NANOWRIMOOOO #2

Further lack of proofreading abounds. :D

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He smiled at that, his lips curling up at the sides, but the rest of his face remained passive. “No, I don’t think you’d want me to.”
She wasn’t sure what that meant, and Ariel gave a curt nod before turn walking down the quiet hallway as quickly as possible. “See you around,” she said without looking back. He said something in reply, but it was quiet and she couldn’t make it out as she turned the hall corner sharply.
That, she decided as she heaved herself against one of the heavy double doors at the end of the hall and practically fell into the chill of the October evening, was strange. She had talked to a janitor here once before, when she had been haplessly locked out of a classroom where she had left her sweater, and he amiably rambled on to her about his sister’s cat’s surgery as he searched for the right key. In high school, one of the janitors had been a genuine mute, and the other two were twins who spent their free time constructing models of cathedrals out of pretzels. She was pretty sure they had won some sort of prize for that. They had all been on varying levels of the strange-spectrum, but at least they blinked and didn’t stare at her with their eyes that just wouldn’t blink. They had also never helped her scour a room for a lost item for twenty minutes, though.
“I guess there always is a silver lining,” Ariel muttered as she navigated threw the college parking lot. She knew McTavern’s was directly behind lot C, but she had not known that she’d have to scale a seven foot ledge and a chain linked fence to get to it. She moaned audibly as she approached the wall of agglomerated clay and stone that had been left behind when the ground had been leveled for the parking lot. She could walk around the school and then around the block, but that would take ages and she could see the glow of McTavern’s through the crisscrossed twists of the rusty wire fence and hear the faint mix of laughter and voices and music on the breeze.
She took it back. There was no silver lining here.
Squaring her shoulders, Ariel marched to the ledge. There was a battered white Land Rover parked facing the wall, lonely in the otherwise empty lot. Ariel climbed onto the hood, then froze when the thought struck her that perhaps this car belonged to the strange janitor. But that was silly, she told herself; even if it did he’d have no way to know she’d climbed and stood on his car.
Shaking now, she got to her feet, balancing herself on the curved surface of the hood by gripping a rock jutting from the dirt wall. It was essentially a cross section of the once hilly area that was once Rockmont State Community College campus, and the residual mix of stone and mud was wonderfully uneven. With the Land Rover giving her a boost, Ariel gripped the grassy top and used another jutting rock as a stepping stone. Her other foot found a foothold somewhere on the rough ledge wall, and she pushed up with her legs and transferred her hands to the chain linked fence. In this way she climbed to the top of the fence, swung her legs over and climbed down the other side into the grassy median at the edge of McTavern’s parking lot.
That wasn’t nearly as traumatic as I expected, she thought.
The parking lot was packed. Ariel wove her way through the menagerie of motor vehicles and to McTavern’s front door, which she opened uncertainly. The sound of hundreds of conversations between hundreds of people and the beats of a brass band errupted from within, and Ariel paused in the doorway to allow her eyes to adjust to the light.
The hostess, who stood at attention at a podium by the door, shouted something Ariel couldn’t understand at her.
“Excuse me?” Ariel shouted over the noise, approaching the podium. A group of teenagers entered behind her, crowding through the glass doors, and swarmed the hostess. Ariel found herself pushed into the main part of the restaurant as the group whooped and high-five the hostess, whom they apparently knew. At least, Ariel hoped they knew her, with the way that one boy immediately swung his arm around her shoulders.
Ariel drifted past tables crammed full of chattering people. Empty beer pitchers and chip bowls were everywhere, and employees were bustling about picking up dropped and forgotten forks and taking orders, cupping their ears to try and hear over the din of the merriment.
She spotted Bryan in a corner both filled with somewhat familiar faces– most of these people had gone to high school with her, though none of them in her year. She squeezed past a high chair and wondered over to him.
“Hey!” she yelled, waving unenthusiastically from the head of the table. Conversation stopped, and everyone turned to stare at her. “Uh, hi,” she said, blushing. She doubted any of them could hear her.
Bryan look confused for a brief moment, but then his face lit up with a cheery grin. “Ariel!” he called and waved for her to sit down.
There was a great shuffling and rearranging of people then, and three people flailed their way out of the booth to let her sit next to Bryan, laughing as they untangled and retangled their limbs. Bryan introduced them as friends from Rockmont High, and like Ariel, they all seemed aware of who she was, though she doubted she had ever said more than two words to any of them.
