Charlotte awoke as a pillow hit the back of her head.
Her roommate said, "Your alarm has been going off for five minutes now. You might have an earlier class than I do, but you don't need to take it out on me."
"Well, sorry about that. I must have been in the middle of a REM cycle or something. Thanks for being backup."
"Mmph" was all she heard as her roommate buried her face into her blankets and went back to sleep. As she got ready, fragments of her dreams surfaced. What a bizarre night. I'm so glad it's over. A tooth broke off her comb as she pulled it through her hair, bringing to mind the dream where parts of her body fell off but somehow were reattached. She grabbed her backpack and headed to Ketter.
Excited conversations buzzed through the dining hall, and she picked up fragments as she gathered her breakfast from different buffets.
"…about time someone showed him he doesn't run campus."
"At last someone sticks up for the humanities!"
"Why would someone wear a costume and prowl around campus at that hour?"
What's going on? I'm missing something, apparently. Charlotte found a small table and enjoyed a book about the brain and language with her breakfast. She looked at her watch and saw that she had to get to class in seven minutes, and the English building was fairly far away. She sighed, shoved her book into her backpack, put her dishes on the conveyer, and started the trek to her classroom
Good morning, everyone. I'm Marietta Ellis with the Channel 6 news. We're here at Lapray College, investigating an interesting case of vigilante justice. Late last night, a student, John-Paul Mente, was attacked by three others. A person dressed as some sort of robot grabbed the attacking students, turning the tables on them, giving John-Paul time to get to the call box. When the campus security force arrived, they found all four students with moderate injuries and unable to stand. All four have been attended to and have been released from medical care. When interviewed by security, the ringleader of the attackers, Steffan Tommas, said that, quote, "It came from nowhere and kicked me in the stomach and then hit me in the chest with the side of its arm. I'd never seen anything like it before. It looked like a person but not quite there. Its hands and feet looked the same, like small hands with the fingers all curled up. The scariest thing happened when I thought I was far enough away to avoid attack, it threw its hands at me, and they hit me in the face and neck. It also moved very fast for something its size. I'm telling you, that thing is bizarre" end quote. Mente was unavailable for comment. Back to you in the studio, Grant.
Charlotte raced into her class, arriving with only thirty seconds to spare. Some of her students seemed surprised by her uncharacteristically late arrival. The professor, however, seemed not to notice. Since her usual spot was taken, she took the one to the left. She opened her folder and saw the empty assignment sheet facing her. No! She had read the passage, but in her haste to finish calculus, she had forgotten to answer the questions. She grabbed a pencil and started scribbling down answers as fast as she could, thankful that a word or phrase would answer most. Class had technically started, but the professor seemed absorbed in her work, so Charlotte kept writing her answers, lifting her head every few seconds to see whether or not the professor was making a move to start. Finally, the professor stood up and announced,
"We're missing quite a few people, but we had better get started, because we have a lot to cover. Please pass in your assignments." Charlotte sighed and passed her sheet forward; she had only an essay question and a half remaining, but they were worth a third of the assignment's points. She wrote down the points people were discussing, but her mind was on her incomplete assignment. They were worth a significant chunk of her final grade, so she wanted to do well on them, and she often did. She mentally muttered about her calculus prof, wishing that a raincloud would form in his office or that all his tires would go flat. She didn't care about themes found in Oliver Twist.
The class was interrupted by a quiet knock on the door. The professor looked at the caller, and her eyes grew wide, but she indicated by a nod that the interruption was permitted. The person walked in and the class gasped. John-Paul looked like a wreck. His hair stuck out at different angles. One eye was black, while the other had a dark circle under it. He sported an angry red cut on a cheek, and his lower lip was swollen. Parts of his arms were wrapped in bandages, and bruises spilled out from under them. The professor finally found her voice.
"John-Paul, I heard about what happened to you last night. I wouldn't have blamed you for not coming to class today."
He responded in a low voice, "There's too much material to cover for me to miss a class, and I need a feeling of normalcy and routine now."
"Very well then. We're following the discussion outline for this section of Oliver Twist. We're on the third question." John-Paul sat in the closest seat available. He said a few things that enlivened the discussion but said little overall. After the class finished, the professor came up to him and said,
"This is more of a want-to-know on my part, but I would like to hear your account of what happened last night if you are willing to share."
"I was getting very unsteady on my feet, and my vision was swimming. Steffan and his henchmen could see that and were enjoying it. I could hear it in their voices. He said, 'Good night, John-boy' and was about to punch me when this figure blazed in and kicked him in the stomach and then hit him in the chest. It looked human but had weird-colored skin, royal blue, dark green, and black and some crest-type, Mohawk-looking device on its head. Its hands had little claws on them. I was startled, but its help bought me time to drag myself over to the call box. After pressing the button, I saw that it was beating on Steffan's friends. I think I blacked out and then woke up to a security officer shining a light in my face. Security didn't believe my story at first, but then Steffan and his friends corroborate it. If I could, I would thank it for saving me."
