Anna was never able to discover anything else about the elusive Mark Smith, but neither did he make any further attempts to contact her. Thus, the two remaining weeks before spring break passed uneventfully – save the migraines that unfortunately became so frequent a campus PA prescribed some pain relievers.
Before she could take a breath after mid-term exams, Anna found herself required to set everything else aside to prepare for her trip to Columbia University. The day of her departure, she surveyed her side of the closet that she and Susan shared with a frown. A large travel bag lay open on her bed half packed with what Susan would call her "lil' miss schoolgirl attire".
Her roommate was sitting cross-legged on her own bed watching her progress but clearly lost in her own thoughts. Anna would be catching a bus for New York that afternoon, and Susan had not quite taken time to cope with the idea of not having her friend around during spring break.
"This is going to be the most depressing spring break ever," Susan moaned.
"Quit your whining! It won't be bad. You're getting to go home, after all. You haven't been home in ages."
Susan grimaced. "Yeah but I have to figure out how to tell my mom I'm going to have to retake P.E. P.E.!" She fell backwards onto her bed with a dramatic flair.
"Susan, you're a second-year senior. I doubt she will let you retake P.E. Besides, the semester is not over yet. You have almost a month to schmooze your professor into giving you a passing grade."
"Maybe so," Susan agreed glumly. "What are you so depressed about your wardrobe for?"
"I just have this uneasy feeling that something will come up during the trip that I'll be underdressed for," Anna murmured.
"Awww, don't let yourself get nervous over silly stuff," Susan admonished. "I'd be more worried about the crazies you're going to meet along the way. I still can't believe you turned down a first class plane ticket in favor of the bus!"
Anna frowned. "You know how I hate to fly! Besides, I like the idea of taking a road trip in the spring. Could you check to make sure I packed my iPod?"
"What?" Susan cried in mock surprise. "You mean you're going to wear headphones in public?"
Anna favored Susan with her best smoldering glare until she relented and leaned over to peer in Anna's travel bag.
"Ipod, check! Susan's farewell gift to Anna, double check!" Susan called out with a grin.
In answer to her questioning frown, Susan pulled out the iPod and scrolled to the playlist menu before handing it to her.
"Songs Susan Wishes She Had Written," Anna read slowly from the menu. "This is great, Susan. Are they all from your collection?"
"Some. Others I bought in iTunes. If you can't stand some of the songs, you can delete them from your library. It won't hurt my feelings," Susan said with sincere nonchalance.
Ignoring the latter, Anna returned the iPod to her bag. "Thank you, Susan," she said. As soon as she spoke, she paused in her movements and gazed out the window, a strange, distant expression descending upon her features. "Thank you, Susan," she repeated in a softer voice. "You have always been a kind friend, and I'll never forget that."
All traces of mirth drained from Susan's face as she observed her roommate's peculiar change of mood. "Are you going to be alright by yourself?" she asked.
The sound of genuine concern coming from Susan brought Anna immediately out of her reverie. She shook her head and chuckled, "It's not as if I'm leaving for Columbia for good. I haven't officially accepted their offer and neither have they officially declared me the recipient of that scholarship. I still have to go through some interviews before that's confirmed."
"Oh come on!" Susan exclaimed. "They're practically rolling out the red carpet! It's as good as a sure thing!"
Anna smiled. "I probably wouldn't get the red carpet treatment if they knew I wouldn't go to their school without the scholarship."
Susan nodded absently and watched Anna finish her packing in silence. She remembered the time when she first met Anna, who was then an incoming freshman. Susan, at that time a sophomore, was representing her sorority during freshman orientation. Her task was to lure as many unsuspecting, wide-eyed freshman girls as possible to the sorority rush. Standing apart from a crowd of people whose freshness from high school was painfully obvious was a tall, elegant young woman who seemed to move as if she thought herself a ballerina. What struck Susan was not her striking features but her air of self-possession, so different from the anxious novices that bustled around her. However, she could also clearly see that the young woman was painfully reserved to the point that every person in the room was probably in the process of invading her personal space. The first thought that entered Susan's mind was, Well, I'll never get her to sign up! She was right, of course, but that did not stop them from becoming friends.
Susan sighed forlornly. She had the rather depressing feeling that she would lose her friend in the same way she had lost all the other friends whose paths in life had diverged from hers. No matter what advances in communication would be made over the years, Susan knew from experience that, with the strain of time and distance, their bond of friendship would gradually thin until Anna might as well be living in another world altogether.
