“A million miles away is a good place to be sometimes,” her eyes dropped to the white, pastry box on my bed. “That must be a welcome gift.” She pointed at the pastry box, and I opened it to find two cupcakes with chocolate icing and the Castlehill University seal as an edible sweet laid over the top.
I shut the door behind me and helped Mila carry her cello up the next two flights of stairs, and we were exhausted by the time we got up there, laughing at how unfit, sweaty, and out of breath we were. She found her room, and I was surprised at how much larger it was compared to mine, and she seemed a little embarrassed by that, whereas I pretended I hadn’t noticed. After all, she was a Wolsey and I was Boleyn and most likely much wealthier than my family.
“Oh, fabulous,” she cooed, seizing the pastry box left on her bed, then flipped it open to discover that they were raspberry flavored. Then shot me a look, “One for one?”
“Sure,” I laughed and retreated to run back down the stairs to grab my pastry box with the chocolate cupcakes. “We need to exchange numbers as well.”
“Absolutely,” she grinned as if I were the first friend she had made in a long time. I doubt we’d have much in common when it came to our classes, since she was studying music and the arts, and I was studying boring subjects like Finance, Digital Transformation, and Innovation at Castlehill School of Business. This was what my father and I agreed on.
Today was the day I forcibly started my fitness program by running back up the stairs with my pastry box to Mila’s room on the third floor.
“I’ll need a sleep after this,” I panted as I handed her the box. We each exchanged a cupcake, so I had one chocolate and one raspberry, and I retreated because I wanted to unpack and reexamine the strange message from my dead Mom’s account.
Once I was back inside my new room, I collapsed on my bed as a gloom of loneliness came over me. Here I was in the middle of nowhere, so far away from my home and father, my mom was dead, and… ants were crawling up the wall of my bathroom.
I stood in front of the line of ants, wondering where they came from and where they were going because they seemed determined to climb up into the ceiling. But I was glad they hadn’t found my cupcakes yet. Speaking of cupcakes, I bit into the raspberry one with pink icing that I swapped with Mila, shoved it into my mouth, savoring the sweet taste, although it wasn’t as good as my mom’s recipes.
Excitable shouting outside my window urged me to peer at the view of the park, where a group of six broad shoulders, tall jocks playing a friendly game of ball throwing or something.
“Huh,” I couldn’t help but find them utterly enticing to the eye, but then I noticed the group of cheerleaders hovering by watching, trying to grab their attention. Cringe.
I wiped the crumbs off my boobs and was about to pull away from the window when I spotted a familiar figure. Bulky white T-shirt, but he had put on a grey hooded sweater, which is why I didn’t notice him at first. Messy dark blond hair, thick across the shoulders and chest, tall—maybe about six-foot-three. That triangular shape some men have when they work on their upper body.
A jock tossed him the football, and he grabbed it with one hand, then did a faux throw, pretending he was about to throw in one direction before throwing it in another.
As I watched him, I tried to figure out where I’d seen his face before, but still I couldn’t place it. Did he attend my high school,and was maybe a year or two above, and I took little interest in him because he was popular. Or perhaps he was the son of one of my father’s business partners or golfing buddies.
His head turned in my direction, and his gaze lifted, and it took a few seconds for me to realize that he was looking right at my window. My heart jumped, and I propelled backwards, hoping he didn’t see me, and I continued to unpack, staying away from the window for the next hour.
3
My phone beeped and almost leapt out of my skinbecause it was so quiet in my room. As the sun fell below the horizon, the temperature dropped with it. There was very little foot traffic on this floor, and it was weird how Mila and I didn’t see a single resident while we were finding our rooms. Yet there were plenty of students walking about, mostly in friend groups, but no sounds of closing doors or footsteps along the halls here in Morgana.
The message was from Mila:Are u hungry? Meals are served in the dining hall.
Me: Starving.Do u know where it is?
Mila: On the map, it looks like it’s at the end of the road.
Me: Okay. Let’s go. I’ll meet you at the stairs in ten mins.
Mila: See u soon.
My finger scrolled over the message from my mom’s account again, and I was tempted to answer it, but decided against it. Dad still hadn’t answered the message I sent him earlier, but that’s not unusual, as he’s probably too busy to view my message as a little tantrum that he thought was best to ignore. Or, that wicked stepmother read and deleted it. Or, she slipped poison in his whiskey, and he’s dead.
No, no, don’t start thinking like that. She’d never kill him this soon after I left, as it looked too suspicious. No, no, she’d wait a few days, unless…unless she wanted to pin it on me.
Stop. My mind was getting away on me. The downside to spending many hours alone was that I tended to make up dramas in my head. The upside was that I didn’t have to talk to people and discuss topics I didn’t care about to be a nice person. Mila, on the other hand, was different as she was easy to like.
I pulled a black sweater over my ponytail and put the black baseball cap back on my head. I grabbed my keycard and backpack, which held my phone, money card, and a heavy wool jacket if I got cold.
My footsteps echoed through the hallways as I walked to the stairs, and when I paused to listen for sounds of voices or footsteps—anything to suggest other students were there. Are we living in an empty hall? I mean... I didn’t mind that, but, strangely, I ran into Mila at the bus stop, who just so happened to be assigned to my hall, though no one else was.
Mila came trotting down the stairs, “I ate the raspberry cupcake,” I confessed.
“So, did I,” she admitted. “I’m keeping the chocolate for tomorrow.”
“I don’t suppose you know where the nearest gym is?” I asked her.
