James's mouth made a round O of surprise. "Of course, you don't know al the col ege traditions yet. The long corridor on the third floor of this building has pictures from al the different periods of Dalcrest's history. Including a nice photo of your parents and yours truly."
"I'l have to check it out," Elena said, feeling a little excited. She hadn't seen many pictures of her parents from before they were married.
There was a tap on the door, and a smal girl with glasses peeked in. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, and started to withdraw.
"No, no, my dear," James said jovialy, getting to his feet. "Elena and I were just chatting about old friends. You and I need to have a serious talk about your senior thesis as soon as possible. Come in, come in." He gave Elena an absurd little half bow. "Elena, we'l have to continue this conversation later."
"Of course," Elena said, and rose, shaking James's offered hand.
"Speaking of old friends," he said casualy as she turned to go, "I met a friend of yours, Dr. Celia Connor, just before the semester started. She mentioned that you were coming here."
Elena whipped back around, staring at him. He had met Celia? Images fil ed Elena's mind: Celia held in Stefan's arms as he traveled faster than any human, desperate to save her life; Celia fending off the phantom in a room ful of flames. How much did James know? What had Celia told him?
James smiled blandly back at her. "But we'l talk later," he said. After a moment, Elena nodded and stumbled out of his office, her mind racing. The girl who was waiting held the door open for her.
In the hal outside, Elena leaned against the wal and took stock for a moment. Would Celia have told James about Stefan and Damon being vampires, or anything about Elena herself? Probably not. Celia had become a friend by the end of their battle with the phantom. She would have kept their secrets. Plus, Celia was a very savvy academic. She wouldn't have told her col eagues anything that might make them think she was crazy, including that she had met actual vampires.
Elena shook off the unease she felt from the end of her conversation with James and thought instead of the picture he'd told her about. She climbed the stairs to the third floor to see if she could find it now.
It turned out that the "third-floor corridor" was no problem to find. While the second floor was a maze of turning passageways and faculty offices subdivided from one another, when she stepped out of the stairWellon the third floor she discovered it was a long hal that ran from one end of the building to the other.
In contrast to the chatter of people at work on the second floor, the third floor seemed abandoned, silent and dim. Closed doors sat at regular intervals along the hal .
Elena peered through the glass on one door, only to see an empty room.
Al down the hal , between the doors, hung large photographs. Near the stairWell, where she began looking, they seemed like they were from maybe the turn of the century: young men in side-combed hair and suits, smiling stiffly; girls in high-necked white blouses and long skirts with their hair pul ed up on top of their heads. In one, a row of girls carried garlands of flowers for some forgotten campus occasion.
There were photos of boat races and picnics, couples dressed up for dances, team pictures. In one photo, the cast of some student play - maybe from the 1920s or '30s, the girls with shingled flapper cuts, the guys with funny covers over their shoes - laughed hilariously on stage, their mouths frozen open, their hands in the air. A little farther on, a group of young men in army uniforms gazed back at her seriously, jaws firmly set, eyes determined.
As she moved on down the hal , the photos changed from black-and-white to color; the clothes got less formal; the hairstyles grew longer, then shorter; messier, then sleeker. Even though most of the people in the photographs looked happy, something about them made Elena feel sad.
Maybe it was how fast time seemed to pass in them: al these people had been Elena's age, students like her, with their own fears and joys and heartbreaks, and now they were gone, grown older or even dead.
She thought briefly of a bottle tucked deep in her closet at home, containing the water of eternal life she'd accidentaly stolen from the Guardians. Was that the answer? She pushed the thought away. It wasn't the answer yet - she knew that - and she'd made the very clear choice not to think about that bottle, not to decide anything, not now. She had time, she had more life to live naturaly before she'd want to ask herself that question.
The picture James talked about was close to the far end of the hal . In it, her father, her mother, and James were sitting on the grass under a tree in the quad. Her parents were leaning forward in eager conversation, and James - a much thinner version, his face almost unrecognizable beneath a straggly beard - was sitting back and watching them, his expression sharp and amused.
Her mother looked amazingly young, her face soft, her eyes wide, her smile big and bright, but she was also somehow exactly the mother Elena remembered. Elena's heart gave a painful but happy throb at the sight of her. Her father was gawkier than the distinguished dad Elena had known - and his pastel-patterned shirt was a fashion disaster of epic proportions - but there was an essential dadness to him that made Elena smile.
She noticed the pin on his horrific pastel shirt first. She thought it was a smudge, but then, leaning forward, she made out the shape of a smal , dark blue V. Looking at the other figures, she realized her mother and James were wearing the same pins, her mother's half-obscured by a long golden curl fal ing across it.
Weird. She tapped her finger slowly against the glass over the photograph, touching one V and then the others.
She would ask James about the pins. Hadn't he mentioned that he and her dad had been in a fraternity? Maybe it had something to do with that. Didn't frat boys "pin" their girlfriends?
Something nudged at the edges of her mind. She'd seen one of these pins somewhere. But she couldn't remember where, so she shrugged it off. Whatever it stood for, it was something she didn't know about her parents, another facet of their lives to be discovered here.
She couldn't wait to learn more.
Chapter Twelve
"Good practice," Christopher said, stopping next to Matt as he headed out of the locker room. "You've got some great moves, man."
"Thanks," Matt said, glancing up from putting on his shoes. "You were looking pretty good out there yourself." He could tel Christopher was going to be a solid team-mate, the kind of guy who did his job and focused on the big picture, working to help the rest of the team. He was a great roommate, too, generous and laid-back. He didn't even snore.
"Want to skip the dining hal and order a pizza?" Christopher asked. "This is my night to beat you at Guitar Hero - I can feel it."
Matt laughed. In the couple of weeks they'd been living together, he and Christopher had been working their way through al the Wii games Christopher had brought with him to school. "Al right, I'l see you back at the room." Christopher slapped him on the back, grinning widely.