“Were you in my Spanish class?” the girl on the other side of Bryan, Theresa, asked.
“I think so. Spanish III with Señora Wright?” Ariel answered, picking at the half eaten plate of french fries someone had shoved at her. They were cold, but she didn’t mind.
“Yeah!” Theresa giggled. “And she didn’t understand the subjunctive at all, remember?”
Ariel laughed wryly at that. Señora Wright had not been the most competent teacher.
“Aw, I liked her. She was nice,” Bryan chided.
“You just liked the easy A,” Theresa teased. “Señora Wright was in looove with him,” she went on, turning to Ariel and wrapping her arm around Bryan’s. Bryan reciprocated the action by covering her hand with his and pulling her closer, almost into his lap. Both grinning and giggling, they were quickly distracted from Ariel by each other.
Ariel fixed her gaze straight ahead of her as not to stare, a nervous smile plastered across her face. She felt like someone had poured a glass of ice water over her head, the chill trickling down her neck across her back. Bryan had said this wasn’t a date, and while her mind agreed that she had expected no such thing from him, just a chat with a friend and a good time at a party with familiar faces, she found herself envious of Theresa and how well she seemed to relax and lean into Bryan.
You’re being stupid; he’s just some guy you ran into one day, she reminded herself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. To distract herself, she focused on the conversation going on across the table from her.
“Yeah, I was visiting my brother down in Milton, and, well. You heard what happened, right?” A man Ariel thought was named Jordan was animatedly gesticulating his story. A chorus of nos and whats answered him. “This chick was murdered like two blocks down from him. It was way gruesome: her body was all twisted up, and the new lady said her face was screwed up like she was screaming or something.” There were gasps and his audience had gone relatively quiet. Bryan and Theresa were still busy with each other, Ariel noted with some discomfort. “The weirdest part, to me at least…” Jordan leaned forward conspiratorially. “There was no blood. Not a drop. Nada.”
There was a moment of stillness, then the man next to him guffawed.
“That’s the most retarded thing ever,” he said. “You don’t have to make someone bleed to kill them, man.” Ariel mentally agreed. They continued with this discussion, but Ariel was distracted by a vibration in her pocket: her cell phone.

parked car in rmscc lotmctvrn lot 2 full keys under seat likeusual

Ariel rolled her eyes at her father’s text. He had started text messaging her instead of calling like a normal parent a few months ago in some sort of attempt to bond with her and seem like a “cool” parent. He had figured out how to added spaces, thankfully, but Ariel still cringed every time he tried to use texting slang, like using the number two instead of the proposition “to.”
She sat without speaking for a while after that, just listening to other people talk. Eventually Bryan and Theresa broke apart, and the older girl excused herself to the bathroom. Bryan turned to Ariel, snatching a cold french fry from her plate.
“Sorry about that,” he apologized. “She has, uh… very distracting assets.”
Ariel tried to smile and failed. She imagined it looked more like a grimace, but either Bryan didn’t care or didn’t notice.
“So how’s college? He asked, casually draping an arm across the back of the booth’s seat. “Still acing everything? I bet all the professors think you’re great.”
“I guess I’m doing alright,” Ariel replied. “I had a disagreement with my English prof today, though.”
Bryan raised his eyebrows. “What type of disagreement?”
“Oh, it just– you know,” Ariel babbled. She suddenly felt embarrassed. How could she complain about a C on a paper to him? He’d probably made tons of Cs before and been perfectly happy with them. “I thought he’d graded me a bit low is all. I mean, I don’t think I got enough credit for all the work I did.”
“That sucks,” he sympathized. “I bet you did awesome on… what was it?”
“An essay,” Ariel answered, perking up at the opportunity to tell her story. “It was on my interpretation of TS Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland.’ Ever read it?”
Bryan shrugged lightly. Ariel went on anyway.
“Well, anyway, I did all this research and worked really hard gathering my thoughts on it and– and I wrote three drafts of that paper, and he tells me I haven’t backed up any of my arguments.” Ariel fumed, gripping the edge of the table with all her might. “Just because he doesn’t agree with me doesn’t mean my ideas are invalid or, God forbid, wrong.”
Bryan, who had been eyeing her death grip on the table with a bit of caution, leaned over and patter one of her white-knuckled hands. “I totally know where you’re coming from. These intellectual types, they think they know everything just ‘cause they have a fancy degree, but really–” He broke off when Theresa reappeared. Everyone shifted again, getting out to let her in and then sliding back into the booth, all yelling and laughing at each other. In that moment, Ariel completely lost Bryan’s attention as he turned to Theresa, wrapping an arm around her waist and picking something out of her hair.
