Days turned to weeks as Shane eased into college life at Annandale as one does into a too hot bath. It was no great adjustment for her, save for worse dinners, lumpier beds, and a larger library that did not conjure up so many misty memories. Despite Shane's fear that she would find every inch of the campus saturated in Essence of Eliot, she only associated him vaguely with the library (as, she thought, she always would with every library) and concretely with the garden. Everything else seemed a blank slate on which she could draw her future with a purple crayon.
Yet the slate remained blank; she had yet to make her mark anywhere. She had explored the campus with breadth, but little depth; she could direct a curious party to any building on campus, but wouldn't know why one would want to be at that particular location, café, library and dorms aside. Her interest was not in the buildings but the land on which they sat. All she knew or cared to know was the world in which she interacted each day. Shane could wander through the glens and dells of the campus for hours without being bored in the least. There were sporadic statues to be found even in the deepest forests, from classical figures to what seemed to amount to little more than a pile of scrap metal. But nothing filled her heart as much as Blythewood did from a distance and no statue felt as alive as Eliot's Eve.
The turning of autumn seemed more poignant to Shane than it ever had cause to before. It made her want to clutch her textbooks to her chest and spin in circles, falling into a pile of leaves. She did not do this, as she thought her books might outweigh her by a few pounds and she might be thrust by centrifugal force into a tree. Also, though the falling red and orange leaves danced around her, Shane's mother had always taught her that tempting piles of flaming red leaves were invariably breeding grounds for ticks. It's hard to Carpe the Diem when one is worried about bloodsucking parasites and vertigo. Lyme's disease and nausea aside, she could feel almost content for the first time since Eliot. This was far closer to what her life was supposed to be.
Roselyn and Shane formed a sororal relationship. True, they hadn't imagined a sister like the other and they considered one another the "little sister," but they were satisfied with their lot. They ate many lunches and dinners together (neither being the sort of people to wake up earlier than was absolutely necessary to get to their first class, thus not religious breakfasters) and talked superficially of people and the contents of campus newspaper, The Phoenix.
The latter topic of conversation was eternally fruitful. The Phoenix mostly reprinted the strangest news items it could find in place of original articles, which would rely upon a marginally talented writing staff that simply did not exist at the college. Shane and Roselyn had spent the last week of meals drawing connections between news items. For example, days after scientists auctioned off a sword that could slice through samurai steel and which was made from a meteor, a naked man ran into in church a dozen miles away, brandishing a very similar sword and trying to behead the parishioners. No explanation would be given, so they would have to make due with their own theories involving demons and averting the apocalypse. Or an elephant would vanish from a circus only a week before an adjoining town created the world's largest sausage. Shane was certain that the world was getting to be a far stranger place than the one in which she had grown up. Everyone likely felt this way, which she constantly reminded herself to prevent from becoming unreasonable.
However, Shane happened to be completely right.
Shane was browsing through the paper for an update on the meteor sword -- a report that it was stolen or a statement from the naked swordsman -- when she felt Roselyn's eyes on her. "You really should get around to meeting other people," chided Roselyn gently over their respective dinners. This was Shane's first real exposure to nagging outside her mother, who subscribed to the school of permissive parenting until her daughter began lamenting the lack of Eliot.
Shane picked at her plate of chicken Caesar salad and frowned. She had met people on campus, even those of the opposite sex. She learned quickly that college was far different from high school and being bookish could be sexy to the right kinds of guy (and, she was amused to note, girls). Quite a lot of attention from a staggering amount of boys, in fact, though some seemed to think her name was Tiffany. She was not opposed to getting her due, but wasn't interested in making good on her newfound comeliness. She politely declined anything she saw as a romantic proposal, though sometimes the boys in question genuinely wanted to study. Shane made a good enough showing in her classes to be thought intelligent but stopped short of being a know-it-all, a very appealing ground to hold.
"I have met other people," argued Shane.
Roselyn cocked an eyeliner-darkened eyebrow at Shane. Roselyn's eyebrows, like the rest of her hair, were naturally pale blonde that often looked gray. Only make-up gave her face the expression she desired.
"I have! Many people. Some with penises," Shane continued too loudly. Shane suspected that Roselyn thought she was doing a proper and friendly thing by bringing the topic up several times a week. Shane also suspected that Roselyn actually believed her boyfriend Dryden was a vampire, so her sense of how reality worked might be slightly off.
