The door slammed shut behind me, and I leaned against it, my frustrations bubbling out in a deep sigh.

My siblings and I were coming up on spring finals for our first year of college, and I was staying busy preparing for them, but that wasn't what was really bothering me. No, that would be the memories.

Days spent in quiet company. Sarcastic jokes thrown back and forth. Lessons learned through patient and gentle teaching. Friendship, and all the days that brought that friendship into bloom. Simple conversations became tangible memories that took over as flashbacks and, on the rough days that were becoming more and more frequent, robbed my focus.

In the first semester of my Freshman year of high school, I had taken a shop class. I hadn't been very interested when I started, but my choices had been metal shop or art. I couldn't—and still can't, honestly—draw a straight line with a ruler, so I enrolled in metal shop.

I quickly decided I enjoyed the class, but what made it worth attending every day (and getting up at the crack of annoying to do so) was my friendship with the shop instructor.

Jeff and I had quickly become friends—well, as much friends as a fourteen year old and a teacher could be—but that semester had included many days where I came back to the shop outside of my assigned class, or even outside school hours, just to sit and chat with Jeff.

Our friendship grew surprisingly fast, especially considering that by that time I had been wary about making friends. Too many previous "friends" had faded to time as day-to-day life no longer kept us together, and I had long tired of having only friends of convenience. I preferred to be alone than to make a "friend" that would disappear as soon as life changed.

This fear had come to the fore when Jeff announced two weeks before finals that, due to family medical issues, he would be quitting his job and moving to a town sixty miles south. Day-to-day life would no longer keep the friendship running, and I knew the brief friendship would be ending.

But it didn't. Jeff proved himself different from everyone else when he kept up contact. Though I never did get to see him again, we kept up semi-regular phone calls and Facebook messages over the coming years as he moved again, this time to somewhere in New York, my Junior year and I found Camp and fought in the Titan and Giant Wars. I hadn't seen him since that semester of High School, but our friendship had remained.

Then, in the last few months, the phone calls inexplicably slowed, then stopped. He never called me, and whenever I called, he either couldn't talk long or wouldn't answer, promising to call me back. When he did call me back, though, he still couldn't talk more than a couple minutes. I wondered what I had done wrong, but it was never a surprise. I had figured years ago that the friendship would never last. None ever had, and I cherished the time the friendship had continued. But that didn't mean the end wasn't hard. I had come to depend too much on the lasting friendship of my longest friend, and the end of the friendship hurt. The pain bubbled up into reliving memories of the beginning, at the shop, and all the phone calls in between, and it would be some time before the pain and the hurt and the longing worked itself out.

Machaela was still in class, so I had our dorm room to myself as I sat against the door, trying to organize my thoughts and shove those memories to the back of my mind.

I wasn't sure what had made today so bad. Something about having too much time to think in my classes combined with a couple of triggers, I guessed, had launched me into a tailspin. Even the slightest unexpected noise, if it happened behind me, had the ability to launch me into a memory. Completely immersed, I would blink five to fifteen minutes later to find I had been moving on autopilot. I tried to temper this by staying busy, but nothing kept me fully grounded except music played loudly enough to drown out my thoughts—the only problem being that I couldn't exactly blast my music in the middle of class.

As finals drew closer and the normal stress of striving to do well took hold, my flashbacks and jumpiness have only increased. I've been running around so much, with so many things to do, I haven't even read a book in nearly a week, and I had another pile of work to do tonight if I wanted to stay caught up. A homework assignment was due in two days, I had a quiz in three, and I still needed to finish studying for my first final, Calculus 2, that I would take in four days.

A soft chuckle sounded from down the hall, and I'm no longer sitting on the floor of my dorm room.

I'm sitting on a stool next to a tool cabinet talking to Jeff, who's sitting in the desk chair at the shop computer. We're the only ones in the shop, and he's telling me about the pool table he just bought. According to him, he bought the table from one of his neighbors, and it's a really nice one. Weighing about 750 pounds, the neighbor expected him to disassemble the table instead of lift it when the time came for him to take it home. The neighbor's surprise was palpable, then, when Jeff and ten friends showed up and lifted the table into a trailer, which bowed under the weight, without any issues. Jeff's amused chuckle at the story bounces through my mind even as the memory fades.

I blinked, my eyes moist from the memory and wondering and longing, and a glance at my watch showed about five minutes had passed. There was no way I was going to be able to study, not if I spaced out at every noise my neighbors made.

A book. That's what I needed. A few hours engrossed in a book with some music in the background might reset my stress level enough to study.

Closing my bedroom door and turning on a random playlist from the computer I had long-ago gotten monster-proofed, I selected a book from my shelf and got comfortable. My clock said five pm. I resolved to at least attempt some studying by eight, and my music faded from awareness as I started to read.

A little shorter than usual, but this chapter sets the scene for the rest of this three-shot. This story is and will be different than my others, both in the way it was written and in its content, so review and tell me what you think. :)