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Chapter Five: Wherein Adam and the parking patrol girl make my already complicated life more difficult

Louis pulled his matchbox car into his usual parking lot at eight twenty the next morning. No clouds hung above him that could compete with the sun. The sky was a clear, steady blue like the open sea. Louis smiled to himself as he rolled down aisle after aisle of solid automobile. He had Biology class that morning: not even a full parking lot could dampen his mood. His first love was engineering, but tied for second were the other sciences, all with their pleasurably unique kisses. It didn’t even matter that four-fifths of the students in his Biology course were freshmen while he was somewhere between junior and senior – regardless that the college did not give out bachelor degrees. Such was the result of his insistence for independence in planning his degree without an advisor, like a toddler insisting on tying his own shoes.

Waiting to snatch the parking place a car was inching out of, Louis stopped beside a red car parked on the curb he had illegally blocked just the other day. He chuckled to himself.

“You’re gonna get in trouble,” he futilely warned its absent owner. “This lot is patrolled by Sheriff…hm… what’s her name.” It seemed odd not to know that security girl’s name since Louis had been thinking about her almost a full day. What would a girl like her be named? he wondered as the parking place emptied and he pulled into it. Something that sounded like a full-of-herself self-proclaimed agent of justice… Barbie?

She did have blonde hair.

Louis parked, exited and locked his car. He slung his book bag over his head so the strap would lay flat against his navy blue sweatshirt. In any case, he wouldn’t let the thought of her spoil yet another day.

“Hey Louis!”

Louis looked over his shoulder to see what looked like an upside down triangle on stilts, wearing a classy black leather jacket and slightly worn blue jeans. They were the kind of stylistically battered trousers where the knees had holes but the rest of the fabric looked like it hadn’t seen the outside of the factory, yet they sold for more than most intact pairs. On top of the inverted triangle sat a stocky neck and on top of that, a square head with short black hair, round eyes and a large, sparkling grin.

“Hi Adam,” Louis greeted and the would-be football star came alongside him as they walked.

His name was Adam Gunther Georgeson the fourth, son of the current owner of the monopolizing Georgeson Steel Company. Adam had enough money to attend the five most expensive universities in the world at the same time, yet he had chosen to live separated from the family mansion and start his training in psychology in the less glamorous, no central ventilation system, in the middle of a campus-wide asbestos removal operation, community college, to, as he jokingly put it, rub elbows with his future clients. In reality, he probably just wanted out from under his father’s thumb.

“Did you get my message?” he asked in his friendly lion sort of voice.

Shoot, Louis had forgotten to call him back.

“Uh, yeah I did,” Louis replied as they made it up the three steps into the science department building. He really didn’t want anything else to juggle, especially with the CCC so close, but Adam was his biology project partner and it was all for science. “I haven’t had time to think of anything good yet. Maybe we should start with a broader topic: like gravity or scar tissue.”

Adam shrugged and pulled the plain wooden door of their classroom open. “Fine by me. We need to get thinking, though. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Louis didn’t need to be told. There was never enough time to do the important things. If only Louis had two lives to work with, then he could fill one with everything he wanted to do and dump the rest of life’s obligations into the other.

The door closed behind them and Louis scanned the hundred-student room humming with conversation for two seats together. Like cloth on barbed wire, as his eyes passed over the heads of the seated crowd, they caught on the intense, blue eyes of a blonde curly haired girl. It was Sheriff Barbie in a large, hot pink breast cancer awareness tee-shirt.

“I like your scar tissue idea,” Adam went on as they continued towards the front.

Suddenly, those big blue eyes trailed up from her paper and stared straight into the center of his pupils like a blue laser pointer. Louis quickly looked away and scratched the shimmering scar that curved around his ear from his temple to his jaw. He grabbed the two furthest seats from the girl, which just happened to be in the very front row next to another girl, reading the hefty novel in her lap. Louis and Adam unslung their bags and sat in the thick blue plastic folding chairs bolted to the tan linoleum floor like theater seats without cushions. Louis heaved his bag onto his lap and dug around in it for his biology notebook. His fingers brushed across the smaller volume of his Countersink book. In it he wrote all his invention notes, new machinery plans, notes-to-self and new objects and places to burn as they arose. One might call it his doomsday list, but Louis didn’t. It had nothing to do with doomsday: the words that compiled the three-page list were just objects, which burnt would benefit him. He pulled out his biology notebook and took the pen from its coils.

The girl with a long brown ponytail next to Louis glanced at him and then scanned the rapidly filling classroom, trying to look casual, but her creased brow led Louis to believe it was anything but. She spotted someone she knew and smiled, closing her book and getting up to sit beside her friend several rows away.

“That was rude,” Adam commented, having been audience to the whole thing.

“It’s not like I know her,” Louis murmured and opened his notebook.

