by Sonya Jesus
His thick, dark hair shines almost black under the bright blue-toned lights of the hallway. It’s slicked back and messily tousled all at once; soft waves at the ends curl it outward and away from his pretty face. His striking hazel eyes brim with warm chocolate undertones and hold me hostage for a few seconds.
A few seconds that add to the unease in my bones. It’s been a long time since I was face-to-face with a man who wasn’t trying to heal me, especially one as cute as this one.
Mr. Random’s hand flies to his belt, latching on to the loop. He tilts his head, the onslaught of the overhead lights cutting through the imaginary strings of our tight gaze. His cute smile widens, softening his features. As if just remembering he knocked on my door, not the other way around, he says, “Rose Kingston?”
“That’s me.” I cajole a smile to my lips for nicety’s sake. “And you are?” My adopted parents changed my last name. With the DEA’s help, they got me new papers confirming my new identity. They changed my birthday, fibbed my height by a couple of inches, and added an extra year to my age so Kai and I could be in the same year.
He nods quickly. “Right, sorry. Corbin. Nice to meet you, officially.”
My nose crinkles in confusion. “Officially?”
“Teacher’s assistant,” he clarifies while rubbing his palm over the back of his head. “[email protected].”
“Ah!” He’s the guy who has been sending and grading all my English assignments. My last one, he gave me a D! I grab my lanyard and key off the desk and shut the door behind him. “What are you doing here?”
“Uh, I work here?” he adds with a hint of annoyance. “And I kind of go here. Grad school.”
Right. “I meant here. How did you find me?” I lived in a drug lord’s home for over a year and was oblivious to everything, being slightly vigilant was a good thing.
The door automatically locks behind me, but I double-check the lock three times and give it a slight tug until I’m satisfied it won’t open.
“It’s closed,” he muses and steps back to give me some space. “I got an email saying you had relocated for a couple nights until your room becomes available.”
“Why does that matter to you?”
He clears his throat. “You’re kind of straightforward, huh?” He wipes at his curved lips with his thumb and index finger, unintentionally drawing my mind back to his mouth. He repeats the action a few times, starting at the corners and running them over his plump lower lip, pinching it in the center, as if trying to train his mouth to keep it from smiling.
“Little bit.” I swallow hard and look to the sides, away from his penetrating gaze. My social skills still suck, and the crimson tint of my cheeks complicates the matter.
“Since you missed orientation, the director of the theater department had arranged for your suitemates to show you around,” he points down the hallway, “but you’re stuck in The Dungeon… and Vanessa isn’t the most welcoming person on campus.”
Her social media had made that very clear.
“So, you got stuck showing the new girl around?” I push the weird feelings down and fall in stride beside him.
“Don’t mind that part so much,” he mumbles as he holds the door open. “I was a creative writing and theater major too. Screenplays.”
I nod, paying careful attention to the steps.
“Is that what you want to do?” he asks.
Just before we clear the last flight of stairs, I glance at him for a quick second. “I’m not really sure.” I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do, and since I’ve been acting most of my life, I think I’d be pretty good at it. Also, a good trait to have. “It would be cool to be an actress.”
He holds the back door open for me. “Theater or movies?”
“Whichever. I don’t really mind as long as there’s a script, and I get to be a different person.”
Out on the sidewalk, the warm night air makes me feel silly for bringing a jacket with me, so I fidget with it and end up tying it around my waist like a nerd.
Corbin does not chuckle at my change of attire, but when I loop the lanyard through my head, dangling key and ID included, he guffaws. “Florida is always hot as balls. I’m from the East Coast. Fall weather is a bit different.”
He thinks I’m born and raised in Canada, so I don’t mention sharing the same location in my youth. “Canada too.”
He glances down at my ID, hanging just below my breasts. “This will get you anywhere you need to go. It’s also like a credit card. Swipe it at JJ’s or at the bookstore.” We pass a row of parked cars and dorms. “The cafeteria is over here.”
We reach an intersection. The sign puts the library and campus center to the left, The Lofts forward, and to the right, the town’s historical center. “JJ’s?”
“Jumping Joe’s. The coffee place on campus.” He points right. “It’s just before reaching Imperial Boulevard. It was the old guard post.”
I grunt in an awkward plea. “Any chance this tour starts there? Coffee is fuel, and I’m running on empty.”
“I don’t drink coffee,” he says flatly.
I halt all movement and cock my head to the side. “What!?”
“I’m just messing with you.” He snaps his head back and flashes me his sparkly whites. “This place has coffee in the water fountains, and the vending machines are like seventy percent caffeine-related.”
“Seventy, huh?” I toil with the number in my head, my face stoic for a moment before I crack a smile.
“Well, most of them are chocolate, but same thing, right?” He crosses the small road between the parked cars and heads toward the arch of the university. “Did you eat already?”
“No,” I answer just as my stomach growls. Luckily, only I hear it.
He checks his watch. “It’s eight. The dining hall is closed, but JJ’s serves some sandwiches, bagels, and cake, or if we leave campus, Gepetto’s is within walking distance. I can show you the Church of Perpetual Sorrows on the way.”
