Single Mom's Protector - Complete Series

by Nella Tyler

  “Right,” I said, laughing and shaking my head. “Because if I can’t wrap my mind around the stages of childhood development, not even looking at it at all is going to totally help me.”

  “Actually,” Ashley said, sitting up and beginning to look excited, “it might. You’ve read over the material probably five or six times, right?” I nodded, frowning. “I’m going to give you some spoilers for the learning and memory chapter. The best thing to do sometimes is to read through something a few times and then put it down, distract yourself with something else, sleep on it and then get back on it.”

  “How does that work?” I frowned more deeply. Ashley shrugged.

  “Your brain never really stops working,” she explained. “So when you’re doing other stuff, it’s filing away the readings and the classroom discussion and the lecture, and when you dream, it creates the actual memories. So by going to Game Night with me, you will actually be making it easier for you to remember the stuff in the textbook.” I stared at her for a moment before shaking my head.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” I said, taking a deep breath and sighing. I had been working hard ever since the semester started, but I seemed to barely be able to keep up with any of my classes, no matter how hard I tried to get ahead. I rubbed at my eyes; it felt like I had sandpaper on the insides of my eyelids after staring at the book for so long.

  “It’s totally right, and anyway, how are you supposed to learn something if you don’t even understand it? Let’s go to game night, and then tomorrow morning, if you still aren’t getting the material, I’ll go over it with you between classes.”

  “I guess that could work,” I said, pressing my lips together. Part of me felt guilty at even the idea of knocking off on my homework before I’d finished it. All of my classes cost so much money and the thought that I might not even do well in them—or that I might have to re-take them after all the money I’d spent and all the work I’d put in already—filled me with dread.

  “You definitely need to get out of this room,” Ashley told me, nodding firmly. “You’re going to drive yourself crazy if you don’t give yourself at least a little time to relax and unwind every now and then.” I laughed, scrubbing at my face again and then standing.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, stretching against the muscles that had started to go stiff in my neck and back. “I’ll go to the stupid game night with you. But if it’s super boring then you agree to come back whenever I feel like it, right? Or at least let me go.”

  “If it’s super boring and lame, then we’ll both come back and find something better to do,” Ashley agreed. I went into my side of the dorm and looked at myself in the mirror; my hair was a mess, but I didn’t think that anyone would care that much. I smoothed it a little bit, took the ponytail elastic out and then put it back in a little tighter. I decided I wasn’t even going to bother with putting any makeup on. I would just go the way I was. I should probably put a bra on, at least, I thought, glancing down at the sight of myself in my t-shirt; it was obvious I wasn’t wearing one. I slipped my t-shirt off and found a bra in my drawer, and then in a matter of a couple of minutes I was as fully dressed as I thought I needed to be.

  “How are the rest of your classes going?”

  I shrugged off Ashley’s question as I gathered up my keys and purse. I checked to make sure that I had my ID card, since I’d need it both to get into the Student Union and to get back into the dorms.

  “I still don’t have a clue what I’m going to major in,” I told her. My ID was right where I had left it: in a pocket sewed into the lining. One of my friends from high school had made the purse for me from a bunch of old neckties she’d found at thrift stores, and I had never found a single bag that I liked better. I slung the purse over my shoulder and exhaled, looking up at Ashley.

  “I still say you should go into International Affairs like me,” Ashley said, gathering up her own stuff and moving toward the door.

  “Right—I can’t even manage to get through regular Freshman classes and I’m supposed to go into the major where you have to take all kinds of sociology and economics and statistics,” I said sarcastically, shaking my head. “No thank you.”

  “I think you’d be really good at it,” Ashley said. “It’s really intuitive, once you start getting into it.”

  “You said that about Math for Liberal Arts, too, and it took me halfway through the first class to realize that Professor Blue was talking about real numbers.” Ashley snorted.

  “It’s more intuitive than that,” she insisted. “I mean it’s just understanding how people interact—how countries interact with each other. It’s really cool—and it has the best study abroad chances, after Anthropology.”

  We stepped out of our room and started down the hall toward the elevators. I hated taking the elevators if I didn’t have to. We were on one end of the floor, and the stairs were in between the elevators and us, so it took longer to go that way. The elevators for the ancient dorm building creaked and groaned every time I’d ever been on them, and I’d heard horror stories about people getting stuck between floors when the elevator broke down, especially on weekends when the maintenance crew wasn’t on-campus and they had to wait for more than an hour for someone to come and get it running again. But Ashley had bad knees, so whenever we went somewhere together I ended up taking the elevator down with her.

  “If I can’t keep a 3.0 GPA, I wouldn’t qualify for any study abroad chances anyway,” I pointed out. It wasn’t even midterms and was already fairly certain that I would be struggling the rest of the semester to make a C average.

  “Well, you’re going to have to choose something to major in by the end of the year,” Ashley said. “Are you doing really well in any of your classes?” I shrugged as the elevator chimed, letting us know it was about to open. Fortunately no one else was on it, so we stepped on and pressed the button for the first floor.

