Ivy was walking as fast as the muscles in her stubby legs would carry her, she was seriously panting. The braids on her head were sticking in different directions and she was sweating profusely. ‘I can’t believe I overslept!’ She thought to herself. She was ten minutes late, she looked a hot mess, and the humid weather wasn’t helping her situation.
Finally, seventeen minutes after the lecture was scheduled to start, she stumbled through the huge white doors of the lecture room. She hated the lecture hall’s layout, and she whined inside every time she wasn’t the first to walk in.
The class was silent, as she shuffled across the lecture hall, to the only available seat in the back. The pile of books she clutched to her chest looked too heavy for her to carry and the oversized swinging bag hanging from her right shoulder made her gait lopsided. She silently wished she hadn’t chosen today to wear her neon coloured spanks and hot pink oversized polo shirt. If she had any chances at getting a life, she had ruined it now. She looked back at the lecturer, his brow was furrowed slightly in disapproval, ‘Why won’t he just get on with the lecture?’
Just when she was about to make it through the waves of awkward stares, she tripped at the foot of the stairs. That must have broken the ice because there were a few giggles and snickers in the lecture hall that replaced the stiff and cold silence. Ivy wished she could stay down and wait till the embarrassment just killed her.
The lecturer resumed his lecture as Ivy slowly picked her books. She made her way to the end of the lecture hall and fell in a heap on her seat. She spent the remaining hour and ten minutes validating her reasons for coming to the lecture hall. She backtracked all the events of her day and felt her mood get worse with each memory that passed. She thought about how her day could have been, and quietly blamed herself for everything that went wrong. She was having a very bad day.
She was in her own world and was oblivious to the end of the lecture. When she became conscious of her environment, the room was half empty. Her heart skipped a beat when she noticed he was walking towards her. “Hi,” he said with a smile. Ivy tried smiling back, but she feared it looked like she was suffering from a stroke.
He was simply the ‘hottie’ of her class. He had the right eyes, nose, lips, arms, build… he was just right. On the ‘down side’ was he was a Jesus-fanatic… Girls laid at his feet around the clock until it became public knowledge that he wasn’t interested in that life. Ivy looked up at him and he seemed to be thinking through what to say, “Do you need help to carry those?” Ivy shook her head, no.
He paused and smiled, “I think you’re very beautiful”.
It was two minutes after he left when she realized she had stopped breathing.