Fragmented (3 page)

We said our goodbyes and nice-to-meet-yous, and with a cursory wave in our direction, Raleigh maneuvered herself away from the lunch table and in the direction of the cafeteria exit.

“Did you see her arms?” Lauren announced when Raleigh was out of earshot. “She’s like totally ripped.”

Maia tossed a chicken nugget in Lauren’s direction. “Did you miss the part where she’s in a wheelchair?”

Lauren ignored the projectile and flexed a skinny bicep. “I wish I could get muscle definition like that.”

“You’re kind of the worst person I know right now,” Kelley said, shaking her head.

The critical words bounced off of Lauren as easily as the chicken nugget had, and she continued to squeeze at her bicep. My friends persisted in tossing food at each other and talking about exercise and diet or how to get skinny arm muscles or something equally vapid while I became lost in thought.

Lauren had dominated the lunch conversation with her inquiries, but I had a few questions of my own. I wondered where Raleigh had transferred from and how Chicago compared to where she’d lived before. I was familiar with being the new girl at school. Immediately after my mother had been hospitalized I had suffered the prying eyes of those who had known what had happened to my family. I’d had to transfer schools because of it. I could handle only so much taunting and whispering behind my back. My grades had slipped and I would come home to my Uncle Jerret and Aunt Olive’s with far more bloody noses and black eyes than straight-A report cards.

A new school was the change of pace I had desired, but it was only a matter of time before the people I’d thought were my friends had let spill the reason I lived with extended family instead of my mom and dad. Despite my brother Damien’s advanced age, he’d been in no position to raise me when my mother had been taken away, so I was sent to live with my mom’s brother, Jerret, and his wife, Olive. They had no children of their own and had had no idea what to do with a nine-year-old girl, but we’d survived.

It had made me purposely friendless for the majority of my high school years. I really only began trusting and opening up to people again when I started college in Chicago. But even now, I rarely revealed anything about my Memphis roots and only barely shared what I did or who I spent time with off campus.

After a long moment, I realized that someone had asked me a question. Three pairs of eyes peered curiously at me.

“Sorry. What?” I snapped my attention back to the table.

“I asked what you have after lunch,” Maia restated.

“Oh. General Psychology.”

“Psychology?” Kelley echoed. “Do you need that for your major?”

“No. But I need an extra social sciences class for graduation.” I looked down at my lunch, having lost my appetite. “Actually, I’ve got to stop by the library before my next class,” I said, gathering my tray and my messenger bag. “I’ll see you guys later.”

I left the university library with heavy books a new burden in my school bag. I needed to start making flashcards of body parts for anatomy. I’d done well in high school science classes, but Introduction to Human Anatomy was known as a weeder class for first years looking to go pre-med. It didn’t bide well for those of us taking the class as a general education course to fulfill the university’s laboratory requirements. I also had to start looking into finding an internship for spring semester. It was only the first day of school, but I was already experiencing that familiar feeling of being overwhelmed.

I entered the academic building that housed my psychology class. I would have preferred a less science-focused schedule, but I’d postponed my general education classes until my senior year, and I needed the credits if I was going to graduate this academic year.

I smiled at a few familiar faces as I traveled the sparsely populated hallways. I had no way of knowing everyone’s name, but after being on campus for a few years I was starting to recognize people. I turned a corner and stopped to refill my water bottle at one of the filling stations in the building. I wiped at my forehead and felt the perspiration that had accumulated from my short walk from the library. The weather was still warm for early fall and for that I was thankful. Chicago winters were too long and too harsh to take this Indian summer for granted. My southern blood was thin, and I didn’t do well in the winter months.

General Psychology was my largest course of the semester and would probably be the biggest class of my college career. The university generally had a low student-to-faculty ratio, but my psychology class was scheduled in one of the larger lecture halls on campus. I wanted to show up early so I could claim one of the seats in the front row. When I spotted a vacant seat in the front next to an aisle, I realized I knew at least one other student in class.

I couldn’t very well ignore her, especially if I wanted a seat near the front of the room. Raleigh looked up from reviewing her course syllabus when I sat down in the vacant chair beside her.

“Hello again, Harper.”

“Hi.” I dumped my bag on the floor. “I didn’t realize we’d be in this class together, too.”

“Don’t worry,” Raleigh smiled mildly. “I’m not stalking you.”

“Good to know. What else are you taking?” The writing surface squeaked as I swung it over my lap.

“I’m overloading this semester to catch up on some of the time I lost because of the accident. I’ve got Anatomy and Psychology with you,” she listed, “and World Literature with your friend Kelley. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays I have French Fairy Tales and Cultural Anthropology.”

I whistled under my breath. “Geez, so you’re not planning on having a life, huh?”

She smiled wistfully. “I guess not. Between school and physical therapy, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else.”

“I’m in the same boat,” I commiserated. “I’m not overloading, but I’ve got class everyday, and I nanny for a family in Lincoln Park after school.”

Our professor walked into the lecture hall, signaling the beginning of class and the end of our conversation. Despite it being the first day of the semester, the instructor hit the material fast and hard. We went over the course syllabus briefly before he launched into a lecture.

I was half-focused on whatever the teacher was talking about and diligently copying the information down in my notebook. The rest of my attention was spent observing the girl beside me. Raleigh didn’t appear to be equally curious about me, however. Instead, she looked focused and intense, scribbling down everything the instructor said.

