In the evening, I poured over the books. None of them were what you’d call easy reading. The next day, Tuesday, was the last day before classes. After breakfast with the guys, I set up shop at the huge table in the living area—facing the mountains, of course. I spent most of the day going through the syllabi for my courses and flipping through the books.
And getting more and more worried. I’d never been what you’d call a natural scholar. I did okay in high school because I worked hard. And also because, truth be told, our small high school wasn’t exactly a top school in the state. College had been a bit of a rude awakening, and at first, I’d struggled. Then I’d learned when and where to ask for help, and I’d put my nose to the grindstone and worked my ass off.
But here? I was beginning to think that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. What if I couldn’t manage the classes? I was tempted to ask Parker about it, but he was gone for most of the day. Once, when I took a break and enjoyed some tea on the balcony, I saw him walking rather aimlessly on the sidewalk near the quad.
Jude seemed like he could lend a sympathetic ear, but he and Mason spent some time mounting the flat screen TV on the wall, and it didn’t go smoothly. Both seemed cranky by the time they were done. Doing my part as a roommate, I told them it was perfect even though the screen was clearly higher on one side than the other.
And then on Wednesday, the classes started. That’s when I knew I was in over my head.
That night, I couldn’t fall asleep, no matter how much I tried. It felt like I’d barely understood half of what was said in my first few classes. After all the work I’d done to get my scholarship and to earn money to come here, it felt like it was all crashing down on my head.
I didn’t know what was going on with the others, but Mason and Jude seemed to be tossing and turning, too. Not Parker, though. I didn’t know where he was. Maybe he’d fallen asleep on the couch?
Panic filled me. It was after two in the morning and I had class at eight. But the harder I tried to fall asleep, the worse it got. Finally, I crawled out of bed and went into the main room.
Without really thinking about it, I walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows even though it was too dark to see the mountains well. Somehow, just knowing they were out there helped. Then I nearly jumped through the roof because something moved on the other side of the glass. With my heart still pounding hard, I realized it was Parker sitting at the bistro table out there.
Trying to get my heartrate under control, I slipped out the door to join him. “Can’t sleep?” I asked, which was probably a stupid question.
“No.” His voice was quiet in the night air. I hugged my arms around myself as I looked up. Even with the lights from the campus, it was still possible to see the stars. Not as many as back where I came from, but enough to humble me.
Parker lifted his hand, and I saw that he had a silver can. “Can I have one of those?” Maybe a beer would finally help me sleep.
“There’s more in the fridge,” he said, starting to push himself to his feet.
“I’ll get it. I want to get a sweater, anyway. Do you want another one?”
“I’m good.”
The fridge had a dozen or so cans of rather uninspiring-looking beer. If this was the guys’ choice of alcohol, I seriously needed to expand their horizons. I grabbed my sweater and then pulled it over my head before returning to the balcony. Parker had moved to the chair on the other side of the little table so that I could have the seat he’d been in. He was a polite guy. Yeah, he was a total zombie sometimes, but a polite one.
I popped the top of the beer and took a long swig before setting it on the table between us. Probably Parker wanted to be left alone, but it didn’t seem like solitude was doing him any favors. So maybe this was my chance to finally get to know him a bit better. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sleep.”
He took so long to answer that I wasn’t sure he was going to. But then he said, “I don’t do much of it these days.”
“That’s got to suck. Rumor has it that sleep’s pretty necessary, although I don’t think that applies to graduate students. Not with the homework the professors assign.”
Again, there was a pause, but it was a shorter one this time. “You’ve only been to one day of classes.”