A. Walters: Lead Me Not

Heading out. See you tomorrow.

I thought about texting her back, demanding details. Once upon a time Renee had been the ultimate fun girl. She had been the first to blast her music and get crazy drunk.

She used to be my complete opposite in every possible way. The wild girl with the heart of gold. The total extrovert who was the life of the party. Beautiful bombshell with guys falling at her feet. Taking full advantage of her long red hair and killer curves, she worked a room and enjoyed every moment.

But that was before Devon Keeton had entered the picture.

I squeezed the phone tightly in my fist and forced myself to put it back in my pocket. Responding to the text in any way would only further alienate the shadow girl who wore my best friend’s clothing.

At one time, our friendship had started to heal the snarly tangles of my wounded psyche. I had opened myself up to Renee in a way I never thought I’d be able to open up again.

So feeling like I was losing something I had come to depend on made me anxious and sometimes bitter.

And more than a little angry.

The campus was surprisingly busy for a Friday evening. Usually the place became a ghost town by four o’clock. The college was small, so most weekend entertainment happened away from the manicured lawns and perfectly pristine brick buildings.

I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets and hunched my shoulders, feeling the cold. I was making some outrageous and rowdy weekend plans in my head that included digging out the rest of my winter sweaters and categorizing them by textile and color. Watch out, world, Aubrey Duncan was getting her cleaning on!

I noticed a group of people standing in front of the brick wall that ran along the north edge of the campus. The students gathered there were pointing, and there was a definite excitement as they stared at something that had grabbed their attention.

My curiosity got the better of me, and I made my way over to the crowd. Shouldering my way through the group, I was confused by what I saw—more particularly, by why it was creating such a reaction.

I tilted my head, trying to make out the detailed picture that had been spray-painted onto the brick. A massive hand was holding a grip of figures meant to be people. Some were screaming, some appeared to be laughing, and others were falling to the ground, a mass of flailing limbs, as they jumped from the grasping, God-like fingers. The picture had been painted in vivid reds and oranges, and the people were outlined in thick bands of black.

Beneath the picture in sweeping block letters was the word Compulsion followed by a series of numbers.

It was definitely impressive, for graffiti. I just couldn’t understand why people were staring at it as though it held the meaning of the freaking universe.

I turned to the two girls standing beside me. They were talking in excited whispers, pointing at the painting. “I don’t get it,” I said blandly, arching an eyebrow.

The girl closer to me looked shocked. “X did this,” she replied, as though that would explain everything.

“X?” I asked, feeling like I had missed an important lesson on college cultural relevance. From the way the two girls were staring at me, I might as well have a damned L tattooed on my forehead. Look at me! I’m the loser who has no appreciation for spray paint on a wall!

“Uh, yeah,” the second girl said, over-enunciating her words as though she was talking to a total idiot. Apparently, I was the idiot in this situation.

“He leaves these pictures for everyone to find. You know, to help people find where Compulsion will be over the weekend. You can tell it was him. See the line of tiny X s in the drawing along the back of the hand,” girl number one answered, with just enough nastiness to make me want to slap her.

But again, my curiosity got the better of me, and I overlooked her huge case of bitchitis. “What the hell is Compulsion?” I asked, throwing a little of my own bitchiness into the question.

“Are you kidding? Have you been living under a rock for the last decade?” a guy snorted from behind me. Bitch One and Bitch Two snickered, and I gave them a look that was meant to shut them up but only prompted simultaneous eye rolling.

I looked over my shoulder and tried my look of death on my newest ridiculer. The guy had the sense to take a step back and drop his sneer.

“Uh, it’s just that Compulsion is the biggest underground club in the state. Finding the location in the painting is part of the mystery. It’s like a real-life urban legend,” the guy explained.

I looked back at the picture, clearly not seeing what I was supposed to. I wished I could share in everyone’s enthusiasm. Their anticipation was tangible.

The girls pulled out their cell phones and started punching the numbers into their GPS. As people figured out the super-mysterious location, there were shrieks and whoops of excitement.

Normally I didn’t think too much about how much I had missed in my single-minded focus to become Aubrey Duncan, super student.

But right now, surrounded by people who clearly had way more excitement in their lives than I did, I felt like I had forgotten about some necessary steps in the whole growing-up-and-experiencing-life thing.

Ugh, this was too deep for a Friday night. There were reruns of Judge Judy on the TiVo calling my name.

“Good luck,” I told the less-than-friendly group before pushing my way back through the crowd.

I headed off campus and walked the two blocks to my empty apartment. The loneliness that greeted me was more pronounced than it had ever been before.

And for the first time in years, I hated it.

aubrey

normally organizing, categorizing, and putting things in their place was all I needed to go to my warm, happy place. Forget mood stabilizers. If I was depressed, just give me a dustrag and sixty minutes to declutter. Sure, my room looked like something out of OCD-R-Us, but it was that small semblance of control that helped me get through the day.

Renee, back when we could talk about more than whether it was T-shirt or sweater weather, would tease me about having my shoes lined up in perfect rows. She used to fuck with my almost obsessive need to have my desk laid out in completely symmetrical piles. My pens and highlighters, an exact number of each, were sitting just so in my green Longwood University mug. My laptop was placed at an exact midpoint between my Texas Instruments graphic calculator and my leather-bound daily planner.

Okay, so maybe I took the whole neat and tidy thing a bit too far. But I liked knowing where things were. I liked knowing what to expect when I walked into my room. Surprises sucked. Being blindsided, whether in a good or a bad way, put me on edge, and it didn’t take a PhD to figure out why.

Too much of my past had been dictated by things beyond my control. One tiny twist of fate, and I had been catapulted into a scary oblivion that I was still trying to claw my way out of.

But if there was one thing Aubrey Duncan did well, it was surviving. Whatever it cost me, I put one foot in front of the other and kept on walking. There wasn’t any other option for me.

“You really need to get in the habit of locking your front door. What if I was a robber here to swipe all of your 90210 DVDs,” a voice called, startling me out of my mission to get the dust bunnies out from underneath my bed.

I slithered out from under the mattress on my stomach and peered up at the good-looking guy with the dark brown hair who was dominating the doorway.

“I keep those under lock and key, Brooks, you know better than that,” I answered, blowing my hair out of my face and wiping a grubby hand across my forehead. I was pretty sure I looked like something pulled out of a ditch. Fortunately for me, Brooks Hamlin wasn’t someone I felt the need to impress.