Those first days were spent cataloging each experience that Patience would miss.

She imagined that the next few years of college would have been painstaking. One year had already taken its toll; scholarships had only covered so much, the rest of her tuition to be taken out of her own pocket with parents that could hardly support themselves let alone secondary schooling. Every moment that she wasn’t in class she spent covered in a mixture of Chai, spoiling milk, and syrupy mocha. In the few hours of sleep that she managed to grasp each week, she dreamed of the BA in English that would eventually allow her to turn the key and lock the door to food service.

Even as the workload increased, she would still find time after her classes to stop by the corner store cater cornered to her dorm. The fluorescent lights would hum as she spent too much time picking out candy, knowing that her roommate would root through the bag until she found the Kit Kats. She would take a bite out of the fully formed cookie rather than break it into fours and incur Patience’s mock disgust. The two would then argue over the proper way to eat the candy before Patience returned to her studies and Emoni to her sketching. Neither of them would be students who just attended the school; they would graduate with Honors, the favorite of all of their professors with cushy jobs waiting for the both of them when their diplomas were finally pressed into their palms. Patience would become a beloved English teacher. She’d listen to her students, and she’d introduce names like James Baldwin and Rosario Castellanos to her students as early as she could, storing Hawthorne and Shakespeare somewhere where they could collect dust in peace.

There was no doubt in her mind that Emoni was only so far off from becoming one of those names that everyone just knew like Banksy or Andy Warhol. Coming home to a room stinking of acrylic paint and cleaning dark smears of charcoal from the walls had become routine.

She would’ve finally worked up the nerve to speak to that guy in her African American Literature class. She had wanted to ask him what his wash day routine was and who did his eyebrows. He looked like the easy-going type. She couldn’t remember him sitting up straight a single time, always leaned back in his chair with his long legs stretched out beneath his table, his arms folded over his chest. There was always a pencil perched on his lower lip, constantly tapping if it wasn’t trapped between his teeth. At the beginning of the year, it had been a blue ballpoint pen, but one burst ink capsule had put an end to that. She knew he had friends - there was no way a man like that didn’t - but he usually sat alone during evening lunches in the dining hall, seeming to enjoy the solitude as he cradled one book or another in his lap. If they became friends, he would have invited her to sit at his table and together, they would have discussed how interesting it was that a white professor was teaching an African American Literature class.

Qway would have - well, that she hadn’t worked out yet because he hadn’t worked that out yet. But he would have.

Owl’s name would have remained bottled and stored on a shelf in the back of her mind. It would have rattled only in the safety of her therapist’s office, and only then would she have cautiously gripped the neck of the bottle and peered inside. All of the pieces were supposed to have just fallen in line.

Next Chapter: 5