Charlotte overheard this with mouth agape. Someone really laid down the law. I wonder who. A half-formed thought rose in her mind but raced away when she tried to catch it. Shrugging her shoulders, she headed off to her Russian history class and heard an interesting lecture on Peter the Great. She contemplated beard taxes as she made her way to her usual table in the deserted area on the fourth floor to study her Chinese.
The radicals and characters for the practice set flowed from her pen. Stroke order had not been easy to learn, but she found it beneficial in recognizing unfamiliar characters. As she wrote ni hao for the umpteenth time, her mind wandered to what she heard after her literature class. What if it were an actual robot? How could it move so fast? She looked down and saw that her brain had commanded her hand to write "ast" rather than the correct finishing strokes. She crossed it out and wrote the characters again, this time focusing on what she was doing.
Charlotte looked up at the clock. 12:30. Lunchtime. She hastily loaded her notebook into her backpack and headed for Ketter. She loaded chicken salad onto a croissant before making a spinach salad. No grapes or feta? What a bummer. Oh well, it's food. She sat down and ate her lunch while reading The Princess Bride for the twelfth time. Time got away from her, and during the middle of Fezzik's childhood, she discovered she had one minute to get to her calculus class that was four minutes away. She grabbed her backpack and sprinted across campus, breathlessly entering the classroom two minutes late.
The professor gave her a look that said, "You? Of all the people in class?" and motioned her to a seat after taking her homework. Please let them be right. The professor launched into an explanation of integration by partial fractions. Do my eyes look as glazed-over as I feel? She nevertheless persevered in taking notes, hoping that soon the jargon would make sense. Relief washed over her after the class finished. Done for the day!
She strolled back to her dorm and plunked her backpack on floor by her desk and pondered what she should do next. She changed into athletic gear and headed to gym for a round of racquetball. To her disappointment, all the courts were full, but she asked a pair about to head in, and they agreed to a cutthroat game. She and one of the players were close in their moderate skill levels, while the other one played like he was born holding a racquet. The scores of the third game stood at 9-7-6, and Charlotte was serving. She hit her specialty, a shot that floated near the wall and proved difficult to return, earning her the top spot for now. She ran back, getting out of the way of one of the players so he could hit it.
He gave it a gentle tap, and it barely hit the wall before the second bounce. Charlotte rushed to no avail.
"That was sneaky," she said, pointing her racquet at him, "I'll have to use it on someone else, maybe even you." He chuckled, retrieved the ball, and served. A lengthy volley ended with the server gaining a point, nearly tying the game. As he served again, a peculiar sound reverberated in the court. A split second later, its cause was made evident when the ball landed with a hollow-sounding hit on the floor and gave a few small bounces. The server walked to it, picked it up, and nodded slowly as he examined it. A blue flap of rubbery material fell to the floor.
"Does either of you have another ball?"
"No," chorused Charlotte and the other player.
"Game and match over. Looks like I win," he replied. After a round of high-fives, the three went their separate ways. Swinging her racquet, Charlotte headed for her dorm, her mind and body refreshed by the exertion. She grabbed her Chinese homework and headed for the basement. The match had done something to her neural wiring. These radicals are making sense at last! It seemed that the lines were drawing themselves. She was in the flow of things.
After completing her assignment, she went ahead in the book and copied down more characters. Might as well take advantage of this. She paused and looked at the clock on the wall. 6:10. Time to eat. She ran back up to her room, where her roommate stood waiting sternly.
"Hey, Angel. I was about to head to Ketter. Do you want to come with me?"
"No. I was going to have some ravioli, but I can't find the can I'm positive I had. I guess I'll have to settle for something else. Not everyone is on the 18-meals-a-week plan."
"Oh, that. I missed the closing time for Ketter last night, and all I could find from my stuff was a sort of mushy apple and hard peanut butter crackers. You said that if I had an emergency, I could take something from you as long as I told you and paid you back. 'member?"
"Well, you didn't tell me or leave a note or some money."
"I was in a hurry this morning and away for most of the day. My last class was Calculus II, so I came back in a fog."
Angel breathed a dramatic sigh. "Don't let it happen again."
Why so grouchy? Charlotte thought as she grabbed her ID and copy of The Princess Bride and strode to the dining hall. Mmm. French Dip sandwiches and fries. She carried her plates, bowl, and cup to an empty two-person table. Yuck. Someone left a mess. She used some napkins to wipe it up. After throwing the napkins away, she picked up the silverware she didn't previously have enough hands to get and returned to her table. As she ate, she delved back into Fezzik's childhood, simultaneously laughing and cringing at his parents' actions.