Kendra landed in the middle of The Commons on
top of Stamford’s star quarterback.
He staggered, but caught her in his arms.
“Jesus!” he squealed, as much as a baritone can squeal, “you
stink!” He didn’t quite drop her,
but he backed away quickly.
The gaggle of undergrads around him sneered, smirked, or
giggled as they held their noses and backed up, staring. Kendra didn’t mind. High on the adventure she’d just had,
she smiled at them all, then walked across The Commons toward her
apartment. She paused where the grass
ended and the sidewalk began to put on her filthy soggy flats.
It was amazing to Kendra that she attracted so little
attention as she walked to her apartment, but then Stamford was a university
town. The townspeople must have become impervious to whatever bizarre stunts the
students pulled off campus. Kendra
had worked so hard since she arrived that she had little idea of the happenings
in the world outside the physics building.
Unfortunately, her building’s super seemed never to have no
immunity to the unusual.
“Tanagawa!” he shouted down the hall at her as she waited for
the elevator. “What the hell do
you think you’re up to? You stink
to high heaven.”
“I know.
Sorry. I’m just on my way
to shower.”
“Oh no, you’re not.
Outside, young lady.” He
pointed toward the front door.
“I’ll meet you around back.”
He watched, with a very sour look on his face, while Kendra walk by him
and out the front door.
Puzzled, she squelched around to the back of the
building. Morty stood waiting, a
hose in his hand.
“Morty,” Kendra wailed.
“You can’t hose me down like a dog! It’s cold out.”
“You think I like this?!
If you don’t want the hose, don’t roll in dog shit. For chrissake, quit crying. I brought you a couple of towels.” He gestured to the back stairs where he
had laid a few old thin towels.
Morty sprayed, and Kendra shivered and sniveled.
“Here,” he handed her two towels when he was done. “I’ll leave the back door open for
you. Lock it behind you.” He dried his hands and arms with the
third towel as he walked up the back steps. At the door he turned to shake a finger at her. “Don’t you drip on the floors, hear
me? And leave the towels outside
my door before you go up.”
Kendra’s long hair soaked the first towel. She could have used the second on it,
but did her best to dry the rest of her instead. Hands trembling with cold, she wrung out each towel and
repeated the process. When she
went in, she wasn’t dry, but she wasn’t dripping either. Morty would just have to live with
moist footprints.
Upstairs Kendra showered long enough to use up her apartment’s
allotment of hot water. She wanted
more. At last she was clean. She heated a cup of water in the
microwave, then scrounged through her cupboards for a packet of hot chocolate
or a tea bag, but found nothing that wasn’t fully caffeinated. Tired and dispirited, she brought her
hot water to bed with her, sipped some, then pulled the covers over her head
and shivered herself to sleep.
She woke an hour later when the guy who lived above her
started dancing with his new pet elephant, or so it sounded. She dressed, stopped by the diner for
lunch, and then went to the Salvation Army Store to assemble her costume. The peasant blouse and a plain wool
skirt weren’t hard to find, but the half-dress to pull over it was tough. She finally found a shift that wasn’t
lycra or hot pink or patterned, but it also was three times wider than Kendra
was.
“This is a nightmare,” she muttered as she checked out. She would have to sew. Her mind filled with its favorite primitive
domestic scenes--barefoot, pregnant, cabin, dirt floor.
“All set, Hon?” asked the tough but friendly older woman who
rang up her order.
“Um, do you know where I can buy a needle and thread around
here?”
“Yeah, there’s a hardware store a block down that sells ‘em
believe it or not.” The woman
squinted at Kendra’s scratched hands.
“If you’re new at sewing, do your finger a favor and buy a thimble
too--easier to push the needle through the cloth.”
“Thanks.” The cashier
seemed so stolid and wise that Kendra wanted to stay near her, but the woman
was already busy with the next customer.
Reluctantly, Kendra dragged her purchase off the counter and left. She missed her mother.
A week later Kendra had finished the revisions that her
adviser suggested for her dissertation, and sent it back for final, she hoped,
approval. She had also assembled a
sixteenth century peasant’s outfit and, because there was no way that Morty
would hose her down again, Kendra found out which locker room the women’s rugby
team used.
She hadn’t seen Matt since she’d told him to act his age, and
assumed that American Missile had sent its spies to hassle someone else. Their loss.
Kendra shoved her costume into her book bag and headed for her
lab. The one thing she hadn’t been
able to do was to figure out the vampire population curve. She still knew neither what caused the
five-hundred year plateau in the pre-industrial era, nor what was about to make
them extinct. A jump back in time
to a year in the curve’s long plateau would allow Kendra to look for clues and,
though they seemed separate in time, for any link between the plateau and the
extinction force. Time travel made
temporal relationships, or lack thereof, irrelevant. She planned to start by testing her theory that the
execution of witches had adversely affected vampires.
Out of habit, Kendra swept her lab for bugs as soon as she
arrived, and then set the decoy program to run on her computer. Better safe than spied on. She entered the variables for the
jump. Her stomach growled as she
was about to change into her costume. The revisions to her dissertation and the sewing (both chores
she was very pleased to be done with) had kept her so busy that she couldn’t
remember when she’d last eaten.
She also didn’t know how long she’d be gone, or if she’d get a chance to
eat in the past. Impatient and
resentful of the needs of her own body, Kendra nevertheless stomped over to the
student cafeteria and ate.
Full and fully frustrated by the delay, she practically ran
out of the student center, and promptly collided with someone dumb enough to
stand in front of the door.
“Whoa there, Little Missy. Where are you off to in such a hurry?” Matt.
“Shit!” Kendra
thought she might explode with impatience, but the last thing she wanted was to
let Matt know that she was in a hurry.
Not wanting to waste time listening to his bullshit, she headed for
campus security.
“Hey, no need to go get security.” Matt spoke as if he were calming a crazy person. “I just thought I’d ask if you wanted
to work out with me sometime.”
The unexpected proposal was enough to stop Kendra. She turned to face him. “What?! Why would I do that?”
The question seemed to be just what Matt had been waiting
for. “Well, I thought I saw you
cross campus with a bag of clothes awhile ago. I just assumed you’d been working out.” He smiled, but his eyes searched hers
coldly.
“Am I wrong?”
