Light Through the Window

by Cassandra Morphy

  "Settling into your new dorm room? How's the new roommate? Do I have to defend your honor? Because I will. I'll go AWOL and fly across three states to protect you. I've done it before."

  "Okay, that was one state," Ellie said.

  "One state and a province. And it was one of the bigger provinces."

  "And you went AWOL from a school, not a military academy. Not that I don't love that you would do that for me, and could. But I am quite capable of defending myself these days."

  "Ah hah. So, there is some defending that needs doing?"

  "No, hot shot. Don't go all gung ho on me or anything. Everything is fine... Well, fine enough. I don't know, she seems nice enough. I just... There's just something about her that I don't..." She paused, looking over to her closed door, half expecting Becky to come back at any minute. It was quite possible that the girl was listening to her talk about her, just on the other side of the metal door that led to the hallway.

  "Are we talking forced admittance to a secret society or clips her nails on the bathroom sink?"

  "I know, I know. I'm being overly sensitive. I just... There's something about her that rubs me the wrong way. She's no Jenny... as far as I've been able to find out. She doesn't really seem snobby, but..."

  "You do know you could hack into her files, right? See what there is to see about her? Maybe her parents are secretly spies... Oh, wait, no, that's me."

  "Oh, ha ha. No, seriously. You know what, never mind. It doesn't even matter. Let's talk about something else, alright? How are things over at the academy? Still glad you didn't go to West Point?"

  "Very much so." She quickly gushed about all the cool things, training, and lessons she had been through since starting at the Academy. And, this was from someone that didn’t usually gush about anything. Ellie smiled at how excited she was about all of that, despite the fact that they had to be so far away from each other for her to do it.

  "So, you're liking it there? That's good." Ellie looked out through the open window, where she could hear the whoops and hollers from below. Her fellow freshmen were celebrating their new-found freedom now that most of the parents had left. Ellie didn't quite have the same amount of freedom, knowing full well that her father was only a few miles away, and would be back the next morning. Still, she almost wished she could join in their revelry. And, yet, she wanted nothing more than to spend time with her girlfriend.

  "You know, we could call this here and you could go out and celebrate," Mare said, snapping Ellie out of her daze.

  "What? No. I'm here. I want to talk to you."

  "Really. I get it. It's not like we were able to talk much when I first got here."

  "That was because you were in training and you weren't allowed. This is completely different. I'm here. I want to be with you."

  "Okay. As long as you're not putting off joining in all the fun on my account."

  "There's no fun for me out there. My fun is right here with you. Besides, I wouldn't even know what to do out there. Sure, there are probably parties somewhere on campus. I mean, it's campus. But, it's not like I know where they are or who to ask or had any desire to go to any of them."

  "No. Because my girl ain't no party animal."

  "Exactly," she said.

  She loved when Mare called her 'my girl', despite the almost possessive tones to it. Ellie was always shy when it came to breaking in new girlfriends. With Mare, though, it was different. She had started it, had made it rather clear that she wanted to be with her. Sure, they thought they were about to die, surrounded by gun wielding henchmen. But it still counted, still broke through all the reservations Ellie ever had about them. They had been together ever since, with barely any bumps in the road. Sometimes, it had seemed almost too easy, like Ellie had some kind of spell over Mare. One that she had no hand in or control over. However, knowing that she was the first person that Mare had really dated, she mostly wrote it off to the lovesick nature that usually came with first loves.

  "Besides, I have an 8:00AM class tomorrow morning," Ellie added. "I need my sleep."

  "Ouch," Mare said. "I have a lot of early mornings myself. I'd complain, but, well..."

  "Yea, I'd probably take it out on the professor, but, well, it's my dad's class."

  "Ah, yes, the good professor. Staying out of trouble, is he?"

  "So far. But I wouldn't put it past him to get kidnapped again. If it does happen, though, let the authorities take care of it. I'm sure your father's people will be on it a lot faster this time around."

  "I'd like to think they'd be on it, but it's not like I have clearance to know what they're doing. Besides, I think it's more the FBI that should be handling it, anyway. Unless it's a demon that kidnaps him, in which case they’d be out of their element."

  "The demons are all much closer to you than to us. I don't think there had been a confirmed report of a demon east of the Rockies ever. I think we're pretty safe from them."

  "Very true," Mare said.

  She smiled, nodding into the camera, as they both fell into an awkward silence. They had been having less and less to say to each other lately, usually just rehashing the same subjects over and over again. Ellie feared they were spending too much time together, though they only had those nightly video chats. That first week of August was amazing. It was right after Mare had completed her basic training and before classes started. Before that, they hadn't spoken in almost two months. As the summer waned and Ellie was spending more and more time alone in her room, she had less items to talk about. Most of Mare's experiences centered around her classes, which she wasn't allowed to talk about. At the end of the day, more and more of their relationship was based around their shared time in high school. Ellie wished they could spend actual time together, in a way that didn't emphasize the fact that they were hundreds of miles apart.

