Evelyn's Pendant

7.

I wake up to my alarm buzzing on my nightstand at seven a.m. I yawn and my phone buzzes as well. I clumsily take my phone off my nightstand and see I have a text from Hannah.

Morning, Lil! Good luck on your first day of classes! Let's meet up later for lunch xoxo

Classes? I start to panic.

Oh, right. College equals classes.

After quickly getting changed, I head to my first class of the day, which of course had to be across campus. The end of summer heat makes my thin and scarred thighs chafe and sweat beads on my forehead. I find the classroom I'm supposed to be in, exactly five minutes before class begins.

"Lillian!" I hear a familiar voice call to me from the other side of the classroom. I look at the people in the class and most of them are either talking amongst themselves or are completely quiet, waiting for class to start. Then I see Alexa, waving me down in the back corner of the class, so I make my way over to her. "Sit next to me!"

"Hey, Alexa," I say. "Glad you're in this class with me." I sit at the desk next to her.

"Me too! But, honestly, I can't even remember what class this is," she admits.

I look at the schedule that I used to find my way here. "It's History of Art."

"Oh, great! I forgot I signed up for this class." We both laugh.

We don't talk about what happened two nights ago, mostly because everything was discussed via text or the morning after. I just told them all to let it go and we're going to move along from it. The dizziness has subsided, but my head still aches once in a while. If I did get a concussion, it was relatively minor. I made sure to rest and take it easy since then, and the Dissidents have been very supportive and helpful.

"Good morning, class!" A woman says as she enters the classroom. She wears a striped dress and has her brown hair up in a messy bun.

Alexa whispers to me, "Oh, I heard this professor is good!"

"Welcome to History of Art," the woman says. "I will be your professor for this semester," she starts writing the name of the class on the whiteboard in front of us. "You can all just call me Mary. I'm not all about that 'Professor LastName' crap. Just Mary," she turns to face us all. "Got it?"

We all nod.

"Good. Now in this class, we will be talking about the most famous artists in our history that have created some amazing things that you all have seen before," she paces the front of the room. "But, before we start all of that stuff, I would like to go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves and tell us your name and major and why you took this class."

Great.

She starts at the front of the room and one by one, the people of the class introduce themselves. Eventually, introductions make their way to Alexa.

"My name's Alexa Kaiser!" she says confidently while waving her hand at our classmates. "I'm a performing arts major and I'm taking this class because I want to learn more about the history of performing arts such as theater and dancing. So, if we could briefly go over those topics, that'd be fantastic!" She finishes strongly and Mary smiles at her. How can I beat that?

Then it's my turn. I take a deep breath. Introductions haven't really ever been my thing. It doesn't really matter what they're about, I just don't like telling people about myself. But, this is a fresh start, right? Time to become comfortable with these kinds of things.

"My name is Lillian Shaw, -" I murmur. I'm cut off by a girl sitting across the room from me gasping, and she looks pale and stares at me with bulging blue eyes.