The Felix Chronicles: Freshmen (4 page)

“You… you have no right,” Eusebius choked out. He had lost all color, his face a mask of terror. “How could you do this?”

“This is
your
fault, my dear governor. Not mine. Not the Emperor’s.” Hosius nodded at the captain of the guard and the soldiers began filing out of the room. Just as he was about to leave, he looked back at Eusebius, who was still staring blankly at the carnage surrounding him.

“One more thing,
Lord
Eusebius. If you choose to disobey Emperor Constantine again, you should know this: He’ll mount your head on a pike and display it for all to see at the imperial palace in Constantinople. Vultures will strip away every piece of rotting flesh from your traitorous skull. And your family—they’ll suffer the same fate as your eldest son. Every fucking one of them.
Now find the boy!”

“COLLEGE”

(THE PRESENT DAY)

Felix and Allison were in danger of being late for freshman orientation. Their dorm’s RD, a spunky and very chatty sophomore named Fallon, had cornered them in the lobby and assaulted them with information about the illustrious history of Portland College. Among the unsolicited facts: it was the oldest college west of the Mississippi River; it had produced the current governor, Portland’s mayor, and the last five senators; it was always included in the annual top ten ranking of the country’s most beautiful campuses (fourth in this year’s issue); and most everyone (even the three women who’d founded the school over 200 years ago) called it “PC.” Felix had been staring off at the ninety-inch TV in the common room as Fallon droned on and on about the campus. He’d given her the occasional head nod to pretend like he was listening, but all he caught were a few stray words, like ‘brick’, ‘cobblestone’, ‘arches’, and ‘ivy’.

“Do you believe her?” Allison asked him.

“Who?”

“Fallon.”

“About what?” He had no idea what she was talking about.

“The
trees
,” Allison said, exasperated. “Weren’t you listening? She was saying they’ve never had to chop one down. Not even after that big storm.”

“Oh,” he muttered vaguely. “Okay.” He hadn’t been listening to that part, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have cared enough to consider whether it was true or not. He gazed around. There was no disputing the fact that there were lots of trees. Some were big. Like the ones that edged both sides of the path they were hurrying along, their branches stretching high into the vibrant blue dome above them. Strong sunlight slanted down through the canopy and fell over the walkway and its aged worn stones. There were smaller trees too, the squat, spreading variety with their gorgeous red and purple leaves. He knew a few of their names—oak, maple, and fir came to mind—but he wasn’t so sure about some of them and didn’t care enough to see what Google had to say about it.

Allison changed the subject, apparently realizing he wasn’t in the mood to discuss trees. “What do you think he’s gonna say?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Taylor.”

“Who the hell’s that?” Felix had never heard of him.

“The President of PC, dummy. President Taylor.”

“Oh. Okay.”

They changed direction, getting onto a path that bordered a huge lawn everyone called The Yard. The grass was so green and pristine it reminded him of some of the golf courses he’d seen on TV. They were walking fast. Allison wasn’t having any trouble with the pace. She was tall, her legs were long, and she ran every day, at least five miles. While Felix kept his eyes focused on his feet and any bodies that got within collision distance, Allison’s eyes were skipping from Felix to the path and back again. And the second he began drifting off into his own private world, she seemed to sense it and her searching eyes flitted up to his face. It had been like this ever since her mom had dropped her off at the dorm this morning. He felt like she was probing him (or assessing whether he was on the verge of going postal) and it was starting to get on his nerves. He glanced over at her intending to tell her to quit looking at him, but when he saw what she was doing, all the irritation instantly melted away. Her long dark hair was twisted into a thick cord, resting on her chest over her left shoulder, and she was running her hands up and down it like she was climbing a rope. She only did this when she was severely stressed about something. And he knew what she was stressed about—
him.

Her eyes narrowed and her brows drew together as if she was trying to tell him something she was too afraid to say out loud. There was something about her eyes that was impossible to ignore. It was the first thing he’d noticed when they met in a freshman geometry class in high school in a little town on the Oregon coast called Coos Bridge. They were such a surreal shade of green he remembered thinking she had to be wearing tinted contacts. She wasn’t. They were just that green. But that was only part of it.

