Besides a mug of earl gray
rooibos
, there were few different things on her tabletop. An Organic Chemistry textbook and a stack of marked index cards. If a friend could peer through her second story window they would guess that she had staged the scene for a
Facebook
photo because
Sally Archimedes
never kept a clean desk. Her usual setup consisted of a stack of textbooks, multiple notebooks, and two rubberband wrapped wads of pens and markers, and finally the
Macbook Pro
she was never seen without. But this had been back when she lived in the dorms. Now she found herself behaving differently after getting her own apartment.
Transition
She was always afraid that someone was looking through her window. This is why a first story apartment had been always been out of the picture. But this couldn't be that strange a fear. It appeared in movies. But nobody probably thought of it as much as Sally. She would shut every blind throughout the entire apartment whenever taking a shower or even when quickly changing clothes. In these situations it was a no brainer: close the blinds. But it was when going to sleep she felt in a pickle. With the blinds shut, she couldn't wake up was easily in the morning. The sunlight peering in really helped galvanize her soul. With finals upcoming she would need to sacrifice her fear of peepers for the sake of good sleep. The sun along with caffeine free tea like rooibos would help her grades. She thought of this while staring out the window. That's when she thought she saw a gait she recognized. She quickly backed away, spilling some of the rooibos onto her floor.
Closer
Betraying the words she had used, Sally was relieved after Trevor left. Still, she wasn't without worry, mind-looping on where he would stay for the night. Back in high school she would've certainly let him crash. Just how different she must've been back then. She didn't feel like herself when mouthing the words, "why don't you stay here tonight?" Just to see if she could do it she tried saying it after he was long gone. Her phonetical system could mechanically produce the sounds to utter the English sentence. But it was just sounds. It wasn't a promise coming from within. Sally creeped up to the window once again to stare out. Nobody was there under the orange the streetlight cast.