Purgatory: Seven Years Later...

The first year had been the hardest.  Josie hadn’t spent more than a week or two away from home in her entire life—but if she was being fair, the house in Hamorsville wasn’t home anymore.  Not really.  The knowledge that Jason had drunk himself into a stupor, lost the house and the Charger, and was now living in a homeless shelter in Fort Collins had almost destroyed her during her freshman year at college, but she’d made it.

It was easier to pretend that none of it had happened.  Oh, sure, every campus had their ghost stories, but Halloween at Colorado North brought out nothing scarier than the typical fraternity and their yearly pranks.  The first year, Lambda Lambda Lambda had thought it would be funny to cut the power to the freshman girls’ dorms and rampage through the halls in Scream masks.  They thought it was less funny after she put three of them in the hospital with concussions and one broken arm.  The incident had nearly resulted in her expulsion from the psych program—after all, how fit was she to study the human mind if hers was so unstable?—but a year’s worth of intensive therapy convinced all involved that she was just as sane as they were.  Not that the frat boys’ bodies took much comfort in that.

It hadn’t been easy, but she’d stayed in everyone’s good graces long enough to secure letters of recommendation to a master’s program in psychology at Denver University.  The hustle and bustle of the capital city was quite a change from sleepy Hamorsville or even the semi-metropolitan college town of Bakersfield.  It took more effort than it should have to ignore the prickles on the back of her neck when she walked back to her apartment every night, the knowledge that something unseen was watching her.

Sometimes, she wondered if DeMarco’s club was still a few miles east, luring the unsuspecting into a world of darkness.  She wondered if he still looked like a clean-cut businessman, or if he’d changed his face by now.  When she’d met him as a child—fourteen years old and scared out of her wits—he’d explained that his appearance was a matter of convenience, that he changed it the way some girls changed clothes, to suit the tastes and whims of what folk found attractive.  She wondered what that looked like now.  But she never went there to find out.  Going back to that club would mean going back to that world, to the life she’d left behind, and she didn’t see the sense in that.  There was nothing left for her there but an early death, or a jail cell, or both.

Today, however, there didn’t seem to be much waiting for her in this world except a pile of paperwork.  She would start working in the Health and Counseling Center next week—on her way to her Ph.D. now that her master’s was done—and that meant days on end of patient confidentiality agreements, policy and procedure reviews, and learning how to fill out the intake forms.  Bethany had warned her that they were different from the intake forms they’d trained on; some bean counter thought this was a better method, although Bethany didn’t think so.  Josie wasn’t sure she cared.  They all had to ask the same basic questions.  She only hoped there was room for her to write in the answers.

She was halfway across the Reed Commons when she caught sight of a tall blond man in a stiff white collar.  Probably on his way to the Evans School of Theology—this school couldn’t decide whether it was Catholic or not.  She almost dismissed the similarity, and then he stopped and stared at her and called out as she walked by.

“Josie?  Seward?”

Her feet stopped before her head made the decision to acknowledge him.  She turned, got a good look at him, and recognized the neatly brushed hair, the big green eyes, and the anxious way he wrung his hands.  “Aaron!  Hi!”

Hi?  That was the best she had to say to him after seven years?

“How have you been?”

His voice sounded so strange now—deeper, the high-pitched warble replaced by an earthy crunch.  Josie shrugged.  “Good!” she said.  Why was she raising the pitch of her voice?  “Great!  How are you?”

“I’m good,” said Aaron.  He smiled—a more confident smile now, with deeper lines around his mouth that suggested it came often.  “Are you a student here?”

“Grad student,” said Josie.

“What are you studying?”

“Psychology.”

“Oh!”  He smiled again.  “Great!  Getting your master’s?”

“Got it,” she said.  “Going for my Ph.D. now.”

“Oh, excellent,” he said.  “Good for you.”

“What about you?” Josie asked.

“Guest lecturing,” said Aaron, fidgeting with his collar.  “The School of Theology is having a colloquium on itinerant preachers.”

“Oh, great.”  Josie tried to sound like she meant it.  “So you’re just here for the day, then?”

“Pretty much,” said Aaron.  “I’m being moved off to another church in a few weeks.  Nebraska.”

“Have fun with that,” said Josie, grinning.

“Oh, yes.”  Aaron nodded.  “Nothing but sin and decadence in Pallet, Nebraska, I’m sure.”

“Guess you’ll just have to go beat the devil out of them,” Josie said.

Aaron laughed, but the joke hung between them like a third wheel on a bad date.  Were they supposed to keep talking?  Were they supposed to acknowledge what had happened to both of them so many years ago?  It wasn’t the sort of thing preachers and psychologists talked about in public.  Josie fidgeted with the strap of her book bag.  She knew what she would do in a clinical scenario—ask him another question, get him talking about something else—but this wasn’t a clinic, and he wasn’t a patient.  And they both had other places to be.

“Well, I won’t keep you,” she said at last, “if you’re off to that end of campus.”

“Oh—yeah, I think they’re expecting me at ten,” said Aaron.

“Good luck with your speech.”

“Good luck with school.”

She wondered later if she should have left it that way, if she shouldn’t have asked to meet him for coffee later, or gotten his email, or something like that.  But she was happier, forgetting that world, and since he’d made no effort to contact her, she assumed he was, too.