Graceful Deception

1. Frankly, My Dear...

Chapter 1

Frankly, My Dear...

You would think that just lying on your new bed in your new dorm room would be a little relaxing, especially when your roommate wasn't there yet.  You'd already watched your tearful mother drive away with your father and brother, unpacked all of your things, and even went to get a late breakfast before the lunch crowd started coming in.  Some people would have even been a little sociable, going outside where all of the new and returning students were gathered, the ones who had already unpacked like you had and decided to spend some time with the people they'd met at orientation and kept in touch with over the summer. 

But me?  I wasn't. 

I knew I should have been doing exactly that, just so I wouldn't have time to myself.  Because when I wasn't moving or doing something productive, my mind was free to do anything, think about anything.  And these days?  These days, I wasn't in the mood to think. 

When I had time to think...my mind would go back to what had happened just a few weeks before, that crazy adventure that had been disguised as my kidnapping.

The story of Emmy Alexander's kidnapping was still fresh in the minds of basically the entire world.  That was because, unfortunately, the short segment that I'd filmed with an interviewer had gone viral just three weeks after I'd been 'found.'  It had been played on every news station that had covered the story and hundreds of newspapers. 

Of course, I had to make up the 'few things I remembered' of the ordeal, since it obviously didn't happen.  The woman who had interviewed me, Tory Moss, was fresh out of college and was looking for her big break into the news world.  Out of the dozens of people who had wanted to interview me, all of them from major news companies, she was the only person that I picked to do an interview with.  Since then, she'd been hired at one of the biggest companies and credited me for everything. 

So since almost everyone had seen the video or the news coverage during my disappearance, whether online or on television, everyone knew my name and my face. 

This was the main reason that I was currently lying on my bed in my dorm room, doing absolutely nothing besides listening to my iPod.  But even the music blaring in my ears wasn't helping clear my head.  The name of the one person who I wanted to see the most was floating behind my closed eyelids.

John Raymond.

A pretty inconspicuous name, huh?  Yeah, that's what I thought the first time he'd told it to me.  At first, I thought it was just a made up name, the most basic name in the book. 

He was anything but basic, that's for sure.

My kidnapper, that mean guy who threatened me but then also vowed that I would be safe, the next leader of a secret society who had kept themselves hidden from the world for thousands of years...whatever you wanted to call him.  But me?  I called him something else.

He was the guy who I fell for in the eight week time period in which we'd broke into museums to gather the pieces of a puzzle, the puzzle in which that secret society, the Fraternitatem Temporis, would be able to find the location of their hidden records.  These records were basically the history of the world, every little thing that happened that changed the current time as we knew it. 

But when we found all of the pieces of the puzzle, did it show us that location?  No, it absolutely didn't.  There was more to it, more that we had to find.  Ed Parsons, the current leader of the Brotherhood, had said that I would be brought back to help if I wanted, which I didn't even had to think about to give him my answer.  But so far, in the weeks since I'd gone back home to New York and was now starting at Boston University, there had been no word from anyone.  Nothing at all.