by Jamie Knight
At least for the time being.
Chapter Six - Augustus
You never know what you have until you lose it. I’d been appreciative of Amelia’s help in unpacking but never really knew how much of a help she had been until I had to do it again, all by myself. Less than three weeks after doing it the first time.
I always knew it might happen. That something would transpire, and I would get expelled. Though, thankfully, that wasn’t what was going on.
I was just being moved and, frankly, I wasn’t sad to go. I had no idea what was awaiting me at my new place but at least there would be someone else there. Cold as it might sound, anyone would probably be better than the six jackasses I’d been sharing with.
Keira was the only reasonable one. It could have just been my mighty male bravado, but I was fairly certain that she was sweet on me. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Though it would have been the first time a girl who was already attached had set her eye my way.
Nothing could happen. Things were made quite clear by several of the Seven Tenets of the religion I followed that another person’s partner was strictly off limits unless agreed on by all parties well in advance.
Getting my music and movie posters down was the easy part, gravity helping as much as anything. The difficult thing was stacking and moving the records, which seemed to weigh a ton— one of the solid downsides to vinyls.
Yet, I persisted, getting my three boxes and a backpack by the door in good time, incurring only a one-Advil backache. That was a new record, I was pretty sure.
Everything set just so, precision being near the top of my list of priorities, I stepped out into the gathering clouds. Autumn had finally decided to show itself, and turned in the direction of the housing office.
Happiness really is mostly a state of mind. Though there are some places, so soul-crushingly depressing, it was like they were designed to kill any happiness that might potentially take root.
Airports are one. As well as most DMV offices. Highway Motels also have a history of this. Though the one place I would never expect to find such ardently dedicated killjoys was among the university employees in charge of giving out keys.
There was more to it than that, I was sure. They certainly seemed to be typing furiously enough to give the illusion of working, but then again, so did most government employees. It must be a trick they learned during training.
Taking my place in line with the miserable wraiths, I turned up “Square Hammer” on my first-generation iPod and did my best to stay complacent. No one has control over their circumstances. The mark of maturity is how one faces them.
The process was surprisingly easy once I actually got to the desk. It was merely a matter of giving my name and trading my keys from the ones for the cluster house to the ones needed for my new apartment dwelling.
All the boneheads from the cluster were at some kind of sporting event, leaving me the lovely task of carrying the load across campus to the fancy-pants apartment units overlooking the bay. It only took three trips, with a bookbag on my back for the third.
At least the room was on the first floor, a small mercy for which I was still grateful. In my religion, didn’t really believe in ‘blessings’ in the usual sense but good fortune was still something to be noted, no matter what its source.
The smells filled my nostrils as soon as I was through the door. No one seemed to be home. I wondered if I should have knocked first.
The officials had put out notices to everyone, but it was still nice to give some warning. It was technically my place too, but I didn’t want to be walking in on anyone. Personal space and security are really important to most people.
I decided to compromise and stay in the living room, my boxes piled beside me on the floor by the couch. My wallet and keys were already out on the table. I didn’t see any reason to be hanging around outside or in the corridor, since I had already come inside, but I decided not to cross the line into the bedrooms or bathroom before making proper introductions. It was only polite.
Digging through my bookbag, I excavated my battered copy of I Await the Devil’s Coming while I awaited the arrival of my new roommate.
I hadn’t heard the shower, but I’d heard the door. I looked up in time to see Rachel, the girl from class and the fountain, stride in, clad in nothing but a towel. Her skin was still carrying the sheen of a recent shower. That’s what I had smelled. Her shampoo and whatever else she used.
I kind of expected a scream, which would be perfectly understandable under the circumstances. Instead, I was faced with something much worse. A cold, silent, terror, like I was going to brutally torture her before carrying her remains out in a suitcase the next morning, Henry Lee Lucas style.
“Hi,” I tried.
Silence. Her expression did not move one inch. A tear began to roll down her cheek. I had no idea what kind of change had come over her and began to worry that she thought I was stalking her, that somehow I had found out the address of her dorm room and had come here to mess with her.
“I’m your new roommate,” I said, picking my keys up off the table and holding them up to her. “Because of the new regulations. I was randomly assigned to live here now, from the cluster houses. Crazy, hey?”
Without a word, she backed away and burst into a run, going into what I assumed to be her bedroom. The door slammed so hard the windows in the living room shook.
I was surprised by her reaction, but not furious. People tended to fear things that were different, and I was about as different as it was possible to get. Not in the usual ways people tried to distinguish themselves. By what they wore, or the music they liked or who they slept with.
Even politics had become a mark of pride, the two sides playing off each other as though there was that much of a difference between cats and dogs. Even the self-proclaimed ‘anarchists’ were picking from the set menu of options like they were ordering Chinese. All the ‘choices’ were pre-set, even among the ‘deviants.’
I was deviant in a different way. Inside the head. My thoughts on the universe and humanity’s place in it tended not to match up with the consensus. Therefore, very little of what I thought did, either.
