Chapter Text
An 8 a.m. biology class was not how Morgan Jepsen had wanted to start the first semester of her senior year of college, but after putting it off for three years, the fates and her advisor had finally conspired against her. Which was why she was taking the path to the science building at a full sprint, even though it meant her backpack was slamming just right into the small of her back, and she was increasingly worried that her right sneaker was going to come untied and fly off. Upstate New York in late August was still hot, and sweat was making her damp, itchy, and grumpy.
She checked her watch as she burst through the front door and let out a gusty sigh as she slowed to a more appropriate walking pace. Five minutes to spare, and she could tell her hockey coach she got in a run this morning.
The class was in one of those giant lecture halls that fits three hundred seats, and there was a gaggle of students surrounding the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. “There are assigned seats,” a guy with a backward cap and coke bottle glasses said as Morgan plopped into the chair at the end of his row. “With our lab groups. There’s a list up front.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
She clambered back to her feet and made her way to the front of the room at a much slower pace than before. She hated assigned seats and assigned lab groups. Not that she knew many people in this class—it was mostly freshmen and sophomores—but one of the underclassmen on the hockey team was supposed to be here, and it would have been better than nothing.
She pushed her way in front of a couple lost-looking eighteen-year-olds and scanned the chart for her name. There she was, just off the aisle in the middle of the room, squished between a Novak and a Rauch. There was a box around their names and the three behind them. Her lab group, she supposed.
With a weary sigh, she climbed the stairs one more time until she got to row J and slid into the second seat past a scrawny kid who looked like he couldn’t even shave yet. “Parker Novak,” he said, sticking out his hand in a way that somehow straddled the line between pompous and terrified.
“Morgan Jepsen.”
“I’m a freshman. How about you?” He rushed on before she could answer. “I’m from Idaho. I know, I’m really far from home, that’s what everyone says. Where are you from? Do you like it here? I do so far, but there’s so much that’s really different than it was back home. Like pizza. Have you tried the pizza here? I went yesterday with my roommate. Idaho pizza doesn’t taste like that at all!”
Parker turned to look at the back door, which had banged open again, and Morgan took the opportunity to shoot a “please help me” look at the tall Black girl sitting on her other side, who smirked in response.
Parker turned back, but just as he opened his mouth again, the girl pulled her earbuds out. “I’m Emily Rauch,” she said, holding her hand out close enough to her body that Morgan had to completely turn her back to Parker to shake it.
“Morgan Jepsen,” she said again, with a huge grin. She followed it up by mouthing, Thank you.
She felt Parker shift in his seat, then heard him yammering on to the girl sitting behind him. She let out a small sigh of relief. “He’s going to be fun this year.”
Emily smiled. She had a nice smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’s a freshman. Two weeks of eight o’clock class, and he’ll be just as dead inside as we are.”
“You’re not a freshman then?”
Emily shook her head. “Nope. Senior. You?”
“Me too!” Morgan bit her tongue when she realized how loud and high-pitched her voice had gotten. She grinned self-deprecatingly. “Sorry. I was just terrified I was going to be the only person in this class who could legally get a drink after it.”
Emily chuckled. “We might need it,” she agreed, nodding to the small, squat man hand-writing the syllabus on his whiteboard. “Do you think he knows this is a technology school?”
“He’s the last remaining Luddite hero.” She watched Emily dig around in her messenger bag and pull out an IBM laptop with stickers all over the case. Morgan recognized the Wonder Woman logo, a Zelda triforce, and something that may have been written in binary code. “Nerf Herder?” she asked, nodding toward the biggest one.
“They’re this really cool geek-rock band,” Emily said. “They did the Buffy theme song.” Then she pulled up short and gave a little half shrug. “You know, if you’re into the sort of thing.”
“I love Buffy.”
They shared another smile, but it was cut short when the professor cleared his throat noisily and said, “Settle down, please!”
Morgan dug in her bag for her own laptop. It was decorated less lavishly than Emily’s, with a pride sticker on one side and a Minnesota Wild sticker on the other. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Emily checking it out.
Morgan spent most of the class wishing she was a coffee drinker so she’d have had something to keep her awake besides Emily’s gentle elbows and Parker’s bouncing leg. It felt about a hundred years long, full of information she didn’t care about and was never going to remember.
“So you’re a hockey fan then?” Emily asked as they packed up.
“And then some,” Morgan said fervently. “You must be too. Or you’re from Minnesota. No one around here recognizes the logo.”
“I am. A hockey fan, that is. Not from Minnesota.”
“Where are you from?”
“California originally, but I spent most of my life here in New York. Well, first in the city, then in Buffalo.”
“You guys moved around a lot?” They eased their way out of the row and into the stream of students clawing for daylight.
“I was in boarding school actually. My parents are still in California.”
Morgan had never met anyone who’d actually gone to a boarding school. It was so different from anything she’d experienced that she said the absolute dumbest thing she possibly could have. “Like Harry Potter?”
Emily blinked at her, and for a second Morgan was seized with the impulse to smash her head against the nearest wall like, well, like Dobby, but then Emily cracked up. “I wish! It would have been so much more interesting than it actually was.”
Fighting to keep her pale skin from turning pink, Morgan brushed short blonde hair out of her eyes and said sheepishly, “So no magic wands or cool spells or evil wizard trying to take over the world?”
“Sadly, no. The same boring classes that everyone else had to take, and the only thing that was evil was the dorm monitor who used to yell at us for breaking curfew.”
“You’re totally destroying the image of boarding school that I’ve always had in my mind.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Funny,” Morgan said, slanting her gaze sideways, “you don’t sound sorry.”