People tended to avoid him, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why. Something was obviously distasteful in him; he didn’t shower as often as recommended and had to wash his clothes in the sink. He never had people over, partially to protect his identity but also because guests often snooped and things were often broken. But Adam had somehow missed the memo that had apparently been stuck into every mailbox on campus. For whatever reason, the guy would not leave Louis alone.

Louis flipped to where his notes ended and began reading over what he had written down from the previous lecture. Someone in pink passed before him and when he glanced up without bothering to change the angle of his head, he saw it was the security girl. He let his eyes fall back onto his paper. She stood before him for another second and then plopped into the empty seat beside him. Louis flipped to the next page, refusing to acknowledge her presence.

Adam glanced between the two, troubled. He could sense the friction between them, but in the carefully cultivated knowledge of manners engrained into him from practically birth, he assumed it was just an unintentional breach of etiquette, and determined to fix it.
He leaned over Louis and extended his hand to the girl. Louis gave him an angry look but he didn’t notice. “Hi,” Adam greeted with a pearly smile. “I’m Adam.”

The girl gripped his hand enthusiastically and shook it. “I’m Summer,” she replied.

Adam sat back into his chair, leaving the top page of Louis’s notebook crumpled and partially torn from the rest. Louis tried to flatten it. Adam watched him with concern, wondering why he wasn’t introducing himself as well.

“And this is Louis,” he told Summer. Louis’s shoulders dropped in frustration and he gave Summer a sideways glance as he shook her hand.

“Nice to meet you,” he muttered.

Adam crossed his long legs comfortably in his chair with a satisfied grin, like a superhero who had just rescued twelve people from a sinking boat. He unlocked a touch screen cell phone as sleek and black as the jacket he pulled it from and proceeded to scroll through internet pages.

Louis got a whiff of roses as Summer leaned closer to him. Without taking his eyes off of his paper, he leaned away from her, like two magnets of the same polarity.

“Look, I didn’t want to give you that parking ticket,” she whispered. “but it was my job.”

“So why are you apologizing?” Louis asked calmly.

“Because I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said about not being able to pay the fine. I don’t want to be the sheriff of Nottingham. I know how hard it is to find money for anything while paying for college, so I… I’ll pay half of it.”

Remaining aloof flew from Louis’s mind and he looked at her full in the face. Hers was the expression of the guilty and tortured soul, whose crime was magnified because of her hypersensitive conscience. She was a traffic cop: she didn’t need to go around paying for people’s tickets. However, he wasn’t about to decline her offer. Especially since it was such a trivial citation.

“Well, thanks a lot,” Louis said with a smile, watching the professor approach the table in front of the whiteboard, beginning to unpack his things.

“On the condition that you don’t violate another traffic law,” she continued, stonily.

“I never make it a point to break laws,” Louis reasoned.

“I’m sure you don’t, but you have to make a conscious effort to abide by them in the future,” Summer replied. “Because I’m not going to pay for another one.”

Who could realistically guarantee that they would not break another traffic law for the rest of their life? With policemen posted at every twenty-five mile-per-hour speed zone and yellow curbs lining all the buildings, it was impossible. Louis tapped a rhythm on his notebook with his pen as he thought it over. Or, as he pretended to think it over. He hadn’t lied when he said he didn’t try to break laws. It wasn’t his goal. Paul’s maybe, but not his.

“Alright,” he sighed, smiling at his fifty-percent discount. “I’ll do my best.”

Summer smiled and nodded with finality. “Okay then. I work in the campus security office most mornings during lunch. When you have your hundred, swing by and I’ll take care of the rest.”

A stab of panic stuck his heart when he remembered what he had done with the ticket. He rubbed his scar nervously. Unfortunately, Summer picked up on his distress.

“Where’s the ticket?” she asked carefully.

“Good morning class,” the professor began.

Louis motioned towards him. “Class is starting. Sorry.” He hunched over his notes, writing the date vigorously, regretting, for the first time in his life, burning something. Louis was sure that burning a citation warranted another, steeper citation, one that Summer would not offer to pay, and probably would add a fifty dollar “How dare you?” fee on top of it all.

Summer didn’t bother him about the ticket during class and when it ended, Louis shoved his notebook and pen into his book bag with less care than recommended, causing the red cover of his notebook to bend in half. But he didn’t notice; he was focused solely on leaving before Summer picked up their conversation. He stood and took a step, but her hand caught his shoulder like briars.
“So, what happened to the ticket?” she inquired. He jerked his shoulder forward with no success. When he turned around, she let go of his shoulder and stared at him, jaw firm and shoulders back, her sheriff mode kicking in.

Adam laughed as he packed his own notebook away. “You got a ticket?” he exclaimed.