“We can save that for another time.” My comment brings another smile to his face for a reason I rather not think about. I’m only here for Kai. “Coffee and bagels work. I like breakfast for dinner.”
“They have pancakes too. Not IHOP or anything.”
“What is that?” I ask as we stop in front of the historic stone building that has been transformed into a coffee shop. Warm yellow light spews out from the windows, welcoming people inside.
He swings the glass door open, the low hum of chatter filtering out. “Do they not have the pancake house in Canada?”
Definitely thought it was Apple-related. “Never been to one,” I admit, making a mental note of the name. I didn’t spend much time in restaurants when I lived on this side of the border, and in Canada, it was either hospital food or takeout when the Kingstons’ cook was off.
“In undergrad, we always used to drag ourselves there for brunch on Saturdays.” He points inside with his head. “Ladies first.”
“Thanks.”
Inside, not many people are here. The ones who are have scattered in the ample room. Some sit at the higher tables, others have taken a seat along the newer wall with booths.
“This place has two rooms.” Corbin points toward the door. “The bathrooms are through there, and just after, a large back room where the guards used to sleep. This room was divided and had a lot of work done.”
I scan the area to find that some of the walls have the original stone, which makes them look like carefully positioned accent walls.
“It’s a great place to write.”
“Oh?” I ask as we get in line.
“The back room. This one gets really busy. It’s distracting, even if you have your headphones on.”
“Do you write here often?”
“I did last year. This place really helped me get through The Snow Queen.”
“The Snow Queen?”
“I’ll tell you later.” He points toward the menu.
Before reading over the menu, I spot a poster on the wall. It has a picture of a snow palace and a ‘save the date’ request below it.
“We should order before the night crowd comes in,” he replies before I can ask about the poster. “You’ll have busy times just before nine and during lunch. So, if you think about stopping here for a quick bite, you have to factor in the wait times.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.” I glance at the blackboard on the wall with a snarled lip. “Which one of those is black coffee, no sugar?”
He steps toward the counter and leans on it. “Let me order it for you. CamU lingo.”
I reach for my ID card to pay, and he stops my hand, touching me. I gulp down the nervousness flooding my system. Touch isn’t something I’m used to.
“It’s free your first time. Compliments of Camelot.”
It’s a blatant lie, but sweet.
“What size do you want?”
I’m glad I don’t have to use the words written on the chalkboard. “The biggest one they’ve got.”
He chuckles and orders for me, “Golden Bitter Queen, please … and my usual.”
I roll my eyes in exaggeration while reading the rest of the menu. “They have tea,” I point out. “Lady in the Lake.”
He winks at me and mimics the dropping of the tea bag into an imaginary cup, as if it were a sword being dropped into the water, just as his phone rings. After a quick glance, he silences the call.
The barista returns with Corbin’s usual and my coffee. He takes a ten out of his back pocket and pays while I continue to be mesmerized by the shitty names.
“Seriously? I’m going to have to say that every morning?” Even the food in the display case has castle-themed names.
“Or get the same thing every day, so you don’t have to say it all the time.”
My jaw drops in horror as he holds the coffee out to me. I take it from his hand, eyeing him suspiciously. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Relax, it’s a seasonal thing, like a freshman prank. The school thinks it’s funny. That’s why all the tours end here. It’s kind of like an icebreaker, you know?”
My face flattens, and I read the apple pie label aloud, “Princess Pie? It sounds like a medieval porn movie.”
He snorts his very hot drink through his nose and rushes to grab a few napkins. “You’re right.”
“You okay?”
“No one needs nose hairs, right?”
“Right.” Bringing the paper cup to my lips, I cover the genuine smile he put there.
He asks the clerk to send over a Cream Tower, which I assume is a stack of pancakes, to the other room. “Come on, let’s get out of here before the crowds show up. I don’t need you screaming out porn every time someone orders the pie. You might get me fired, and I need this job.”
The resulting silence veers toward awkward, so I fill the silence as he leads me to the other room. “This place is pretty obsessed with the castle on campus.”
“Oh, yeah. Just wait until the Glass Ball.”
I wince at the word glass, but I don’t think he notices. He’s busy pulling out my chair. “What is that?”
He comes around and takes a seat in front of me. “A fundraiser for scholarships. This year it’s fairy-tale-themed.”
Another roll of my eyes. “Definite obsession. When do the names go back to normal?”
He smiles wickedly. “When people stop using them. The secret is not to tell the freshman. It’s part of the self-discovery process.”
Self-discovery. The word resonates with me. “Good thing I’m not a freshman.”
4
Ocean Sounds
Kai
Ledger Brighton, my best friend since middle school, and I always fly home on October twentieth and come back the day after, but I called him up after the fight with Vanessa and canceled. I end up at the beach behind the school, strumming my guitar until Ledger interrupts me.
“You left your phone in your room.”
“I wanted to be alone.” I set the guitar down on the case and stretch my legs out.
“Tough shit.” He kicks my thigh and hands me a full bottle of something, then counts the lights scattered around the beach. “About thirty groups too crowded.”