  “I’m doing all right in my English Literature survey class,” I said, thinking about it for a moment. I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to get the first paper for that class done the right way, but Dr. Bell had said that she would make herself available as much as she possibly could the week before the papers were due, and that if we were worried about it, we should schedule a meeting to discuss our paper topics.

  “Literature isn’t a bad idea,” Ashley said. “I mean if you like it, at least you can eventually become a teacher.” I nodded, but I wasn’t so sure that I had the patience to be a good teacher; and if I couldn’t do that I didn’t think there were a lot of options open to me for a career once I graduated.

  I held my breath as the elevator moved down through the floors of the dorm building, and luckily it didn’t get stuck. Ashley and I made our way over to the Student Union, walking across campus and talking about some of our professors.

  The farther away from the dorms I got, the more relaxed I felt, and by the time we’d arrived at the building that held the Student Union—along with the administration and a few of the upper level classes—I had put all the stress of trying to teach myself about childhood brain development behind me.

  The Student Union was packed with people, all spread out in different corners. I looked around and saw that one cluster of people were playing games like Connect Four, rummy, and even poker, while another group was playing board games, and a third cluster of people on the floor were laughing their way through Twister. Off to one side of the room, far enough away to not be disturbed, I spotted a big sign proclaiming that Bingo games for prizes would start in ten minutes. “That’s what we’re doing,” I told Ashley, pointing at it. “Bingo.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But if it turns out to be super lame…”

  “Then we’ll play Twister and go home,” I said with a shrug.

  I pulled her in the direction of the Bingo tables, looking around to see if I spotted anyone I knew from our building or from my classes. Everyone in the area seemed to be people I didn’t know—some of them upperclassm
en, some of them just from different buildings—but I was more than happy to sit down at the table and show my ID to get my first five Bingo cards.

  Ashley and I compared cards, trying to come up with a strategy to make the most of our chances; out of the corner of my eye I spotted a really cute guy I’d never seen on campus before. He was tall—probably at least a foot taller than me—and skinny, with messy brown hair in floppy curls around his face and bright eyes. He was wearing a Frank Turner t-shirt and a pair of khakis, and I blushed when he glanced in my direction. Then someone up at the calling station began rattling the Ping-Pong balls, and I put all of my attention on the game.

  Chapter Two

  I didn’t want to go to Game Night at the Student Union, but I’d lost a bet with one of my friends over lunch. “Ty, it’s going to be great,” Alex told me as we walked across campus to get there; he’d been bothering me for the past hour to get off of my computer and go with him.

  “A bunch of college kids playing stupid games,” I said, rolling my eyes at the idea of it. Most of the events that Residential Life put on were exactly the kind that journalists wrote articles about where they talked about “the dumbing-down of America” or how college student’s couldn’t handle real life: “Stress Buster Night” with kittens and puppies from the local shelter, or Disney movie nights where they had fifty kinds of cookies and cakes and never any alcohol—because it was open to everyone, and they didn’t want to seem like they were encouraging underage students to drink.

  “There are prizes,” Alex pointed out. “Besides, there’s bound to be some cute girls there to chat up.” I laughed at that. Alex was hopeless when it came to girls; no matter how many he tried to chat up, he always seemed to make friends with them instead of getting anyone to go out with him.

  He wasn’t one of those assholes who bitched about being “put in the Friend Zone,” but the thought of him endlessly chatting women up at a game night event, only to end up making plans to go in a group with a bunch of girls to some gallery opening, was too much.

  “Maybe you’ll finally find a girl you want to actually ask out to dinner,” I said, nudging Alex.

  “Maybe you’ll find a girl who’s worth doing something other than studying with,” Alex countered, smirking at me. “Seriously dude, your life has gotten so sad this year.”

  “I’m getting ready to graduate,” I pointed out. “I need to be serious. I need to pass that exam in the spring.”

  “The exam is months away,” Alex said, as we got closer to the Student Union building. “You don’t have to be ready to pass it tomorrow or anything like that.”

  “Fine, fine, fine,” I said, throwing my hands up. “I’m coming with you to this. I will be social and meet people.”

  “Good, because I’m starting to pity you,” Alex said, opening the door to the building. We walked through to the Student Union and I looked around; Alex was right that there were some cute girls at the different tables, but the games were every bit as stupid as I’d thought they’d be: Twister, with people giggling and tumbling all over each other, Connect Four and board games, a poker table.

  “You know, our odds of winning anything at any of these games are pretty low,” I pointed out to Alex.

  “Don’t start on it,” Alex said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. “I don’t want to hear it, man.”

  “Well look at the Connect Four game,” I told him, pointing at that table. “Assuming you take second turn, you’re just about guaranteed to lose, unless you’re playing against a total idiot.”

  “Ty,” Alex said, groaning but smiling at the same time. “Is there anything you’re capable of doing without analyzing the math behind it?”

  “Math is what I do,” I said, laughing at him. “You didn’t have a problem with my math skills when I helped you with Fantasy Football last year.”

