“Did you even know my name before today?”
“Of course I did, Luella Pierce,” he said, as if I were the one back to making jokes now.
But I wasn’t.
The fact that he had answered surprised me. I honestly hadn’t known if he would know my name or who I was at all. It was a small campus, sure. It was hard not to know the people you constantly walked by on it, and yet I honestly assumed when he saw me, he still just thought back to the day he had made fun of my clothes three years ago.
Satan’s mistress, coming to steal their souls.
If only that were the truth. Then, I wouldn’t be stressing out over whatever it was I needed to figure out to do next. In all facets.
“What’s your major?” I asked casually.
His eyes widened with delight. He was getting somewhere with me, unfortunately. But I still hadn’t made up my mind. He just looked so pitiful. Reaching down, he started to pull more folders out of his bag. A mishmash of papers floated out of the edges.
“I’m in elementary ed,” he answered proudly. “But what I really need some help with is biology. I’m behind on a science credit. But I also have an English paper due soon—on pridefulness or something?”
“Pride and Prejudice?”
“That’s it.” He tapped the spine of his paperback against the table, taking another look at the front cover. “My professor is all about the author this semester. So, we could choose whatever for our first assignment, and since I watched the movie with my little sister before, I chose this. She’s all about romance books, much to my mother’s dismay.”
She seemed like my kind of girl.
“You took biology too, right? I’m trash with research.”
“Yeah. I changed my major to bio halfway through my first year. My friend Vadika thought I would make a good horticulturist.”
“Your tall friend who commutes? The one with the dark hair?”
I nodded, still confused how he knew all this.
“Did you like it?”
“What?”
“Biology.”
“I liked the horticulture part,” I admitted, though that part was few and far between.
Some of my happiest times in class had come when I ended up drawing leaves and other herbs in my journal during the spring for “research.”
“Like botany—plants and their uses. Vadika was right about that. The rest of the coursework and the premed students I could live without.”
“It sucks that you can’t just study what you want. You could be, like, an expert then. It’s kind of like your crystals, right? Learning different plants and how they can help things?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“You could always switch back,” suggested Ryan.
The idea of going backward wasn’t something I liked to ruminate on, but this point was something I considered. I really didn’t know what kind of use horticulture was going to get me in life after my final year in school came to a close, however. Tests completed and honor cords perhaps hung around my neck.
No one seemed to talk about such practicalities in university. It was all about getting a degree at school and less about if you cared about it or would be able to live off the piece of paper after graduation.
“Maybe,” I conceded, confused about where this conversation had taken us.
He smiled again, as if I had given him the moon. “I used to want to be a scientist as a kid. Crazy hair and bubbling potions and all that.”
“Really?”
