Running late on a rainy Thursday. Oh well. seems to be a theme this week. Maybe I am just slowing down for the holidays.. Regardless, I am ready for my brain warm up now so let’s jump into the morning prompt, everyone in the boat whose going.
I like the set up. It could go several ways. She could hear something that affects everything she knows. One of the people talking could be murdered and she is the only witness. So many possibilities. I like that in a prompt.
Thursday, December 8th: I forgot my cardigan.
“I forgot my cardigan,” Alice said. She looked around. The bench and it’s surrounding areas just in case she dropped it instead of leaving it in the classroom. It wasn’t on the ground.
“Maybe you stuffed it in your bag?” Doug suggested. She shot him a glare and he shrugged even while Marcie shook her head. “The day Alice shoves an item of clothing somewhere is the day you ace your maths exams,” she told him.
Alice’s black look faded as she felt vindicated. Still eh looked into her bag hoping that by some miracle it had been stuffed inside. The last thing she wanted to do was go back to Professor Jensen’s classroom. Once today had been plenty and they managed to escape without any homework. She was looking forward to a weekend without thinking of Professor Jensen at all.
The cardican had not miraculously appeared in her bag. “I have to go back,” she said glumly. It was her favorite cardigan, the last one that her gran knitted her before she died. She couldn’t leave it over the weekend and just hope it showed up in some lost and found box on Monday.
“If I go quickly it might still be at my seat,” she decided.
She stood. “I’ll meet you back at the apartment,” she said. She knew Marcie still had one more class but that Doug would be going back to the house they all shared for a few hours before heading out to his part time job. She thought Doug at least might offer to go with her, even if she knew Marcie couldn’t. He didn’t
“I’d leave it til Monday if I were you,” Doug said.
“I’d go but I have physics,” Marcie began. She was already backing away from the bench where they gathered to revel in the fact that Professor Jensen forgot to assign anything over the weekend.
“Yeah,” she said, expecting it. Alice rose and settled the strap of her bag on her shoulder. She left the others behind striding quickly towards the building that housed most of the classes offered by the math department.
‘It’s not like he can retroactively assign homework,” she thought as she moved, but Alice knew it wasn’t the possibility of weekend equations that made her not want to go back. She hated the mathematics hall. While most of the other campus classrooms were updated and given more recent technology, the math department held on to its rooms with walls of chalkboards instead of the white boards. The building was a wifi dead zone so no cell phones even worked in the building and almost everyone found it easier to take notes by hand than to bother bringing out a lap top. Plus Professor Jensen often had them working on equations during class so the smell of pencil and erasers from rubbed out wrong answers was always thick in his class room. The seats were almost stadium like with the professor standing center stage, jotting things on the board in chalk as he spoke so at least half of the class room time they stared at the back of his head. The room always gave Alice a headache even if she did in fact love math.
Alice made good time getting back to the building. It was mostly abandoned at this time of day and she passed no one as she made her way down the corridor and into the classroom. She spotted her cardigan right away, a bright spot of color against the blonde wood of the chair backs. She went to her seat and pulled it off the back of the chair. That’s when she heard the door open behind her.
“We can talk in here, all of the students have fled until Monday.” Out of instinct Alice ducked down, hiding from the new arrivals.
Ten til Midnight 