As our professor droned on and on, I found myself drawn to the soft, pale skin of Raleigh’s knees and her smooth calves that the skirt of her dress revealed. There were no scars, no blemishes of any kind. It was amazing and quite a bit distracting. Before I realized it, Professor Glasglow was wrapping up his lecture and the students around me had begun collecting their things, packing up laptops and notes into their bags. Raleigh too already had her notebook in her bag and was putting her textbook away.

“Do you mind if I take a peek at your notes?” I blurted out in a panic. “He started to talk pretty fast at the end, and I want to make sure I got it all.”

“Sure thing.” Raleigh twisted at the waist and pulled a purple notebook from the backpack slung over the back of her wheelchair. She didn’t look annoyed that she’d already put her books away. “You can give it back to me whenever.”

“I could copy them here, if you don’t have to run off.” I choked over the final words. Why had I said that?
She couldn’t run
. “I just mean, I don’t know about you,” I self-corrected, “but I don’t have any place to hurry off to right now.”

Raleigh gave me a smile I’d come to recognize. It was accommodating, almost reassuring, or at least it was designed to make me feel more comfortable about my word choice. The smile killed me. She shouldn’t feel sorry for me; she was the one in the wheelchair, not me.

“My aunt is supposed to be picking me up,” she said. “You can give me the notebook back in anatomy on Wednesday.”

“Oh, um, yeah. I can do that.”

Raleigh exited the classroom, leaving me behind feeling like an idiot. I shook my head and muttered to myself. For someone who was apparently book smart, I seemed to fall short in a lot of other categories.

I opened up Raleigh’s notebook to the first page and compared the careful, legible handwriting with my own frazzled scribbling. I always felt so frantic while trying to take notes in class. I was amazed by the thoroughness and neatness of her notes.

It only took a few minutes to copy the parts of the notes I had missed. I tucked my notebook and Raleigh’s back into my bag and I hustled out of the building, hoping to catch her before she took off for the day. The north campus parking lot wasn’t terribly large, but with so many students milling about, it proved impossible to identify her flash of blonde hair.

CHAPTER THREE

The next morning I met up with my friend Maia at the university library. Similar to our daily lunch meet-ups with Kelley and Lauren, Maia and I tried to get together at least once a week to study during a mutual free period. We usually didn’t get much homework done, though; more often than not we ended up studying undergraduate girls instead. It was nice having a queer friend on campus. I hadn’t had many friends in Memphis, let alone someone who was also gay.

I found Maia at a table in the main lobby where the best people watching occurred. If we had really wanted to get work done, we would have found an empty space in the stacks. Hardly anyone ever ventured to where the books lived.

“So tell me about your summer break,” Maia implored. “Lauren totally dominated our conversation yesterday, and we didn’t have the opportunity to catch up.”

“There’s not much to tell, really. I babysat for the Henderson’s nearly every day, and at night I hung out with Jenn.”

“Jenn.” Maia released a wistful sigh. “What’s she like?”

I thought about my girlfriend of a few months. Beyond our mutual admiration for the female form, we didn’t have much in common, but we’d made it work so far. “She’s quirky,” I decided on. “She’s got a lot of opinions, and she’s not afraid to share them. I suppose it could come across as bossy, but I like that about her. She’s pretty brave.”

“Is she cute? Of course she’s cute,” Maia interrupted herself. “You wouldn’t date someone you didn’t think was cute.”

“If you’re into androgynous women, you’d like Jenn. She likes to wear male fashions and she’s got a lot of tattoos and piercings, but there’s still something really feminine and delicate about her.” Jenn didn’t look like the kind of girl I usually dated, but that had been part of my initial attraction to her.

“How did you guys meet?” Maia asked.

“I was at a book reading in Andersonville. She approached me afterwards and immediately started hitting on me. I thought she was cocky and a little bratty, but all of that confidence had me intrigued. We got a beer afterwards, and I guess the rest is history.”

“How did she know you were gay?”

“Well, I was at a book reading in Andersonville,” I chuckled. The Swedish-American neighborhood was popular with lesbians. Boystown was another predominately queer enclave, but I preferred the small-town feel of Andersonville.

“I don’t know how or where to meet girls. And everyone I crush on turns out to be super straight,” Maia sighed. “It would be so much easier if there was a secret handshake or something.”

“I’ll ask Jenn,” I proposed. “Maybe she’s got some hot lady friends at DePaul she could hook you up with.”

“Really?” Maia’s eyes brightened. “You’d do that?”

“Absolutely.” I grabbed my phone from my bag and wrote a quick text to Jenn before I forgot. She didn’t respond, but I figured she was probably in class. “There,” I said with some finality. “Mission: Find Maia a Girlfriend has commenced.”

Maia dipped her head. “I’d be happy with a first date at this point.”

I patted her hand. “She’s out there,” I assured my friend. “Plenty of gay fish in the Chicago seas.”

Maia noticed my anatomy textbook on the shared table. She flipped the hardcover open to the table of contents. “Raleigh’s in this class with you, isn’t she?”

“Yeah. And I found out after lunch yesterday that she’s in General Psychology with me, too.”

“Do you think she’s gay?”

“Raleigh?” She didn’t ping my gay-dar, but I didn’t have much of a sampling; we’d only exchanged a few words. I shook my head. “I really couldn’t say.”

Maia rested her forehead on the library table. “Maybe I should just go on a date with a guy. Guys seem easier.”