Page 12 of Serpentine Valentine
But again, that wasn’t why I felt breathless looking at her across the quad.
It was more this: She stood straight, evenly braced on both feet. It was an odd pose for a young woman, who usually cocked a hip or fluctuated from foot to foot. She was still and poised, her chin tilted up toward the sun. She was posing, flaunting the fact that she knew every eye was on her.
Look at me, she seemed to say.Look at me. I have nothing to hide.
And even more intoxicating,I have nothing to say. You aren’t worthy of my notice.
Haley’s “wow” was right.
“Isn’t it kind of, I don’t know, wrong or gross that she’s just standing there like that?” Flora asked with a grimace.
“Jesus, Flo,” Haley whisper-yelled, leaning over my shoulder to shoot her a glare. “Insensitive much?”
“I’m just saying it’s weird. She has to know everyone’s looking at her and talking about her. She’s like…famous now.”
“For what?” I asked softly, my eyes still locked on the victim whowas not in any way acting like a victim across the quad. “For being raped?”
My words dropped like a nuclear bomb in the middle of our little group.
“Tucker told me she fucks anything with a dick,” Flora argued, eyes flashing.
She was like that. Argumentative without caring much which side she landed on. In debate, it was amazing to watch, but in real life, it was callous and unfair more often than not.
“Tucker says that about any hot girl,” I bit back. “He’s a grade A misogynist. You said that yourself last semester when he asked you to suck his dick outside the Penny Farthing, remember?”
A sniff was her only answer.
Across the courtyard, Lex Gorgon finally tipped her head down and watched impassively as a group of three girls approached her. They didn’t hesitate to fall in at her sides, touching her briefly in solidarity.
I didn’t know her, but I felt profound relief seeing that she had friends.
For a moment, I’d seriously considered getting up and going over to her myself. Wondered how she would receive me if I got close enough to see just what color those pale eyes were. Imagined she might give me a smirk because she seemed like the kind of girl to smirk and then invite me for a beer at the Penny.
“Luna?” Kenzie said like she’d said it a few times already. “Did you finish that reading for Gibson’s Shakespeare class?”
“Honestly, giving homework before classes even start should be criminal,” Haley muttered, propping her chin on my shoulder.
I knocked her cheek with mine. “Don’t think of it as homework. Learning shouldn’t be confined to a classroom.”
As a unit, my friends rolled their eyes and said, “Such a nerd.”
I laughed, but even as I did, my gaze slid to the other end of the quad.Lex Gorgon was still standing there, holding court with her three friends, a similar image to the one I was part of. But there was no doubting, even from a distance, that she was different.
Scarred, rebellious…even dangerous.
So why was I so intrigued?
Historyof the Tragedies was my first class every Monday morning and followed for an hour each on Wednesdays and Fridays. I was doing an honors double major in English and History even though my mother told me it wasn’t practical.
Maybe I even chose it because she told me that.
The truth was, I found it difficult to relate to people socially from an early age, and it was only through books that I began to understand them. The Harry Potter series taught me about courage and conviction, Jane Austen taught me about the longing every woman feels for something more outside of their norm, and the Gossip Girl books educated me on the currency of rumors and good looks in teenage girls. It was only by reading about the emotional landscape of others through the written word that I eventually felt like I could partake in real life without inevitably ending up an outcast.
So I felt a tender gratitude for literature for raising me in ways my mother never could.
I was excited about Tragedies, and not just because I was one of the dime-a-dozen college girls who fancied themselves obsessed with Shakespeare. I’d always preferred sad stories, the kind that left an aching echo in my chest for weeks.
“You seem curiously excited for a class about tragedy.”
