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Ashley
Ashley was on the cusp of getting everything she ever wanted. This year was about getting her life back for the first time…well, for the first time since she died.
She turned to the vanity she’d rescued during post-graduation moveout season nine years ago and pointed at a five-by-seven of her senior portrait taped to the center of the mirror. One from the series in her cheer uniform.
“You are a twenty-year-old girl—I mean, woman.” Crap, she’d forgotten she’d changed that part of her mantra. She shook out her hands, bouncing back and forth on the balls of her feet, her socks sinking into the white faux-fur rug, and then returned her attention to the mirror. “You are a twenty-year-old woman. Always have been. Always will be.” She struck a superhero pose, channeling confidence from her core to the soles of her feet. “You’ve got this.”
The photo was two years younger than she was meant to be and taken in a cornfield just outside her hometown but worked better than a mirror reflecting an empty room back at her.The point was no one would know her age if she…well, acted her age, and she’d gotten pretty good at acting twenty over the past decade. It helped that, aside from one big, vampire-shaped difference, not much had changed. She was still going to school, didn’t own any property, had no real career aspects, lived in a home full of roommates, and was rich in student loans.
And being late for class again was not going to help.
Ashley peered through her curtain’s sliver-sized opening.
Another beautiful, sunny day in upstate New York shone back at her—she was definitely going to be late for class. She tucked the blackout curtain into place with a sigh. She would do unspeakable things for a cloudy day. Well, nothing too awful. But she would do several softly whispered things if the sun would hide for the next ten minutes.
But being late might mean she got to sit next to a certain unspeakable someone. Ashley’s mind wandered to crimson lips and slender fingers caressing her throat before waking from the daydream.
These were not safe thoughts to have before class.
A knock at her door pulled her focus.
“Shouldn’t you be in class already?” Cynthia—her mentor, not babysitter—leaned against the doorjamb, impressively pulling off a denim jumper with flared pants in the twenty-first century.
Crap. How long had she been daydreaming? Maybe she should have offered just one unspeakable thing to the universe.
“Right. Of course. I was just heading out.” Ashley pulled out her sunny day gear—gloves, Ray-Ban category 4 high altitude sunglasses, lightweight shawl, and a wide-brimmed fedora.
Cynthia didn’t look impressed by her hustle. “I mean, it’s not my business, but maybe try taking your future seriously.”
Ashley nodded as she pulled on her gloves, keeping her protective smile in place and ignoring the tightness in her chestwhenever she was reminded how important this year was. She’d heard the speech a million times, and it never got easier.
“This isn’t one of your sappy movies,” Cynthia said. “The Family isn’t known for giving second chances, let alone third.”
“I know.” Her words came out tighter than she intended as she slipped her arms into her J. Crew trench coat, cinched it, and eased past Cynthia and downstairs, desperate to escape the foreboding message hidden in her mentor’s nagging.
Cynthia stuck to the shadows as Ashley slipped on her boots and opened the front door. “Maybe this year, try not obsessing over a pretty face.”
Her cackle followed Ashley out the door.
The last rays of daylight coasted the treetops as Ashley stepped out on the creaking porch, breathing deeply and feeling her shoulders relax. Her smile weighed heavier every day as the only people who knew the real her saw her as a burden at best and a liability at worst.
Twelve years of this crap. She was the last twenty-year-old millennial in existence and trying to finish this same school year over and over again without incident was growing old. But if all went as planned, this was her last year. This was her last chance to join the Family and gain the sense of security she’d hunted for the past decade. She just needed to keep her head down and finish one school year without letting her impulsive tendencies grab the wheel and careen off the road to happiness.
She needed this year to be perfect.
Ashley pulled up her collar and slunk into the shadows along the hedge. This year, she’d be a normal college student in a normal college town where the only supernatural characters were actors on TV. She just had to play a twenty-year-old. Not the impulsive romantic she had actually been at twenty. She followed streets canopied in old oaks and crept along thesouthern edge of the library until sprinting the final stretch across the quad.
At her lecture hall, she slid into the first available seat while her professor’s back was turned, dropping her Platt U tote by her feet and ignoring any feelings she might have about the chair’s proximity to a certain classmate. She dug in her bag, fishing for a gel pen. She removed the sparkly pen’s cap and set to work coloring in the bubbled title of her list.
Ashley’s Rules for Succeeding in Undergrad
Rule 1: Do NOT discuss your roommates