Louis whipped his head around. “Hey, not so loud,” he growled, then glanced behind him, pleased that the professor was in the far corner of the room, talking with a group of students. He looked at his digital watch, which informed him the time was ten o’clock. He had another class at three and if he hurried, he could get some more work done on the CCC project. He turned to face Summer again. “Hey, I have to go, so we’ll talk about this later.” He squeezed through a group of students barring his path to the door, and the gap he had found closed when Summer tried to follow him. Adam made his own pathway sidling along the wall, and was able to follow Louis.
Louis glanced back and saw Summer following, albeit too slowly. He pushed the door open just as Adam caught up to him.

“So, what is this about a ticket?” Adam asked, fairly skipping beside him. “Are you going to jail?”

Louis sighed and walked faster, glancing back to make sure she wasn’t following them. “I just parked on a curb that apparently wasn’t up for grabs,” he explained, shaking his hands near his head to show the absurdity of it.

He opened one of the glass front doors and walked down the steps into the heavy sunlight. Adam put on a pair of dark sunglasses but Louis’s were on the dashboard of his car. They walked to the parking lot, Louis glancing back a few more times. Adam got out his car keys as they passed rows of cars.

“So, did something happen to it?” he ventured.

Louis stopped at his car and fumbled in his pocket for his keys. Why couldn’t everyone leave him alone?

“Just drop it already,” he snapped.

XXX

Louis already had his headgear on the passenger side floor of his car, so he didn’t stop by home before driving to Paul’s apartment building. It was probably dangerous, he knew, to leave his helmet in the car, but in the paper grocery sack that enveloped it, it looked like nothing more than a head of cabbage. Besides, who in his right mind would bother burglarizing Louis’s “making dirt fashionable since 1982” vehicle? Well, Louis would, but only he knew the power it had been given.

Louis parked on an unmarked curb, grabbed the sack, walked past the usual groups of business people and rode the elevator to Paul’s floor. He knocked on the door, Paul made sure it was Louis, the door was unlocked and he was led inside.

“Good morning, Paul,” Louis greeted with a deep sense of relief at being able to push parking tickets, biology assignments, nosey Adam and self-righteous Summer aside for a few hours and concentrate on grease, gas and metal. He hungered to get back to his table, to continue working in the only line of physical expense that produced results in equal quantity. No tricks, no emotions. Just simple hardware.

Paul was already wearing his goggles and a plastic glove on one hand holding its empty twin, a sign that he had gotten up from his work only to answer the door. Louis took his headgear out of the sack, fitted it over his head and turned it on.

“Any progress?” Louis asked, moving towards the kitchen.

“Must I remind you every time to remove your shoes?” Paul droned, scratching his sagging cheek with the gloveless hand he had used to open the door.

“Oh, sorry.” Louis dropped to the floor and pulled off his shoes. “See?” he said holding up a black and gray checkered laceless boating shoe. “No Converse today.”

Paul smiled a proud mentor smile. “I’m glad to see you can remember things when they are important.”

Louis got to his feet, his goggles and ear cones fully operational. He was about to say removing shoes did not qualify as an important task, but decided against it, not in the mood for more conflict. He set his shoes neatly on the shoe rack by the door. Paul crossed his arms in approval.

“Well, you remembered two things,” he commented as they walked into the kitchen. “Dare I hope for three of four?”

Louis stared intently at the flamethrower on his table as he sat down, trying to remember what he was supposed to remember. No use: it would not come. He shrugged and smiled sheepishly up at Paul, who was washing his gloves at the sink. Paul emitted a sort of electronic groan as he pulled on his other glove, letting it snap against his square wrist.

“I assume you didn’t fill out the form,” he said.

Louis smoothed his sooty red faux hawk back with his hand, only to have it spring back into place. What was it about forms that refused to stick in his mind? He had either turned in late or flat out forgotten to fill out every piece of paperwork the college pushed at him, which explained his lack of scholarships - that, and he hated competition.

“You assume correctly,” Louis admitted.

Paul rested his hands against the sink and hunched his shoulders. “Did you at least bring it with you?” Paul continued, his robotic voice flatter than usual.

Louis lifted his index finger into the air. “I did that. It’s still in my school bag.”
He glanced around himself for the bag. He looked around the legs of his chair and then leaned down to peer under the table. Nothing. He jumped up and walked slowly back to the door, scanning the carpeted floor as he did. Louis reached the door empty handed. He glanced to the wall, on the shoe rack, then crouched and opened the grocery sack, feeling inside it and then in a fruitless act of despair, lifted the sack and peered underneath it.

Louis stayed crouched, holding the grocery sack, bewildered. “My bag isn’t here,” he announced.

“We need to send that form today, Countersink,” Paul nearly growled. “Maybe it’s back at your place.”

“It wouldn’t be,” Louis protested. “I came straight from class.” He groaned and stood, remembering. “And my Countersink notebook is in there too!”

Paul emerged from the kitchen holding a beaker of clear liquid with tongs. “Well, it seems there is not much reason to remain here with no form or diagrams,” he stated. “I’d suggest finding your bag and then coming back.”

