Page 162 of Skalterra By Nightmare
It was a sunny day in Bergdale, and the historic downtown district bustled with summer vacationers in shorts and hiking boots. We wove between them on the boardwalk style pathway that connected storefronts and shops. The smell of freshly-baked waffle cones made me breathe deep, and I looked around for the source.
Liam caught me staring at the ice-cream and laughed.
“I hope you aren’t thinking about cheating on your favorite ice-cream scooper.”
“Gams only stocks three flavors. It’s not personal.”
“Excuse you, it’s four flavors.”
“If you say so.” I stood on my tip-toes to better survey the surrounding street. The buildings were rugged and wooden, as if to emulate an old mining town. A river gushed somewhere out of sight, the gurgling of the water intermixing with the rush of wind through the trees. “Where’s campus?”
“Through those trees there.” Liam nodded at the forest, and I whipped around to stare at him with blood pounding in my ears. “Don’t worry, we won’t go through the woods. We’ll go around.”
A bell tower in the distance tolled out two o’clock, and I bounced on the balls of my feet.
In five hours, I would be sitting in a lecture hall listening to my biological father speak.
As we walked, the historic district turned into something a bit more modern, with bars and hotels, but we veered left before we strayed too deep into the busy streets.
We passed over a footbridge towards athletic fields that were busy with some sort of soccer camp. The forest stayed to our left as we wrapped around it. Trailheads hinted at quicker paths between campus and the train station, but Liam had been courteous enough not offer them up as a possibility.
Buildings rose around us in a mishmash of old and new architecture that told the story of an expanding campus. I wondered which buildings had been here when Mom had been a student, and which had been added since then. Oak trees growing between buildings and green lawns gave the campus a cozy, park-like vibe, and a fountain spitting water to our right reminded me of the city fountains in Vanderfall.
“What do you think?” Liam asked.
I stared at the glittering windows, the gardens, the lawns, and the clock tower that rose from the stone building at the center of campus.
“It’s okay.”
“I know. It’s stupid how nice it is, right?”
The knot in my stomach loosened as I sighed.
“Yeah. I hate it.”
I needed to get in. I wanted to make this my school. I wanted to spend late nights holed up in the window-laden library typing up reports on tectonic shift. I wanted to complain about how the school put too much money into making the student center look nice, and not enough into making the cafeteria food taste good. I wanted to spend warm afternoons after class playing frisbee on the quad, and I didn’t evenlikefrisbee.
The trashcan to our left rustled, and the largest squirrel I’d ever seen bolted from inside, carrying a banana peel.
“Holy crap!” I jumped into Liam, grabbing his arm, and he laughed.
“You’ll get used to the squirrels.”
“Wasthat a squirrel? Or a small raccoon?”
“If you thought that was wild, wait until you see the one with two tails.” He led the way deeper into campus. “Rumor has it that the science majors are conducting experiments on them, but not everyone believes that theory when it comes to old Two-Tails.”
The back of his hand brushed against mine as we walked in the shade provided by a row of oak trees.
“And what doyoubelieve about Two-Tails?” I grinned. The shifting light that spilled through the tree canopy caught the edges of Liam’s curls as he smiled back.
“He obviously stole the tail from another squirrel, who is now running around campus tailless.”
“I’m sure someone would’ve noticed a tailless squirrel.”
“Not if he’s hiding among the marmots by the river.”
He stopped to point at a building made of sand-colored stone. It stood three stories high, and its roof was adorned with chimney-like vents and a greenhouse. “That’s the Life Science building.”