They grinned again, and Morgan felt a little zip of attraction she hadn’t expected. Then Emily checked her watch. “Need to get going?” Morgan asked, feeling disappointed.
“Yeah.” Was it her imagination, or did Emily sound a little disappointed too? “I have another class at ten thirty, and I promised a friend I’d pick something up at the bookstore for her.”
“Cool. That’s nice of you.”
“I guess.” For an awkward second, they both rocked back and forth on their toes, each waiting for the other to say something. “So, uh, I guess I’ll see you on Wednesday,” Emily finally said.
“Right. Yeah. I’ll be the one shoving a gag in Parker’s mouth.”
Emily smiled—that really great, beautiful one—as she walked backward slowly. “I’ll be the one helping.” With a final wave, she turned and strolled off, her height making it easy for Morgan to watch her until she was out of sight.
Well, she thought, pleased with the turn the day had taken, this semester will certainly be interesting.
*
By the time she banged into her apartment six hours later, Morgan was beginning to think “interesting” was a poor word choice. How was it possible she’d managed to save all her shitty classes for the same semester? After biology had been Graph Theory, which made her consider just taking a cyanide capsule now and ending the misery. Then Introduction to Rhetorical Criticism, which was as much a waste of her time as biology was going to be, but didn’t have the added benefit of Emily in it.
Heedless of everything around her, she dumped her backpack on the floor and flung herself onto the couch, letting out a loud groan and a few choice swear words just for good measure. After a long moment where she tried to pretend it was still summer and she didn’t have to do this again the next day, she removed the arm she’d thrown over her face and glanced around to see a big pair of eyes blinking back at her from the kitchen table.
“Hi, Brooke,” she said with a feeble wave. “Long day.”
“It appears so,” Brooke agreed, still staring and looking just a little worried.
“I’m okay,” Morgan promised. “Just tired, that’s all.”
“Okay.” Brooke glanced at the trail of shoes, jacket, and bag that Morgan had left from the door to the couch.
“I’ll put them away in a few minutes,” Morgan said preemptively. “I promise.”
“History hasn’t always proven that.”
Morgan rolled her eyes and shoved herself into a sitting position. “I always do it eventually. Relax.”
Brooke tapped her foot against the floor in a staccato rhythm. Morgan watched it for a second before pushing to her feet and grabbing the backpack, jacket, and shoes. She tossed them into her room and shut the door. “Sorry,” Brooke said in a quiet voice. “I know you’d have done it.”
“Nah,” Morgan said good-naturedly. “I know how much it bothers you to have things out of place. It’s okay.”
Brooke’s leg stopped shaking, and she looked a little embarrassed, but she smiled sincerely enough, and Morgan flopped onto the chair opposite her. “How was your day?”
“Acceptable.”
Morgan smiled a little at that. Brooke’s days were always like that: acceptable, mediocre, incorrigible… It was just how she spoke. They’d met in a Principles of Computing lecture their freshman year, when Morgan had been a wide-eyed Midwesterner who tried to connect with all her classmates, and Brooke had been a scared fifteen-year-old who’d latched onto the first person who didn’t brush right by her. They’d been roommates since sophomore year, and they’d moved off campus this year, now that Brooke was finally eighteen.
“I take it your day was unsatisfactory?”
Morgan shrugged. “It was alright. Long. My classes kind of suck.” Brooke hesitated as if she was weighing the possible outcomes of what she was about to say. “Go on. Out with it.”
“You did say you’d saved your most unpleasant challenges for this year…”
“Yeah, I know.” She kicked her foot against the floor. “There’s a reason for that.” She sat up straighter. “At least they’ll all be over in December. Everything I have left for next semester is going to be fun.”
“That’s encouraging, then,” Brooke said.
“Plus,” Morgan continued, leaning forward to whisper conspiratorially because it always made Brooke roll her eyes, “there’s a cute girl in my biology class.”
“That’s appropriate,” Brooke said, and Morgan took a second to process the joke before cracking up.
“The syllabus does say we cover human anatomy,” she agreed, wiggling her eyebrows as obnoxiously as she could.
Brooke rolled her eyes again. “Are you actually going to engage in a relationship with this one, or just pine for her from afar again?” she asked cuttingly.
“Hey, I do not ‘pine.’ ”
“You speak with a lot of bravado,” Brooke said, “but you haven’t dated anyone in fourteen months. Almost fifteen months. Fourteen and a half.”
Morgan shot her a dirty look. “I dated Chelsea last spring.”
“Maybe you had a sexual relationship with Chelsea last spring…”
Morgan blinked. “I never slept with Chelsea.”
That pulled Brooke up short. “You didn’t? What were you doing with her then? Because I don’t think it was dating. I know I don’t engage in it often, but I believe I’d recognize it if I saw it.”
“Alright, alright, so it wasn’t really dating. But, well, you remember what happened with Sally.”
“Sally,” Brooke said with relish, “was a bitch.”
Morgan was so startled to hear Brooke say that, she burst out laughing.
“What?” Brooke said. “You taught me there are times when that word is the only appropriate choice. This is one of those times. She wasn’t a very nice person.”
The pain wasn’t as raw as it had been a year and a half ago, when Sally had unceremoniously dumped her in the middle of her post-season celebration, but Sally had been her first love and her first heartbreak and… a lot of her other firsts, and Morgan still felt a dull ache at the memory.
Something must have shown on her face because Brooke said, “I’m sorry. Did I take it too far again?”
“No, it’s okay.” Morgan forced herself to shrug casually. “You’re right. It’s been a long time. I need to get back out there.”
“Perhaps with the attractive woman in your biology class,” Brooke said, lowering her eyes coyly, and Morgan had to chuckle.
“Yeah. Maybe with her.”