Louis sighed in frustration, turning off his helmet and removing it. “I’m leaving this here, okay?” He set it on the paper sack.

“Fine by me,” Paul replied, checking his wristwatch and moving into the kitchen to continue the experiment. “I’ll see you when I see you,” he called. “Hopefully soon.”

“Hopefully it’s in my car,” Louis mentioned, pulling on his shoes, unlocking the door and striding with purpose to the elevator.

Of course it was not in his car, and no matter how viciously he searched, he found no trace of the bag he had shoved his biology notebook into less than an hour ago. Bent at the waist, resting on one knee on the passenger seat, Louis smoothed back his pointed hair in confused panic. If it wasn’t in the car, he must have not put it there, but Louis was loathe to admit where he knew it was, or at least the last place he remembered interacting with it…

He couldn’t have left it in the classroom. That would be the equivalent of introducing himself to the police. “Hello officer, my name is Louis Marvin, 1334 North Bradford Way. You know me as Countersink…” No.

He hadn’t left it there.

Louis closed the passenger side door and crawled across the cup holders and gear stick into the driver’s seat, swinging his legs into the space beneath the steering wheel. He pushed the clutch in and turned the key in the ignition. The car didn’t roar to life, but it definitely made some sort of sound as it started up – more like the cough snort of an old man startled out of sleep.

Louis drove a hundred yards from the apartment building and slowed to a stop a few cars back from a red traffic light. Struggle as he did against it, logic was getting the best of him. He knew his bag wasn’t at home, and it had never made it to the car.

He sighed at his stupidity and let his forehead fall against the top bar of the gray plastic steering wheel. Louis couldn’t believe he had left it at the college. It had probably been stolen already.

Louis fairly skidded into the parking lot and slid into an open space by a curb. He was pretty sure it was not painted, but he didn’t care enough to check. He hurried out of the car and headed to the science building. With each step, he pictured more vividly someone coming into the classroom, maybe for another class, maybe just leaving one, or maybe just lurking around, and saying, “Oh what’s this? A bag with no owner? Cool! I’ve been needing a new one.” He sprinted the last couple hundred feet then up the stairs, into the building and straight into the classroom.

To Louis’s relief, the room was empty, silent but for his heavy breath. Chemistry notes were left on the board where the biology notes of his class had been erased. Another class had come and gone, hopefully with only as many book bags as they had entered with. Louis walked to the front as if moving too quickly would scare his bag away. He turned and passed the seats in the front row checking under each. He checked the area he and Adam had occupied but it was empty except for a crumpled piece of notebook paper and a forgotten half-empty soda can.

When the row ended, he continued to the second row, scanning under chairs, then the third, fourth, fifth… At the end of the very back row, he stopped. His left hand found his scar and scratched nervously.

What now, genius?

It had better be in the lost and found, Louis thought as he rushed out of the classroom and down the main hallway which was painted robin-egg blue and lit with flickering fluorescent lights. Louis didn’t realize until then that he didn’t know where the science department office was. Fortunately, the building had only one level and that level was not very expansive. The classrooms were on one side of the small lobby-like intersection that the main doors emptied into, and the laboratories were on the other. There were only two ways to go in that building. As Louis continued deeper down the classroom hallway and the classroom at the end came closer, he thought he had chosen wrong. But just as he was about to turn and try the labs side, he passed by a room with large windows and “Office” printed in small black lettering on the glass.

Louis breathed a swift “Finally,” as he let himself in. The young Hispanic woman in a bright red dress shirt at the front desk typed a few last words and then looked up from her computer as Louis approached the desk. She smiled an impatient smile.

Louis let it slide, for he was impatient too. “I seem to have lost my book bag. Could I look in the lost and found box?”

“Sure thing,” the woman replied as she pushed her chair out and crouched down.

Louis stood taller to watch as she slid a large cardboard box out from under her desk. The woman heaved the box onto the raised portion of her desk that faced Louis and pushed it closer to him.

“There are a few bags in here,” she said. “Hopefully one of them is yours.”

Louis had to stand on his toes to see the full contents of the box. He rummaged through them for a while, examining each bag, to no avail. His was not among them. Louis set his heels back on the floor and pushed the box towards the lady.

“It’s not there,” he explained as he turned and started towards the door.

“Oh, sorry,” the woman said taking the box off the counter.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Try Campus Security,” she bid as Louis opened the door. “They have the campus-wide lost and found.”

Louis held the door open for a moment, a bitter taste on his tongue just from hearing the words.

“I’ll consider that,” he muttered and left the office.

The campus security office was an area indwelt by Summer and Louis considered the potential hazard of encountering her. But his book bag and its priceless contents were on the line. Louis pushed the main doors outward with a vengeance and traveled as fast as his surprisingly long stride took him towards the larger parking lot and the campus security office that bordered it: no doubt placed there to catch traffic felons without leaving their desks.

