she mumbled, with a touch of hysteria, and pressed down her foot on the gas pedal to exit onto Main Street, toward downtown.
Duke University was the center of the city of Durham, a former tobacco town. Through no conscious plan of her own, Laurel had landed in one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. The area boasted three major universities and a burgeoning software park within a half-hour’s drive of each other, and development had exploded in the Triangle cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, all of which consistently made “Top Ten Places to Live” lists.
Durham—the whole Triangle area—was much smaller than Los Angeles, of course. Anywhere would be. The up side was that getting around town was as easy as teleporting. Locals complained about the traffic, but Laurel had no idea what they were talking about; she often drove on the streets feeling as if she’d woken up in some postapocalyptic movie in which all the people on Earth had been vaporized.
She drove too fast now on the surreally empty streets, as always marveling at the sheer number of trees. There were many things about North Carolina that Laurel knew she would never get used to, but above all were the trees.
The trees were everywhere. So dense they formed walls—walls lining the highways, walls obscuring the houses and the businesses, vast green walls preventing her from seeing any direction except in a straight line. She sometimes felt as if she had been dropped into an enormous hedge labyrinth. The trees made the nights darker than she’d ever experienced (although that meant you could actually see stars, which was thrilling), and made navigation around town practically impossible. In L.A. Laurel was used to triangulating off buildings. A tree looks like a tree, especially when surrounded by hundreds and thousands of other trees.
She’d spent her first few weeks in a perpetual state of lost, metaphorically and literally, until she’d broken down and bought a GPS for her car. The implacable digital voice was unnervingly like her mother’s. She hadn’t figured out how she felt about that, but on the other hand, also like her mother, the device was rarely wrong, and so far it had kept Laurel from driving off the map entirely.
Prompted by the GPS, Laurel made the turn onto Campus Drive and another sharp right to skid to a stop in the faculty lot. She zapped the car locked and hurried up a stone staircase that opened onto the long, rectangular main yard of West Campus, lined with its magnificent old oaks.
The campus was a Gothic castle of a school, with graystone walls and turrets and gargoyles (actual gargoyles!), arched walkways, a gorgeous medieval chapel, and fifty-five acres of world-famous gardens.
At the top of the stone stairs, Laurel veered onto one of the meandering paths, breathing faster as she hurried, wobbling on too-high heels, following her vague recollection of where the Faculty Club was.
There was apparently some formal event scheduled for students as well; Laurel found herself navigating around packs of young men dressed in what she’d come to learn was the Southern uniform of the privileged: tan khaki pants and navy-blue sport coats and light blue Oxford shirts—and brightly chattering bevies of blond, blue-eyed young women in flowered dresses, today even adorned with pearls and gloves. (Gloves! Had she ever even owned a pair?)
The students were … well, interesting. Bright and motivated young people, both wealthier and more driven than the ones Laurel had taught at Cal State. And more homogenous than that melting pot, for sure. Duke accepted students from all over the world, but the vast majority were white, and a good third of them pledged frats and sororities; the Greeks dominated the campus social life.
It all added to Laurel’s constant time-warp, Twilight Zone feeling.
A group of the slicked-out boys looked her over as they passed, and Laurel was suddenly uncomfortably aware of how alien she must look to them, in her short black knit dress and matching long black sweater and twisty silver belt.
Yes, I’m from Los Angeles, and we have this color we like called “black.” She lifted her head defensively. The boys stared back. She turned her head and kept walking, struggling to keep her balance on her heels.
They look and look and never crack a smile. At least in California men smile at you when they check you out.
And they were amazingly predatory for their age.
On the first day of classes Laurel had been trying to acquaint herself with the