Cured [ManxMan]

Chapter Nineteen

I adjusted the straps on my backpack as I pulled the door to the student center open, immediately being struck by the chaos inside. I usually avoided the building from eleven to one, the height of the lunch rush, when the line for every food counter was long and every table was surrounded by students, some even choosing to sit in half-hidden corners or against walls.

But I'd promised Mattie I'd meet him for lunch because it was the only time I would be able to see him today, he had a big test coming up so he would have to go to the library after his evening lab to study.

It took a while to make out his dark hair in the crowd, not helped by the fact that he was hunched over a table and not at all looking for me. There were books and papers spread across most of the table, and his head was bent close to a pretty African American girl. Her arm brushed his as she leaned closer, speaking animatedly and gesturing to something on the paper in front of them with her other hand.

I might have been jealous of my boyfriend being so close to such a pretty girl if I thought there was any chance he was interested in her, but Mattie didn't have a straight bone in his body. So I knew I wasn't interrupting anything when I approached the table and dropped my bag next to the empty seat on Mattie's other side.

Mattie shot me a tired smile as I sat down, reaching out to grasp my hand for a second before turning back to his companion, who didn't seem to have noticed me and had continued a long winded explanation on something about atoms and bonding and honestly it all went right over my head. I understood just enough to know it was related to Mattie's chemistry exam tomorrow, and really nothing else.

Honestly, it shouldn't have even been that confusing. We were only a month or so into our first semester of college, getting ready for the first round of exams, and I already felt like I was in way over my head. Mattie had a bit of trouble in chemistry because he had a mind for physics, but he was breezing through Calculus, some programming class, history, and English, while I was struggling through English, Spanish, precalc, and intro to psychology, the only class I even halfway enjoyed, and I already had credit for it from AP.

Okay, I enjoyed going to English, but only because I had it with Mattie, not because I enjoyed the subject in any way. And I wholly regretted taking Spanish in the hopes I would understand my boyfriend when he slipped into his second language. So far I'd only learned articles and a handful of introduce yourself phrases. Certainly nothing of use.

Minutes passed, long enough for me to pull out my phone and scroll through a good bit of my Facebook feed (wow, Sarah was already pregnant? We just graduated high school!) before the girl finally paused to ask, "Do you have any more questions?"

"No, I think I'm good," Mattie replied. The girl nodded and finally looked up to see me for the first time and startled a bit, then laughed and held out her hand.

"I'm Kiara Young," she said, smiling. "I'm a junior in Microbial, Cellular, and Molecular Biology."

I took her hand and gave it a firm shake, trying to return the smile and not show how intimidated I was by her very smart sounding major. "Hello. I'm Topher Wright, freshman in Psychology."

Kiara gasped. "That's so cool! The brain is so weird, it's not like any other part of the body, did you know..." and then she kept talking and whatever it was, I certainly didn't know it before, and I didn't know it now because she was explaining complicated biology stuff and I'm pretty sure some of the words coming out of her mouth weren't English.

Was I supposed to know all of this? It was somewhat related to psychology, but there was no way I would ever be able to retain that kind of information. I just liked learning how people think, especially because I did such a poor job understanding it intuitively. Maybe because my brain just worked different from other people's, but I had never been able to read people very well, and learning psychology was definitely helping me with that.