Free Fragmented by Eliza Lentzski

don’t want to fall behind.”
    “All of my notebooks should be in my backpack,” Raleigh said, gesturing to the bag hanging on the back of a desk chair that probably went unused beyond serving as a coat hanger. “I’d get it for you, but that would take a little longer.”
    My smile felt tight on my face. I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable every time Raleigh made reference to her condition, even though she’d never been self-pitying about it. She was simply stating facts.
    I dug around in the bag, flipping between folders and textbooks and spiral notebooks until I found the notes I had been looking for.
    “Did my aunt freak out when she answered the door? We don’t get many visitors out here.”
    “She looked a little skeptical,” I admitted, “but she seemed fine.”
    I sat down on the floor with Raleigh’s notes and pulled my psychology notebook out of my backpack. I flipped both notebooks open. My own half-earnest attempt to pay attention during the professor’s lectures glared back at me in blue pen. Unlike mine, Raleigh’s note-taking was thorough and focused, and her handwriting was evenly-spaced letters and words. It was maddening how perfect even her notes were.
    “You don’t have to copy those right now,” Raleigh said. “You can take them home and return them later.”
    “No, this is fine.” I couldn’t admit that I wanted to spend more time with her—not to Raleigh and certainly not to myself. I was only doing this for school, I lied to myself.
    I focused my energies on transferring the information from Raleigh’s notebook to my own. Half a page in, I hazarded a glance up at the bed. Raleigh stared back at me, her position unchanged since my arrival and her book still closed on her lap. I hastily looked away, bringing my eyes back to the pages of the notebook.
    “Is everything okay?”
    “With what?” I asked, looking up.
    “The people you babysit for; you said there was an emergency.”
    “Oh. That. Yeah, Sasha got sick at school.”
    “Poor thing,” Raleigh murmured. “How old is she?”
    “She just turned five.”
    “That’s a fun age.”
    There was something regal and reserved about Raleigh, yet sly and knowing. It made me wonder what secrets she was hiding. I knew all too well that everyone had secrets.
    “Your real name is Anna?”
    “That’s what it says on my birth certificate, but no one’s ever called me that—except my aunt.”
    “She seems…” I searched for a word to describe the woman who’d answered the door. “Intense.”
    “So do you.”
    “Touché.”
    Raleigh picked at the yarn of the afghan while I resumed copying her notes. She looked up with new curiosity in her eyes. “How did you know where I lived?”
    I winced. “I called the university pretending to be someone from your hospital checking up on the school’s ADA compliance.”
    “Wow. You really are serious about school.”
    “I have to maintain a certain GPA to keep my scholarship,” I shrugged in my defense. “There’s no way I would have been able to afford school on my own.”
    “I get that. My parents are paying for me to be here, but before that I was on academic scholarship at Smith.”
    “Oh yeah?” I hated my voice. It sounded too loud in my head.
    Raleigh nodded. “My parents had been hoping I’d go to Boston College and be closer to home, but it had been my dream to go to Smith, ever since I was little. But then the accident happened. My parents were helping me make the two-hour trip into Boston a couple times a week for PT, but I think it got to be too much for them.” She shrugged delicately. “So, here I am in Chicago instead.”
    “Why do you live all the way out here? Don’t they have accessible rooms on campus?”
    The modest smile that she’d been accommodating enough to give me faltered. “I need help doing things,” she said simply. “And I couldn’t ask a roommate I barely know to do those things for me.”
    I immediately felt bad for prying. I