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Sins of the Past
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Chapter Five
I trudged back up the stairs to catch what little sleep I still could before I had to leave for my first day of classes. Today was the day where I was supposed to check out campus and integrate myself into town society.
I peeked into Mom's bedroom as I passed by. She seemed fine at first glance, almost peaceful in fact, but it was profoundly weird knowing what fate would befall her when she woke. I detoured into the bathroom to ensure that the Advil could be easily found for when Mom inevitably came for it.
I took a quick glance into the mirror as I left.
"Goodnight, Elsa." I quipped.
Nothing.
Perhaps she was resting as well.
I returned to my waiting bed, the covers still strewn all over the floor the way that I had previously left them. My bedside alarm clock read 5:27 AM, which meant that I'd get at most 3 hours of rest before I had to return to the world of the living.
Sleep came easily.
I first thing I noticed when I woke was that of the distinct feeling of cold.
Like, I was really, really cold all of a sudden, freezing in fact, despite being tucked snugly beneath my blankets.
The second thing I immediately noticed was that my alarm clock was ringing, loudly. I rolled over in my bed to see the bright red LEDs flashing 9:07 AM.
Wait, 9:07?
Crap.
My bus arrives at 9:18 AM. Not much time to get ready.
I blindly slapped my clock silly, trying desperately to shut it up. Times like this made me wish that I wasn't such a heavy sleeper, seeing how I somehow managed to sleep through its ear-shattering ringing for 7 whole minutes and all.
It's a good thing that Mom is one as well, otherwise she'd rip my head off for waking her.
I eventually managed to silence the alarm, and an eerie quiet befell my room once more. The temperature stabilized almost as quickly.
Hmm.
I began my day by falling off the bed into a massive heap onto the floor, mirroring my actions not 3 hours ago. I then made my way into the bathroom, and immediately noticed the pale image of a tired Elsa waiting for me in the mirror.
She had a very unamused expression on her face and I had a feeling that I could guess why.
"The alarm clock, right?" I asked, sheepishly scratching the back of my head. "Sorry about that."
The apparition crossed her arms, and I could feel her piercing stare scolding me. Elsa shook her head in annoyance, then turned and disappeared into the wall behind me. I noticed her shoulders scrunch up in laughter before she left, presumably because of my world famous bedhead.
Jerk.
I quickly began my morning routine. I brushed my teeth, tamed my hair, ignored my makeup, washed my face, went back to my room, threw on some clothes, panicked when I saw that it was 9:14 AM, tripped down the stairs, skipped breakfast, grabbed my bag, and burst out of the house just in time to flag down the bus before it left without me.
A standard morning, all in all.
The bus unceremoniously dumped me off by Arendelle University at this centralized bus hub, where it seemed like 4 other bus routes converged to service neighbourhoods from all over the city.
I took the time to drink in my surroundings. Two sidewalks lead out of this junction: one to the left, and one to the right. From what I could observe, left lead toward a shopping district of sorts mostly filled with popular restaurant chains, all peddling their wares to hungry students. The right on the other hand seemed to lead towards the facility itself.
I had nothing on my person besides paltry bus fare, so grabbing a quick breakfast was out of the question. I headed down the path on the right.
I whistled quietly as I walked.
This pathway, the one that lead to the schoolgrounds, was lined by tall oak trees on both sides. Like a tree itself, the sidewalk had several smaller paths of its own branching out towards various other buildings whose purpose I had no idea. I noticed that several of the bricks beneath me had names inscribed into them. Probably the school founders or something, I'd bet.
All around me were students coming and going from place to place, walking around in large groups chattering amongst themselves. It didn't take me long before I reached the main building, though, and made my way through its large ornate double doors.
I groaned internally as I was greeted by an endless sea of bodies when I stepped inside.
If there was one thing that I had hoped would improve from highschool, it would be the hallway congestion.
Guess not.
Sigh.
It was a real pain weaving through the crowd, due in no small part to a certain group of idiots who decided that the middle of the hallway was as good a place as any to conduct a conversation about an upcoming party, but I eventually managed to shove my way into the lecture hall of my first class of the day: Arendelle History 101.
I scanned the hilariously large room for available seats, of which there were very few I was willing to take, and noticed that the front few rows were completely empty for some reason. I was in the midst of making my way down towards them when I heard someone call out to me from the side.
"Hey! Meatball sub! Over here!"
I quizzically turned to find the deli cashier —Rapunzel— sitting off to the side, waving and beckoning for me to sit by her side.
"Just what were you thinking of doing?" she demanded as I approached, incredulous.
"Sitting down?" I answered, confusedly, as I dropped myself into a chair next to her.
"Near the front?" she asked, disbelief evident in her voice.
"What's wrong with the front?"
Rapunzel's eyes boggled as though I had asked her if water is wet.
"Everything! Don't you—oh right, you're new in town, and to AU as well I assume." She shook her head. "The prof for this class, Mr. Weaselton, is a living nightmare. No one ever sits in the front three rows of his classes because of the hair-trigger temper he tends to unleash on the closest human being whenever he feels slighted."
Oh.
"His name is Weaselton?" I asked. Who could've hated their child enough to name them that?
Rapunzel shrugged.
"Almost no one respects him enough to call him by his real name, so instead we call him after his home country that he obsesses about: Weselton. The place is little more than a glorified country-wide truck stop nowadays, but if you point that out to him he'll destroy your eardrums screaming about how the place was supposed to be one of the major powers of the world."
