Free Double Vision by Colby Marshall Page B

eyes to block the sun, aware of the glass door in case the brunette with the swishy ponytail came back out, but his gaze lingered on the homeless man with the shoe box across the way. Students entering the pavilion passed him, mostly paying him no mind, ignoring his requests for change as though they couldn’t hear them. Standard. As the man who called himself Justice watched them, he seethed quietly. These people had committed no crimes, but to observe people ignoring another human being, even if that man
was
a beggar, brought a metallic taste to his mouth.
    Occasionally a guy or girl would smile at the old man and politely explain that they didn’t have any spare money. Once or twice, he even saw someone toss a few coins into the cardboard box. Some decency, perhaps. Something to be grateful for.
    He glanced at his wristwatch, a cheap plastic thing he bought at the Dollar Roundup for a buck. The brunette with the swishy ponytail had only been inside ten minutes. Why was he so antsy for her to come out?
    Across the way, next to where the bearded man sat, a horde of students spilled into the pavilion, no doubt in the fray of time between class periods. The old codger put his shoe box on the wall, then held on to the edge of the low wall, bent one knee, and used the stone slab to push himself to his feet. Just as he reached for his shoe box, however, a hand knocked into it.
    For a moment, the old man stared at the ground, the meager contents of his receptacle strewn across the pavilion stone. Then he turned in the direction from where the hand had come. His face looked sunken, confused.
    But the man who called himself Justice had already seen what the beggar was now spotting for the first time. Two students. Females. One girl with a pencil-thin neck and bony cheeks stood a foot away from another girl with wild, frizzy red curls. The bony-cheek girl lingered but hid most of her face behind the book she was holding, embarrassed. But the other? The red-haired girl faced the old man, shoulders squared, cackling. She smirked as her laughter waned. The old man put his hands to his knees as he bent ever so slowly at the waist, reaching for a dollar that had been flung from his shoe box. Just as his fingers brushed it, the pointy toe of a black high-heeled boot clamped over its end.
    The scrawny beggar looked up at the redhead from his crouch and shook his head. “Why are you doing this? I just want to pick up my dollar bill here, young lady. No reason to be nasty about it.”
    The redhead gave the old man a fake smile, marinated in contempt. “
Your
dollar? Don’t you mean the dollar of some bleeding heart kid? One who gave you pocket change you’re too lazy to earn, because all you do is sit around a college campus all day asking for handouts?”
    She slid the dollar under her boot toward her, then bent and lifted it, held it directly in front of the old man’s face. “This dollar? It was never yours, and it’s not going to be now, either.”
    She ripped the single bill in two, then crumpled the pieces in her hand, tossed them to the ground by the old man’s shoe box, which lay on its side. “Come on, Diana let’s go,” she said. The redhead whipped around and headed for one of the iron tables adorned with umbrellas, like the one the man who called himself Justice was sitting at now. Her friend, however, stayed behind just long enough to mouth, “I’m sorry,” to the shaky old man.
    And that’s when the man who called himself Justice saw it. The book the friend carried, the one she had used to hide her face. The screened print on the front said very clearly Latin III. That was one three, and the spine of the book she held under it at her side provided the final two threes: Biology 3300. Three threes.
    The man who called himself Justice forgot about the glass door of the Student Life Center and the swishy ponytail of the girl inside it as he slowly turned his