Queen of the Clueless (Interim Goddess of Love) (2 page)

Our relationship, Quin and I, was strictly professional. Really it was. Going out with Robbie sort-of was no threat to it, would not change anything about it.

Because how can a guy compete with the God of the Sun?

I wanted to like Ms. Sanchez, because she was my General Psychology teacher, and I was a psych major. Call it wanting to root for the home team and all, especially because we had non-psych majors in our class. But when she pulled out the touchy-feely getting-to-know stuff in class in the first week of my second semester as a sophomore, she lost points with me.

Ford River College was a fancy, exclusive school, located just outside of Metro Manila. I went there because I got a scholarship (no way would we have been able to afford the steep tuition otherwise) and because my mother wanted me to, very badly. She fell in love with the charming, brick buildings and view of hills on her first visit there. I grew up in the middle of a noisy, dirty, crowded city and thought at first that the move out to the
hills would lead to culture shock. But I adjusted pretty easily. Fresh air, clean bathrooms, good cafeteria food, facilities that seemed new every year. Why would I hate any of that?

So this probably seems like such a shallow complaint, but the one thing I did hate about Ford River was that they made their teachers "get to know the students as people." It was meant to make sure we were treated as mature individuals and not children, but the mandate led to some icky teacher interactions.

On our first week, Ms. Sanchez asked us to stand up, introduce ourselves, and make the sound of the animal we were most like. And explain why.

Some people may be into that, but not me. I rolled my eyes and said I was a bird. Because I liked to hover and fly away from uncomfortable situations.
Chirp
.

This week she was talking about hypnosis. She cast a glance around the classroom, and caught my eye.

"Hannah, would you mind joining me here in front please?"

Not that I could have refused. I took the seat she had set dead center in the front of the room.

"Have you ever been hypnotized, Hannah?"

"No," I said, and now that I felt the eyes of all my classmates on me, I started to wish I were somewhere else.

"To become hypnotized," Ms. Sanchez said, to the entire class, "you'd have to begin by being induced into a trancelike state. This usually involves emptying your mind of thought—which is going to be really easy for some of you here."

That was funny. Half the room got the joke.

"Everyone, please, some silence. Hannah, I'd like you to close your eyes."

I tossed a skeptical look at Sol, over at the third row. She sort of blinked at me in a weird way, and I could tell she was reminding me about the thing she wanted to talk about. I nodded and closed my eyes.

Ms. Sanchez had a slightly tinny voice. As she encouraged me to empty my mind, saying things like "You are in an empty, white room" in a lazy and drawling tone, I realized that her voice was so annoying. It grated. I wasn't being lulled into a relaxed state at all. I could totally see myself in that empty, white room, but I could also see her in it, and her voice was bouncing off the walls and growing louder and more metallic with each word.

I didn't get enough sleep last night, didn't get to have
caffeine this morning. It took some effort to tune her out, but eventually I think I did. I must have. Because I started goddess-dreaming.

Better get out of the way.

I don't just think that; I actually say it aloud. I take a tentative step to the right, and my bare feet feel the slight crunch of fallen leaves. I am looking up at coconut trees, all around me, their overlapping leaves blotting out the bright sun in places.

The trees are all around me. I remember what adults always told me, when I was a kid, get out from under the tree, if a coconut falls on your head it'll kill you. Kind of hard to find a safe spot in this place.

A hand reaches out for me and pulls me under a small beam of light.

"Hello," I say.

It's Quin, or it's the being I assume is Quin, who neither looks like the twenty-one-year-old student nor responds to the alias. He kisses me, and briefly his fingers run through the long, lush, slightly reddish hair that I know I don't really have.

I know this is likely a borrowed memory, because when I goddess-dream I warp into a time and place that only a real goddess must have been in. I know that I am not a real goddess, but I take what I can get, and kiss him back.

"How long this time?" I say, when the kiss ends, a zillion seconds later.

"Shorter, not as long," Quin tells me. "Father has taken half of Aman's dominion away. He will surely surrender soon."

"You said that last time."

"If it were up to me, he would be dead, and you would not need to worry."

"I'm sure your father disagrees."

"I don't know what he thinks anymore."

"He is thinking the way you would. If I weren't involved. You would have fought to save Aman, not have him die."

"You don't know what I would have done."

"I do know." I look at him and see that he believes me. He will not admit it, but he believes me. "You always want things to stay just as they are."

"I want order maintained."

"Maybe there are some changes you can't fight."

"Stop talking like he has already won."