As if on cue, a tiny balding old man, whom I assumed to be the Weasel himself, thundered into the lecture hall, evidently already in a very sour mood.
"What's gotten into him?" I whispered.
Rapunzel shrugged again.
"The guy gets ticked off at everything, remember? He's the kind that explodes if the barista stirs his coffee clockwise instead of counter-clockwise. My best guess, though, would be the very fact that he's in this room, about to teach Arendelle History. You see, he's not a big fan of Arendelle. He's got this weird idea that Arendelle's mere existence is why Weselton is so economically weak."
"Why is he teaching here in Arendelle, then?" I asked.
"Beats me, but the only reason why he's teaching this course specifically is because the guy who normally does is on leave."
"How do you know all this?" I noted that Rapunzel was just as likely to talk your ear off as the Weasel himself supposedly would.
Rapunzel began to fiddle with the hem of her shirt.
"Everyone makes fun of him here at AU. He's basically a metaphorical punching bag. Did you know that someone actually wrote their thesis detailing exactly why Arendelle prospered while Weselton didn't? The dude did it partly because he wanted to shut up Weaselton. I heard that the old man's reaction was priceless."
The loud slamming of a fist on a table and a nasally "AHEM!" signalled that the Weasel was about to begin lecture. The old man glanced over in our direction, and suddenly turned so red that I wondered if steam would start billowing out his ears. I glanced over at Rapunzel to see that she had nothing in front of her with which to take notes, and instead was perched back in her seat, hands behind her head.
"Not gonna take notes?" I asked.
"Nah." She replied, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear. "The TAs are preparing to teach all the course material themselves since they all know that Weaselton won't. I'm mostly just hear to see how long it'll take for everyone to get fed up and leave."
She stuck her tongue out toward the Weasel, which earned her a free eraser as he threw one in our general direction. I could see that Rapunzel's advice to not to sit too close was one to be heeded.
Rapunzel's other statement about the Weasel's willingness to teach the course material was also very quickly proven right when, after unsuccessfully trying his damnedest to make Rapunzel apologize, he began the lecture by extolling the virtues of Weselton. When he showed no inclination of teaching the stuff we paid for him to teach, I, along with literally every other student in the room, packed our bags in disgust and left.
"Hey Rapunzel?" I asked, as she forcefully dragged my sorry butt back to the bus loop in order to cram some breakfast into me once I told her I hadn't any this morning. "Could you very quickly re-explain the Elsa myth thing to me again?"
"Huh? Uh, okay. Sure." She glanced back at me, slightly taken aback by the admittedly very strange request. "The gist of it is that calling for Elsa three times while looking into her mirror causes her ghost to appear and do very bad things to you. Why do you ask?"
My mind overruled the heart, for once, and I carefully considered my responses.
Would she really believe me if I told the truth? That Elsa actually did come and scare my pants off? That she does it mostly because she's bored and lonely? That she and I had a friendly chat about possessing bodies almost immediately afterward?
Probably not.
Even I knew it was a bad idea to confide secrets of this magnitude to strangers you'd met only the day previous, and if I had learned anything from sitting in lecture this morning it was that Rapunzel's a rampant gossip. I'd probably get laughed off the planet if she's just messing with me, so I decided to play it safe.
"Oh, no reason, really. I tried it last night and I guess I saw something? But I wasn't sure what, so I'm just asking for confirmation. That's all."
Rapunzel's expression grew dark, and her grip on my hand tightened.
"I figured as much. The people who began all this crap all belong to the same dumb fraternity here at AU, and I know that they use the myth as a hazing ritual that every new recruit gets put through."
Rapunzel palmed her forehead.
"Ugh, I can't believe I fell for their silly ghost story. They probably made it all up while drunk off their asses during some party."
I shuddered at the thought of intoxicated frat boys breaking into our house to visit Elsa, and made a mental note to get Mom to install a security system.
"It's strange though, because they all actually seem to believe in it. Every single one of them insists that a clear image of Elsa appears in the mirror, that the temperature inexplicably drops, that the door suddenly locks, and that she's dead silent as she somehow makes you fear for your life even though she only visible in the mirror, among other things."
That about accurately sums up my first encounter with Elsa. At least they're not liars.
"They're all genuinely terrified of returning to Elsa's house. Well, technically it's yours now.. but you know. Though, the only thing that isn't unanimous about Elsa is the idea that she's inaudible and invisible outside of the mirror. There was this one guy who insisted otherwise, but no one else believed him. He eventually moved away though, I think."
Hold on, what?
Someone actually claims to have seen and heard Elsa?
Huh, that's one thing I'm certainly going to ask Elsa about when I get home today.
What I've written here is based off of my experiences attending an entry level history course at my local university in which the course was split into a lecture component and a tutorial component.
All students attend the lecture component, where the professor teaches all the course material.
At a later and separate time, the students then attend their chosen tutorial class, where graduate students / teaching assistants elaborate on what was lectured to smaller classes of ~15 students.
My prof was nowhere near as bad as the Weasel though, mine was actually cool enough to perform a puppet show to wish us luck on our finals, in fact.
I don't actually know if colleges classes are in this format, so I had Anna attend a university instead. If you noticed that discrepancy between the summary and the story, then know that the reason why I wrote "colleges" in the summary instead of "universities" was because I was hard pressed for characters and needed shorter words to fit everything in the summary.
Side note for aspiring writers: Don't neglect your summary. If a reader doesn't like your summary, then what reason do they have to believe that the story itself will be any better?