"Not that you would know from first hand experience?"
A blush quickly grew over Shane's cheeks. "No," she answered to the plate in front of her, "I'm not interested in knowing that right now. I'm really happy not knowing in fact. Thanks anyway."
Roselyn had even gone so far as to try to fix her up with one of her new coven mates -- there was no lack of similarly minded people at a liberal arts college -- but Shane had refused to do anything more than shake her friend's hand and tell him she had to write a big paper about the school's founding. Roselyn knew Shane couldn't possibly be happy leading such a monastic life, though Shane would have been the first to disagree with this assumption. Meeting and mating with Dryden had certainly perked Roselyn up. Even now, her mouth felt lonelier for the absence of his tongue.
"Level with me, why the fear of boys?" Roselyn asked to penetrate the silence. "They really have a lot of good features."
The abruptness of this startled Shane. They may see one another fresh from the shower, but their relationship was hardly intimate enough to give the real answer. Roselyn, after all, had only backed off on converting Shane to Wicca a week before. "It's not a fear of boys, it's…" She fumbled for a credible lie.
"It's Eliot?"
Shane sat, frozen in her seat, mouth agape still trying to form the lie requested of it. She had made it a point not to mention Eliot to anyone. Ever. At most, she said that she had a serious and brief relationship with a guy from home, but never dared to speak his name. She didn't want to stop remembering him, but just as much she didn't want to have to think about him any more than was necessary. She didn't want to have to share him.
Roselyn put her hand on top of Shane's in a gesture that was supposed to telegraph that she cared deeply, but made Shane feel more invaded. "It's okay. You mumble in your sleep sometimes… And you might have left your diary open on the desk once. It talked a lot about how in love you were with Eliot and how you felt abandoned and... I like your poem about lakes. Very Robert Frost."
"So you know that he died?" Shane asked in a small voice, feeling and sounding like a child. She hadn't expected to be so terrified of the sound of her own voice. She searched her mind for the doubt that kept a candle of hope flickering within her. If she could believe at five that her stuffed rabbit could come to life if she loved him enough, she certainly could love Eliot enough that he would just have amnesia somewhere. He could come back and love her. He didn't have to be in the ground. But the doubt ebbed, its flicker too dim to find with her mind's eye.
"No. I..." Roselyn had only pieced together that Shane had been serious about this boy and that it ended badly. Roselyn grasped Shane's hands in her more firmly, genuinely compassionate. Unbeknownst to her, Roselyn's rings pinched Shane's skin against her own ankh ring, drawing a welling of blood to the surface.
"I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I wouldn't have… I just thought he dumped you and you were still… I'm sorry. Oh gods, I'm so sorry. I wouldn't have…" she stammered. "Are you okay?"
Shane nodded her head, though it didn't feel at all that way. She wasn't angry with Roselyn for having read the open journal; Shane would have done exactly the same if the situations were reversed. She just felt that, now that Roselyn knew about Eliot, she had lost a little more of him and she had none to spare.
"I really believe that there is a plan to everything," Roselyn began clumsily, wanting to smooth things over or at least replace the awkward silence with the sound of her voice. Anything she said had to be better than the silence. "Even though he died, something good can come of it. Like, my goddess Kali is the destroyer but is also the embodiment of essential goodness. She brings about change and the shedding of old habits."
"That's Shiva," corrected Shane mechanically, but the pain crept into her tone as she first noticed the blood on her hand. "Kali wore the corpses of children as earrings. She was the goddess of thugs. And I don't believe that there is a grand plan to the universe. Eliot killed himself. He drown and he's dead, okay? It was the first stupid thing her ever did and the last. So, no, I don't think that there is goodness to Eliot dying; it was just an otherwise intelligent person giving in to utter, contemptible idiocy. I loved him and he is gone. I can't believe in any loving god that would allow that to happen." Shane tried to wipe her wound clean with the edge of her shirt, but more flowing red replaced it. So much blood for such a tiny hole.
Shane stood without another word and walked out of the cafe. Roselyn wanted to call after Shane, wanted to argue against atheism and anguish, but not even air would come out of her throat. People around her were looking at her out of the corners of their eyes. Roselyn imagined derisively that they thought Shane and she had just broken up.
She hoped they hadn't.
We Shadows is a serialized novel being written by Xen, also known as Thomm Quackenbush. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
