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.