Ovenshine

1.

The library is never as quiet as a library probably should be.

A group of friends to Indy's left bond over their mutual hatred for Orgo and its apparently eccentric professor. A reticent boy to her right, for whatever reason, decides to watch a YouTube video without headphones. And faintly, beyond the library's gothic arched windows, rings the chaotic revelry of all the Proudley students who decided studying was the very last thing they were going to do with their Saturday night.

How Indy wishes she was one of them. Someone who could wing all their exams with little consequence, someone to whom an A or a B meant more or less the same thing. But she isn't, and she never has been, so she whittles away the hours at the mahogany desk in front of her, the air scented with carpet cleaner and coffee gone cold.

When her phone rings, she nearly misses it, her mind is so far away. The YouTube boy picks up his head and glances at her from behind smudged glasses as if to say, You gonna answer that? Indy curls her lip, and answers. "Hello?"

"Indy. Hey. Are you busy?"

It's Sylvia, her roommate, who was her enemy for much of her first semester here, before being enemies got old and Indy needed someone who actually knew how to cornrow. "Sort of."

"No you're not. Listen. I need you to come to Dauphine Street."

Indy isn't sure how she knows, but it's something in the exhaustion of Sylvia's otherwise colorful voice, the way it drops partially into a whisper, too, like she's saying something it's better someone else doesn't overhear. "Tell me straight, Syl," Indy says with a sigh, already closing her laptop, the click of it echoing off the high ceilings. "Is it Percy?"

There is no sigh, no hesitation, only grim acceptance. "It's Percy."

She's going to kill him. One of these days, she swears she's going to. "Put him on the phone."

"Bad idea," Sylvia says. "He's currently upchucking next to a sewer drain. Even if he were available I don't think it'd be the most pleasant conversation."

Indy wants to throw her backpack through one of the windows. Instead, she tosses it over her shoulders. "I'll be there in five. Don't let him wander off anywhere."

"Sure. Hurry up," Sylvia says, and the call clicks to a close in Indy's ear.

The autumn air is crisp, skin-tingling, not yet enough to make Indy's teeth chatter but enough to make her wish she was wearing a slightly heavier jacket. The red and pink cobblestones of Proudley's central walkway are strewn with leaves and shiny with puddles of dubious depths; it rained the night before, and the smell of damp earth and grass still lingers in the air. Normally Indy would pause, at least for a second, to appreciate the reflection of the gold street lamps in the pools of water between the stones, the throngs of laughing people tucked under the brick awnings of the residence halls. Now her heart is beating too fast. She cuts a sharp diagonal through the Commons, the square lawn around which Proudley's Tudor-style buildings are all organized.

It's a further walk than she would like at this hour, since Dauphine Street isn't part of Proudley at all, but rather just beyond the campus border, leading into the town surrounding it. She walks fast, and when her legs begin to ache with the effort, she ignores it.

She doesn't see the man turning the corner on his way out of Bethune Building until she's already slammed into him, sending a flurry of crisp white papers floating towards the soggy ground. Indy's pulse speeds with embarrassment, even before she looks up into a face she wishes she didn't recognize.

"Dr. Clover!" Indy yelps, bending to retrieve the papers, ignoring his insistence that she doesn't need to. "I'm so sorry. That was completely my bad."