Page 5 of Mate

I grabbed her arm as I raced her up the stairs, but around the time we made it up to the floor where the party was, we looked around and realized that there were no more wolves. They weren’t behind us anymore, and when we went to the balcony, we didn’t see them there either.

We were quiet as we looked out, our eyes circling the outside of the building as we peered out into the night. As dark storm clouds began to cover up the light of the moon, it became increasingly impossible to see anything. We saw the parking lotwe had come from, but even that was already becoming faded with a slow-growing fog.

We silently stood there, leaning over the side, watchful and waiting, until a stripper walked out of the boy dorms and warned us that not wearing shoes was dangerous. We didn’t tell her about the wolves, because we were both silently becoming less and less sure of their existence.

“You know what?” Macy finally said, looking at me. “Maybe we should go to bed… I’m thinking maybe there’s something in the ice cream.”

I agreed, looking out at the darkness one last time before we walked up one more floor to get to the girls’ dormitories. “Yeah, I bet it was the gummies. They were a bad idea… They’re always a bad idea…”

I didn’t look like a real human being anymore, I realized as I rolled out of bed that Monday. I put my sister on a train back home, and then I sort of became my old self, the self that my parents didn’t like. In short, I smoked a lot of weed, I drankmore, and I tried to forget about the wolves.

The wolves were in my head. The wolves were in my dreams. There was no forgetting about the wolves any more than there was the ability to forget my most embarrassing moment. It was just blazed in there, seared right into my core, creating damage.

For the most part, I was done with the first two years of college even before I passed year one. I might have been a ‘C’ student, but I was still an Advanced Placement student. SinceI already had credit for the common core classes, I’d chosen to take Archeology this semester, thinking it would be an easy A. Despite the teacher being attractive enough to make most of the female student’s panties wet on a daily basis, this class was always brutally boring. Sometimes I truly worried if I was going to make it out alive, and how bad would it be if I just passed out in the middle of class.

But it was the first day that I felt like I had to pry my own eyelids open. Today, my teacher was looking right at me.

It wasn’t a good look; it was an unnerving look, like I had grown an arm that was now coming out of my face and was taking notes in his class, and he was wondering if it was rude to stare right at it.

Still, I had smoked a lot of weed the day before and I was thinking that maybe I still had some paranoia in my system. And sometimes people simply looked right at you. I remember going to a couple of concerts where I could swear up and down I made eye contact with a celebrity. Maybe for only a couple of seconds, but it had happened.

Okay, so this was more than that; this was a lot of eye contact. He also didn’t seem okay with me not wearing a bra. He seemed to have noticed I wasn’t wearing one long before I did, and it wasn’t as if his expression was even grumpy. I’d call it nervous.

I was going to write it off, but my biology professor had also been weird, and in the exact same way. If my dorm had been closer, I would have stopped and just put on a bra. As it was, it would have been more than a mile out of the way, and classes were only fifteen minutes apart. Besides, it wasn’t super porn-star obvious.

“Kaci Iverson, right?” the teacher said after class, coming up to me as I was trying to fit a 2-inch binder into a space not big enough for a 1-inch.

“Um…” I looked back and forth, like he might be talking to another Kaci. Everyone else was filtering quickly out of the class. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Hi,” he grinned and then scratched at his perfect stubble, looking over at me thoughtfully. “Um… I’m Dr. Roger Holldender,” he said.

“I know,” I told my professor, the one I’d had for six weeks now.

“Right.” He nodded and then pursed his lips at me. “Um… You’re going to have to… go to the… um…” He pointed upwards.

“The Great Spirit in the Sky?” I asked, my words teasing, but I was mostly confused by his poor attempt at sign language.

“No,” he snorted. “Um… The boss. The um… president?” He blinked at me expectantly.

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked, confused. Nobody had seen the president much; like all presidents, everywhere, he was mostly in charge of making generalized emails for newsletters, taking the credit for the school doing well, and passing the blame when there was something bad that happened on campus.

He shook his head, still looking awkward. He didn’t really strike me as a biology professor like he had a few moments before. He seemed like a frat boy who was trying to manage a situation. “Nope. I don’t think so. I just think it’s good to go there before Ry comes to get you.”

“Ry.” I repeated this name because I was trying to recall any and all Rys that might make sense in this conversation. None werecoming to mind. I didn’t think I’d ever known anyone named ‘Ry’.

“The provost,” he explained a little wearily, wincing slightly. “Ryker. Ryker Willenger.”

Ah, shit. Sure, I’d crossed horns with that guy pretty commonly, but that didn’t make the provost the most terrifying man in creation, as my professor was making him out to be. I did have to work my way up emotionally to any and all confrontations with him, though.

You’d think the title of ‘scariest man alive’ would belong to some hitman who was hunting down a politician somewhere with a sniper rifle, but instead he’d decided to work at Newsome University as the provost. He was huge, had dark hair, and there were tattoos under his shirt. There were a lot of rumors about him. Some said he used to play professional hockey, some said professional football but was kicked out after breaking a spine. Others said that he was a UFC fighter that had broken someone else’s spine, or that he used to be a hitman called ‘The Spine Breaker’.

I rolled my eyes to the ceiling as I ran through all of these rumors. Now that I was thinking about it, it was beginning to sound more like a very poorly played game of telephone. Well, it didn’t matter. I agreed with Dr. Roger; if the provost was looking for me, especially today, then I did not want to be found.

“You want to borrow a sweatshirt? You look cold,” Dr. Roger said smoothly, going down the steps towards his desk and grabbing one off the back of his chair.

“I’m fine,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“No, you need something,” he assured me, waving his hand and bringing me a grey sweatshirt. He proceeded to put it over my head in a very smooth way, like he dressed women all the time against their will.

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