If I was going to be looking at photographs, I should’ve reviewed the selection for my entry into the art department. I had put that off during freshman year, scared away by the horror stories. The dean of the School of Fine Arts had managed to make more students cry and want to drop out than when the on-campus Starbucks shut down for three days after a water leak.
I picked up my battered college course catalog. If I wasn’t going to get up the nerve to apply to the Fine Arts program, I needed to pick a major, something to focus my attention on, so that the rest of the world became blurred-out background noise. It was all in the perspective, I reminded myself.
“Anything wrong, Grace?” I started at the sound. Mike Walsh stood leaning against the circulation desk, holding his ever-present red Nerf ball. Mike maintained that he needed the ball to avoid strangling some of the more obnoxious students, who generally wanted the library staff to do their research for them.
“Nah, just not ready for classes to start again. How was your summer?”
“Can’t complain.” He tipped his head toward my dog-eared course catalog. “Worried you haven’t picked a major yet?”
Mike was my student supervisor and all last year he had watched me page through this course catalog at least once a week. “Kind of. I’m getting so tired of saying ‘undeclared’ to everyone who asks me about it.”
“Just make one up. No one knows the difference anyways.”
“No one except the students who are actually in that major,” I pointed out with what I hoped sounded like wryness. I wasn’t good at lying. For the longest time, I always thought Lana was just super-perceptive, until she told me that every emotion passed across my face like a parade of black ants on a white picnic blanket.
“So, you hear the gossip?” Mike leaned closer, his eyes bright with mischief. Mike was known for two things: his red ball and sourcing more gossip than TMZ.
“Is someone sleeping with their professor already?” That was about the only kind of gossip I figured was juicy enough to account for the eager look on Mike’s face.
“Nope. We’ve got some celebrities in our midst this year.”
“Like movie stars?” I hadn’t heard anything about this, and you’d think that Lana and the sorority girls would’ve been all over this.
“No, mixed martial arts fighters. Two guys who transferred from some junior college in California.”
If my heart had stuttered before, now it completely stopped. All the blood drained from my face, and I may have ceased breathing for a moment.
“Grace, you don’t look so good,” Mike said, leaning back as if he was afraid I was going to infect him.
“No,” I croaked. “I don’t feel so good.” I pressed my fist against my heart again.
“You should go home. There’s nothing going on tonight.”
I nodded my agreement. I needed to go home, and not just to the apartment I shared with Lana, but all the way home to Chicago. Instead, shaking inside, I packed up my tripod and camera with little conscious thought, muscle memory taking over. Mike may have even helped me; I don’t remember. I felt like my head was filled with cotton. All I could hear was the name Noah, over and over, thumping with each beat of my heart.
Noah
“Tap your Goddamn pencil one more time, and I’m going to snap your fingers off along with it,” Bo muttered to me. I looked down at my hand, not even realizing it had been in perpetual motion. “Just go and talk to her.”
“Can’t. She’s working,” I said. But she hadn’t been working two hours ago, or the many other times I had spotted her during the past week. The truth was that I was a coward. Facing Grace Sullivan after nearly two years of no contact was more terrifying than the first time I was on patrol in Afghanistan. At this point, I’d rather face down ten angry insurgents than one 5’ 6” girl I could probably pick up and toss with one hand.
But back then, I had been through ninety days of basic training and was surrounded by my buddies, all of us armed to the teeth while we were deployed. Here my only weapons were my lackluster verbal skills and the knowledge that she had written to me, once a month, for four years.
I justified the two weeks since classes started by telling myself I first had to do some recon. No mission is undertaken without good intelligence.
I had to find exactly the best time to not exactly ambush Grace, but at least find the right way to let her know I had landed back in her life.
I found out she had all early classes and was done by noon every day. I learned she lived in a swanky house two blocks away from campus. Bo had chatted up some chick down at the library desk and learned that Grace did her required weekly hours of service on Thursday nights and Sunday afternoons. The one thing I hadn’t managed to obtain was her cell phone number, so I resorted to stalking her around campus.