based on the handwriting alone…unless the script was purposely designed to implicate a female and throw the professor off the scent.
But altered handwriting implied that the writer didn’t want to be identified, either by the professor or a third-party like Josie.
She pinched the bridge of her nose in the dark, having reasoned herself in a full circle like a dog chasing its tail.
The fifth and final letter was the center jewel in the Crazytown crown, the brightest twinkler in the Loony-toons tiara. Scrawled in bigger and more violent-looking letters that embossed the paper with the writer’s vigor, it contained, with the same bad grammar, one very simple message:
If I can’t have you, no one else will. Your dead.
Locked in her room—not even the intended recipient of the message—Josie had shivered as she read it. The letter’s author had been so furious, she’d gouged a hole in the paper with her ballpoint pen.
What kind of obsessed psycho do we have on our hands?
#
At stupid-early o’clock in the morning, Josie found herself sliding a plastic tray down the metal ledge at the breakfast buffet in the cafeteria. Clean clothes, damp hair, and a freshly scrubbed face had not changed her low opinion of cafeteria cuisine, but the Scooby gang had inhaled all of the mediocre Chinese food from the night before, leaving Josie with nothing but a lingering layer of greasy air in her dorm room and a stomach that was getting angrier by the minute.
Ahead of her, the breakfast hot dishes stretched out like a carb wasteland. What they lacked in quality, they made up in quantity. With a spatula, she poked at limp triangles of French Toast and then grimaced at the vat of steaming gray oatmeal. After the gauntlet of gruel and despair came pale, watery melon wedges of indeterminate types, chopped in haphazard polygons, stacked and teetering like an icy glacier due for a collapse.
“Screw the stalker,” she said under her breath. “This is killing me. One chafing dish at a time.”
“Good morning,” a cheerful voice rang out.
Josie ducked to peer under the Plexiglass sneeze guard, searching for the source of the voice. Decked out in a hairnet that tamed her wispy fair hair, Sarah beamed at her, waving a crinkled, gloved hand.
Banging her tray on the counter with more force than necessary, Josie said, “I can’t take this anymore. Who’s in charge here?”
“Of breakfast?” Sarah hunched down to address her between the steaming dishes and the sneeze guard.
“Yes,” Josie said with great patience. “Of breakfast.”
“Well…” Sarah was hedging, still crouched over so they could see each other. “There’s me. And Sam who swiped your meal card when you came in. And Jack, who’s kind of a janitor. And a few more of us work-study program people you haven’t met yet. We have different shifts, especially since this café is kind of the outpost compared to the main dining hall on campus up at the student center. But we don’t really have a manager, per se. They give us our shifts and assignments at the main student center. It’s on a clipboard at the beginning of the month. I mean, after they train us, we don’t really see anyone after that.”
Josie took a deep breath, braced her shoulders, and abandoned her tray on the buffet rail. Clearly, the U.S.S. Nasty Carbs was a captainless ship, and it was going down fast. Then she pushed her way through the swinging door and made her way into the kitchen toward Sarah.
With just a quick glance around and peek into the walk-in freezer, she located the issue. “Here’s the problem,” she said. “This isn’t a kitchen. This is a…snack counter.” With one gesture, she encompassed the entire room. “Unused ovens and grill. A massive freezer full of pre-packaged food. Nothing fresh. Nothing with color. This place is full of toddler food.” She did a full circle, frowning. “Seriously? How much is tuition at Bader this year?”
“Like, forty-kay.”
“Forty freaking thousand dollars! And room and board is probably another fifteen thousand. Where is that money for food going? Because it’s not coming through that back door right over there. For that much money, you should be able to hire an honest-to-goodness chef. You should be getting fresh, local produce. Kosher choices. Organic choices. And—I don’t know—things that you don’t microwave straight out of a box. You kids can’t live like this. You need to feed your brains and your bodies. This is not nourishment. This is crap.”
