1. Homecoming Chaos

I think, if I’d known what I was getting into, I’d sooner have moved across the country than stay. Moving around the country for the first fifteen years of my life worked out well enough—I should have known better than to think that I could settle down for more than a few years here. Or maybe, just maybe, this all could have been avoided if I’d stayed behind in that lab.

It started like this: despite my better judgement, I let Lily coax me outside into the autumn afternoon.

Lily is my partner in our Intermediate Medical Lab Sciences class, and she’s normally pretty responsible with classwork. Homecoming weekend, however, is apparently where she draws the line.

We had a lab section earlier this afternoon, and I tried to linger around afterwards, but it’s Friday, and the homecoming parade is tonight, and Lily practically got an aneurysm when she realised I wanted to stay after-hours. We’re just undergrads, so we don’t have access to the lab on the weekends, and the assignment write-up is due before lecture on Tuesday morning.

“Everyone will be scrambling to finish their report after the Monday lab section,” I grumble as we wait for the elevator. “The lab will be super crowded.”

Maybe I can offer to stay behind on my own? It’ll suck to finish up the hemoanalysis by myself, but I also don’t want to risk my grades for something so mundane as the annual homecoming parade (which, you know, happens annually). Lily is nice and smart enough to keep up in class, but unlike me, she’s not a scholarship student. I need to keep my GPA above a 3.9 for my scholarship, and I can’t afford tuition otherwise.

As the elevator pings its arrival, however, a part of Lily seems to relent. “We could come in on Sunday?” she offers. “I’m free in the evening, and our TA—Jason—lives in the same dorm building as me, so I bet I could get him to open the lab up for us.”

I bite my lip. I have to work at The Caspian on Sunday, and I don’t really want to go around begging my coworkers to switch to a morning shift, but Lily definitely won’t agree to coming in the morning of the homecoming game and dance, so Saturday is out. I sigh to myself. Sunday night is probably the best compromise I’ll get.

Outside, the late September air is golden and syrupy, heavy with the sunlight of late afternoon and the scent of caramelised sugar. As I pay perfunctory attention to Lily’s ramblings-on (about her cheerleader friends, her date to the homecoming dance, and her planned outfit, among other inanities), I try not to judge her for how utterly foreign her world seems to be—all shallow drama.

I barely have time for friends, let alone boyfriends, and I’ve long since given up on being pretty. I’m the same height as Lily—which is to say: short—and we both have long, wavy hair, but that’s about where our similarities end.

Lily’s hair is auburn and perfectly pressed, compared to mine, which is messy and brassy-blonde. Lily actually has a figure, whereas I look all of fourteen years old. I have to work a part time job and maintain a scholarship to fund my degree, while Lily has her family supporting her.

Case in point, as we walk and talk through the campus, fording our way through the sea of fellow students, returning alumni, and their guests, we are interrupted by:

“Aunt Lily!” The owner of this girlish shriek is sprinting at full tilt towards us: a child, about five or six years old, dark red twin braids and a plaid pinafore dress.

Lily laughs and receives her niece with open arms, dropping her book bag carelessly to the pavement.

“I think I’ll go check out the stalls,” I quickly say, excusing myself as the rest of Lily’s family (parents, younger brother, older brother, and sister-in-law) congregate around her.

I can’t help but feel envious. Not in a mean way, I don’t think. Lily deserves to be happy and carefree, to have a family that loves her and to not worry about money. Still, though, it sometimes just feels like that sort of life is out of reach for me, orphan girl extraordinaire, squeezing into college by way of scholarship, working after school and on weekends to pay off bank loans, without so much as a great uncle or second cousin to my name.

Just me, Cecilia Thornhill.

It’s just a little lonely, is all.

“—just got rated, three Michellin stars—”

“Oh. My. God!” shrieks three voices in near-perfect unison.

I grimace discreetly. The crowd has carried me closer and closer to the street that’s to host the homecoming parade, and I’ve gotten stuck behind a massive group of cheerleaders, all golden tans and tight uniforms.

“I know, right?” the first one says, smugly tucking a stray curl of platinum hair behind her ear.

“I’d tell you off for hooking one of the players, but I’ll save the lecture for if he lets you on a second date.” The speaker this time is the tallest and blondest among them, standing near the centre of their group. If I’m not wrong, this would be their captain.

The first girl scowls, “You’re just jealous he didn’t ask you.”

The cheer captain scoffs. “He’s nice to look at, but he’s still on the team. You might be able to get away with a single date and a friendly you-know-what, but mark my words, if Coach finds out, she’ll definitely take you off the competition team.”

“You better—”

“I’m not going to tell her, but Emeric’s teammates? They might gossip—you know their rules are less strict than ours. They’re allowed to go out now and then, as long as they put football first.”