Like a monkey, Ariel seethed. Both of them.
She didn’t want to be there any more, with all these people she barely knew and the screaming child one table over, and Bryan with his hands on Theresa. Without a word, she climbed over her neighbors and stomped from the booth to the restaurant door and out into the night.
The car was in the college lot. This was inconvenient, but it was better than having to wait around from someone to pick her up or take the city bus. Ariel trudged through two lanes of cars before pausing to think. She could go back over the fence and down the ledge, possibly risking her neck again, or she could walk around the block, the longer but safer route. The breeze nipped at her too-thin jacket and blew her hair across her face as she squinted toward the main street. It seemed so far away, but the fence was right here… She shivered and decided to take the shortcut.
Getting over the fence proved simple enough, but as she was trying to find a decent foothold in the dirt ledge, Ariel lost her foot and fell the rest of the way, landing on her bottom and skinning the palms of her hands as she tried to stop herself from all backwards. Shaking, she picked herself up and blew on her stinging hands. She wasn’t bleeding, but her hands were raw and the top layers of skin were peeling away. Her butt was sore, but that would wear off soon. At least, she hoped it would as she limped across the lot.
There was no car in sight. Ariel bit her lip. Her father must have parked it in a different lot.
Bracing herself against another blast of cold air from the autumn weather, Ariel wrapped her jacket tighter around herself and head toward the alleyway between Reinhurst Hall and the administration building, where the college hid its dumpsters and recycling bins. This would take her straight to parking lot A, where, as it was where she was dropped off every morning, Ariel presumed her father had left the car.
It was too cloudy for much light from the moon to make it through, but the general light pollution of the town made it easy enough to see in the open parking lot. The alleyway, however, was full of suspicious shadows. Ariel stopped at the mouth of the alley under the pretext off blowing on her still burning hands some more.
There was a scream, then it was abruptly cut off. Ariel froze, staring bug-eyed down at her palms. It had, without a doubt, come from the alley before her. There was shuffling noise in front of her, quiet but desperate. Slowly and painstakingly, she lifted her face to the alley. There was a bang then, like something thick had been hit against metal. Judging by how close it seemed, Ariel guessed someone had hit something against the dumpster closest to her.
She wanted to run. Every part of her told her to leave as quickly as possible and keep out of it. But what if some was hurt? What if she could help? She had no idea what was going on, really, behind that dumpster.
It took every ounce of willpower she had to take the step steps necessary so that she could see behind the dumpster. She nearly screamed herself. It was the janitor. He had someone else pinned to the brick wall, another man. The man’s face, which she could so clearly see, was contorted in pain, his mouth hanging open as if he meant to scream but couldn’t. He head was twisted to the side, his ear pressed against his shoulder, as the Janitor poured over his neck. It was almost like the janitor was kissing him, there on his exposed, meaty neck, but the man was staring at her in such intense, horrified pain–
He was staring at her.
Ariel felt a squeak escape her throat, disobeying every message her brain was sending throughout her body to stay as silent and still as possible. The janitor straightened, raising his mouth from the man’s neck and started to turn–
Ariel ran.

NANOWRIMOOOO

Total lack of proofreading ahead. You're lucky I ran a spellcheck, even.

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Ariel Anders was not the type of girl who ever wanted to associate her name with being a “daddy’s girl.” From the moment her father had bestowed such a name on her, a name which shared its initials with a fellowship dedicated to maintaining sobriety and its forename with an obnoxious cartoon sea siren, she had been at odds with him. Her mother had left them over a decade ago to pursue her journalism career in New York– Ariel didn’t blame her. West Virginia was sea of boredom and annoying mountains.
So naturally, when her father loaned her his car so she could pick up some meat for dinner, she instead took it down to her friend Katherine’s house.
Katherine rolled her eyes when she answered the door. “Don’t you have anyone else to bother on the weekends?” she asked. Katherine was short in appearance and in nature, making her generally difficult to get along with. But she didn’t complain when Ariel followed her into the living room and silently offered her a bowl of peppermints.
“No thanks,” said Ariel, dropping her purse onto the couch and sitting down seat to it. Katherine took a place in the armchair across from her. “How’s school?”
Katherine groaned. “Awful. I don’t know how you handled so many APs; I’m practically drowning in homework.”