He approached the small square whitewashed building and casually peered through the barred window in the door to see who was sitting at the front desk. Louis reasoned that if Summer was there, he could get Adam to check for his bag instead, explaining that he had a big test in ten minutes or something like that. The body at the desk was a man, so Louis discarded his accumulating list of excuses and opened the door.

It was unnerving walking into such a small room with so much power. The more serious campus security officers, the ones with actual uniforms and guns, stood around off duty, drinking water from the water cooler. Louis tried not to look at them as he approached the desk.

Following the same process as before, the man at the front desk set a larger box out for him and Louis sifted through the misplaced objects. There were more interesting pieces in that box than in the science building one. Car keys, half a dozen student ID cards, a wallet, even a can of mace. However, Louis’s bag was not there either.

Louis left the office, and walked to the lot he had parked in and sat in his car. Again, the taunting question hit him: what now, genius? Maybe he had left it at home, somehow. It didn’t make logical sense, but it was the last option on his list of possibilities.

He had produced those sketches and notes; if worst came to worst, he could start from scratch… Start from scratch? Louis wiped a hand over his face at the prospect of losing the last four years of work. However, not even that frustration was the worst of it. That bag held the potential to shine an unwanted spotlight on him and the conference. Louis didn’t know how well the Death Angel, the CEO and sponsor of the conference, hid it. It had been held annually, without being exposed, for over fifty years: there must be some effective method in place to keep the real goings on covered. Surely there had been other, clumsier attendants.

Description
Chapter Five: Wherein Adam and the parking patrol girl make my already complicated life more difficult

Louis pulled his matchbox car into his usual parking lot at eight twenty the next morning. No clouds hung above him that could compete with the sun. The sky was a clear, steady blue like the open sea. Louis smiled to himself as he rolled down aisle after aisle of solid automobile. He had Biology class that morning: not even a full parking lot could dampen his mood. His first love was engineering, but tied for second were the other sciences, all with their pleasurably unique kisses. It didn’t even matter that four-fifths of the students in his Biology course were freshmen while he was somewhere between junior and senior – regardless that the college did not give out bachelor degrees. Such was the result of his insistence for independence in planning his degree without an advisor, like a toddler insisting on tying his own shoes.

Waiting to snatch the parking place a car was inching out of, Louis stopped beside a red car parked on the curb he had illegally blocked just the other day. He chuckled to himself.

“You’re gonna get in trouble,” he futilely warned its absent owner. “This lot is patrolled by Sheriff…hm… what’s her name.” It seemed odd not to know that security girl’s name since Louis had been thinking about her almost a full day. What would a girl like her be named? he wondered as the parking place emptied and he pulled into it. Something that sounded like a full-of-herself self-proclaimed agent of justice… Barbie?

She did have blonde hair.

Louis parked, exited and locked his car. He slung his book bag over his head so the strap would lay flat against his navy blue sweatshirt. In any case, he wouldn’t let the thought of her spoil yet another day.

“Hey Louis!”

Louis looked over his shoulder to see what looked like an upside down triangle on stilts, wearing a classy black leather jacket and slightly worn blue jeans. They were the kind of stylistically battered trousers where the knees had holes but the rest of the fabric looked like it hadn’t seen the outside of the factory, yet they sold for more than most intact pairs. On top of the inverted triangle sat a stocky neck and on top of that, a square head with short black hair, round eyes and a large, sparkling grin.

“Hi Adam,” Louis greeted and the would-be football star came alongside him as they walked.

His name was Adam Gunther Georgeson the fourth, son of the current owner of the monopolizing Georgeson Steel Company. Adam had enough money to attend the five most expensive universities in the world at the same time, yet he had chosen to live separated from the family mansion and start his training in psychology in the less glamorous, no central ventilation system, in the middle of a campus-wide asbestos removal operation, community college, to, as he jokingly put it, rub elbows with his future clients. In reality, he probably just wanted out from under his father’s thumb.

“Did you get my message?” he asked in his friendly lion sort of voice.

Shoot, Louis had forgotten to call him back.

“Uh, yeah I did,” Louis replied as they made it up the three steps into the science department building. He really didn’t want anything else to juggle, especially with the CCC so close, but Adam was his biology project partner and it was all for science. “I haven’t had time to think of anything good yet. Maybe we should start with a broader topic: like gravity or scar tissue.”

Adam shrugged and pulled the plain wooden door of their classroom open. “Fine by me. We need to get thinking, though. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Louis didn’t need to be told. There was never enough time to do the important things. If only Louis had two lives to work with, then he could fill one with everything he wanted to do and dump the rest of life’s obligations into the other.

The door closed behind them and Louis scanned the hundred-student room humming with conversation for two seats together. Like cloth on barbed wire, as his eyes passed over the heads of the seated crowd, they caught on the intense, blue eyes of a blonde curly haired girl. It was Sheriff Barbie in a large, hot pink breast cancer awareness tee-shirt.

