“Yes.”
“Very good. Now, should you find yourself trapped in an in-between, you tap out a beat precisely like that, and you’ll pop right out,” he said with a reassuring smile. “And I may ask you to assist the other students with their flail-beat inside the in-between studio, but,” he said shaking his finger at her, “that is theonlyplace on this campus where you may produce a regular percussive noise, do you understand?”
“Yes, but, Professor…why—”
He held his hand up. “No more questions today, you’ll learn everything about in-betweens and the veil and the Aether and everything else in class. For now, go and eat, pick up your welcome package and meet your fellow classmates,” he said, patting her on the back and hurrying her away.
The eating part went well, as did the picking up of the welcome package, but the meeting of the fellow classmates—that went nowhere.
While Fin worked the room like a movie star, Hailey literally repelled people. No one would come within five feet of her, and she was starting to wonder if she smelled bad.
For almost two hours, Hailey sat alone at a table for fifteen, eating her smoked salmon and exploring her welcome package, which thankfully came bundled inside a Bear Towne backpack—another item she hadn’t brought. As students began filing out, she looked over her orientation schedule for the next morning and pulled out her room assignment:
Dorm: Eureka Hall, 3rd floor, Room 333
Roommate: Giselle Goarhausen
Just as she found Eureka Hall on her campus map, a friendly voice rang out from inside her invisible five- foot demilitarized zone.
“Come on, I’ll help you with your bags,” said Fin.
Hailey looked up from her map.
“Can you tell me how to get to Eureka Hall from here?” She folded her papers and placed them inside her backpack.
“I’ll do you one better and show you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m heading that way too,” he said as they walked into the grand hallway, where the other ParaSci freshmen had already removed the shrink wrap from the pallets and were picking through the luggage.
“Which ones are yours,” he asked, and her eyes searched the piles.
“That one’s mine.”
She pointed to the smallest bag on one of the pallets, and Fin grabbed it.
“What else?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it? This?” he said, shaking her small bag. “This is all you brought to Alaska?”
“Well—” Hailey let out a curt sigh. “Yes! My letter said to bringonepurse-size bag, and there wasn’t any packing list or anything else inside the envelope, and it said not to ask any questions until I got here, and…”
Hailey threw her hands up then dropped them in a huff, and Fin stared at her, unamused.
“Why didn’t you just ask me?” As if this would have been the logical thing to do.
Hailey let him have it.
“I haven’tseenyou since the day we buried Holly. You never came back to work, you never evencalledto say you weren’t coming back, you just disappeared. You left me!” She turned to stomp away but turned on him again. “And you never mentionedanythingabout going to school in Alaska. What the heck were you doing in Pittsburghanyway?”
Fin dropped her bag on the floor at her feet and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Ineverleft you,” he said forcefully, and then he pushed her away, turned around, and left her.
“Clearly, Fin,” she muttered to herself as she grabbed up her bag, “you and I differ greatly in our idea of what it means to leave someone.”
He threw open the Chinook Hall door and looked back at her.