Ariel stiffened. “You’ll get used to it… learn how to manage your time and stuff.”
Katherine shrugged and took a peppermint for herself. “Still, I’m a senior now. Shouldn’t I have time for fun and bullying freshmen?”
Ariel laughed. “Don’t relish being at the top so much. Next year you’ll be a lowly freshman again, and upperclassmen can smell arrogance.”
Katherine paused in unwrapping a second peppermint, the first one still in her mouth. “So you’re getting picked on by upperclassmen at Rockmont State?”
“What?” Ariel sat straight up. “What gave you that idea?”
“Well,” said Katherine slowly. “You’re pretty arrogant, right? You’re always talking about how you’re too good for community college.”
Ariel scowled. “That’s different. I don’t think I’m better just because I happened to be part of a certain class. I know I’m better because I’m smarter than everyone else.”
Katherine snorted. “Says the girl who was rejected from every college she applied to.” Ariel threw a couch pillow at her at her. Katherine jerked to the side away from it, and it knocked over the lamp. There was a thick silence as Katherine righted it, checking for damage. When she confirmed it was unharmed, she burst into laughter. After a moment Ariel joined her, not sure if she meant it or not.
After about twenty minutes of meaningless chatter about the high school and new teachers who didn’t understand the subject they taught and the boys Katherine liked, Ariel picked up her purse and stood.
“I should be going. Can I use your bathroom first?”
“Better than going in our yard,” Katherine replied dryly. Ariel shuffled out of the living room, but instead of going down the hall to the bathroom, she veered left and entered the kitchen. Quietly, she opened the freezer and took a plastic-wrapped steak from the door, hastily shoving it into her purse. Closing the freezer door, she wonder back into the hallway and into the bathroom, where she dutifully flushed the toilet and washed her hands. When she returned to the living room, Katherine barely looked at her over a magazine.
“See you, Kat.”
“Next time find someone else to bug, okay?” said Katherine as she turned a page.
“Will do,” said Ariel as she walked out the door. She wouldn’t, of course, since all her friends had left town to pursue a college degree.
When she arrive home, Ariel’s dad was pouring over papers in his office.
“I’ll put the meat in the kitchen,” she said from the doorway. “Where’s grandma?”
“She went across the street to see how Miss Gables was doing.” Miss Gables had caught an early case of the flu. Ariel’s dad marked something on his papers with a red pen, then glanced up at her. “Where’s the change from the money I gave you?”
Ariel shrugged. “There wasn’t any change.”
Mr. Anders sighed. “Ariel, please.”
Scowling, Ariel removed some money from her wallet and tossed it at his desk. “I don’t see why you care so much about a dollar sixty-two.” Turning on her heel, she stomped back to the kitchen and dropped the steak she had stolen on the table. Someone had left the jar of pickles out. She took one for herself and replaced the jar in the fridge. She then climbed onto the counter herself, dangling her feet over the linoleum floor and letting her ballet flats slide off her feet.
She still had an essay to proofread, but that wouldn’t take so long. She’d already done the calculus assignment and finished up the Spanish worksheet… she took a bite of her pickle. Sunday afternoons were quite dull when you’d already finished all your homework on Saturday.
Ariel sighed and tried to lean against the wall behind her, but the toaster made this to difficult and she settled for a pathetic slouch. It wasn’t her fault, really, that she had nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than her homework. It wasn’t her fault that Beth and Caroline were in Ohio, and Jackson and Claire and Sibyl were in Virginia, and Daniel had gone all the way to California, and Linda had gone and gotten herself into Yale, that traitor. It wasn’t her fault Harvard and Princeton and MIT didn’t want her. It wasn’t her fault she hadn’t applied anywhere else, either. It would have been silly, and she was guaranteed to get into one of them as a transfer student next year anyway. Maybe she’d even apply to Brown or Stanford or Yale like Linda…
Ariel continued that sour train of thought as she finished her equally sour pickle. Her grandmother came home to find her glaring fiercely at the left sink faucet from her place on the counter.
“Hey, princess. What’s got you down?”
“Meat for dinner’s here,” Ariel answered flatly, and held out the partially thawed meat package. Her grandmother took it from her.
“Ariel, sweetheart, this is expired a week ago.”
Ariel blinked, then giggled. “Sorry. I guess I wasn’t paying attention. Don’t tell dad?”
Her grandmother huffed. “I don’t see how I couldn’t. He’s expecting it.”