  The door let out the familiar beep beep click sound as Becky keyed her way into the room. Ellie flinched, turning around to face the door and unconsciously blocking the view of her tablet. While she had been out for almost four years, she was still sensitive about letting people know that she was gay. Besides, she had a feeling that Becky was the kind of girl that would be a pain about that sort of thing.

  "Oh, hey," Becky said. She didn't seem the least bit surprised to see Ellie back on her bed. "Video chatting the SO?"

  "Huh?" Ellie asked.

  "The significant other, boyfriend, girlfriend, fiancé, unidentified love interest."

  "Oh, uh."

  "Actually, yes," Mare said, her voice easily heard over Ellie's dithering.

  "Ah, girlfriend, cool," Becky said.

  Ellie eased up at her tone, scooching further back on her bed, equally so that she would be further away from her roommate and so that Mare could see the room again.

  "Oh, hey Jenny," Mare said, jokingly, once she could see Becky standing there by the door.

  "It's Becky, actually," Becky said.

  "Oh, sorry." Ellie and Mare shared a smile at that remark. "I don't know. She doesn't seem that--"

  "Okay, Mare," Ellie said, interrupting her. "I should probably go to bed. Early day and all that. I'm surprised you've adapted to yours so readily."

  "Who ever said I adapted?" she asked, around a heavy yawn. "I think I go through an entire pot of coffee a day, just myself. I'll tell ya, those baristas are a godsend."

  "Ha," Becky barked a laugh. "My mom was a barista."

  "See?" Mare said, pointing at her through the video. "So not a Jenny."

  "Good night, Mare," Ellie said, hitting the end call button before she could say anything else.

  "Her name is Mare?"

  "Short for Marissa."

  "Oh, okay. I was picturing... I mean, I was thinking more like a mare, like a female horse and all that. I mean, she's not all that horsy or anything, but some people name their kids the weirdest things."

  Yeah, Ellie thought to herself. She may not be a Jenny, but she's definitely something.

  "Anyway, I'm surprised yo
u're not out partying or whatever," Ellie said, rather disappointed that she had come back to the room so quickly.

  "Oh, no. I'm not much of a party person. Like I said, I'm a morning person. Ever since my mom… Anyway, that means if the sun isn't up, I'm ready for bed. All those parties take place at night. So not happening for me."

  As if to demonstrate, she yawned heavily. In the same motion, she stumbled forward, heading over to her side of the room and falling unceremoniously into her bed. Despite still being in her clothes, she seemed almost ready to tuck under the covers and go to sleep.

  "Want to grab breakfast together tomorrow morning?" she asked.

  "No thanks," Ellie muttered. She was still sitting defensively against the wall on her bed, her legs full out in front of her, a natural barrier against her roommate. "I'm probably just going to grab something on my way over to class."

  "Alright," Becky yawned. "I'll probably be getting food around dawn anyway. Maybe I'll even hit the gym."

  Her words seemed to drop off as she fell asleep, lying there on top of the covers in her clothes. Ellie wondered if that was something that she had picked up back when she was a kid. A habit that her mom had never managed to break her of before dying. Still, she didn't like the fact that she was forced to sleep in the same room as this perfect stranger, wondering if she'd try to kill her in her sleep. When she had first started at the boarding school, she had a room by herself, only switching to a double once she had gotten to know her new roommate. It was quite a different story there.

  Ellie eventually drifted off to sleep herself, still in that same defensive position.

  Chapter Five

  Physics Class

  Ellie had a crick in her neck from sleeping against the wall. She tried to massage it out, but it wasn't helping. She was sitting in the back of the lecture hall, looking down on the assembling masses from above. The last thing she wanted was to be right in front of the class, right near her father as he spouted on about physics. She knew that would be too tempting for him. Knew that he would treat her like his daughter, in front of everyone, rather than as just another student.

  Her dreams the night before were full of people with no eyes. They reached out to her in the dark, calling for her to join in their sightless world. She hadn't seen the girls with the black eyes since before dinner. But that sight still stayed with her, no matter how much she tried to shake it off. It didn't help that the lighting of the lecture hall threw everyone's faces into shadow, making it seem like everyone had those same black eyes.

  It took her the ten minutes that she had been early for class to realize that the lecture hall they were in was familiar. It had been that same room that her father had been abducted from, almost two years earlier. She stared over at the back door, the one that led out to the back alley where he was thrown into a van. It was also where the student had been shot dead, just because he had stumbled upon the abductors. Somehow, she doubted that that would have been on the tours.

  "Good morning, class," her father said, as he came into the lecture hall. The large doors that led out to the hallway boomed closed, blocking out the noise from outside. They called the class to order, much more easily than his voice did. "Welcome to Physics 101. If you're not supposed to be in Physics 101, you're in the wrong room." A few of the students got up from their seats, scurrying off towards the door. Dave waited there for a few moments while the door slammed several times, marking the departure of another lost student. "For those of you that aren't morning people, I do apologize for the early hour." A few laughs sparked up between the students, which took Ellie by surprise. She didn't remember her father being funny. "I'm not all that fond of the earlier hour myself, nor is my daughter who is--" he stopped talking midsentence so that he could scan the faces of the crowd. Ellie skootched down further in her seat, trying to hide from his searching eyes. "--Somewhere in the crowd here. So, I just want you to know that there is no preferential treatment. No later class that you can attend instead. No skipping classes because you're tired or bored or whatever. Attendance will be taken at the beginning of each lecture and will count towards your grade. But, hey, you're getting credit just for showing up, and you don't have to be awake for it. Although I would prefer that you didn't snore." More laughter stretched out from the class.

