Bright Stars, Broken Compass

Chapter Two: Abbey

I'm sweating by the time I reach the top of the stairs, bent almost double under the weight of my back pack and the bags of books hanging from each hand. I'm standing at the very top of the third flight, squinting to find my apartment door, loaded down with what feels like a metric ton of required reading. Falling would be a very bad thing.

Death by textbooks. Classic.

Humidity makes my dark, wavy hair limp. Sweat plasters strands to the back of my neck, the side of my face. A pair of dragon flies chase each other in the dim light of the landing, crashing together and then separating before beginning the chase again. Even my bones ache from the long walk across campus. But there's a kind of weightlessness inside me too, a breathless expectation that something wonderful waits for me this semester, just ahead, in the shadows, if I can only be fast enough and brave enough to seize it for myself.

I'm barely two feet from the door when it swings wide, revealing a petite, blonde, curly-haired pixie wearing tight dark denim and impossibly high heels.

"There you are!" The pixie throws her arms wide and wraps herself around me, either not seeing or not caring that I'm about to pitch forward, dragging her and hundreds of dollars of dead weight with me. "I got in two hours ago. I would have called, but I lost my phone." She holds me at arm's length and grins up at me. "I'm sure it'll surface when I finish unpacking."

I give her a labored smile in return. "Hi, Amy. I'm glad to see you too." And I am. Amy was my roommate last year, when we shared a cracker box of a dorm room in the dreaded freshman cluster. "But I kind of feel like I'm carrying a dead body on my back. Help?"

Her blue eyes are huge as she surveys both bags and my bulging back pack. She grabs the bags and tries to lift them, but can't. Amy might weigh a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. She mixes great cocktails and her French toast is to die for, but she's useless in the brute strength department. She settles for dragging them, throwing her back into the effort as she grunts her way into our apartment.

"You and your Honors College hybrid genius degree," she grumbles, dropping everything in the middle of what will be our living room. "A regular major just won't do, will it? You have to go and design your own." She crosses her arms and surveys the maze of trunks and boxes piled haphazardly around us. "Don't blame me when you keel over during finals."

I let the books drop from my back with a low groan of ecstasy and arch backward, feeling the knots slowly unkink. I can't even see across the room, the space is so packed. And it wasn't like this when I left a couple of hours ago. "Uh, Amy..."

"Don't start," she says, palm out, forestalling my protest. "This is everything. I swear." Her lower lip disappears behind her teeth. "Until my next trip home," she adds quickly, darting behind a tall pile so she misses my narrow-eyed glare.

"How'd you get it all up here so fast?" I peek into one of the boxes. A sparkly pink boa rests on top.

"Found it!" Amy thrusts her phone skyward, waving it excitedly. "And two ways: Adam and Blake. They live downstairs." She punches keys wildly. "I've got their numbers. In case we need anything," she adds with a sly wink.

I refrain from asking where the hell Adam and Blake had been when I moved my stuff in this morning. Life just works like that for Amy Pendleton. She's never even changed her own tire. Some guy always stops and does it for her.

"This is going to take hours to sort out," I groan, surveying the mess. I pick up a box, full of mostly maps and notebooks. Scoring one of the coveted on-campus apartments on the quad is something I never thought would happen to me, but it pays to be in Honors College. Most of the time. I can't wait to start decorating, making this space truly ours. It's my first ever apartment, and I couldn't be more excited.