“I like your scar tissue idea,” Adam went on as they continued towards the front.

Suddenly, those big blue eyes trailed up from her paper and stared straight into the center of his pupils like a blue laser pointer. Louis quickly looked away and scratched the shimmering scar that curved around his ear from his temple to his jaw. He grabbed the two furthest seats from the girl, which just happened to be in the very front row next to another girl, reading the hefty novel in her lap. Louis and Adam unslung their bags and sat in the thick blue plastic folding chairs bolted to the tan linoleum floor like theater seats without cushions. Louis heaved his bag onto his lap and dug around in it for his biology notebook. His fingers brushed across the smaller volume of his Countersink book. In it he wrote all his invention notes, new machinery plans, notes-to-self and new objects and places to burn as they arose. One might call it his doomsday list, but Louis didn’t. It had nothing to do with doomsday: the words that compiled the three-page list were just objects, which burnt would benefit him. He pulled out his biology notebook and took the pen from its coils.

The girl with a long brown ponytail next to Louis glanced at him and then scanned the rapidly filling classroom, trying to look casual, but her creased brow led Louis to believe it was anything but. She spotted someone she knew and smiled, closing her book and getting up to sit beside her friend several rows away.

“That was rude,” Adam commented, having been audience to the whole thing.

“It’s not like I know her,” Louis murmured and opened his notebook.

People tended to avoid him, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why. Something was obviously distasteful in him; he didn’t shower as often as recommended and had to wash his clothes in the sink. He never had people over, partially to protect his identity but also because guests often snooped and things were often broken. But Adam had somehow missed the memo that had apparently been stuck into every mailbox on campus. For whatever reason, the guy would not leave Louis alone.

Louis flipped to where his notes ended and began reading over what he had written down from the previous lecture. Someone in pink passed before him and when he glanced up without bothering to change the angle of his head, he saw it was the security girl. He let his eyes fall back onto his paper. She stood before him for another second and then plopped into the empty seat beside him. Louis flipped to the next page, refusing to acknowledge her presence.

Adam glanced between the two, troubled. He could sense the friction between them, but in the carefully cultivated knowledge of manners engrained into him from practically birth, he assumed it was just an unintentional breach of etiquette, and determined to fix it.
He leaned over Louis and extended his hand to the girl. Louis gave him an angry look but he didn’t notice. “Hi,” Adam greeted with a pearly smile. “I’m Adam.”

The girl gripped his hand enthusiastically and shook it. “I’m Summer,” she replied.

Adam sat back into his chair, leaving the top page of Louis’s notebook crumpled and partially torn from the rest. Louis tried to flatten it. Adam watched him with concern, wondering why he wasn’t introducing himself as well.

“And this is Louis,” he told Summer. Louis’s shoulders dropped in frustration and he gave Summer a sideways glance as he shook her hand.

“Nice to meet you,” he muttered.

Adam crossed his long legs comfortably in his chair with a satisfied grin, like a superhero who had just rescued twelve people from a sinking boat. He unlocked a touch screen cell phone as sleek and black as the jacket he pulled it from and proceeded to scroll through internet pages.

Louis got a whiff of roses as Summer leaned closer to him. Without taking his eyes off of his paper, he leaned away from her, like two magnets of the same polarity.

“Look, I didn’t want to give you that parking ticket,” she whispered. “but it was my job.”

“So why are you apologizing?” Louis asked calmly.

“Because I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said about not being able to pay the fine. I don’t want to be the sheriff of Nottingham. I know how hard it is to find money for anything while paying for college, so I… I’ll pay half of it.”

Remaining aloof flew from Louis’s mind and he looked at her full in the face. Hers was the expression of the guilty and tortured soul, whose crime was magnified because of her hypersensitive conscience. She was a traffic cop: she didn’t need to go around paying for people’s tickets. However, he wasn’t about to decline her offer. Especially since it was such a trivial citation.

“Well, thanks a lot,” Louis said with a smile, watching the professor approach the table in front of the whiteboard, beginning to unpack his things.

“On the condition that you don’t violate another traffic law,” she continued, stonily.

“I never make it a point to break laws,” Louis reasoned.

“I’m sure you don’t, but you have to make a conscious effort to abide by them in the future,” Summer replied. “Because I’m not going to pay for another one.”

Who could realistically guarantee that they would not break another traffic law for the rest of their life? With policemen posted at every twenty-five mile-per-hour speed zone and yellow curbs lining all the buildings, it was impossible. Louis tapped a rhythm on his notebook with his pen as he thought it over. Or, as he pretended to think it over. He hadn’t lied when he said he didn’t try to break laws. It wasn’t his goal. Paul’s maybe, but not his.

“Alright,” he sighed, smiling at his fifty-percent discount. “I’ll do my best.”

