by D Haltinner
Darren always noticed her. He tried not to, but it wasn’t something his conscious could control. Every time his eyes floated to the waves of her hair dangling across her back, he felt nothing but guilt. His mind threw an image of Rachel up at him, blocking his mind’s eye from seeing anything else.
He needed to get that fish out of his mind now, before he did start to think that there were better fish in the sea besides Rachel. Other fish that would actually acknowledge his existence, at least. If there was one thing life taught him, it was that a girl like the one in front of him would never stoop low enough to be seen with a boy like Darren. American girls don’t like Arab boys. It was a simple truth, but it was just that-truth.
The girl set the book on the table with a gentleness reserved for love making and set a notebook alongside it before brushing her hair off her shoulder and finding a comfortable position in her seat.
“One if these days I’m going to ask her out,” Jack said.
Darren felt a tenseness growing inside of his chest, but ignored it. “What’s stopping you?”
Jack laughed. “The fact that she’d say no.”
“She might not.”
“Yes she would. I know I’m not her type. Just by looking at her, you can tell that she’s attracted to those rare nerds that are still tall, dark, and handsome by some sort of freak of nature.” Jack looked at Darren. “Kind of like you.”
Heat swarmed across Darren’s face. “I got a girl, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Jack said. “I hope you two work past this. Otherwise you may have to be on the lookout for someone new.”
“I’ve always been happy when I was with Rachel,” Darren said. “We enjoy the same things, I love the way she-”
“But is she good in bed?”
“Let’s just say she’s a wild one.”
Jack laughed.
“I never had much luck with girls until I met Rachel,” Darren said.
“You seem like you’d be good with the ladies.”
“Maybe. If they’d talk to me.”
“Too shy?”
“For good reason.”
“What that?”
Darren frowned. “Just look at me.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t look like everyone else.”
“You do to me.”
“My family is from Saudi Arabia, I’m an Arab.”
“So?”
“What do you mean, so? Most people just hate the sight of me.”
Jack looked around the room, filling with more people as the other students wandered in. “I don’t see anyone hating you,” Jack said. “How could they hate you if they don’t know you?”
“Everyone thinks I’m in cahoots with Bin Laden just because of how I look.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, everyone else does.”
“Doesn’t seem that way to me.”
“You didn’t see me have to grow up after nine-eleven,” Darren said. “To put it simply, it wasn’t easy to make friends.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t,” Jack said. “But you’re in a different world now than you were back then. I bet most of the people here don’t think like that, they know that having an Arab ancestry is just that, and not some sort of terrorist affiliation. Not all terrorists are Arab, and not all Arabs are terrorists.”
“That’s easy to say,” Darren said. “But unfortunately this isn’t the ideal world you seem to think it is.”
“I think it’s gentler than you know.”
“I wish you would have been with me last night. It may have changed your view.”
“Last night?” Jack asked. “I thought you were doing research or something?”
“I was,” Darren said. “With a guy who thought the military should have slaughtered me and all the other Arab terrorists a long time ago.”
“Who said that?”
“My history partner.”
“Who’d you get stuck with?”
“Troy something.”
“Well, I can assure you that his view of the world isn’t the same as everyone else’s.”
“Perhaps not, but it’s the only side of the world I ever get to see.”
“Point him out to me in history later,” Jack said. “If I think he is who I think he is, it’ll make a bit more-”
“Sorry I’m late,” the professor said as he rushed into the classroom. “Got caught in an impromptu meeting.”
Professor Coleman tossed his leather briefcase onto the table in the far corner of the room and began to rummage through it. He looked a lot like his son Jack, but a bit more overweight and with a much larger forehead. A forehead that climbed all the way over his scalp to the back of his head.
No one knew that the professor was Jack’s father. The professor never mentioned it, and neither did Jack. Jack got no special treatment in class, nor did he get picked on-he was treated as just another student. Fair in each respect.
Professor Coleman slid his horn rim glasses up his nose and fished through his briefcase, pulling out a stick of chalk in a steel holder. The cuffs of his shirt showed the chalk dust of previous classes, but they weren’t as bad as some that Darren has seen. The dry eraser markers were worse at washing out than the chalk seemed to be-a lot of professors had marks all over the sleeves of their light colored shirts.
“We’ll talk later,” Jack said at a whisper. “Just point out Troy to me in history later.”
Darren nodded in agreement.
“All right,” Coleman said. “What were we working on? Oh yes, outliers.”
The professor moved to the board and began to draw lines and dots, talking about generic data and values. But Darren’s eyes weren’t on the board. The wavy haired girl was in his sights, her face angled just right so that Darren got a side profile of her. He watched her eyes blinking with such gentle care, her nostrils flaring ever so slightly when she breathed.
Darren forced himself to take his eyes off of her and put them on the chalk board in front of him. He couldn’t be attracted to another girl when he had Rachel. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t natural. Man was designed to be monogamous. Cheating with one’s eyes was still cheating.
Then again, people trade their cars in for better ones all the time.