“Tell him you didn’t have enough time to left it thaw,” Ariel persuaded, sliding off the counter.
The older woman sighed. “I guess. We have some leftover meatballs I could heat up… and we have a box of bow-tie pasta…” She began methodically gathering cooking supplies.
“How’s Miss Gables?”
“Oh, better,” her grandmother answered vaguely. “Well enough to cook her own meals.”
Ariel drifted out of the kitchen then, up the stairs and into her room. She was turning on her laptop when her cell phone rang.
“Hey, Katherine.”
“Woman, did you take my meat?”
“Kat, why would I take your meat?”
“You took my baby corn last week; why wouldn't you take my meat?”
“I don’t even like baby corn.” Ariel opened Solitaire.
“Everyone likes baby corn,” Katherine hissed.
“Look, even if I did like baby corn, why the hell would I steal it from you? Only creepers and weirdoes do stuff like that.”
“Then where would it go, Ariel? To the magical land of Oz?”
“Look, Katherine,” Ariel whined, “I have a ton of homework due tomorrow. Can we argue about this some other time?”
“Don’t come to my house anymore,” Katherine asserted. “My mom’s seriously pissed about this whole disappearing-food thing.”
“Kat–”
“Don’t.” And she hung up.
Ariel frowned down at her ancient phone. “It was no good anyway,” she muttered to it.

Ariel was still peeved that, although she had had her license since she was sixteen, and even though she was technically an adult, her father still drove her to school. Usually the car ride was passed in sleepy silence, but on that Monday morning Mr. Anders decided to start a conversation.
“How are classes?” he asked.
“Okay,” Ariel answered.
“Still top of your class?” He briefly took his eyes off the road to smile at her. Ariel’s face remained blank and she made an ambiguous noise in the back of her throat.
“Next year,” he tried again, “I think you should apply to WVU. That way you can come home on the weekends.”
Ariel was tempted to hit her head against the dashboard. Instead, she settled for slumping lower in the car seat.
“Dad, you know I want to get as far away as possible.”
“I know, but…” He looked back at her again. “I just don’t understand why. Rock Mont’s a beautiful town, it’s got wonderful people, and–”
“And you still live with your mother.” Ariel stared back at him accusingly. He broke he gaze almost immediately. Most likely it was to continue paying attention to the road, but Ariel liked to think it was the challenge in her eyes.
They didn’t talk the rest of the way, and Ariel didn’t say goodbye when she slide out of the car, pulling her messenger bag along behind her. Her father did, though.
“Have fun at school.”
She was not enter second grade. She ignored him.
Her nine o’clock calculus class was as dull as usual and was followed by a two hour break before her Literary Analysis class. She decided to spend in the student lounge.
Rock Mont State Community College was not very big, and the lounge reflect that. There were five or six round tables scattered about with thread worn couches lining the walls. The was a TV you could watch by tuning in to the correct radio station to get sound, three vending machines, a pinball machine, and a claw machine filled with random plush toys. Ariel deposited her bag on one of the couches and wondered over to it.
The claw machine had been her mortal enemy and best friend ever since she had started school back in August. On one hand, it was the most exciting thing to do on campus. On the other, she had yet to win anything from it and had lost a large amount of quarters. But she had just tricked some spending money out of her father with the whole meat incident, so she fished some loose change out of her pockets. All she had were pennies and a single dime.
“Need a loan?” A voice asked from behind her.
It was a blonde boy she recognized as going to high school with years ago. He had been a year or two ahead of her, but beyond that she remembered nothing about him. She managed to pull her lips into a smile for him, and he grinned back, perfectly aligned teeth behind his thin lips and freckled face. She suddenly recalled that, at some point, he had had braces.
“No thanks,” she said, edging away from the claw machine. “It’s just a game.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun. It’s just a quarter.” And he brushed past her to put a coin in himself. She watched him pick up a stuffed elephant and drop it with the mechanical claw as she grumpily bit at the nail of her right pinky finger. He was taller than she remembered: she barely reached his shoulder. Of course, as she was roughly five foot three, this was not much of an accomplishment.
“Aw,” he turned back to her, pouting. “I can never win anything from these things.”
“Neither can I,” she admitted, scratching her forearm. “But they’re fun, I guess.”
“Hey…” he cocked his head and squinted at her, lazily leaning against the claw machine. “You seem familiar. Did you go to Rock Mont High?”