“Coach’s rules are brutal,” one of the other girls grumbles. “We’re in college, not high school. Does she think we’re gonna lose our heads just because—”

A path opens up, and I finally manage to stop listening in on the cheerleaders’ conversation—about the new quarterback, if I’m not mistaken. I was only a freshman last year, but everyone knew that the captain and quarterback of last year’s football team was a senior (now alumnus) named Adam Campbell who managed to lead the team to their first semi finals win in a decade. (They lost in the finals, of course, to some team from upstate.)

I look around for some landmarks, trying to figure out where the crowd has brought me.

After a moment, I realise that I’m only half a block away from the actual parade street, almost right at its start point. It must be getting close to the beginning of the parade, because everyone seems to have squeezed over to the side of the road, leaving the expanse of green lawn in front of a row of fair stalls rather empty.

“RECREATIONAL DODGEBALL LEAGUE SIGNUPS!” one of the tents advertises in block letters. Yet another banner reads, “HELP WANTED—MED TEAM ASSISTANTS AND VOLUNTEERS!”

This latter one is more along the lines of what I was looking for. I’ve been looking for a job closer to campus, and one of my TAs mentioned that some of the teams are open to taking pre-med students for medical assistants. I might only be a sophomore, but pre-med is still pre-med.

Just as I step forward to get a closer look at the second tent, I feel a sudden tingle at the back of my neck. I freeze, peering around at my surroundings even as I keep my head still. Once I determine that it has to be coming from behind me, I carefully turn around.

There! My gaze immediately snaps to a man standing on the outdoor practice fields, barely twenty feet away. He’s in full football gear, though, so his face is obscured by his helmet. Mostly, I can only see his silhouette, which is naturally tall and broad, as well as strangely suited to the ridiculous shoulder pads that football players tend to wear.

Beyond that, there’s just the large “07” emblazoned across his chest in glowing white paint and his eyes, which even from twenty feet away and through a chain link fence and football helmet, I can tell is a piercing blue-grey.

I can’t look away from them, these terrible eyes, somehow pale and dark at the same time, seeming to see right through me—not leering, though, not in the way that some men do, obviously trying to look past my clothes and envision the skin that lies beneath.

No, his eyes are looking through my exterior, penetrating beneath my skin to study the fat and sinew of my inner flesh, peeling into my body layer by layer until I am flayed to the skeleton.

The gaze is both violent and intimate, and I understand only one thing: danger.

I snap out of this suspended state of fight-and-flight, half-running into the crowd, using my slight frame to squeeze my way past larger bodies until I no longer feel his lingering gaze.

The parade has already begun, the marching band blaring its way down the street. I feel disoriented, my heart pounding to the drumline’s brisk beat. I control my breathing, calming myself down, trying to forget about that strange encounter. It was as if my eyes were drawn automatically to his, as if there were some inexplicable force of physics that directed my focus to him and him alone.

“Hey kid, did you want a better view?” some man yells into my ear, and before I can shake my head no, I’m moved bodily to the second row of spectators, settled at a prime spot where I’m able to see the street through the gap between two girls standing at the very front.

The music changes slightly as it moves down the street. Then, someone yells something I can’t understand, and all of a sudden the crowd around me erupts. People begin to clamour, pushing and shoving for a better view. As small as I am, I’m powerless to resist the force of the mob.

As everything around me reaches a fever pitch, an elbow drives itself into the middle of my spine, hard, and I stumbles forward, crashing into the two girls in front of me. We go down all together in a tangle of limbs and a chorus of shrieks.

Thankfully, I don’t land on top of anyone, sprawling instead across the rough asphalt, but someone does land on top of me, heavy-boned and breathing harshly just behind my ear.

“Watch it!” someone shouts.

“You watch it,” retorts the person on top of me—a man, by the sound of it. He’s yelling almost directly into my left ear, and I can’t even move enough to flinch away from it.

The guy on top of me squirms, and I yelp in pain, trying desperately to wheeze out a, “Please, can you get off of me…”

It doesn’t work, I don’t think, and even if my diaphragm wasn’t being crushed into mush, I doubt anyone would have heard me over the fading sound of a trumpet solo and the ongoing cheers and yells all around us.

My vision begins to fade, and I can feel myself getting smothered. But then, just as the encroaching blackness of my sight threatens to obscure everything, the pressure on me eases.

“Hey, what the—” starts the man who’d fallen on top of me, but he either cuts off or I stop being able to hear.

Instead, all I can feel is a large hand, feverishly warm, grabbing me around the waist, pulling me up with ease. For a moment, all I can do is gasp for breath, clinging to the arms around me as I try to stand up.

“Thank you,” I say with what little breath that has returned to me.

There’s no response, but my saviour still hasn’t let me go. A part of me wants to relax into the hold, wants to revel in the warmth of the masculine smell of musk that’s beginning to envelop me, but another part of me, the one that recognises how embarrassing this whole ordeal has been, how conspicuous I must look, forces me to turn around, to push my way out of my saviour’s hold.

That, of course, is when I notice that my saviour is wearing a football uniform, and that the smooth plasticky paint at the front of his jersey traces the unmistakable numbers of 0 and 7.

It’s him.