Page 9 of Tangled Up In You
“I don’t think so…” she hedged. “I took a lot of placement tests.”
“Placement tests? Like what?”
She looked up, thinking. “I think they were the fall semester finals for Calculus, French, Mandarin, Microeconomics, Organic Chemistry II, Molecular—”
“And you passed?”
“Yes, of course.”
He dragged the tip of his index finger down the list. “Why are you taking Intro Mandarin, then?”
“I can only read and write it,” she admitted. “I’ve never had a conversation with anyone. I don’t know if my pronunciation is right because we don’t have a CD player, and the textbooks only write phonetic pronunciation.”
Silence stretched between them, and he chewed his lip, working through something.
“Is…is my schedule okay?” she asked, finally.
Fitz nodded, eyes pinned to the page in his hand. “You’re in my immunology seminar.”
“That’s great!”
He jolted slightly to awareness, his frown replaced with a smile, and there was that shift again, him stepping out of one body and into another. “Yeah, it’s great.” He winked at her, leaning in. “Let’s get to that tour.”
CHAPTER FOUR
FITZ
In all honesty, Fitz thought everyone on campus was a sucker.
Corona students, faculty, and staff looked at him and saw Fitz: campus playboy, soccer captain, teacher’s pet, academic scholarship whiz kid. They saw a soon-to-graduate senior with a 4.0, a rich daddy, and a loving family. They looked at him and saw a golden future.
They assumed he got straight As because he was genetically gifted.
They assumed he grew up playing soccer on the manicured fields of Clyde Hill.
And they assumed he gave tours to new students because Dean Zhou was so charmed by him that he asked Fitz to occasionally welcome incoming students, and he agreed out of the goodness of his heart.
See? Suckers.
In fact, work-study was only one of the many side hustles Fitz needed to keep his head above water and his bank account in the black. He also worked as a bartender at the Night Owl, and, in his free time, helped a group of thick-spectacled octogenarians with their tech issues.
Sweet grannies who got flummoxed when their phone stopped working and didn’t realize the battery had simply died. Pun-loving old grandpops who called Fitz up to help them fix a “broken” desktop computer without realizing they’d just turned the monitor on and off over and over. And all Fitz could think while he watched this girl with the Swedish name skip ahead of him down the campus sidewalks, pointing to buildings and calling out the names of architects and trivia about the granite used in this or that statue, was that Judy, Bev, Dick, and Joyce would love the hell out of this kid.
Unfortunately, college was another thing entirely, and if Sweden kept up her brainy-farm-girl thing on campus, she would be eaten alive.
“Whoa, whoa, Speed Racer,” Fitz called when she’d managed to skip half a block ahead of him. She turned, arms sticking straight out in that ancient arctic jacket. “Stop and take a look.” He pointed to the right. “This is where your music class is.”
She jogged back and followed his outstretched arm to the building in front of them. She had to turn her head up nearly to the sky to be able to peer out of that enormous hood. “Oh! The Blackburne Mansion! Did you know this house was built in 1898?”
“Sure did.” In fact, he’d had no idea, though the information was likely italicized and underlined somewhere in a training pamphlet Dean Zhou had handed him at some point.
She grinned, bolstered by what she seemed to read as Fitz’s enthusiasm. “And in the late 1940s the school bought it, and it became the music conservatory building. Legends say that it was once haunted.”
“Cool story.” Fitz clapped his hands, relieved that they’d reached the end of their walk around campus and he could head to work. He pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the time. “Well, you have a class here Tuesday and Thursday mornings at ten.”
“Would you go into a haunted house?” she asked.
He looked up from his iPhone. “What?”