  “Just grab a drink, pick a game, and let’s get started. Don’t get your math all over my good time, dude.” I looked around the room again and spotted the refreshments table off to one side. I wandered over and grabbed a soda and some chips, trying to decide which of the games would be the least annoying to be a part of. I was definitely not interested in Twister. I thought about playing poker for a few rounds—especially since one of the tables was Black Jack, and I knew I could rack up the chips in it, even if the chips didn’t mean anything.

  As I was looking around, I caught sight of a girl moving over to the Bingo table, dragging her friend in her wake. She was short—probably about a foot shorter than me, with dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, away from her face. She was curvy—even in a t-shirt and jeans, I could make out the hourglass shape of her—with big, dark eyes that flashed in the fluorescent light of the Student Union. I watched her sit down and get her Bingo cards, chatting excitedly with her friend, and almost immediately I made up my mind about what game I wanted to play.

  “Alex,” I said, walking up to where my friend stood, watching a game of checkers in progress. “Let’s play Bingo, man.”

  “What?” Alex looked over at the Bingo table. “You pick probably the lamest game in the entire room to play?” I shrugged.

  “Hey, it has prizes,” I pointed out. I wasn’t about to tell Alex that I wanted to play so I had an excuse to watch the cute girl—she looked like a freshman—for a little while. “And anyway, with enough cards you have pretty good odds of covering the board and getting a win.” Alex rolled his eyes at my mathematical reasoning, but he gave into the inevitable.

  We walked over to the Bingo section and took seats; I picked a spot where I could watch the girl I’d seen before, but where I wouldn’t look like I was just staring at her the whole time. We got our game cards and blotters and Alex grabbed some more snacks for us, joking that I was clearly trying to live up to becoming an old man accountant. “Next thing you know, I’ll come in after dinner to find you watching Wheel of Fortune or something,” he said, shaking his head.

  “It’s not a bad game,” I pointed out. “It’s mostly skill. Not like something like Deal or No Deal.”

  “Hey—you said the other day that if you went on that show, you’d clean up,” Alex said.

  “And I would—but only because I know how to play it right. I’m sure as fuck never going to watch it again.” I shook my head. The game started up and I divided my attention between actually playing, talking to Alex, and watching the girl who’d brought me to the Bingo tables in the first place. She was way more excited about the game than I was, though she and her friend still talked and laughed like everyone else playing the game. The first round ended, and I considered getting up to leave, maybe to go to another one of the tables; but the girl was too interesting, too cute for me to want to walk away from and forget about.

  I heard her friend call her “Nic” more than once as round two of the game started. I filed that way in my mind and decided that sometime in the night, I would find a way to introduce myself—maybe just see if I could “run into” her somewhere along the way. I wondered where her dorm was, which building she was in, and why I’d never seen her before. She looked like a freshman, which explained it a little bit—but I’d met a lot of the freshmen either in classes or at the different mixers the school hosted.

  I watched her play almost more than I watched my own cards; fortunately Alex got so involved in the game that he didn’t even notice I wasn’t really paying attention, or he would have immediately gone over to talk to the two girls I kept looking at. I smiled to myself as the girl I was interested in started to get more and more excited with every number that got called.

  “Oh my god, I have almost-Bingo on three different cards,” she told her friend, just loud enough for me to hear from where I was sitting. I saw that in spite of how distracted I was, I was in almost the same shape—I was one number away from a bingo on two of my cards, with another card two numbers away from winning. If you get a bingo, don’t say anything, I thought; I didn’t want to ruin her fun by snatching away her win at the last moment.
I watched the two girls get even more excited as the last few numbers of the round were called, both of them checking and re-checking their cards, groaning whenever it was a number that didn’t line up with their existing ones.

  Finally, the person calling numbers called out “B-32!” and the girl almost jumped up out of her seat, dancing in place. “Bingo! Bingo—Bingo—I got Bingo!” I covered my face so she wouldn’t see me laughing if she happened to look my way; I didn’t want her to think I was laughing at her.

  She was absolutely adorable, dancing in place like a little girl as one of the RAs came over to verify that she had actually won. I sipped by Coke as the RA called out the numbers on the girl’s card, checking them against the master list.

  The girl let out an excited almost-squeal when the RAs running the game confirmed that she won; I looked over to see that the prize she’d gotten was actually pretty decent for a Res Life event: it was a basket with a few gift cards to the campus coffee shop, a book of coupons to the pizza place across the street, and a voucher for two free orders of ice cream at the parlor ten minutes away from campus.

  I played one or two more rounds, winning a prize of my own—which I agreed to split with Alex, since he’d been the one to force me to come to the stupid event—and then I saw the girl and her friend standing up, gathering their things to walk away from the table. They were still chatting excitedly about “Nic’s” win, giggling between the two of them.

  At first I thought I’d missed my chance—that they were going to leave the Student Union and I wouldn’t have an opportunity to talk to the girl at all—but they began to wander around the game tables.

  “I think I’m about done,” I told Alex. “Why don’t you see if you can’t scam some more snacks out of them and then we can go?”