Ariel stopped herself from giving a snide answer about how most of the students here went to their high school. “Yeah, I graduated this year.”
“Huh, cool,” he answered, and absently began fiddling with the machine’s joystick controller. “I just moved back here… I was working in Charleston for about a year and a half, but you can make more money with a real degree, you know?”
Yes, yes she did know. “Why not go to school in Charleston?”
He shrugged. “I missed this place. A lot of my best buds are still here, you know?”
This boy expected her to know a lot of things, apparently. “All mine left,” she replied bitterly. He smiled in the way people do when they’re not quite sure what else to do.
“Huh. Um. My name’s Bryan, by the way.” He extended his hand to her. She took it.
“I’m Ariel.”
His eyes widened at that. They were hazel, she noted. “Ariel Anders?”
“Yeah.” She wrestled her hand from his grasp. She had a novel in her messenger bag, and she gazed longingly at it past Bryan’s shoulder.
“Weren’t you that super smart girl? Why are you still in Rock Mont?”
She winced. “I… only applied to three colleges. No back-ups.”
“Oh…” he looked at his feet then. “I’m sorry about that. At least you’ll do well here, right?”
“I hope so,” Ariel answered and stared down at her own feet.
“Say…” He stood up from the machine and took a step toward her. “You know McTavern’s?”
Ariel scuffed her foot along the thin carpet. “The place behind the school?” She wasn’t sure where this was going, and she took a step away from him. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah, there having, like, a party this Friday. Live bands and cheap food and free pool and stuff. Proceeds go to the children’s hospital.”
Ariel had never played pool in her life. She had also never been inside McTavern’s. She furrowed her eyebrows. “Are you asking me out?”
He laughed nervously at that. “Well, no, not exactly. But it’d be good to catch up, yeah? Plus, think of the children, Ariel, the children!” He teasingly and lightly punched her shoulder. Ariel’s mouth did a sort of twitch as she restrained herself from the scowl such behavior from a near-stranger would usually warrant from her.
“Maybe,” she muttered.
“Cool,” Bryan beamed. “Seven on Friday, okay? I’ve got a ten thirty class, but I’ll see you around.” He turned from her and half-jogged out of the student lounge. Ariel suddenly realized there were a handful of other students seated at the table and couches, and even though none of them had been paying the slightest attention to her and Bryan, she felt her face go hot.
Thursday night Ariel called Katherine to see if she wanted to hang out Friday night.
“Oh, dude, I’m going to Steve’s with Emily and Nora.”
“Oh. Can I come? I think I’ve met Emily, we get along pretty well, and–”
“Steve doesn’t like you.”
And Katherine hung up on her.
Ariel let out a frustrated gurgle that was meant to be a scream, and threw her phone against the back on the couch on which she was sitting as hard as she could. It bounced off and slide across the hard wood floor and under the coffee table, which Ariel kicked at in frustration. Her leg proved too short. She actually screamed then.
“Ariel, sweetheart.” Her grandmother poked her head into the living room. “What’s wrong now?”
“Katherine is scum,” Ariel seethed and buried her chewed-off finger nails into the arm of the couch. She could think of many more colorful words for Katherine than scum, but none of them were suitable for her grandmother’s ears.
“Oh, honey,” her grandmother waltz across the room and sat next to her, covering Ariel’s thin hands with her own wrinkled ones. “I think you’re relying too much on Katherine for companionship.”
Ariel bristled. “Well what else am I supposed to do? Everyone else left, and dad won’t lend me the car for even a weekend, and–”
“Ariel.” Her grandmother brushed a strand of her black hair from her face. “Surely you’ve got some other people to talk to? Think.” Ariel stared back at her.
“Well… I– I was invited to a party.” Her grandmother smiled and patted her hand.
“See, sweetie? You can still branch out. It’s not the end of the world.” And she got up and went back to the kitchen.
Ariel kneeled on the floor in order to retrieve her cell phone from under the coffee table. She wasn’t particularly interested in Bryan, but she’d be damned if she spent another Friday night home alone.
Friday morning did not go as planned. She received her graded literature essay back at the end of class.
“Professor Hayden.” As soon as the last, half-asleep student had left the room, she cornered the stocky man. “I don’t understand my grade.”
Professor Hayden paused in organizing his class notes, hunched over the small table at the front of the room. “I thought I made myself clear in my comments.”