So, I was a bit used to people fearing me or not wanting to be around me. It took time for me to find my tribe and I only fit in with other ‘different’ people. However, I was a bit stumped by Rachel’s reaction in that I had thought we had had some chemistry. I thought she liked me, but I couldn’t have been more wrong, I supposed.
Giving it a respectable amount of time, I put my bookbag on and started hauling boxes to the room with the door that wasn’t closed. It was about twice as much space I needed, the bed roughly double the size of the one I had had in cluster housing.
I could pull it out from the wall a little and run laps around it, burning quite a few calories in the process. At least I could if I ate many. By circumstance more than intent, though, I’d gotten used to about fifteen hundred calories a day, which was how I managed to stay so athletic looking despite never having kicked a ball in my life.
I found a place for everything. Using the nightstand, which was similar to the one in cluster housing, I put my records in there, as well as some of my toiletries since there was a shared bathroom and I didn’t want to hog up all the room. There wasn’t a bookshelf but there was a desk, so I lined whatever books didn’t also fit into the nightstand up across the back of it, using two of the heavier, hardcover editions laid flat as bookends.
With everything else where it needed to be, there was only one last order of business. It was time to claim my territory and make it truly my own. So, I hung up my music and movie posters on the wall and felt satisfied.
What an odd turn of events this had turned out to be. I had been excited to see that Rachel was my roommate, but she clearly didn’t feel the same.
Maybe I had read her vibes wrong and she hated me. Perhaps she found my class notes less than satisfactory once she had had time to read them over. Or it c
ould be that she was shy and old-fashioned and didn’t like having a male roommate. I could understand that.
I doubted she would tell me the reason, since she had run off without talking to me. And that was okay – she didn’t have to share her innermost thoughts with me just because I had moved in.
I just didn’t want things to be awkward or uncomfortable between us.
But I really had no choice but to try to make the best of it, so that was what I would do.
I was going to stay.
This was where I had been put, and I wasn’t leaving. I doubted I could even if I wanted to, what with the university having bigger problems to worry about, trying to re-house students during a pandemic, than any requests to be changed that I might think of making.
But that didn’t mean I was going to be a dick about things.
I could be a respectable, considerate roommate, and I would make sure to try even harder now that I had seen how Rachel had freaked out upon my arrival.
My presence had upset her, and even if I didn’t know why, I had enough empathy in my dark little briquette of a heart to not want to provoke her.
We would just have to steer clear of each other for a while.
How hard could it be?
Chapter Seven - Rachel
I was frozen, my emotions having completely shut down. But I figured that was better than letting whatever might happen out.
The white lights I was focusing on in my mind were getting so bright it was nearly blinding. My body didn’t quite get the memo and the tear had started to fall. I could sense it rolling down my cheek.
I wanted to wipe it away but that would require acknowledging it was there in the first place. Acknowledging my weakness. I had to be brave, even though I didn’t feel it at all. There was no way I was going to give Augustus Graves even more advantages than the ones he already had.
It almost seemed entirely too perfectly coincidental, really. He had just so happened to appear in my dorm room, with the full weight of the campus housing authorization behind him. With a key and all. It all had to be a dream.
Hit with a sudden burst of energy, I had bolted from the hallucination in the living room and shut myself in the safety of my bedroom. I was pretty sure I heard the windows in the living room rattle through the door, though I couldn’t really be sure of anything anymore.
The sting was sharp, ripping into my cheek like a blade, the sound echoing around the big room. I did it again even harder. More tears came as my face started to burn. It wasn’t a dream.
I dropped to my knees, the tears still coming. My mind spun so fast it was making me dizzy. If it wasn’t a dream, that meant it was all real. He was actually there, in my place, boxes stacked, ready to move in. He had a fucking key!
Okay, so, this was not a dream.
If it wasn’t a dream, though, then what was it?
Some kind of sick joke?
I couldn’t really see the humor in it, even in a twisted sense. I didn’t really know anyone in this town or on this campus, and I didn’t think the administration would be involved in such a conspiracy against me. To think otherwise would be downright paranoid.
I was wide awake and there was no conspiracy. Sadly, this fact didn’t make me feel much better. The fact remained that the sworn, blood enemy of my entire family was sitting in my living room.
Reaching out, I took the chair by the leg, pulling it toward me. It was one of those solid wood things with leather padding and a low, C-shaped back. It would do well for my purpose. Using all my strength, I got the chair over in front of the door and wedged it up against the handle. Then I sat on it. I didn’t know how he’d found me, but I’d be damned if I was going to let him hurt me. To be fair, I had no idea what he might do. If he wanted me, he could have done it when I first came out of the shower.
He had the drop on me when I wasn’t wearing anything but a towel. In the reality that existed outside my head, he had only really looked at me and not even in a lustful way. He had kept his bewildered gaze on my eyes as I fell to pieces.
Had he seen the burns?
Not likely.
He could still be planning something, though. Possibly to kill me in my sleep. My father had warned me about them, about what they were really like.