Summer smiled and nodded with finality. “Okay then. I work in the campus security office most mornings during lunch. When you have your hundred, swing by and I’ll take care of the rest.”

A stab of panic stuck his heart when he remembered what he had done with the ticket. He rubbed his scar nervously. Unfortunately, Summer picked up on his distress.

“Where’s the ticket?” she asked carefully.

“Good morning class,” the professor began.

Louis motioned towards him. “Class is starting. Sorry.” He hunched over his notes, writing the date vigorously, regretting, for the first time in his life, burning something. Louis was sure that burning a citation warranted another, steeper citation, one that Summer would not offer to pay, and probably would add a fifty dollar “How dare you?” fee on top of it all.

Summer didn’t bother him about the ticket during class and when it ended, Louis shoved his notebook and pen into his book bag with less care than recommended, causing the red cover of his notebook to bend in half. But he didn’t notice; he was focused solely on leaving before Summer picked up their conversation. He stood and took a step, but her hand caught his shoulder like briars.
“So, what happened to the ticket?” she inquired. He jerked his shoulder forward with no success. When he turned around, she let go of his shoulder and stared at him, jaw firm and shoulders back, her sheriff mode kicking in.

Adam laughed as he packed his own notebook away. “You got a ticket?” he exclaimed.

Louis whipped his head around. “Hey, not so loud,” he growled, then glanced behind him, pleased that the professor was in the far corner of the room, talking with a group of students. He looked at his digital watch, which informed him the time was ten o’clock. He had another class at three and if he hurried, he could get some more work done on the CCC project. He turned to face Summer again. “Hey, I have to go, so we’ll talk about this later.” He squeezed through a group of students barring his path to the door, and the gap he had found closed when Summer tried to follow him. Adam made his own pathway sidling along the wall, and was able to follow Louis.
Louis glanced back and saw Summer following, albeit too slowly. He pushed the door open just as Adam caught up to him.

“So, what is this about a ticket?” Adam asked, fairly skipping beside him. “Are you going to jail?”

Louis sighed and walked faster, glancing back to make sure she wasn’t following them. “I just parked on a curb that apparently wasn’t up for grabs,” he explained, shaking his hands near his head to show the absurdity of it.

He opened one of the glass front doors and walked down the steps into the heavy sunlight. Adam put on a pair of dark sunglasses but Louis’s were on the dashboard of his car. They walked to the parking lot, Louis glancing back a few more times. Adam got out his car keys as they passed rows of cars.

“So, did something happen to it?” he ventured.

Louis stopped at his car and fumbled in his pocket for his keys. Why couldn’t everyone leave him alone?

“Just drop it already,” he snapped.

XXX

Louis already had his headgear on the passenger side floor of his car, so he didn’t stop by home before driving to Paul’s apartment building. It was probably dangerous, he knew, to leave his helmet in the car, but in the paper grocery sack that enveloped it, it looked like nothing more than a head of cabbage. Besides, who in his right mind would bother burglarizing Louis’s “making dirt fashionable since 1982” vehicle? Well, Louis would, but only he knew the power it had been given.

Louis parked on an unmarked curb, grabbed the sack, walked past the usual groups of business people and rode the elevator to Paul’s floor. He knocked on the door, Paul made sure it was Louis, the door was unlocked and he was led inside.

“Good morning, Paul,” Louis greeted with a deep sense of relief at being able to push parking tickets, biology assignments, nosey Adam and self-righteous Summer aside for a few hours and concentrate on grease, gas and metal. He hungered to get back to his table, to continue working in the only line of physical expense that produced results in equal quantity. No tricks, no emotions. Just simple hardware.

Paul was already wearing his goggles and a plastic glove on one hand holding its empty twin, a sign that he had gotten up from his work only to answer the door. Louis took his headgear out of the sack, fitted it over his head and turned it on.

“Any progress?” Louis asked, moving towards the kitchen.

“Must I remind you every time to remove your shoes?” Paul droned, scratching his sagging cheek with the gloveless hand he had used to open the door.

“Oh, sorry.” Louis dropped to the floor and pulled off his shoes. “See?” he said holding up a black and gray checkered laceless boating shoe. “No Converse today.”

Paul smiled a proud mentor smile. “I’m glad to see you can remember things when they are important.”

Louis got to his feet, his goggles and ear cones fully operational. He was about to say removing shoes did not qualify as an important task, but decided against it, not in the mood for more conflict. He set his shoes neatly on the shoe rack by the door. Paul crossed his arms in approval.

“Well, you remembered two things,” he commented as they walked into the kitchen. “Dare I hope for three of four?”

Louis stared intently at the flamethrower on his table as he sat down, trying to remember what he was supposed to remember. No use: it would not come. He shrugged and smiled sheepishly up at Paul, who was washing his gloves at the sink. Paul emitted a sort of electronic groan as he pulled on his other glove, letting it snap against his square wrist.