A lot of CamU students come to the beach at night to relax—for most, it means lighting up and drinking. It’s usually patrolled by campus staff, but you can see them coming, and the sand provides a quick place to bury evidence. The local drug dealer makes a fortune off the addicts here.
He plops his ass down beside me and pulls a smoke from his pocket. “Want some?”
“No, and you shouldn’t either.” It’s not like I don’t smoke weed on occasion, but not as often as Ledger. After his younger sister was diagnosed with a severe cardiac problem and his other sister abandoned the family to be famous, his grandfather appointed him the Brighton heir at age fifteen, which made him extremely popular and even more careless. “That’s not going to make your life any better.”
He plucks one of the dried-out herbs from a plastic bag. “Truth, but I’m Zen, brother.” He passes me the bag with a small block of hash. “Maybe some of this would help you with your Thorn issues.”
“Pass.” Throwing my messed-up life around to avoid talking about his damage is a skill he perfected a long time ago. People envy him, but they have no idea how hard his life is. He’s gone through some rough times, and I’m proud of him for being so carefree here. With a life set in stone, or rather paper, Ledger does everything he won’t be able to do later. Being the wealthiest guy at CamU gives him plenty of people to explore those boundaries with, and I don’t blame him. I’d hate for my life to be planned out for me.
“Random drug tests?” He chuckles. “Nah, I’ve got an insider tip when those happen.”
“Of course you do.”
“The sexy nurse from the Wellness Center said there’s one planned for next week.”
Ledger grinds some of the plant and mixes it with loose nicotine in the palm of his hand. “Grab me a sheet.” He lifts his ass off the towel for me to dig into his back pocket. I pull the black packet out, retrieve a paper, and hold it up to his mouth. I’ve seen him do this hundreds of times. After he licks the back of the thin paper, I stick it to his palm, so it doesn’t fly away with the light breeze, and he transfers the mix to it.
I unscrew the bottle and hold it in the light of my phone. “Irish whiskey?”
“The shitty kind.” He pops his shoulder as he rolls up his smoke. “The old dude with the weird-looking mole on his lip isn’t fond of my charm.” He motions to the bottle with his chin. “That shit, I swiped when he wasn’t looking.”
“You stole this?”
“I figured you needed it.” Ledger is one month shy of twenty-one. He started school a year earlier than I did because of the cut-off date. “It sucks being a senior who can’t get into bars.”
I take a large swig and let it swirl around in my mouth. Shit, the crappy stuff burns going down.
“So why didn’t we fly home?”
I cough before telling him, “Vanessa thinks I’m in love with a ghost.”
“And you are. First loves are messed up. You either wish you could relive them again or wish they never happened. You never got the chance to see which one it would be.”
“You speaking from experience?”
“Don’t switch the subject.”
I take another drink and stare off into the ocean. I can’t see much, except for what the moon illuminates, but it’s the sound of the ocean that calms me. Up close, I tune out the whispers from the groups, or the couples making out, and just listen; hear the struggle of the water as it fights against the wind, the waves rushing toward me—sometimes slower, sometimes faster—as if they’re trying to escape the force holding them, only to be summoned back again.
Just a taste of freedom, the ocean gives.
But there’s no escape. The ocean is never still.
Constant waves crawl forth, reaching out a
nd clinging to the grains of sand, as if they had the strength to pull them out of the depths, but even the millions of grains that blanket the tiniest of spaces, and far outnumber the ounces of liquid above them, can’t contain the energy. They are just fragments of something once solid—a collection of debris evicted from the ocean.
Like me without Thorn.
Which is unhealthy. It took a lot of therapy to even consider moving on. CamU was supposed to be my fresh start away from Thorn, and yet she’s just as much a part of me today as she was when I left.
The strong smell of pine and grass hits my nose, and I glance to my left to find Ledger holding the joint up to me.
With a quick shake of the head, I hold my poison for the night up between us and cheer to getting wasted. Both our phones are out in front of us with the flashlights on. After about a quarter bottle, I’m thinking about Vanessa and what she said, and apparently, Ledger is thinking about me.
“As much as I value our time together, chilling on a blanket under the stars, just the two of us, isn’t how I prefer to spend my nights.”
“Man-whore,” I mumble to lighten the mood. He’s gotten in so much trouble with girls, his parents have a fund to pay off mouthy chicks who like to use possible babies as paychecks.
“True… What can I say? I’m pussy famous.”
“Yeah, you’re all about the variety channel.” I take another large gulp and let the burning liquid cheapen my defenses. “I’ve never been that kind of guy. I’ve been with five girls my whole life.” And only slept with three.
“Willing to bet you’ve only ever loved one.”
“Legit.” I hand the bottle over to Ledger. “What do you think about Vanessa?”
He hands the bottle back to me, eyeing me suspiciously as he takes a puff of smoke and releases it. “You still together?”
“We broke up, I think.”
“Good,” he says. Ledger isn’t one to badmouth the girls I like. He learned his lesson with Thorn. One day he made fun of her, and I traded in Wednesday practice sessions for hanging out with the awkward foster girl who didn’t belong. Since then, he’s been cautious when it comes to comments on my relationships.