I blink. "Has he?"

He shrugs. "I can't see the future."

"I wish you could. I want to know if all this waiting is worth it."

He looks hurt, to my surprise. "If you have to ask, then maybe it's not."

"...Hannah? What sound does a bird make?"

My eyes opened and I spent a second just coming back to consciousness and focusing on Ms. Sanchez's face.

"What sound does a bird make, Hannah?"

I frowned at her. "Chirp?"

Ms. Sanchez smiled apologetically at the rest of the class. "Oh well. Not everyone can be hypnotized this way. It's another mystery of our minds, why some are more open to suggestion than others."

"Can I go back to my seat now?"

Later, I verified with some classmates and yes, I didn't actually fall into a trance and make a fool of myself in class. And it looked like I had just dozed off for less than a minute.

My goddess-dream felt longer than that. I mean, the kiss alone...

"You dropped your pen," Sol's voice beside me brought me back to Earth, to Ford River, to my GenPsych class.

I nodded, still blushing, and still feeling slightly guilty. I knew that those dreams were someone else's, but I enjoyed them a tad too much.

d4 Nf6
Nd2 e5
dxe5 Ng4
h3 Ne3
fxe3 Qh4
g3 Qxg3

This was going to get better at some point, right?

Bad Sol, bad.
She mentally gave herself a kick as soon as she let that thought complete itself. It was unfair. Neil was a great guy. So nice, so smart, so into her. It was totally not her place to think that way
while they were kissing.

One of Neil
's hands was on her thigh, the other on her shoulder, and she was trying to squirm backwards and a little to the right, so she could turn her head a tiny bit more, and maybe not feel like she was being  compressed into a little ball. She was sure that Neil was doing everything right, but something still felt slightly off. Nothing so drastic, but surely if she turned just a bit…

Maybe it was her. Neil
had
had two girlfriends before her. She had kissed a grand total of one other guy, and it wasn't like that was the best experience either.

Cellphone alarm. Sol had set it for thirty minutes before curfew. She fished the phone out of her pocket with some relief.

"I have to go," she said, as she always did lately.

"
You should think about what I asked you." Neil never liked the alarm. He vaguely looked like he would throw the phone against the wall, if allowed to.

Understatement! It was all she thought about. If her thoughts were ever transcribed,
"Move out of your apartment and move in with me?"
would fill pages and pages. It was something she instinctively got excited about, like a more mature version of "
Go to the prom with me?"

She didn
't give him an answer, but this was the third time he had brought it up and it was making her nervous. Sol actually had a canned answer ready, because she looked it up, and found a book on relationships, and bookmarked a section on "Is your boyfriend moving too fast?"

I think we should slow down, and take things a day at a time. The next step will mean so much more if we know more about each other, and really thought it through.

But that sounded so lame. 

She was sure h
e could sense that she was getting nervous, and he was being nice about it by not nagging her every second. But each reminder was sounding heavier, taking on a little more pressure.

"
I want to," she started to say, making sure that it was on the record. "I really do."

"
You know I'm willing to talk to your mom about it."

Yeah right.
Sol's mother didn't just run three successful businesses; she micromanaged her daughter's life too. It took so much begging and pleading to get her to agree to anything not according to plan. Sol's ex-boyfriend was not according to plan, and it ended up a disaster.

Going to Ford River was another unexpected decision. Sol had to promise that she would remain focused on her double major, and not do anything to make anyone regret letting her study this far away from home.

She couldn't think of how to start that conversation. But she wasn't surprised at Neil's confidence.

It
was what attracted her anyway, that confidence. He had the slightly aloof air, like many of these guys who grew up overseas. He didn't seem to care about any other subject in school, but he liked his chess, and he liked that she would beat him.

Later she discovered that he was studying in Ford River because he got into some trouble in California. It wasn
't just that college was cheaper on this side of the world—his family had exiled him to the land of his superstrict relatives. Except they couldn't really control him if he lived on campus and they didn't, so he pretty much lived as he pleased. Although still on a leash, because they handled the money.

One day last semester, he told Sol that he
really
liked her, and he finally felt like there was a point to his being in "the middle of nowhere."

Around the same time, he became really sweet. Affectionate. Kept touching her face, her hands, looking soulfully into her eyes, saying mundane things like
"Join me for dinner" with odd intensity. She lapped it up, because even if it was a little weird, it was still better than being cheated on by a long-distance boyfriend. But his next thing, the "move in with me," that wasn't mundane.