Don’t think like that. She’s not property, she’s a human being. A girlfriend, and a lover. Darren thought he should be thinking about marrying the girl, not wishing he could trade her in for a knockout like the one in the front row. He didn’t even know the girl’s name. She could turn out to be a complete bitch for all he knew.
Or a transvestite.
Okay, maybe not a transvestite with curves like that, but still, Daren knew what to expect with Rachel, and he loved her. It means something after three years. Temptations like the wavy haired girl will come along from time to time, but he just needed to push them out of his mind. It’s just a test of the relationship with Rachel, and Darren can pass it. He might not be able to pass the statistics test if he didn’t start to pay attention, but he could pass off those sexual temptations.
Darren closed his eyes, dry swallowed, and tried to reset his mind into statistics mode so he could pay attention. But when he opened his eyes, he caught the girl glancing back at him.
She smiled as she looked back forward, but that was the end at Darren’s attempt at mental control.
Perhaps he would be better at resisting these thoughts if he and Rachel hadn’t have had that argument on the way to the library. Just because she goes out drinking on the weekends doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him. She’ll get past this phase and things will go back to normal. A lot of kids go to college just for the parties, but that never lasts forever. They mature sooner or later, and hopefully Rachel would too.
He at least never had to deal with Rachel while she was drunk. She did call him in the middle of the night a few parties ago, but that was the only time. He usually didn’t see her until the next day when she was too hung over to get out of b
ed until she had to get ready for the next party.
She would have to get over partying eventually. She’d never graduate with her head in an alcohol-induced haze. Just a phase. Just let her get it out of her system and everything will go back to the way it was. Patience is all he needs.
And to start paying attention to class.
Darren kept his eyes on the board for the rest of the hour, but his mind continued to trail off on its own.
Chapter 5
Darren crumpled up the wrapper his sandwich came in and tossed it on his tray. He had to pay a premium to eat in the restaurants of the student union instead of the dining hall, but it was worth it. Only a few people occupied the tables that spanned the two story wall of windows looking out into the Campus Park and arboretum, but had Darren gone to the dining hall, he would have had to stand in line for a good ten minutes to get to the buffet line.
Not his type of fun atmosphere. Too many people. It was nice to get away from everyone else and have a quiet lunch alone every day. He sometimes used the time to catch up on school work, but on days like today, he just wanted to put his feet up on the chair across the table from him and try to relax.
At least history was next, so he could get the trouble with Troy out of the way. Find out what he had discovered down inside the shaft below the library. And if he got out with or without getting caught.
His backpack was left behind in the library, but that could mean anything. He could have been in a hurry to get out of the building without getting caught and forgot about it. A friend could have let him into his dorm. Or he could still be down in the tunnel with a broken leg.
No on that though. Someone closed the hatch and moved the shelf back, and it wasn’t someone who worked there. If it was, they would have notified the campus police and they would have dragged Troy out of the shaft and off to jail.
His backpack could have been left behind if he was dragged off by the police.
But they would have come looking for Darren after Troy spilled the beans. Even if they didn’t plan on charging Darren with doing anything wrong, they still would have grabbed him between classes to ask him about last night. But they never did.
Whatever happened to Troy, Darren was about to find out. The clock said class was coming up in fifteen minutes, so Darren put his backpack on and carried his tray to the row of trashcans along the wall of windows. When he dumped his trash inside and set the tray on top of the can, he began to walk toward the front of the union, stopping when he spotted the wavy haired girl from class sitting on a bench outside.
She had her long legs stretched out in front of her, leaning back on her hands. She was looking off down one of the walking paths, a clump of stray hair bouncing around her cheek in the light breeze. She had the same chronic smile hanging on her face, looking more like a smirk in the sunlight. But a sexy smirk.
Darren shook his head, trying to free his thoughts, and began to walk again. He didn’t know they shared the same lunch hour, he hadn’t seen her around at lunch before. Maybe she ate in the dining hall most days, but with the gentle fall air and the sun in full force, she chose to enjoy the outside one last time before winter took over. Whatever the reason, he needed to get her out of his thoughts.
Darren passed the coffee shop and the campus post office before pushing his way out the main entrance. He squinted at the sun and followed a pack of students to the side walk and south toward Painter Hall, keeping his face to the ground and his hands in his pockets.
The dorms loomed across the street, soon replaced by the bustling dining hall and the library. Darren had to walk around a section of sidewalk that was pulled up to access the thick cabling beneath it, and followed a couple onto the path going to Painter Hall.
Pre-civil war history of America was held in the room off to the right of the entrance in a lecture hall designed for two hundred people. Though the class only had around a hundred students, the room still looked crowded when class was in session, and it looked just as packed when he stepped into it now.
The doors opened at the back row of the class room. Steps traveled down to the stage where a pair of tables and a podium sat in the center, before a set of white boards. Darren made his way halfway down the tiled steps and picked a seat along the aisle.
