IGNORANTIA (Dark Academia!Wesper AU)

vijf

Jesper doesn't come home that night. Which is fine. Whatever. I can't be mad at him for having fun. Besides, it gives me more time to myself.

But then he doesn't show up the next morning, nor all of that day, nor the morning afterwards.

Nina is also gone. I only know this because she works late shifts at the coffee house where I'll occasionally go to get away from general university madness, but she doesn't show up there, either. When I ask Jamie — Nina's manager and a fellow flute enthusiast — about it, he seems just as worried.

"She was super worked up during Stephien's party, though," he tells me over a cup of coffee during his break Saturday morning. "Kejnan supposedly saw her arguing with this tall guy on the porch. Apparently it was serious enough that she was crying — and Nina's not one to get visibly emotional."

"Do you know who the guy was?" I ask.

He shakes his head. "Kejnan said he didn't recognize him, but Kejnan couldn't recognize his own mother in a room full of other Kerch women."

I don't know how you could forget your mother's face so easily. It's been years since I've even seen a portrait of my mother, but even now I remember every little detail. I remember the way her dimples winked when she smiled, and the fall of her hair in her eyes when she was too lazy to get it trimmed. I remember wrapping my small hand around her pointer finger, and her chest against my back when I sat in her lap.

Most of all, I remember how confused I was when I couldn't find her the morning she had died. I walked the halls in my nightie — a scrawny boy who still sucked his thumb at the age of seven — calling out for her. The maid, Missus Lange, not daring to look me in the eyes or else she'd get weepy.

We had five staff members in total, and not one of them paid me any attention that day. I wouldn't find out what happened to my mom until the nanny dressed me in a black button-down and trousers, and handed me over to my father. Even he didn't care to really explain it. I tried to hold his hand, but he brushed me off.

"Come on now, boy," he had said. "We'll be late."

My lunch with Jamie ends shortly after, once I realize we really don't have anything else to say or talk about. I tell him I'm meeting some friends at the library to study; I should feel bad about lying, but guilt is too natural an emotion for me nowadays. It's easy to leave so quickly.

Jesper and Nina aren't back by the time classes start up again Monday morning. Kuwei, however, is, and I share my chemistry class with him that day. Juliette sits in front of us as usual, while the spot her lab partner typically resides in is unsettlingly empty.

My first private lab with Callaghan starts later that night. It's late enough into the night that I have to walk to the building by lantern light, Kuwei accidentally meeting me at Emmerson's Point in the courtyard. He joins me like we had been planning to walk together all along. And if I'm really being honest, it's a bit of a relief to have him with me. The campus is suspiciously empty; replaced with yellowed leaves falling from hibernating trees. A chestnut colored squirrel dashes across the road, burrowing himself into the small hole underneath a giant oak tree.

Kuwei doesn't talk much, despite how contemptuous he may act. Although in his defense, he's writing in that damn lab journal again as we walk. I have to take him by the shoulders to steer him when he's seconds away from stepping in dog feces.

The silence gets to me in the end.

"What are you writing about?" I ask, shifting the heavy lantern from one hand to the other.

"Lunch time," Kuwei says. "I've been recording everything I've experienced in Kerch so far."

"And how are you liking it?" I ask, intrigued. To be quite honest, I've never wondered what Ketterdam would look like from an outsider's perspective. Even through everything I've experienced here, I don't think I could ever leave. Ketterdam is my home, and I'd rather die here than anywhere else.