The doctor had been wrong—I wasn’t going to be six feet like my dad. By the time I was seventeen, I was six foot one with more to grow. I think I always thought of myself as short because my height felt funny on me. I didn’t really know what to do with it. I tried to disappear in crowds like I used to, but I couldn’t. Too tall, too skinny, and I think people were kind of scared of me because I was so quiet.
Even though I was free, I felt oddly trapped. Like I was waiting. Waiting for someone to tell me my life had purpose. Waiting for someone to tell me what I should be doing. Waiting for answers to all the questions I’d had as a kid—answers that would never come.
Then I met Cami.
Cami was a year older than me. Beautiful. Sweet and shy, maybe a little skittish. We met in the library the beginning of my second year at SU and I think, for me at least, it was love at first sight. Even though we didn’t have any classes together and she lived with her aunt in town, we studied together nearly every afternoon. I looked forward to seeing her, and on the days I couldn’t or she didn’t make it I was sad.
Cami left for the summer, and when she returned in the fall I wanted to marry her. She was everything bright in my life. My past was finally buried; my mother had remarried and moved to Texas, my father was still in Seattle, but I hadn’t spoken to either of them in over two years, not since the day I became an emancipated minor. The time, and college, and Cami all healed me.
For the first time since Rachel died, I was at peace.
The peace didn’t last.
The sensation that someone was watching me again started at the beginning of my third year. I started to feel the pricks in the back of my neck, just like in high school. The mysterious and cryptic notes began again, only instead of being put in my locker they were left in my dorm room. Or in my car. Or as a bookmark in whatever I was reading.
I became jittery and nervous and all I wanted to do was disappear again. I kept it all from Cami because I wanted to protect her. I filed police report after police report, but after the third time, they just stopped caring. I’d become an annoyance, and one of the cops clearly thought I was lying for the attention.
He certainly didn’t know me. I would gladly be invisible if I could.
But I should have realized that whoever hated me, whoever had followed me from Newark to New York, would try to hurt someone I loved.
My junior year, I moved off campus and gave Cami a key to my apartment. I wanted her to move in with me, because she was having problems with her family. But she was a bit old-fashioned, and I liked that about her. She’d often stay until late but always left in the middle of the night. I wished she would take me to visit her aunt, but she said it was “complicated.”
I knew all about complicated families.
It was the morning before Halloween when I had coffee with Cami and asked if she wanted to see a movie that night. She said she’d meet me at my apartment. And she sounded happy for the first time in weeks, and that made me happy. I’d been afraid she wanted to break it off because of my questions about her aunt, and my moodiness.
I got hung up after my last class because the professor wanted to talk to me about a story I’d written. He wanted me to submit it to the campus magazine. I said sure, whatever, but he wanted to talk. Talking wasn’t my strength. So I listened to him, about how talented I was, about how I should be majoring in communication or journalism or the creative arts instead of early childhood education. I listened until he wanted me to give him answers; then I told him I was late for a date.
I had a beat-up old car, but I rarely drove since my apartment was only a half mile from campus. But it was days like this, when I was late, that I wished I had it. I called Cami to tell her I was late, but my