He’d told me vivid tales of terror that would traumatize any kid, particularly one as young as I was at the time. Most kids worried about monsters under the closet. I worried about people like the Graves.
I was always checking under the bed, in the closet, in the hall, in the yard, just to make sure they weren’t there to snatch me away. I slept with my bedroom window nailed shut until I was fifteen.
Augustus was a Graves, which made him dangerous. To me and all others like me, as well as the neighborhood cats. And he was in my place. All my worst, childhood nightmares had come true. I was literally locked up with a Graves and had nowhere to go. I considered the window. The apartment was on the first floor, so the drop wouldn’t even hurt me, let alone kill me. I had a lot of stuff, though, none of which I wanted to leave behind.
It was also more than possible that he would know what I was doing and bring me right back, using the quarantine as an excuse. Then I would really be in for it.
Even if I did get away, my father would have to come all the way back, which would make him mad, not in the least because I’d wasted so much of his hard-earned money insisting on going to college when he didn’t even want me to in the first place, only to have to give up.
If I had to return home, I could be in for another “reminder,” aka punishment, and I really didn’t want that. I was trapped with a Graves and there was nothing I could do about it.
It really shouldn’t have been my priority at that exact moment, but I couldn’t help but wonder why Augustus hadn’t tried to hide who he was. Surly others knew about his family and their ‘temple.’ The founding chapter and Salem had certainly made enough of a stink.
Yet he was here, registered at the school and walking around on campus, under his actual name. Like I found out online, there were only so many dudes named Augustus to go around and Graves wasn’t all that much more popular of a name. At least not in our part of the world.
If he was trying to fly under the radar, he would have used another name. Like when the Dusks changed their name to Dawn, to throw people off the scent. Not that they were the same as the Graves, though I didn’t know that at the time.
As far as I knew, anyone who wasn’t like us was evil and to be avoided if not stopped entirely. With a bullet if necessary. To kill went against the Lord’s word but it was still considered doing the Lord’s work if necessary, and so in way, it was looked at as being a wash, where I grew up.
The realization hit like a battering ram. I’d found out his name, but I had never given him mine. Not my full name, anyway.
There were lots of girls named Rachel all over the place. Even O’Flanagan wasn’t that uncommon of a name. So, if he did happen to find out my last name, he wouldn’t immediately connect me to my family or their crusade. All of a sudden, after what seemed like hours of fear, I realized I was the one who had the advantage over him.
Energized, I jumped up from the chair and whipped off the towel. Going to my desk, the cool air kissing my bare skin, I put on my playlist of choral pieces and selected my clothes.
It didn’t really matter what I chose, not in the least because I couldn’t go out even if I wanted to, the campus having put all of us on lockdown with a series of follow-up emails about how important it was that we stay home and shelter in place, but also because I’d decided to try and avoid Augustus.
He was, no doubt, wondering what the heck was going on but I decided I’d let him wonder. It was a small price to pay.
Some would likely say that it wasn’t good to blame the son for the sins of the father, and that we all had original sin. Except that would have required thinking clearly. Which I absolutely was not doing at this moment in time. I was only thinking about my own surviva
l.
The sweet sounds of giving thanks to the Lord were joined by the jangling of my cell. Pausing my playlist, I picked up the phone, still swaying gently as I put it to my ear.
“Rachel? Have you picked up or is this your voicemail and you’re messing with me?”
“Hey, Jenna,” I sang, deliriously happy.
It was a bit strange, I knew, but the relief was irrepressible. I was already developing a plan that would keep me safely in my room as much as possible. Which seemed to be what the administrations, both campus and national, wanted, anyway. I was always the type to follow the rules.
Dad might not have been thrilled with the idea of me sharing an apartment with a boy.
I’d actually wondered how that had happened despite the school’s prior reassurance to him, but I figured it all came down to desperate times and all that. It was likely that they were so caught up in all the arrangements that had to be made that they hadn’t even noticed.
I couldn’t tell Dad about my new roommate or he likely would come right back and whisked me away, particularly considering who the boy in question was, but, in a funny way, it was more or less what he had wanted, otherwise. Me cloistered away in my room, doing nothing but eating, sleeping and studying, with occasional bathing thrown in, when the coast was clear.
I was definitely working on my hibernation plan in my head. I started making a mental inventory of all the foods I liked that didn’t need to be refrigerated and I could keep in my room.
“Hello?” Jenna repeated in a sing-song voice, startling me out of my thoughts.
“Yes, I’m here,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Oh, good, I thought you might have been murdered or something.”
“Why would you think that?” I asked, the fear creeping back.
“I dunno, paranoid, I guess. I always think people are dead or going to leave me. I have some separation issues, I guess.”
It took a moment, but I soon got used to Jenna and her oddities. She started droning on about a problem she was having, which was that she was supposed to go on a date with a certain boy but now, going out was prohibited, and she was wondering if they should try to sneak into each other’s dorms.