It was the last phone call I ever expected to receive. In fact I hadn't expected to receive any phone calls, which was why I hadn't remembered to turn off my ringer before class.
No, that was a lie. I had just plain forgot.
"I am SO sorry, Professor Miller. It won't happen again."
I ignored the call from Angela and turned my ringer off immediately before setting the phone back down, even as my professor who didn't know my name glared at my from the front of the room. A few of the students around me glanced at each other and chuckled, and some of them even glared at me too. Not exactly the best start to my freshman year.
Professor Miller started speaking again, on a tangent about how important homework assignments were and all the different methods he would accept them in – physical copies, scanned via email, fax, etc.
Who even has a fax machine at college? No one I knew, and it certainly wasn't on my shopping list when I had been setting up my dorm here at USC.
But my phone lit up with Angela's face again as she called me a second time, and I stared at the phone long and hard in confusion. Angela never called me anymore. Usually we talked through text, AIM, and occasionally Skype. Now that she was at Washington State and I was at USC, there wasn't much time to spend chatting on the phone endlessly. Was she just looking to vent about her awful dorm mate again?
I let the call go to voicemail before I returned my eyes to the front of the room. Though I was staring at my professor, I wasn't listening to a word he said.
I mean, if my dorm mate had locked her out with a sock on the door at two o'clock in the afternoon for the second time this week I would probably need to blow off some steam to a friend, too. What kind of a slut is already getting laid the first full week of classes? And how disrespectful was she being to Angela, the bookworm who usually just wanted to sit in her room and read during her free time? Thank God I had ended up with a chill roommate who didn't seem to care about boys, especially since I had sworn off boys since that last weekend with Mike before moving into my dorm.
What a mistake. I should have just stayed home that night. Now I would be ignoring his text messages forever.
The screen on my phone lit up again. Angela. Three times? Something was wrong. This wasn't just her roommate, either. I picked the phone up off of the desk but remembered where I was before sliding over the button on the screen to answer it. Shit.
While Professor Miller started writing his contact information on the dry erase board, I quietly slid my chair back and stood up. I skimmed past the desk next to me before Professor Miller turned around and spotted me, stopping whatever he was saying mid-sentence to glare at me again. This time the whole classroom turned around to do the same.
Great, Jess. Just great. You're the class asshole for the rest of the semester now.
Pointing at the phone in my hand I shook my head and kept moving towards the door, "I'm so sorry, it's got to be an emergency… she knows I'm in class and she called me three times and… yeah, I'm just gonna take this outside."
I turned the knob and pushed my way out of the room, quietly shutting the door behind me. Sliding the green bar across the screen finally, I raised the phone to my ear and made my way down the hallway so that my class couldn't hear me through the door.
"Someone better be dead Angela, I am pretty sure my teacher now hates me."
All I heard was a sob on the other end of the phone. Oh, fuck. Someone was dead. I was just on fire today, wasn't I?
My voice softer now, I attempted to rectify the situation. "Angela? What's going on?"
"I was just sitting here going through my itinerary and writing some notes in my planner and all of a sudden my phone rings and it was Alice Cullen and I was like, why is Alice Cullen calling me? So I picked it up and she told me…" Angela sobbed again, sniffling over the line as she tried to compose herself.
I had no idea where this was going. How did Alice Cullen even have Angela's number?
"Jess, Bella…" Angela trailed off and I could hear her crying on the other end.
My back leaned against the wall and I slid down it until I hit the floor.
"Bella what, Angela?" I knew what she was going to say, but I needed her to say it. It wasn't real until she said the words.
"Bella's gone. She's gone, Jess."