Page 163 of Skalterra By Nightmare
“Where they experiment on squirrels.” I nodded. “Allegedly.”
“Allegedly,” he repeated, and then quickened his step to hasten us around the corner. A second building connected to the Life Science building by a skybridge, but boasted walls of brick and glass instead of sandy stone. “And that is where you’ll be, in the Earth Sciences center.”
I tried to imagine what it would look like in the fall, when campus was full of students, and maybe I’d be one of them.
I wanted it so badly that it hurt, burning an aching hole in the pit of my stomach.
“Where do the architecture students go?” I asked.
“With the engineers. But this—”
“It’s a very nice building,” I insisted, “but imagine if you took me to that ice-cream shop in town, let me see all the amazing flavors that Gams would never stock in a million years, and then told me I couldn’t have any. If tomorrow morning goes well, we can come back before our train leaves.”
His face relaxed into a smile.
“Of course. But there’s no turning back now. You’ve officially committed to a full, in-depth tour of the engineering building.” Liam continued down the path, beckoning me after him. “If we see Two-Tails, you have to buy dinner.”
“How’s that fair?” I chased after him, indignant, smiling, and wishing campus could always belong to just the two of us.
Liam’s tour was extensive and thorough, covering nearly every building on campus. While there were plenty of squirrels, they all had just one tail, so Liam paid for dinner. If he hadn’t, I probably would’ve thrown my food away. It tasted fine, but the closer we got to the lecture, the more my stomach clenched with nerves.
“Is your eye okay? You’ve been messing with it,” Liam noted as we walked back across campus towards the main school hall. I snapped my hand back to my side, embarrassed to have been caught pulling at my eyelashes.
“Yeah, sorry. Big lecture. Big school.” I gestured vaguely at the surrounding campus. Sprinklers chittered as they watered the quad, and I thought back to Mom getting doused on Linsey’s front lawn. I pressed a knuckle against my temple.
She’d be so angry with me if she knew where I was headed.
“You must really love geophysics if you’re this nervous about a lecture. You know there’s no test at the end, right? Just enjoy all the rock jargon and volcano talk.”
“It’s paleomagnetism, not volcanos,” I reminded him. “And you don’t actually know there won’t be a test.”
There was already a line of people waiting outside the amphitheater doors, and I shivered even though the evening was warm.
“Is this guy a big deal?” Liam hissed. “It’s packed!”
“He’s a moderately-sized deal.” I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t told Liam my connection to the speaker yet. Maybe because I knew he’d say it was a bad idea. He might tell Gams, who would tell Mom. I could hardly stand the thought of telling them I wanted to study geophysics. I didn’t want to know what they’d say if they could see me standing in line to hear Maxwell Brenton, PhD, speak.
Or maybe I was afraid Liam would make this too much about me when really it was about finding out if my father knew anything about Skalterra, and why I might be lucid when called there as a Nightmare. It had been one of Ferrin’s theories, after all, that I was somehow connected to Skalterra through family.
The line shifted forward, and Liam murmured something about them opening the doors.
I wondered if Maxwell Brenton would be on stage already when we filed in. Or maybe he’d be sitting down near the front. An usher handed me a program as we walked through the front doors and through the lobby. My father stared sternly up at me from the front page.
“Paleomagnetism,” Liam mumbled next to me, reading off his own program. “What does that mean?”
“The study of how Earth’s magnetism has changed over time. Kind of. That’s a watered down explanation, but I’m not exactly a student yet.”
We passed into the amphitheater, and I pressed into Liam’s shoulder. The other attendees ranged in age. Some of them didn’t look any older than undergraduate students, while others sported grizzled gray and white beards that would’ve put Galahad’s to shame.
Liam found us a spot near the middle of the room.
“Wren?” Liam asked again. I slapped my hand away from the back of my neck and into my lap.
“Hmm?” I forced an ambivalent smile.
“You don’t need to be nervous.”
“I’m not.” I flipped through the program until I found my father’s biography. It listed all of his accolades, degrees, awards, and accomplishments, and even though I’d read it all before online, it still stung that nowhere did it list he had a daughter.
