Free Spirit Legacy by E. E. Holmes Page B

Tia will ever let me pick the movie again.”
    “Sounds like it’ll be Disney movies and science documentaries for you from now on.”
    I grimaced and tucked my long braids into the obligatory hairnet. Then I donned my plastic gloves and started filling the plastic serving trays with Cheerios.
    The dining hall stayed even emptier than usual for a Saturday morning, which made sense considering how many kids had been out partying incognito the night before. Gabby had invited us to a party she was attending, but we’d declined. Halloween had probably been fun at one point in history, but now it just seemed like an opportunity for girls to prance around in the trashiest outfits they could legally get away with in public. After several years in a row of being unable to purchase a costume that covered my ass, I’d gone on strike.
    I was getting bored at the buffet line, and was amusing myself by separating the Froot Loops by color, when I looked up and saw him staring at me from across the room. It was the same boy from the carnival, sitting by himself at one of the tables under the window. Catching my eye, he raised a hand in greeting. Automatically I waved back, and then realized I was waving a spoon covered in blueberry yogurt. Turning bright red, I dropped the spoon and retreated to the bowels of the kitchen, begging Paige to switch assignments with me. Stuck on dish duty, she happily agreed. I spent the rest of my shift volunteering for the least visible tasks.
    The next time I saw him was almost a week later; he was heading up the crowded stairs of Wiltshire Hall while Tia and I were trotting down them. He grinned at me and winked. Momentarily dazed, I turned my head and followed his progress up the stairs until he disappeared around the banister.
    Tia stopped a few steps down from me. “Did you forget something?”
    “No,” I said, ripping my eyes away from the empty hallway above me. “I just saw someone I knew.”
    “Was it T-shirt Boy?” Tia asked, smirking. She had taken to calling him that since I made the mistake of telling her about him.
    I rolled my eyes. “Yes, but his real friends call him ‘Campus Apparel Man’.”
    “Oooh, can we go back up and find him? I want to see what he looks like!”
    “No, I don’t have time to be a psycho-stalker just now, thanks,” I said as I passed her on the staircase. I ignored the little part of me that was willing to risk psycho-stalker status just to talk to him.
    To tell the truth, I was a little annoyed with myself. It wasn’t like me to obsess over some boy, especially one whose name I didn’t even know. It was thoroughly Gabby-like behavior, and I hoped it wasn’t becoming a pattern. I seemed to be able to interact with the rest of the male population without devolving into an idiot.
    November brought gusty winds, the chill of oncoming winter, and the due date for my first major paper for Marshall’s class. Of the required twelve-page length I had completed exactly zero. I had no excuse, really; I’d done it to myself just like always. Somehow, without a deadline looming directly over my head like some invisible guillotine, I was incapable of motivating myself to work. It was one of the few traits I’d inherited from my mom; I always knew that one day, as much as I hated to admit it, I would be tracing her frantic patterns around the kitchen in the morning, gathering up the bits of work that I’d scattered around the house and swearing frantically under my breath as I tried to put on my shoes and eat a Pop-Tart at the same time. It seemed to be, alas, my fate. But I also knew that I worked best under pressure, and somehow, I never left things so late that I didn’t miraculously finish on time. So it was with only a mild fluttering of panic that I set out for Culver Library at 8pm on Thursday night. I had a whopping twelve hours before my paper was due. No problem.
    At least I wasn’t alone. As I walked through the main reading room with my laptop bag