Ariel could feel the ends of her eyebrows swooping down into a scowl. She fought to keep them level. “Professor Hayden, I have provided ample support for all my claims, all with several examples–”
“Miss Anders.” He straightened up then and gave her a look that was somewhere between a frown and a quizzical glance. “It’s not the amount of support, it’s the quality that I’m looking for.”
“I don’t understand.” Ariel had also considered herself to be good at analyzing text. Surely her three thousand words of claims and proof had some merit to it. Professor Hayden point at the essay grasped in her hands.
“You didn’t allow yourself nearly enough room to discuss all the material you brought up. Had it been teased out, Miss Anders, I have no doubt that you could have made it into a wonderful essay. It would, however, have been far above the word maximum. Please keep this in mind for next time.” He placed his file of papers under his arm with some finality, and faced the door of the classroom. Ariel’s’ facial control slipped and she glowered at him, taking a step to the right to prevent him from further heading toward the door.
“I fulfilled all the requirements you outlined, even if not perfectly. I should get at least a B.”
Professor Hayden pinched the bridge of his nose with his free arm.
“Miss Anders, as I have stated to the class several times, grades are non-negotiable.”
“Dan got a B. He has the grammar of a chimp!” The paper in her hands crinkled loudly as she balled her hands into fists. “I got a 5 in AP Lit– I’m not some nitwit who needs everything she writes combed over for her.”
“Miss Anders, stop.” Professor Hayden stepped around her to the door and opened it. She opened her mouth to protest, but barely got a syllable out before he cut her off. “While I have no doubt you did well in high school, I am not an AP evaluator. You grade remains unchanged.” He left, leaving Ariel alone and fuming in the middle of the empty class room. She stood like that for several movements, letting the rage radiate from her body in waves. When she left like she could talk to someone without yelling at them again, she slowly gathered her belongings and walked back tot the student lounge.
Bryan wasn’t there, but she reminded herself he was just an excuse not to stay home on the weekend. She walked to the claw machine and let her messenger bag fall to the floor beside it. She stretched, rotating her shoulders in attempt to pop her back. This failed, and she grumbled to herself about it as she fished a few quarters out of her pocket. She had thought to ask her table mate in Spanish for change earlier that day.
Seventy five cents later, she was out of quarters and had nothing to show for it. For the briefest moment she was as upset and frustration as she had been talking to Professor Hayden, but it passed quickly, leaving her feeling drained. She had been missing sleep in favor of late night television, which she had taken up in favor of calling one of her out of state friends, who were showing more and more disinterest in her as their college lives became more exciting. Dragging her bag behind her, Ariel trudged over to one of the couches and collapses onto it, telling her a short catnap would be healthy.
She awoke to the sound of squeaky wheels. She rubbed her eyes and sat up. Her neck, which had been resting at an awkward angle to the arm of the couch, decided this was a bad idea and pain shot threw her head. She groaned and peered around the room. It was darker outside, she could see through the windows. There were no students left, just a janitor pulling a noisy trashcan on wheel behind him as he gathered trash bags from the various garbage cans scattered throughout the room.
“What time is it?” she asked.
He pushed his foot into a small waste disposal bin, compressing the chip wrappers and scrap paper within into a more manageable volume. “Seven-thirty,” he answered shortly.
Ariel watched him in silence as he wrestled the bag from the bin, tied it off and chucked into the larger trash can. He had several new trash bag tied to the handle of it, and he removed one and lined the small bin with it. When he was done, he turned and looked her straight in the eye.
“Can I help you?”
It was such a cliché, common sort of thing to say, especially since she was staring, that Ariel should have expected it. She didn’t, though, and blushed. He was much younger than any of the janitors she’d seen at her high school– not much older than her, even. They probably would have overlapped in high school, but she didn’t recognize him. He wasn’t particularly tall, an inch or two shorter than Bryan maybe, and his hair was as dark and black as hers, though, she noted with a bit of envy, much more lustrous. His chin and nose were sharp, almost pointed, and his eyes were a honey brown, sharp, and still staring at her expectantly.
“No, sorry, just trying to get my bearings. I wasn’t planning on taking a four hour nap.”
He quirked a lone eyebrow at that. “Well, the last night class ends at 8:00, so if you don’t leave soon I’m supposed to escort you off the premise.”
Ariel laughed nervously and searched around her feet for her bag. “What if I was still sleep?”
“You know,” he answered, carting the his mobile trashcan back across the room toward the door, “I don’t think they mentioned that in training.”
