The Book of Miranda | gxg | ✔︎

(2) Kleptomaniac Academy

The doorknob doesn't turn. After a long silence, a faint scratching sound reaches me through the wood. The hair on my arms prickles as it rises. There's another pause, then a clink. I jump in my skin as the door abruptly swings open.

My roommate is indeed not Exie. Almost the opposite of Exie, in fact, as though the universe detected my thoughts and decided it would be funny to present me with a manifestation of my attempts to scrub that girl from my mind. This one is tall—I could brain myself on her chin if I stood up too quickly—and so ghostly pale, I wonder if I should have included garlic on my packing list. She's got the kind of hair that falls like liquid about her shoulders. Also blue eyes, which I've never had a thing for. Least of all now.

The girl's pale gaze roams the room for several seconds too long before landing on me. She smiles widely. "Hello. Are you my roommate?"

Apparently. "Yes. Des. You?"

"Clarice."

She dips down to grab the twin suitcases beside her. As she does, something slips from her blouse pocket and skitters away across the floor. I stiffen. The silver pen from the check-in lectern comes to rest beneath the bed across from me. Clarice abandons her bags and darts to scoop it up again. She treats me to another smile. Then she re-pockets the pen and wanders back to the doorway to shut the door, humming. That's when I notice the brass nameplate on our door is gone.

Great. Of all the people I could be stuck with for the next ten months, my roommate just had to be the light-fingered type with a magpie's eye for the shiny. Nevermind that I definitely considered thieving that pen myself. It's different when I'd have done it just to cause a ruckus. I cast a glance around the room while Clarice unpacks, still humming. I'm giving the brass knobs on our nightstands a week if I'm generous. The fittings on the windows look more securely fastened, though if Clarice managed to lift that nameplate with little more than a minute and a bit of scratching, I wouldn't put it past her. Maybe she'll take the whole window while she's at it. Get herself kicked out so I can get a different roommate. I'd put up with freezing my ass off for a night for that.

There's a conspicuous lack of other things to steal in this room. Maybe I'm just noticing now because my thoughts are elsewhere, and my room at home looks about like this. But for all the tuition my parents claim to be forking over, there's very little luxury here aside from the fact that it isn't a dorm. Which I'm not complaining about, don't get me wrong. But it's odd. The bedframes are sturdy wood, without adornment. The mattress I'm sitting on has texture that mattresses should not, and I'm glad I'm seventeen and not seventy if I'm going to be sleeping on lumps all night. I'm not thrilled to be seventeen on lumps, either, but at least the blankets look snug. Which is good, because there's a draft coming off that window that I'm sure could stir a girl's skirt if she stood close enough, and no, I've definitely never tested.

Even the lamp in the room isn't much to write home about, unless you are like me and will write home about drivel just to meet my father where he's at. Then I remember I'm planning to burn his letter-paper, and discard that thought with a sigh. The lamp is dull. Dull, and dim, and dusty, with a little spiderweb hanging in one corner like defective lace. That spider is probably living her best life feasting on insects who've given in to the lamplight's siren song and met their ends in the bug graveyard accumulated behind its glass. If I dug through that graveyard and found last century's coal soot at the bottom of it, I wouldn't be surprised.

Clarice has finished unpacking. She maunders out of the room again without so much as a goodbye, and I'm left to contemplate her living space like that will grant me divine wisdom on how to deal with this semester. She has an marked absence of shiny things. Not that she's laid out, anyway. No jewelry, no fancy clothes, no picture frame on the nightstand. In fairness, I have no jewelry and no picture frame, either. I feel a bit of kinship with Clarice on this front. If we're both the kinds of people who'd sooner toss a family photo in a frog pond than display it where our parents can watch us while we sleep, maybe we can get along.