Earle’s dining hall was a low and sprawling place, claustrophobic enough that I’d avoided it until now. I preferred Hurst, whose floor-to-ceiling windows made it feel more open and pleasant. But Liesel had recruited me for a social project tonight, and it wouldn’t kill me to eat here once, before I swore off it for the rest of my undergraduate life.

The space didn’t make it easy to find people, though. Liesel rose up on her toes to scan the room, then dropped down and shrugged. “I don’t see him. Let’s get food, then try to grab a table.”

Read the rest at the Book View Cafe.

And that’s the last of them! But tune in tomorrow for an announcement . . . .

Liesel could tell, even before she settled into her seat for the Cairo Accords lecture, that the guy who always sat next to her had something he wanted to say. No empathy needed; she could read it in his posture, much more upright than his usual slouch, and the way he kept looking at her sidelong. But she’d been delayed on her way to class by a call from her mother, and there was no time for him to say anything before Professor Banerjee brought up the display and began lecturing.

She hoped he wasn’t going to ask her out. Robert wasn’t the type of guy who interested her—and besides, Michele’s flirting had continued well after Carmen stopped eating lunch with them. They’d gotten together the previous night to talk about the possibility of forming a Wiccan circle, if they could find enough other students they wanted to include, but the conversation had continued for a good hour and a half after that, long after Liesel should have gone home.

Read the rest at the Book View Cafe.

One more to go! That will show up on Monday. And then regular blogging will resume, I promise.

A bout of shivering seized me, and my jaw ached as I clenched it to keep my teeth from chattering. Minnesota was not Georgia: I knew that, and yet here I was, soaking wet and outside late on a windy and none-too-warm night. All because I couldn’t let go of tradition.

It started when I was twelve. My gifts had manifested about a month earlier, and were still volatile enough that, although I’d enjoyed my birthday party, I felt twitchy and less than fully in control of myself. After my friends left, I went for a swim in our backyard pool, and ended up floating there for a good hour, thinking about everything in my life: manifestation, how I’d changed, where I was going. The next year, although I didn’t need the calming, I decided to to do it again. And every year since then, the same.

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

I’m going out of town tomorrow morning, so it’s possible I won’t remember to post the link to the penultimate scene before I leave. But by now I figure you all know the drill, right?

Everyone knew the urban legends, of course. The freshman empath who snapped under the pressure of her roommate’s stress and, depending on the narrative variant, either drove the offender mad in a sudden burst of telepathic fury, or bashed her head in with a paperweight. According to the empath who sat next to Robert in their class on the Cairo Accords, there was no true historical incident behind the tales . . . but college was trying enough, and the psychic control of most eighteen-year-olds still imperfect enough, that breakdowns of a less violent sort did indeed occur.

Robert—who knew quite well that he had the empathic sensitivity of a whelk—did not expect to have any such difficulties himself.

But as it transpired, empathy was unnecessary, when living with a highly-stressed wilder.

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

Several dozen of my fellow freshmen had shown up to the first meeting of the Div Club. A month and a half into the quarter, that number had dropped sharply. We might not be as dangerous as the pyros, but we weren’t as exciting, either.

At least, to anybody who wasn’t a hard-core divination geek. People still showed to the occasional meeting, and Akila told me they got lots of messages from students wanting to set up individual readings, but when it came to regular attendance, there were only maybe thirty of us—freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

When I mentioned that to Liesel, she just grinned and said, “Thirty of you, eh?”

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

This is the scene for which I had to invent a new form of cartomancy, very late one night, because I didn’t want to use tarot. Hopefully it’s at least vaguely plausible?

“So, have any of you managed to spot him yet?” Carmen asked, sliding into the last chair at the lunch table.

Liesel shoved a forkful of salad in her mouth to keep from sighing. She liked Michele, a French student she’d met through the International Students’ Union. She liked one of Michele’s two roommates, Sara, who was sitting next to her. But Carmen . . . .

“Spot who?” Sara asked.

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

And if you missed last week’s posts, you can read the first five scenes here.

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

. . . I promise there will be more content soon. It just has to wait for me to stop deathmarching through my current projects. (I wrote four thousand words yesterday, and need to do at least two thousand more today.)

Read the rest at Book View Cafe

Read the rest at Book View Cafe

“So,” I said, “how different does it look?”

My mother surveyed the campus of Welton University and smiled. “This is my cue to say it seems smaller than I remember—but the truth is, it’s much bigger. It used to be all open field over there, behind Cavendish. We had epic snowball wars after second-quarter midterms.”

Her happy reminiscence made me shudder, thinking of the frozen doom that awaited me in a few months. My mother saw it and shook her head. “You’re the one who decided to go to college in Minnesota, Kimberly. It could have been Georgia Psi instead.”

Read the rest at Book View Cafe

* * * * *

There will be one of these coming each weekday for the next little while. (And, confidential to the handful of people for whom those names are familiar: yes. This is exactly what you think it is.)