A few hours later, Susan peeked into the room she and Anna shared and was surprised to see that half of her roommate had disappeared under the bed.
"Umm…Anna?" Susan called, stifling a giggle at the sight of her normally stoic friend in such a compromising position. "Are you ready to go? The van is waiting."
"Just a minute. I'm looking for…aha!" Anna emerged from under her bed triumphantly waving an old book through the air. "I was looking for this. I never go anywhere without it, you know. We can go now."
"Pride and Prejudice? Big yawn. Normal people get sentimental and clingy over childhood stuffed animals and baby blankets, and you get that way over a book!"
Anna frowned reprovingly. "It's only one of the best books ever written, and it has kept me company over the years." She lovingly stroked the worn cover before stowing the book in her bag. "Besides, I want it for the long trip."
"Come on," Susan urged. "I don't want to tell Dr. Peters we are making him late for our mural project because you couldn't find Pride and Prejudice."
"Have I really made you all late?" Anna asked in concern as she shouldered her travel bag and pulled out the handle of the rolling case in which her laptop was stored.
Susan shrugged and relieved Anna of her laptop. "No biggie. We're always late, no matter what happens. I guess it's one of those right-brained artist things."
True to his reputation within the university art department, Dr. Peters was as lively behind the wheel as he was before a canvas. Thus he succeeded in transporting Anna to the station fifteen minutes before her bus was scheduled to leave. Somewhat shaken by the drive, Anna stepped unsteadily onto the sidewalk and might have stumbled had not Dr. Peters reached out his arm in time.
"Steady there, Miss Darcy! Getting to New York in one piece would be a good thing," the professor quipped. "Now you all had better make some quick good byes, 'cuz we're due to paint some cows on a wall in twenty minutes."
"Oh, go wait in the car, and I'll be there in a minute!" Susan ordered with an audacity that would have stunned her classmates, but she was never one to simper before school authorities.
Anna chuckled and embraced her friend. "Let's humor him, Susan. He was, after all, nice enough to give me a ride up here."
The tiniest hint of worry seeped into Susan's eyes as she looked at her friend. She had a nagging feeling that if she let her friend go on this trip, she would never come back. Knowing Anna would dismiss it as being silly, she kept it to herself, but the feeling did not disappear. In fact, as she watched her friend give her a final wave before climbing onto the bus, it became almost a certainty.
Get over it, Susan, she thought as she returned to the van. It's just for a week.
It was with a rather peculiar group of passengers that Anna began her trip to New York. Nearly the entire back section of the bus was occupied by young twenty-somethings who had an apparent predilection for the color black. Further towards the middle was a small group of gaunt, gray-complexioned people, perhaps a family, each staring vaguely at some point in mid air. A more normal variety of passengers had situated themselves towards the front of the bus but had unfortunately left no room for Anna among them, so she had to content herself with a seat across the aisle from the gray family.
As the bus pulled from the station, Anna looked about her, uneasily hugging her two pieces of luggage, which the driver had allowed her to carry on, to her sides. Slowly though, her uneasiness became a tension that spread throughout her limbs and concentrated itself within her mind. Anna recognized the painful sensations with dismay and groaned when a familiar throb of pain twisted its way through her cranium. She hunched forward, pretending to be interested in the contents of her bag but actually bracing herself for the spasms that would follow. Fortunately, when they did follow, they were increasingly less intense than the first, and she forced herself to breathe normally.
Anna would very much like to agree with the PA that these occasional spasms were nothing more than common migraines, but deep down, she suspected it was a little more complicated. The seeming attacks would come upon her suddenly, sometimes leaving just as quickly and other times lingering for hours. It was during these times that the strange sensation of her mind being pulled away was the most acute. After half an hour or so, she began to relax a little and opened her bag to find her copy of Pride and Prejudice.
She was almost through the third chapter when a sweetly elderly, feminine voice spoke beside her, "My, you are a pretty thing, aren't you!"
Anna turned in surprise to see a lady, who appeared to be the eldest member of the gray family, smiling at her. Anna colored and uneasily returned the lady's smile.
"Fairy tale pretty!" the lady added.
The middle-aged man sitting beside her stirred in his sleep and murmured, "Don't bother the nice lady, Mom."
"Oh hush!" the lady scolded her son. Turning back to Anna, she said in a low voice, "Never mind him. Traveling has never agreed with him. He was always frightfully carsick when he was little. Buses don't bother him near as badly, save to make him a little grouchy."
