Brothers Keep Her

You don’t see Sam around on your days off from work even though you look for him everywhere you go (just in case). You go back to work two days after the spin out, hoping Sam will come in. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t the next day, either, or the next. After a few weeks, you figured he and his brother had definitely moved on to wherever they were going. C’est la vie.

Three different mechanics were never able to find any major problems with your car. You’re relieved but curious. Though you will probably never know why you spun out that night, you can’t stop thinking about it. At least you have enough money to get your trunk repainted and still have a little bit left in savings. What douchebag would key your car? There isn’t a person in the world you can think of who you might have pissed off enough to deserve that.

People are jerks.

You try Googling “D. W. S. W.” but only come up with crap that doesn’t make any sense like Deep Water Slender Wells and DSW Shoes. Google is no help.

“What are you looking at?” Nanami asks as she catches you gazing out the front windows one afternoon.

“Nothing,” you say, and start to wipe down the counter.

“Okay, who are you looking for?” Nanami knows you well enough to know when you’re trying to avoid a subject.

“Nobody. I was just thinking. About school.” You can’t look at her because if you do, she’ll see right through you.

“Right. I’m supposed to believe that?” She leans in and snags the towel from your hand. “You’ve wiped down that spot six times in the last fifteen minutes. So, who is he?”

When you finally look at her, your smile is impossible to suppress. You laugh. “Okay. Do you remember that really tall guy that came in a few months ago? The one that was here right at the end of my shift?”

Nanami scrunches her nose as she thinks for a moment. “Oh, the cute one? With the long hair?”

You tell her about seeing him at the library and how he saved you from busting your face on the stairs.

“Did you get his number?” she asks, smiling with you.

You shake your head. “No. Just his name. Sam.”

Nanami grimaces. “Sam? You don’t hear that name very much anymore.”

You shrug. “I think it’s nice. It fits him.”

She giggles. “How do you know? You don’t even know the guy.”

“I don’t know. He’s just...” You sigh because you can’t think of the right word.

“Oh, hey, who keyed your car? Did that happen here? I saw it on my way in.”

You glower. “No idea. I didn’t see it until I got home to my apartment. Might have been here, could have been the library. I don’t know. It’s been there for a few weeks, now.”

“You getting that fixed?”

“Yep. Made an appointment for next week.”

“Did you call the cops? Or your insurance?”

“Yeah. Not much they can do. It’s cosmetic, so. I got pictures of it.”

“That sucks. Sorry, girl. What does it even say?”

You shake your head. “No idea.”

9 Months Go By

It’s the fall semester and you’re walking to your first day of class in the early afternoon. The end-of-summer heat wanes every day, which is great because fall and winter are your favorite seasons. It’s your senior year and you will have that degree before you know it.

“Hey!” your friend Jonah calls out.

You look around for him. When you spot him, you stop and smile. “Hey, how are you?”

He catches up to you. “Good. You going to Shakespeare?”

“How’d you know?”

He nods at the book in your arm and shows you his copy. “McFarlane?”

“Yeah! I didn’t know you’d be in my class.”

“Sweet. I’m gonna need your help. My advisor is making me take this class but I really don’t get this dude at all.”

“Shakespeare or McFarlane?”

He raises his eyebrows at you. “Both?”

You laugh and walk up the old slab steps together. The campus is as old as the college itself, and this is one of the five original buildings. The top floor is sealed off for reasons no faculty or staff member will explain, so it’s a hot rumor topic among students. Some say the original president of the college went bat-shit crazy and hung three faculty members up there, then screamed out the window at everyone who happened to be walking by before he hung himself alongside them.

Some say they’ve seen his ghost standing in the window, looking down on the quad below.

You and Jonah grab seats in the middle of the lecture hall. You don’t want to be too close to the front or too far back (or the professor might call on you). You page through the used textbook you bought from the campus bookstore. It’s one of those super thick books that is actually worse than it looks because the pages are thin and semi-transparent.You wonder how much of it you will have to get through this term. All of the featured plays and sonnets are in old Shakespearean English, and that’s never been easy for you to pick up. Hopefully, this class will help.

The lecture hall fills with students. Jonah watches you page through your book but doesn’t touch his. “So you wanna grab something to eat after class?” he asks.

You look at him apologetically. “I have to work. Or I would.”

“You’re always working,” he says. You know he’s teasing you.

“I have bills,” you say. “Tomorrow?”

“Yeah, tomorrow works. We haven’t been to that Greek place in a while.”

