Oh, no. What if Ophelia forgot to punch holes in that box and she suffocated inside?
How was this even my life? That I was worried about finding my friend's dead body in a box that she attempted to mail to me herself?
Georgie, who had none of my possible-dead-friend-inside-a-box reluctance, used her sharp little fingernail to slice the tape open with surgical precision. I arched a brow and stared her down.
"I've been waiting for hours," she told me, popping the box open. "Hours, Meagan."
To my relief, Keagan was not inside the box. But she had sent me a bunch of stuff from my dorm room. It was great to have everything I needed. My flash drives. The stuffed sock monkey I'd secretly slept with since I was four. My iPod. All of my fall boots, something only Keagan would see as essentials. Every issue of the twice-weekly campus newspaper. Morgan, who worked on the newspaper staff, was convinced that it was a vital source of information for any student. Keagan clearly included them to please her.
The girls had improvised a card from one of the index cards Morgan used as study gear. "Dear Meg, Ophelia is helping us send a few things from home to help you feel more comfortable and catch up on campus gossip. We miss you! Talk soon. Love, K & M."
I chewed my lip as I surveyed all of the little things that would help me feel more at home here at Jane's. It was really thoughtful of the girls to send me a vampire care package, but it also meant that Keagan and Morgan didn't think I would be coming back to campus anytime soon. This felt like good-bye.
"This was not nearly as interesting as I hoped it would be," Georgie said, pursing her lips. She plucked my iPod Touch from the box. "But I will take this and use it to psychoanalyze you based on your playlists."
"I would expect nothing less," I told her as I scanned the newspapers Keagan had included in my coffin-sized care package. I blew through several issues as Georgie continued to rummage through the box, using my newfound speed-reading to absorb the usual front-page fare. Student groups were protesting in front of the president's office for their cause of the week. The administration was drumming up funds for the campus endowment, which had always sounded vaguely dirty to me. Campus police were investigating a string of suspicious laundry thefts from the dorms. (Why was it always panties? Why?) A building near, but not on, campus caught fire. I scanned the article, but honestly, the weirdest thing about it was that it had been included in the paper at all. There were no injuries, and the fire didn't cause any damage to surrounding properties. It must have been a slow news day.
///
"Videotapes?" Georgie asked, holding up the ancient-looking VHS cassettes. "You must be the one person I know who actually possesses videotapes. Is it an ironic hipster thing?"
I smiled, taking the tapes from Georgie's hands. I rubbed a fingertip over my dad's neat block printing on the peeling label. "To Meagan, On Boys and Dating. (DON'T!)"
I'd carted these videos in my little blue suitcase from home to home for years, before hiding them in the back of my dorm-room closet. It was silly, really, just tapes my dad made over the years. Some of them were videos Mom shot of us when I was little, him teaching me to ride my bike, him trying to braid my hair, which turned out to be so bad that he had to cut parts of it out. And some of the tapes were long conversations he'd had with the camera, addressing me as an older girl who needed her daddy's advice about boys and life and car maintenance and other great mysteries. Ever the organized officer, he had them all labeled by subject. Every time he was deployed, he was afraid that he wouldn't come back, that he wouldn't be there for me, and he felt the need to leave a library of parental information behind. Of course, that turned out to be a smart move. And the tapes had been a source of comfort to me over the years. I hadn't watched them since early high school, because none of my foster families had a VCR. But honestly, it was enough to know that I had them.
A knock at the door caught our attention. Ben was poking his head into my room. And I realized it was the first time he'd walked in here since we'd moved into the house. I felt oddly vulnerable, with this guy standing in my bedroom, looking at a box of my most personal possessions. I hadn't felt this weak and open when he saw me burned by silver.
"Hey, Jane's asking for us downstairs," he said. "Are those VHS tapes? I haven't seen any of those since I was a kid."
"Yeah, my dad made them for me. I just never had the chance to switch them over to DVD. Also, the knowledge of how to switch them over to DVD."