Free Waking Rose: A Fairy Tale Retold by Regina Doman Page A

They’re not simply ordinary. No one really is .
     
    H IS
     
    Fish was sitting in his class with Dr. Anschlung, “Keats and the Romantic Movement.”  He had grown to be more and more grateful for his professor and employer, who seemed to value literature for what it was. The other professors in the department seemed more intent on tearing literary works down than leading others to appreciate them. Now she was giving them their assignment for the midterm exam, which would be a paper. “You need to pick a long poem by Keats and give a complete analysis of it according to the methods we have studied,” she said, looking over the class.
    Fish paged through his course book, The Complete Poetry and Writings of John Keats . He had always been taken with the melancholy poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” but of course, that was too short and simple. However, according to the footnotes in his text, the poem was mentioned by name in another Keats poem, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” which was considerably longer. He had read it a long time ago—in jail, actually. It hung hauntingly in his memory, but not, fortunately, among his more painful remembrances. Actually, considering most of his time in juvenile detention, it had been rather positive.
      After class he ran down to the library and found several books with commentaries on the poem. Signing them out before anyone else in the class could do so, he thrust them in his backpack and hurried home. He would look over them this weekend.
    Keeping busy…keeping busy…
     
    Hers
     
    “Kateri, can I borrow your car tomorrow?” Rose asked, as she got ready to leave for play practice on Friday evening.
    “What for?” Her roommate was sitting on the ground, index cards and loose-leaf paper spread out around her, her wild black hair all in disarray around her almond-shaped eyes, which were fixed on her work. She was preparing for a test, in one of her sporadic periods of intense devotion to schoolwork.
    “I need to go looking for a barn in the country that belongs to my family,” Rose explained.
    Kateri shook her head. “Sorry, got a protest tomorrow.”
    That was her roommate—study, study, then protest, protest. Rose mused as she looked at her friend. Kateri went down to the hospital every Saturday morning to lead prayers for the children who were being aborted there. Her commitment to pro-life activism was a consuming passion that dictated her actions like clockwork.
    “Sorry, otherwise I wouldn’t mind,” Kateri said.
    “That’s all right,” Rose mused. “Who else around here is friendly enough to lend out a car?”
    “Why don’t you ask one of those Cor guys? You certainly hang out with them enough.”
    “You know, the first few times I heard you call them that, I thought you meant students enrolled in the Marine Corps or something.”  Rose said, flipping a brush through her ponytail. “But the name does fit. They’re so into weapons and war.”
    Kateri rolled her eyes. “Thoughtless violence,” she said. “Overgrown boys.”
    “Well, after all, they are boys,” Rose pointed out. “Don’t you like them?”
    Kateri looked up at her roommate, her black eyes dismissive. “They’re pretty odd,” she said. “If you like that sort of thing. Which I can see you do. I don’t have patience for those kinds of games.”
    Rose knew that Kateri, who was fairly offbeat herself, didn’t seem to care much for overly colorful people. “You seem to be more interested in Mater Dei guys,” Rose said, unable to resist teasing her.
    “That’s true,” Kateri inclined her head.
    Each of the three men’s dorms had a particular general character. The men of Lumen Christi tended to be athletes and business majors, and the men of Mater Dei were mostly theology or philosophy majors—including several quiet, earnest young men who seemed to admire Kateri for her serious activism, and she had “dated” a few of them (in the odd Mercy College dictionary, this could