You nod, looking at your phone; class should have started by now. “Where’s Professor McFarlane?”

Jonah looks around the auditorium, but all either of you can see are other students. “Maybe he’s running late.”

“Well, I guess if he doesn’t show up in the next fifteen minutes, we can leave.” You feel kind of excited about that. It’s not often you get a get-out-of-class-free card, especially on the first day. And you know Jonah’s happy about it.

“Weird. I heard he’s a hard-ass,” Jonah says, slouching in his seat to get comfortable. He closes his eyes. “Wake me when he gets here.”

You mindlessly browse through your Facebook notifications, then check the weather forecast for the next ten days (all sunshine; cool), and look through your inbox. Eventually, you run out of things to look at so you put your phone away. Still no sign of Professor McFarlane. “I’m going to the bathroom,” you tell Jonah, who murmurs at you without opening his eyes. “Watch my stuff.”

The professor has another five minutes before you can call it, and he will understand that one of his students had to pee. You sidestep to the center aisle and make your way up through the rest of the class to the back entrance. You head toward the closest restroom, passing other classes in session. Usually, if an instructor was going to be late, someone would leave a note for the class, but you didn’t see any notes taped up anywhere.

You’re just about to push through the ladies’ restroom door when you step in a puddle. You look down and immediately hop back. For all you know, the toilets are overflowing and you’re standing in a puddle of piss. Gross. It doesn’t look like it’s coming from the ladies’ restroom. You look at the men’s door; sure enough, it’s coming from there. Still coming. You need to find a custodian fast because this cannot be sanitary.

You find an office and knock on the door. “Come in,” a woman calls.

You walk inside. Three of the four faculty desks are empty, and you notice one of them bears Professor McFarlane’s nameplate.

“Is there something I can help you with?” the woman asks as she stands to greet you. She’s wearing a light blazer and her dark haired is wrapped up in a French twist.

“Uh,” you say, forgetting why you came for a moment. Then it comes back to you. “The men’s room is flooding. There’s a huge puddle in front of the door and it’s getting worse.”

“Oh, these old buildings. I’ll call someone.” She turns and grabs the phone on her desk, and starts punching numbers.

“Um, excuse me... Have you seen Professor McFarlane?” you ask. Maybe she knows something.

She puts the receiver to her ear. “He’s in class right now. He should be out -”

She stops when you shake your head.

“Hey, it’s Laura Thomas from Language Arts,” she says into the phone as she looks at you. “It seems we have a bit of a plumbing emergency in the restroom here on the first floor.” She nods her head as she listens. “Okay. Great. Thank you so much.” She hangs up the phone. “Maintenance is on the way. Now, you were asking about Dr. McFarlane?”

You look at his empty desk. “Yeah, he’s supposed to be teaching Shakespeare but he never showed up. We’re all just kind of sitting there, waiting, so I thought maybe you knew where he was.”

She looks genuinely confused. “I just talked to him at the top of the hour. He left the office five minutes before class started like he always does.” She scans her desk and grabs her smartphone. “I’ll just call him. Maybe something came up.”

You feel awkward hanging out in the instructors’ office so you back out. Ms. Thomas will find him. In the meantime, the rest of the class is probably getting up to leave right about now. You don’t really feel like you have to pee anymore, so you head back toward the lecture hall.

As you are passing the bathrooms and the growing puddle, you hear a cell phone ringing. It’s coming from inside the men’s room. For a fleeting moment, you think it might be your missing professor. What did he do, fall asleep in there? He probably dropped his phone in the toilet. Someone tried flushing it and now there’s this nasty flood.

Two of the building maintenance guys show up as the phone stops ringing. They ask you if anyone is in the ladies’ room, but you don’t know. You never went in.

“Oh, what a mess,” Ms. Thomas’s familiar voice is behind you. You turn to face her. “I haven’t been able to reach him just yet. I was heading to the lecture hall to release the class.” She sighs at the mess on the floor and steps gingerly around the edge of the water. As she does this, she presses the call button on her phone again. You’re about to follow her back to the auditorium when you both hear the cell phone ringing from the men’s room.

“Shit!” one of the maintenance guys says, and busts back out through the door clutching his chest. All the color has drained from his face. He can’t breathe, much less form words.

His partner goes in. You and Ms. Thomas stand unmoving outside with your eyes trained on the door, neither of you daring to breathe. Nothing happens. You hear nothing.

Then the first maintenance guy starts sobbing. His shirt says “Bennet.”