“Ma? Take care that those eggs burn…”

It would take a great deal of distraction, Tereza knew, for something to take her mother’s attention while she was in the kitchen. Mina Dorsey was a woman of complete focus when at the kitchen’s fireplace - suffice it to say that she knows that even the most premeditated of fires can still grow to an immeasurable fury, so she was wary to ever so much as strike a piece of flint without being in perfect control of it - but this morning, and honestly for the past few days, she could not maintain that focus. All of her thoughts were centered on her husband at the moment, but only Mina knew that, for the most part.

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It was eight in the morning, and I was front and center peering over a line of caution tape at another body.

Nick messaged me at some ungodly hour, before the sun was up, and I came to check it out as soon as my eyes would give me the chance to. At a phone booth on campus - somewhere between the food court and the locker room - there was a boy lying in a puddle of his own blood, dripping from the head and more or less pouring from between his legs. The boy from yesterday morning, the nervous, shifty-eyed rugby boy, was our second castration victim. I’m guessing this was the kid who called, and this was where he made it. Sure enough, when I looked up at the booth itself, one ball of paint was splattered on the glass of the door; the other hit him squarely on the chest, where the sternum was.

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“‘Erek Dith was…’” Mina raised her eyebrow, placing her hands on her lap. “Za? Are you listening?”

The girl tried her hardest not to fidget, but her restlessness could not be contained. “Yes, Ma. I’m listening.”

“Alright, then - what did I just say, Tereza?”

“You said…” Tereza squinted at her mother, her brow wrinkled. “You said… ‘Erek Dith was…’ well, he was something, wasn’t he?”

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We didn’t call the cops until we were well inside the car, far away from the smell of paint or blood. Nicky doesn’t dial and drive, so we sat there as he punched it in. “Hello, Police?” he said. “I’m calling to say I’ve seen a body in Avernell College. I dunno how long it’s been there, but the guy’s bleeding pretty bad; you might want to send him to the hospital.”

It only just dawned on me then how much of a fool I’d been; I took out my phone and typed into a notepad app, ‘I didn’t check, is the guy breathing?’and showed Nick. He nodded.

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Avendell College is a very polarizing place to go to school for most people, I’m sure. People who want to actually do work must hate the place, and people who just like being in a place where weird shit happens must wake up every morning actually excited to be here. I don’t fit into either, and I kind of hate it too. Almost every morning is a kind of Twilight Zone where every waking moment offers endless opportunities for limitless flavours of crazy. Often the only redemption is that you may be lucky enough to actually graduate with a worthwhile degree, find love, or at least be able to find somewhere decent to stay while you’re a student.

One out of three wasn’t bad for me - I was renting a two-bedroom on Hammett Street right next to campus for twenty credits, money I was already making doing online freelance odd jobs, mostly writing, mostly writing other people’s essays, or else news stories for nearby culture mags; I was up so much cash without sacrificing my free time that often I wondered why I was still in school to begin with. To be fair, my liberal arts degree was part of the reason I was such a good writer. To be unfair, that was only because their library was bigger than my own.

As for the first two fortunes, I could probably actually make it out of school with a degree in hand; I was going to classes, handing in top-notch essays, or close enough, but mostly because I was trying to get the second fortune too - I couldn’t keep my eyes off of Tessa Jacobs if I took them out of my head and put them in my pocket. If it weren’t for my pathetic crush, I’d have flunked out two semesters ago.

I guess it could be said that if it weren’t for my pathetic crush (and some really bad friends besides), I wouldn’t have gotten in some of the trouble I would soon get into, either.

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Elisha Dell is not very fond of crying. She wasn’t when she climbed a tree for the first time at age ten and scraped her whole leg on a branch on the way up, blood and splinters from the outer right thigh all the way down to the ankle. She still wasn’t fond of crying when the branch she was sitting on as she called out to her friends on the other side of the street gave way and she fell eleven feet on her back to the ground and broke her other leg.

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Dear Journal,

I’m really sorry. Between getting ready for school right away and some of the things that have happened, I’ve been trying to distract myself more than trying to keep you guys up-to-date. That’s my fault. Sorry.

I talked to Pastor Lewis last week Wednesday.

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He will take a stick, one longer than his arm - it absolutely positively needs to be longer than his arm (it doesn’t but that’s what he thinks) - and starts writing a word slowly in the sand at the shore’s edge. He doesn’t want to touch the water. He can’t swim, so he won’t, but he won’t dip his toes into it either because he may be tempted to swim. So he writes a word slowly in large capital letters.

S

He wishes the herd of young girls on his facebook suddenly enamoured of the idea that relationship fracture is only one person’s fault would, frankly, jump off a sharp cliff headlong.

He wishes people would stop sharing the cover of This Is How You Lose Her on their pages.

Because it isn’t.

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Dear Journal,

don’t you think it’s absolutely terrible that Easter Monday is April Fools’ Day too?

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Dear Journal,

I’m so bad at this! All this time I’ve been counting it wrong! I’m such a fool! The forty days of Lent don’t include Sundays!

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Dear Journal,

so the day is almost over, and so is the fast. Although I keep turning that sentence over in my head - that the thing that God does not love about me is something I’m only trying to rid myself of for this one season. It’s not the only thing I’ve been thinking about, but I will get to those in a moment.

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Dear Journal,

I just wanted to say, I guess, that on the last day I can’t possibly stand it. I feel too distracted and frustrated even to let the Spirit flow through me.

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Dear Journal,

It’s been a hard week.

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