It was a second later that he saw the wavy haired girl enter the room and begin to descend the stairs. He tried to keep his eyes looking down to his backpack, but being able to see her abs flexing beneath the tight shirt below her open jacket each time she stepped, was too much. She stayed a couple aisles behind Darren and walked down to the far end, opposite of the room from Darren.
“Aren’t you going to let me in?”
Darren looked up. Jack was standing in the aisle beside him, hands gripping the straps of his backpack.
“Oh, yeah, sorry." Darren slid his knees to the side and pulled his backpack to him.
Jack stepped past his knees and collapsed into the chair beside Darren. “I hate the walk here.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Gym.”
“I came from the union, the gym isn’t that much farther.”
“It is after you were made to run three miles.”
“Thank God you don’t smell like you ran three miles.”
“Thank the science of deodorant for that one,” Jack said. “Hey, don't forget you were going to point out this Troy guy to me.”
Darren panned his eyes across the room until he caught the gaze of the wavy haired girl and snapped his head around away from her as his face grew hot. “I don’t see him yet.”
“Class is about to start.”
“Must be skipping today.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
Professor Hammil walked into the room behind Darren and the chit-chat that had been filling the room began to die off a she made her way to the front of the room and set down her book bag. The light of the stage made the wrinkles in her forehead look deeper and longer than they really were, but it also made her graying hair look more blonde than gray.
“How’d you like her for a night?” Jack said at a whisper into Darren’s ear.
Darren pulled away from Jack. “She’s older than my parents!”
Jack laughed. “Just seeing if you were awake or not.”
“Do I look like I'm sleeping?”
“No, you just look preoccupied still.”
“It happens.”
“Did you talk to Rachel again?”
“Haven’t seen her.”
The speakers in the ceiling clicked and hummed as Ms. Hammil fought to clip the portable microphone to her blouse, tangling the wire in her hair behind her neck.
“I’m sure you two will work it out,” Jack said.
“I know we will.”
“Alright,” Ms. Hammil said into her microphone. Her voice echoed off the walls, but the volume wasn’t too loud. “I think I got this thing set.”
The remaining chit-chat died and Hammil unloaded her handbag onto the table, fishing out a piece of paper. “Before we begin, is there a Mr. Ansari here today?”
Darren’s heart dropped. “Shit,” he said aloud.
Troy got caught. Had to have. That’s why he wasn’t in class, and now it was Darren’s turn to get tossed to the campus police as breakfast too. Darren didn’t even do anything wrong though, he tried to stop Troy, he did his part, why should he get blamed?
Just take it like a man at least.
Darren raised his hand. His arm shook as he lifted it above his head.
Ms. Hammil spotted the arm. “Ah, good,” she said.
Here it comes, Darren told himself.
“I just found out that your partner for the paper will not be returning to class,” she said.
Darren gulped. The idiot did get caught.
“So I need to find you a new partner.” She ruffled through a stack of papers. “If I remember right, we had a group of three because of the odd number of people in class.”
Darren was s
tunned for a moment. Why didn’t she tell him to report to the campus police? Or the administration even? If Troy was in so much trouble that he was being kicked out of classes, Darren couldn’t be getting off Scott free.
To be kicked out of school for something so stupid. What an idiot. It was possible that he could have only been suspended, Darren bad to admit that, but how could the guy be so stupid? Risking everything for a moment of curiosity was just idiocy.
“Here, we are,” Hammil said. “Let’s see, Joan Rimmer, Eric Langstad, and Audrey Wilde. Would any of you be willing to partner up with Mr. Ansari here?”
Darren didn’t know any of the names, but now that he had been pointed out to the class by the teacher, who would volunteer to be partners with an Arab kid? Ms. Hammil should have just let them choose their partners themselves so that he and Jack could have just done the paper together, it would have been easier.
“Thank you Miss...” Hammil said, looking over to the other side of the room.
Darren followed the professor’s gaze with her own eyes to the girl with her arm raised.
“Oh God…” Darren mumbled. His heart was racing faster than a cat chasing a mouse.
The wavy haired girl had her arm raised, her eyes looking over at Darren. “Wilde,” she said.
Heat filled Darren’s face as moisture began to grow beneath his arms.
“Thank you Miss Wilde,” Hammil said. “I’ll let you two make your introductions after class. You can continue with the topic Mr. Ansari had assigned to him.”
Audrey Wilde nodded to the teacher, her smile growing larger as she glanced at Darren again.
“Oh man,” Jack said from beside Darren. “How did you get so lucky?”
Darren said nothing, only shook his head. He watched as Audrey Wilde’s gaze lingered with a smile, and then turned her attention back to the professor. Jack was muttering something in Darren’s ear, but he couldn’t pay any attention.
His arm pits were growing moist and his heart was fluttering, but he couldn’t stop it. He shouldn’t be so nervous. Sure, she was a pretty girl-a very pretty girl-but he already had his own eye candy. Okay, maybe Rachel wasn’t as good looking, but she was his, and he loved her. He’s loved her for years. He didn’t even know Audrey’s name until two minutes ago, and he knew nothing about her.