Page 11 of Blood Moon
I was unsure how Bobby did it, how he could look at me and love me all the same, when I was the constant reminder of how the woman he’d promised his life to just up and left him. It was a sadness that crystallized into a simmering rage. How could she love us so much and leave us in the same breath? Every memory together. Every hug, every kiss goodnight—all of it so trivial … so inconsequential.
And each step I took made me hate her a little more.
I deserved to know why she left.
CHAPTER7
Her winter lips were colder than stone, smoother than marble.
Article VII, Lost Letters from Aadan the First
My first class was located in the Stewart Academic Building of Business and Communications. Like my decision to attend a university, my major was also a last-minute dilemma. My love for reading and writing was robust and dreamy, but not enough for me to actually know what it was I wanted to do with it. Likewise, I found people interesting, and humanity as a construct was an enigma I wanted to pull apart. But I had no interest in pursuing a master’s degree, so that idea left as quickly as it came.
Bobby suggested communications. So here I was, standing in front of a multistory building, unable to make myself step inside.
“Are you going in there, too?” someone asked. It was an Asian girl with chestnut skin, shoulder-length black hair, and curtain bangs that framed her face. She wore a red fitted shirt, light blue jeans, and a pair of wedges, making her appear taller than me.
“Yeah. I have Intro to Communications. What about you?”
“Business 101 up on the third floor.”
“I’m on the second. Wanna walk together?”
Her shoulders relaxed. “Say less.”
I chuckled at her sigh of relief. “It’s nice to meet someone who finds this whole process as daunting as I do.”
“Exactly. Everyone talks about how exciting college is, but we don’t talk enough about how overwhelming it is, too. For starters, there are too many people here,” she said as we weaved through the crowd and entered a hallway filled with fresh eyes. There were people from all walks of life, enough to make me feel a tiny bit suffocated. “Like, have you seen how big these buildings are? They’re massive, and old, and—”
“Beautiful,” I added, noting the porcelain floors.
“And a big waste of energy,” she said. “I’m anxious. I can’t stop talking when I’m anxious.” She inhaled sharply. “This place is nothing like my high school. There were like seventy people in my graduating class, and we had sucky lunches and air conditioners that stuck out of windows and leaked water onto the carpets, and I had a science teacher who single-handedly called me out to answer questions because he assumed I wasn’t paying attention, but the thing was, I was always paying attention, so I always got the questions right. I think it frustrated him, but I’m happy to be out of that hellhole, and now that I look around, I can’t help but notice how nice it is, and you know what, I’m actually thankful for that and hoping I don’t have a professor that’s like my science teacher.” Another breath. “God.Are you from around here? I’m Naomi, by the way.”
I’d never met anyone as anxious as Naomi, and for reasons I didn’t fully comprehend, it made me smile. I liked her a lot. “I’m Mira, and I’m from the area. What about you?”
“I’m from Illinois, an hour outside of Chicago.”
As we walked, I glanced quickly at the room numbers above the door to make sure we were going the right way. “How’d you hear about LLU?”
Naomi’s breathing eased. “I’ve had a few cousins graduate from here, and it was all they talked about.” We approached a staircase and squeezed in between people while conversing about what her cousins studied when they attended Lakeland University, and if I had any family that graduated from here. I didn’t. From what I knew, Rena never attended college, and Bobby attended the University of Kansas.
Upon reaching the second floor, Naomi and I parted ways. I wished her luck, and she nodded a few too many times as she wished me the same.
I entered a room with bay windows that overlooked the Campus Center, and I found a seat in a middle row as I listened to a few nearby students talk about some video they’d seen this morning. It was a close encounter with an animal attack, a few minutes past midnight. A group of students decided to play a game in the woods when they heard snarls of an unseen creature. Somehow, they’d caught the sound on tape and uploaded it.
I fixed my posture, took a breath, and hoped that the animal they’d escaped from wasn’t the same one I’d seen last night.
After a few beats, a woman toward the front cleared her throat. She was willowy, dressed in shades of blue with pale blonde hair that fell in a blunt cut right at her jawline. Professor Peterson was her name, and behind her on a screen was a picture of an iceberg floating in a dark sea.
The sight of it made my stomach clench, and I picked at the hangnail on the tip of my pointer finger. I’d take anythingbutwhat that image alluded to.
Professor Peterson folded her hands together, took a step forward and said, “Icebreakers, anyone?”
I groaned, and a soft mumble slid across the room. Heads turned from side to side, and she instructed us to pair up into groups of threes and fours. After, we spent the remainder of class guessing two truths and a lie.
By the late afternoon, when my last class was over, I felt the weight of exhaustion in my shoulders and behind my eyes. As I entered the long hall that would take me outside, a neon orange poster pinned to an announcement board caught my eye. Someone had ripped the poster diagonally down the middle, cutting off the bolded black font that read:
BEWARE OF …