“You might want to remember his name,” Allison suggested with a trace of sarcasm in her voice.

Felix grunted.

They walked for a spell. Felix said nothing. Allison hummed the lyrics to a song that sounded distantly familiar.

“Why do we even have to go to this stupid thing?” Felix complained as they maneuvered their way around a cluster of students parked in the middle of the path, diverting foot traffic to the grass on either side. “We’re already late. That Fallon chick wouldn’t shut the hell up.”

“Because it’s freshman orientation. And we’re freshmen—remember? And that
Fallon chick
is our RD, so you better be nice to her. And I thought what she was saying was really interesting. PC’s history is fascinating. A lot of strange stuff has gone on here.
Really strange stuff.”

“Whatever.”

“C’mon, Felix,” she said, turning toward him as they slipped past another group of idlers. Worry lines creased her brow. Her forehead always tended to pucker with at least a few lines even when she was just hanging out and relaxed. But today, she didn’t just look like she was worried, she
was
worried, worried about him. “Its not gonna be that bad. It’s just orientation.”

With a flat frozen expression on his face, he gazed down at the path and shrugged. He knew Allison was just trying to cheer him up, and he felt bad that she had to deal with him when he was like this. Felix was a train wreck—and he knew it. He could barely hold a conversation, and just being around people (excluding Allison) made him feel anxious and uncomfortable. But being alone was almost worse: with no one to distract him, he would start thinking about his life, and that wasn’t a good thing because his life had recently swirled down a toilet into a bottomless pool of shit.

Allison was still watching him, and for a moment, he viewed himself through her eyes. Felix had learned to mask the noxious mixture of pain and anguish that consumed him every second of every day. Almost, that is. His eyes betrayed him. It was nothing obvious; they weren’t puffy, watery or bloodshot. But it was there all the same, like a current flowing beneath a precarious sheen of river ice, and Allison zeroed in on it like a bat to a fluttering moth. She didn’t see what everyone else saw: That he was tall with hair that turned from light brown to sandy blond during the summers, and pale blue eyes that drew lots of comparisons to Siberian huskies and chlorinated pools. All she saw was the distant hollow look in his eyes. He couldn’t fool her. He didn’t even try; there was no reason to.

“You meet your roommate?” she asked, her expression rigid.

“No. You?”

“Not yet.” She paused, and chewed on her bottom lip as she searched for something else to talk about. The lulls in the conversation seemed to make her edgy. She looked up. “Check out this weather. Nice, huh?”

Felix almost laughed. She was right about the weather. Warm afternoon sunlight drenched the campus. Light breeze. Perfect.
But seriously,
he thought,
the weather
? Allison was getting desperate. He felt sorry for her, which made him feel guilty, and that made him feel even worse about… everything.

“This’ll probably be the only nice day all year.” He gave her a tired smile, playing along. “You know it’s gonna rain like every day for the next eight months. I just love Oregon.”

She laughed, but it wasn’t her usual laugh. That wasn’t her fault—it was his. What he’d said wasn’t that funny (obviously), but he appreciated what she was trying to do for him. Allison had a great laugh, but she was guarded around people she didn’t know and she didn’t share it with just anyone. By all accounts, Allison was intense, maybe even a little confrontational at times, and the word people often used to describe her was
fierce
.
Felix wouldn’t disagree—because it
was
fitting—but he would never try to sum up Allison with one word. It would be like describing her eyes as simply
pretty
.

She was still talking about the weather, but his attention had wandered to a milling crowd gathering at the entrance of a big brick and stone building in the distance—Rhodes Hall, the largest auditorium on campus. It looked like everyone was trying to file in at the same time and it had created a bottleneck.

Allison had followed his stare and was looking at the same thing. “Hey—I guess we’re not gonna be late after all!” She smiled and let out an exaggerated “whew!” Then added: “Call me a loser if you want, but I was gonna die if we missed this thing.”

Felix recoiled and sucked in a hissing breath of warm dry air. The word
die
(or
death
), along with
fire
, and sometimes even
burn
, caused this to happen. He was conscious of it, but awareness of the issue hadn’t solved anything. His face tightened. The muscles on his jaw stood out like sinewy knots. A dark frown settled over his face.