  Ellie figured that the coast was clear and slid back up in her seat. She looked around the class, though she wasn't sure what she was looking for. A familiar face might have been nice, though she wouldn't know anyone at that school besides her roommate. Unless there was someone from her old school, the one she had gone to before boarding school, the only people in that room she would have recognized was her father and Becky.

  Becky was sitting at the far side of the room, just a few seats away from the alley door. She was, obviously, oblivious to that fact. Ellie was thankful that she hadn't similarly been scanning the crowd. Becky’s attention was completely dominated by her father as he started to explain what they would be covering over the course of the semester. He also mentioned the fact that the 102 class would similarly be at 8AM in the spring. Oddly enough, it seemed to Ellie that Becky was paying a little too much attention to her father.

  Before that disturbing thought could play itself out in her mind, she actually did recognize a face in the crowd. Three people in front of Becky, in the front row, were the girls she had seen the night before. Their eyes still looked as dark and empty as they had when she first saw them. This time, she was able to convince herself that it was a trick of the light and the distance. Everyone in the front row seemed to have similar eyes. She assumed that, if her father had seen it, he would have made a comment about it. If she hadn't known better, if the fact that the demons weren't allowed out of Washington and Oregon, she would have almost thought the girl to be one of them, and possibly recruiting some of her fellow classmates to their side.

  Someone jabbed her in the arm with a stack of papers, claiming her attention away from the front of the room. The seat to her left was empty, but there was a boy sitting one further over. He was holding out the stack of papers to her, flapping them at her until she took them from him. Ellie only glanced at the papers for a moment, easily recognizing them to be a stack of copies of the syllabus for the class. She had seen copies of it often enough over the years and knew that the only thing that changed from year to year were the dates of the tests. She almost passed the entire stack without taking a sheet, but then realized it would be too conspicuous if she did that. Her fellow students already knew that the professor's daughter was somewhere in the audience.

  "Hey," the boy said, once Ellie had passed on the pile.

  "Hey," Ellie said, automatically.

  "I'm Eric."

  "Ellie."

  "Come here often?" he asked, quickly laughing it off when he realized how stupid that sounded.

  "Dude, you're barking up the wrong tree," Ellie said, not bothering to look over at him. "You're not my type."

  "I'm everyone's type."

  "Not mine. I'm gay."

  "All the better," he said.

  Ellie rolled her eyes before gazing down at her father below and doing her best not to notice the boy. She saw out of the corner of her eye when he moved over to the seat next to her. When he took up the shared armrest, she glared back at him again. His blue eyes seemed to shine in the low light of the room as he started to eye her. At first, she was going to tell him off; she had never taken too favorably to such attention, especially from men. However, when she noticed his eyes, noticed that they didn't look like two deep holes into the abyss, she stared back towards the front of the room. She stared back towards those girls from the night before. She had figured it was just a play of the light, but...

  "You doing anything later?" Eric said, claiming her attention back from the spiraling abyss of her paranoia.

  "Several things," she snapped. "None of them with you. Look, I'm not interested. I have a girlfriend. No, you can't watch. No, you can't join. No, we're not interested
in you in any way. Understand?"

  "Jeesh, sure. Whatever," he said, waving her off. "I just meant that maybe you'd like to start up a study group or something. I've heard this professor is pretty hard."

  "Oh," Ellie said.

  She sat there for a few moments, playing the conversation over in her head a few times. She tried to see if she really had misread the situation, if he hadn't been overly flirting with her. All she came up with was the fact that she was way more distracted by the girls in the front of the class than she should have been.

  "Wait, you heard he's hard?" she asked, surprised.

  "Not that way," Eric said. "I thought you said you were gay."

  "What? No. Ew. No. I'm just surprised. I've... I never heard anything about him being a difficult professor."

  "Why would you have? You're a freshman, right? We all are... well, other than the ones that flunked it last year and had to repeat it. I'm sure there are plenty of those in here, too. Unless... I mean, you're not one of them, are you?"

  "No, I'm a freshman. I just... Well, I've lived not too far away from campus for most of my life. I hear things."

  "I've lived just five miles away from here for most of mine, and I haven't heard anything."

  This surprised her. She looked over at Eric again, trying to get a better gage of him. Trying to see if she recognized him. If he lived so close to the campus, and was in her grade, they probably went to the same high school. And yet, she didn't recognize him at all. Of course, that didn't say much. It wasn't like she was the biggest social butterfly back when she had gone to the public high school in the area.

  "Did you go to Tilden?" she asked.

  "No. Harper. Why?"

  "I just... I guess that's why we've never met before."

  "Sure, that's why. Or, you know, because you're a..."

  "I'm a what?"

  "A really nice girl who wouldn't be caught dead with a guy like me," he said, smiling broadly.