Ariel had stopped paying attention. She was upside down on the couch, peering under it with her rear in the air. “Where is it?” she hissed.
The young janitor paused. “Did you lose something?”
Ariel clumsily righted herself on the couch and stood, pulling a few loose strands of hair behind her ears. “My bag.” Her eyebrows were down in the frown she seemed to be wearing so often recently. “I’m pretty sure I left it by my head when I fell asleep…” She trailed off, and he sauntered over to her. His walk was smooth and seemed awfully confident for a man in a blue janitor’s uniform. He got down on his knees and checked under and around the couch himself while Ariel stood to the side, biting her nails and wondering if she should try to start a conversation.
“Perhaps it was moved by accident, or you left it somewhere else,” the janitor suggested as he got back onto his feet.
“Oh, um… maybe.”
He helped her look for it, both of them crawling around the floor of the student lounge as he quizzed her on the size, color and contents of her messenger bag.
“Did you have anything valuable in it?”
“Not really,” she answered, peering behind one of the vending machines. There was no way her bag could fit behind here, she realized dumbly. She did, however, find a nickel. She pocketed it. “I usually leave my wallet at home and my cell phone’s in my pocket… I guess the graphing calculator cost a bit, though. And some textbooks?” College text books, she had realized, were quite valuable.
“It may have been stolen,” the janitor said darkly from where he was examining the underside of a table. Ariel choked back a Well, duh.
"That would suck," she said instead.
"You should come back tomorrow and inquire at Information about it," he went on, crossing the room to her with his gliding stride, making him seem completely out of place in a janitor's outfit, and no, Ariel was NOT thinking about that because she had a date tonight.
"Oh!" she gasped, and fumbled to get her cell phone out of her jacket pocket. "I was supposed to be somewhere..."
The janitor stood and watched her unblinkingly as she fiddled with it. The display told her it was 7:53 and she had missed six calls from home. She realized she was also supposed to have been picked up by her father four hours ago. Cursing under her breath, she selected 'return call' and pressed the device to her ear.
The janitor was still watching, standing not five feet from her, without even a twitch of the eyelid. Come to think of it, she had yet to seem him blink: he just stared, stared, stared at everything. Unnerved by this realization, she mumbled an excuse about needing to make a call and excused herself to the hallway, walking as briskly as possible while listening to her home phone ring.
"Hello?" He grandmother had answered.
"Hey grandma," said Ariel as she leaned against a cinder block wall. "Did dad come for me? I totally feel asleep by accident."
"Ariel!" her grandmother seemed oddly relieved; probably just the typical mother bear instincts of a grandmother. "We had no idea where you went. Katherine had no idea, and your father checked around campus--"
"I was just in the student lounge," Ariel explained, smiling bitterly. "Sorry I worried you. But, uh, I was just going to head over to a party at McTavern's."
"Oh," her grandmother seemed surprised. "So you did find new friends over there."
"Well, kind of..." Ariel completely forgot what she was saying as the janitor came out for the lounge, pulling his trash bin with him. Ariel barely heard the next thing her grandmother said as she watched him lock the door. He still wasn't blinking. "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?"
"I said I'll get your father to drop the car off over there and take the bus back. You be out late, right?"
"Yeah." The janitor stood staring at her again, perfectly motionless. She raised her eyebrows at him in curiosity.
"I don't want you walking all the way home from the bus stop late at night, and I'm sure your father won't want to be up too late tonight," her grandmother babbled on. Ariel was having a staring contest with him now. She was sure that if she watched him long enough he would have to blink, but he was just blandly gazing back at her.
"Oh, Miss NAME's at the door; I'll see you soon, honey. Be safe." Her grandmother made a kiss noise into the phone and hung up. Ariel slowly pulling her phone away from her face, eyes still locked with the janitor's. Her eyes burned, but he was just staring back with total disinterest.
Finally, she blinked. He didn’t.
“It’s 8:00,” he said flatly.
“Good to know,” she answered, frowning slightly. Out in the hallway, it was becoming clear how empty the building was. There was no sound from the surrounding classrooms, just a low electric hum (a projector someone forgot to turn off?) and her own respiration. The janitor didn’t make a noise as he strode toward her.
“I told you, you have to leave at 8:00.”
She had forgotten that.
“Sorry,” she answered, pocketing her phone and averting her eyes abashedly. Wait, no, she thought. Don’t look away from the strange man you’re alone in a secluded place with. “I don’t need you to escort me though,” she added, louder than necessary.