Allison shrank back and held her breath, then looked up at him with wary eyes. Felix met her gaze. She blinked and quickly lowered her head as though a stranger had caught her staring on a public bus. He knew exactly what she was thinking—the pained expression was splashed across her face. He didn’t want to think about it, but it was too late for that. His mind was in free fall and he was tumbling backward, sinking down inside himself, and there was no safety net to catch him.

A week after the
accident
—the word didn’t come close to capturing the sheer horror of the event, but he didn’t know what else to call it—Allison had found him just outside town holed up in a neon-signed motel that shared space with a pawn shop and an all-night liquor store. Allison had told him about the fire. She’d seen it. She’d been out for a predawn run and saw the smoke. She told him that it looked like a bomb had gone off. She told him that she’d thought he was dead. She told him how sorry she was. Her account of the fire—the fire that had killed his parents—was all he knew about it. He had no memory of the
accident
. On the morning of his eighteenth birthday, he awoke to find himself lying in his back yard with paramedics and firemen surrounding him. His house had burned to the ground (a gas leak was later identified as the likely cause), and he didn’t remember a thing. An ambulance took him to Coos Bridge Memorial, and on the way, one of the paramedics had told him that his parents didn’t make it out of the house. He reacted badly—he recalled someone shouting, “He’s flipping out.” Then they restrained him and gave him a sedative strong enough to incapacitate a horse.

Felix gave his head a stiff shake—as if haunting memories were erasable like the screen of an Etch-A-Sketch—and looked up from his flip flops, which he’d apparently been staring absently at for the last 200 yards. A good stretch of path behind him was a total blank. They were standing just outside Rhodes now where they’d joined their new classmates, two among hundreds jostling to get in. The crowd surged around them.

“This is gonna suck,” he whispered to Allison as they squeezed their way through the doors into a darkened vestibule. The army of shuffling feet plowed forward. Eager, chattering voices filled the chamber. As he bodied his way along with the crowd, it occurred to him how excited everyone was. He didn’t feel much excitement (none actually), but he understood what was going on: This was their first official function at PC. Once they entered the auditorium and took their seats, they would no longer be high school students. They were in college. An exciting prospect. But not for Felix.

“It’ll be short and painless,” Allison said to him. “C’mon, would I ever lie to you?”

“Angela?”

A voice. A blood chilling voice. The long twisting paths in Angela’s mind led to a door that only opened at night when the frightening intangible things in her imagination became real. The voice was coming from the deepest recesses of her mind, from whatever dark realm lay hidden behind the door.

“Angela? Time to wake up. Oh Angela. Wakey wakey.”

Her eyes fluttered, but failed. The smell of grease, rubber and dirt clung to her face like a mask. Her head was splitting with pain; it felt swollen. She was cold. Was it the air conditioning? Sometimes she forgot to turn it off and her bedroom became an icebox and her mom would freak out and yell at her for running up the electrical bill.

The voice from behind the door called out to her again, snaking its way through the heavy stupor clouding her mind. Then a vague vibrating sensation coursed through her. Someone was shaking her. By the leg? Or was it her foot? Her mom? Why? Was she late for school? What time was it? If she missed first period again, Mrs. Telfair told her to expect a call from the vice principal’s office.

“Rise and shine, little missy,” the voice said.

The sensation of being shaken grew steadier, more forceful. And it
was
her foot, she decided. The bottom of her foot. Someone was…
kicking her?
No. Not kicking her, but… prodding her. The hard square toe of a boot? She heard herself moan. It sounded funny, muffled. Her eyes snapped open—but the darkness remained. Confusion spilled over her in drowning waves. Was she blind? Did something happen to her? In her mind’s eye, she saw an image of herself trapped below ground. Or was she trapped in some strange unreality? Trapped in a dream—behind the door. Then she felt something being pulled over her head, and a moment later, there was light. She blinked against the sudden brightness, squinting into the dirty golden cast of a late summer afternoon. Sunlight filtering in from above fell over her black yoga pants in a stripey pattern. She straightened her legs, then drew them up to her body and hugged them tight, cradling herself in a fetal position.