Anna responded with a light laugh and made as if to return to her book. However, the lady continued in a whisper, "A moment ago, I was worried you were getting carsick yourself. You alright now?"
Anna nodded dumbly.
"Listen here, Missy. There are a lot of strange characters on this bus. It's hardly safe for a young woman all by herself, so you'd be welcome to sit with us if you're willing."
"Oh, I'll be fine," Anna replied with a smile. "Thank you though."
"Suit yourself," the lady said, "but keep a constant eye on your things!"
Anna nodded and returned at last to her book. Not five minutes passed before she was interrupted again, but this time it was by a violent jolt that shook the length of the bus and awoke all the sleeping passengers. The hum of the engine culminated to a deep rumble before finally giving out. Cursing under his breath, the driver eased his foot onto the brakes and steered the bus to the side of the road. He stepped out of the bus to survey the problem and returned ten minutes later wearing a grim expression.
"Well, this bus isn't going anywhere for a while," he announced with a frustrated sigh. Exclamations and angry shouts erupted among the passengers, which the driver silenced with a sharp gesture. "Easy folks. I'll call right now for a bus to pick us up. Meanwhile, there's that small town we passed a mile back. We'll have at least a couple hours before they get another bus up here, so think of this as a little rest stop."
Most of the passengers took his advice, including the elderly lady and her family. She invited Anna to join them for dinner, but she politely declined. She would have opted to remain on the bus until the new one arrived, but as the riders in black had the same idea, she decided a little walk in the woods was more appealing. Remembering the lady's advice, she carried her luggage with her.
Intending to find a nice, wooded area where she could comfortably wait for the arrival of the new bus, Anna struck a small path through the trees and followed it to a small clearing where a fallen tree was waiting to be her seat. She accepted it gratefully and contentedly resumed her book. From her position, she was unable to see the road, but she could hear cars passing periodically and was confident she would be able to hear the arrival of another bus.
Usually, with Jane Austen's assistance, it would be a fairly easy task to forget the passage of time, but the ghost of the pain that menaced her earlier lingered and grew. Nevertheless, Anna persevered with her book, determined to remove her focus from anything less pleasant. So it was not until Anna arrived at the Netherfield ball and found that the light was growing too dim to continue reading that she gasped and realized that the bus should have arrived by then. She was vaguely aware that the painful tightness in her head had all but disappeared as she quickly stuffed her book in her bag and grabbed her luggage.
Anna ran as well as she could in the fading light toward the road. When she reached it, it was as she feared. The bus had left without her. She was not a little disappointed that the nice elderly lady who had spoken to her had apparently not thought to inquire about her when she failed to return.
She strained her ears for the sound of any approaching vehicle, but after half an hour of hearing little more than wind and crickets, she hopelessly threw her bags to the ground and sat down with an angry moan.
It was then that she noticed the road was not paved.
Anna jumped back up with a start and looked about her in the dark with confusion. She could not have lost her sense of direction to the point that she had taken the wrong way entirely, and she did not remember encountering this road when she had ambled off into the woods, a whim she now dearly regretted. I don't think I will even be able to find the town, Anna thought in despair.
In hopes that Susan would have returned to the university by then, she pulled out her cell phone to call her dorm. She entered the number and waited impatiently for it to process. An unfamiliar, rough tone blared in her ear insteadAnna rolled her eyes and reentered the number. Her phone was useless.
"This is not happening," Anna mumbled as she entered the number for a third time. "I'm going to New York. I will be going to Columbia."
The tone was an angry screech that she was tempted to echo. Her cell phone hit the nearest tree with a loud crack.
The normally calm and collected young woman buried her head in her hands. She was not one to cry at the first sign of trouble, but she could not stop the tears then. They fell silently in her lap as she imagined a plethora of devastating consequences to this turn of events.
Thus, Anna did not observe the approach of the strangely diminutive boy who had been led there by the bluish light given off by her cell phone. He watched her weeping with a solemnity that was peculiar for his age and then reached out cautiously to tap her shoulder.
"Where did you come from?" he asked.
Startled, Anna jerked away from the boy's touch and stood up. From her great height, she saw that the boy was indeed very little, perhaps no more than three years old. His voice had not sounded that young, though.
"I came from the university. I was on my way to New York City when our bus broke down." Anna felt a little funny explaining this to a three year old, but perhaps he had a home within walking distance where she could call for a taxi. She bent forward until she could peer directly into the boy's face. "Is your home nearby?"
The boy shook his head. "My family is only staying here for the summer months. Our home is in the Shire."