Sarah’s freckled face was frozen in uncertainty, her eyes darting back and forth. “So does this mean you’re not hungry?”
Chapter 13
Grumpy, Josie slid into a seat about halfway back and off to the side of the lecture hall for the Western Religions survey course. The room was amphitheater style, like a sunken pit, with a white board and a podium down in front. She didn’t want to sit all the way in the back—too obvious—and besides, the back row was already filled when she’d arrived. Sitting at the side of the room had been a good tactic because she could twist around to scan the room without looking out of place. Plus, she could sneak out the side door if her empty stomach’s howls became too loud and insistent. What did make her stick out like a sore thumb was that she’d neglected to bring her laptop. She was the only one in the entire lecture hall with a paper notebook in front of her.
As the kids were saying, Whatever.
She had to admit, Professor Sanborn was a fantastic lecturer—so good that she felt as if she were in danger of learning something. Heaven forbid—no religious studies pun intended. Animated, with entertaining anecdotes and an absurd ability to remember the names of all the students he called on even though it was just a few weeks into the term, he was absolutely in his element.
“By now, you should be finished reading the Plato I assigned you—right, Vanessa? good—because next week, we’re moving on to The Apocalypse of Ezra. That’s right, people, we’re going back further to ancient times. Jason, you can wear a toga next week if you want, but it’s totally optional and won’t count for any extra credit. I know how much some of you love the Greek system.” Groans and laughter followed his spiel.
Josie was confused by the comment about fraternities until the girl next to her whispered, “That’s why a lot of us picked Bader. It’s anti-Greek, pretty much. I mean, frats mean parties. Parties mean alcohol. Getting drunk increases my risk of being a victim. Am I right?”
Josie blinked a few times and gave a shrug of partial agreement. Because that was pretty much what had happened to her in college during her first year. Same old story. A party. Alcohol. An aggressive date. Things could have ended very badly for her at one point, but luck was on her side that night. If her friends—if Drew hadn’t shown up at the right time, Josie would have been yet another name on the list, yet another part of that chilling campus sexual assault statistic.
In fact, luck was generally on her side, and she wasn’t afraid to admit it. She was grateful
for it.
Then Professor Sanborn launched into the meat of his lecture and the room went silent, except for the tapping of keys on laptops. Josie seemed to be the only attendee not fully engaged. She was, of course, more interested in the other students.
Scanning the room for potential persons of interest, her gaze fell on a female student in the front row. Long brown hair scraped back in a ponytail so tight, it looked like it was giving the girl a temporary facelift. With eyes locked on Sanborn, the girl’s expression was rapt, her fingers frozen in mid-air over her keyboard as, it seemed, she was so caught up in his words that she was forgetting to take notes.
Two rows back, Leah slumped in her chair, her chin resting on her hand, eyelids drooping. Josie hadn’t kept the Scooby gang up that late, had she? Maybe that was her look of concentration.
When the professor turned to the whiteboard to scribble some bullet points, a wadded up piece of paper flew across the room and bounced off Leah’s cheek. Ah, just like high school, Josie thought, then remembered that high school had been last year for most of these kids.
Yikes. She was old. More than a decade older than these kids.
Backtracking the trajectory of the paper missile allowed Josie to locate Brandon, who was grinning at the now-wide-eyed Leah. She flipped him the bird and happened to spot Josie at the same time. This time, Leah’s enthusiastic wave caught the attention of Professor Sanborn, done writing on the board and now turned back to face the class. He stuttered mid-sentence, staring at Leah, then at Josie, as if drawing an invisible line. The entire front half of the lecture hall turned in their chairs to stare at Josie as well.
Just great. Now a hundred students probably knew who she was and why she was there.
And right on cue, Josie’s cell phone rang, loud and unmistakeable. Hank Williams Jr. warbled about a tear in his beer at top volume. Only one person had that ringtone on her phone and that person never called her. Not even for emergencies. Uncle Jack.
