Cheesecake

02. Waiting in the Waves

                                                 CHAPTER TWO

                                               Waiting in the Waves

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Avery pulled her crumpled schedule out of her jeans pocket to check her next class. It was the first day of the semester and her first time going through the campus. Just yesterday she had been to the science building and cafeteria; her mental notes of each building in correspondence to those two places had escaped her mind sometime between going to sleep last night and waking up at eleven-thirty this afternoon.

She perused over her schedule. Her next class is History 1301. Boy, doesn't that sound like fun! Yeah, right.

"Don't tell me you're just going to stand there all day." Serenity said, coming up behind Avery, her metal bracelets clanking on her wrist.

"Huh?" Avery looked up with a confused expression on her tired face.

Serenity shook her head and dropped it. "Nevermind. Do you have a scrunchy?"

After checking her backpack, Avery came up empty-handed, which wasn't surprising. She hardly ever wore her hair up.

Serenity leaned against the wall, hugging a book to her chest. "I don't have one either and I need it for Lab." she said as she tucked a piece of blonde hair behind her ear. "I'll just get one from a girl in class."

"Have you met anyone yet?" Avery asked tentatively.

"Well, I've talked to a few nice people, but nobody I generally like. What about you?" She pushed herself off the wall, straightening her back.

"I haven't had the pleasure." she said in a joking tone, despite her frustration on the matter. Avery didn't think she was so nervous about starting college until this morning, when she looked in the mirror and practiced her smile. She was hoping to look approachable, but she just wasn't feeling it today. All she wanted was to finish the day and go back to the dorm and read until she fell asleep.

"Have you forgotten how to make friends?"

Serenity's question caught her off-guard. "What?" Serenity laughed and Avery pushed her schedule back into her pocket.

"It happens sometimes. You psych yourself out so much that you forget how to function." she said so matter-of-factly. "My brother says that when he was younger he'd just come to school on the first day with a plate of cookies."

Avery smiled. "Right. Because everyone likes the boy with chocolate-chip cookies."

"Yeah. I don't know how that's working for him today, though."

They started into a slow walk toward the lecture halls. Avery looked up and saw the glass panels of the ceiling; the cloudless sky a jewel among squawking birds.

"How old is your brother?" Avery asked out of sake to keep the conversation going.

"Nineteen. Damn, she's such a twat." Serenity said a little harshly. "We have algebra together and I want to just die."

Avery blinked. Did she really just say that, she thought. "I thought you didn't know anybody here?" she asked, remembering their conversation at the dorm mixer.

"You asked if I have any friends here and I said no. I hardly count my brother as a friend." she made a face that told Avery that she was annoyed by just talking about her brother.