“I assume you didn’t fill out the form,” he said.

Louis smoothed his sooty red faux hawk back with his hand, only to have it spring back into place. What was it about forms that refused to stick in his mind? He had either turned in late or flat out forgotten to fill out every piece of paperwork the college pushed at him, which explained his lack of scholarships - that, and he hated competition.

“You assume correctly,” Louis admitted.

Paul rested his hands against the sink and hunched his shoulders. “Did you at least bring it with you?” Paul continued, his robotic voice flatter than usual.

Louis lifted his index finger into the air. “I did that. It’s still in my school bag.”
He glanced around himself for the bag. He looked around the legs of his chair and then leaned down to peer under the table. Nothing. He jumped up and walked slowly back to the door, scanning the carpeted floor as he did. Louis reached the door empty handed. He glanced to the wall, on the shoe rack, then crouched and opened the grocery sack, feeling inside it and then in a fruitless act of despair, lifted the sack and peered underneath it.

Louis stayed crouched, holding the grocery sack, bewildered. “My bag isn’t here,” he announced.

“We need to send that form today, Countersink,” Paul nearly growled. “Maybe it’s back at your place.”

“It wouldn’t be,” Louis protested. “I came straight from class.” He groaned and stood, remembering. “And my Countersink notebook is in there too!”

Paul emerged from the kitchen holding a beaker of clear liquid with tongs. “Well, it seems there is not much reason to remain here with no form or diagrams,” he stated. “I’d suggest finding your bag and then coming back.”

Louis sighed in frustration, turning off his helmet and removing it. “I’m leaving this here, okay?” He set it on the paper sack.

“Fine by me,” Paul replied, checking his wristwatch and moving into the kitchen to continue the experiment. “I’ll see you when I see you,” he called. “Hopefully soon.”

“Hopefully it’s in my car,” Louis mentioned, pulling on his shoes, unlocking the door and striding with purpose to the elevator.

Of course it was not in his car, and no matter how viciously he searched, he found no trace of the bag he had shoved his biology notebook into less than an hour ago. Bent at the waist, resting on one knee on the passenger seat, Louis smoothed back his pointed hair in confused panic. If it wasn’t in the car, he must have not put it there, but Louis was loathe to admit where he knew it was, or at least the last place he remembered interacting with it…

He couldn’t have left it in the classroom. That would be the equivalent of introducing himself to the police. “Hello officer, my name is Louis Marvin, 1334 North Bradford Way. You know me as Countersink…” No.

He hadn’t left it there.

Louis closed the passenger side door and crawled across the cup holders and gear stick into the driver’s seat, swinging his legs into the space beneath the steering wheel. He pushed the clutch in and turned the key in the ignition. The car didn’t roar to life, but it definitely made some sort of sound as it started up – more like the cough snort of an old man startled out of sleep.

Louis drove a hundred yards from the apartment building and slowed to a stop a few cars back from a red traffic light. Struggle as he did against it, logic was getting the best of him. He knew his bag wasn’t at home, and it had never made it to the car.

He sighed at his stupidity and let his forehead fall against the top bar of the gray plastic steering wheel. Louis couldn’t believe he had left it at the college. It had probably been stolen already.

Louis fairly skidded into the parking lot and slid into an open space by a curb. He was pretty sure it was not painted, but he didn’t care enough to check. He hurried out of the car and headed to the science building. With each step, he pictured more vividly someone coming into the classroom, maybe for another class, maybe just leaving one, or maybe just lurking around, and saying, “Oh what’s this? A bag with no owner? Cool! I’ve been needing a new one.” He sprinted the last couple hundred feet then up the stairs, into the building and straight into the classroom.

To Louis’s relief, the room was empty, silent but for his heavy breath. Chemistry notes were left on the board where the biology notes of his class had been erased. Another class had come and gone, hopefully with only as many book bags as they had entered with. Louis walked to the front as if moving too quickly would scare his bag away. He turned and passed the seats in the front row checking under each. He checked the area he and Adam had occupied but it was empty except for a crumpled piece of notebook paper and a forgotten half-empty soda can.

When the row ended, he continued to the second row, scanning under chairs, then the third, fourth, fifth… At the end of the very back row, he stopped. His left hand found his scar and scratched nervously.

What now, genius?

It had better be in the lost and found, Louis thought as he rushed out of the classroom and down the main hallway which was painted robin-egg blue and lit with flickering fluorescent lights. Louis didn’t realize until then that he didn’t know where the science department office was. Fortunately, the building had only one level and that level was not very expansive. The classrooms were on one side of the small lobby-like intersection that the main doors emptied into, and the laboratories were on the other. There were only two ways to go in that building. As Louis continued deeper down the classroom hallway and the classroom at the end came closer, he thought he had chosen wrong. But just as he was about to turn and try the labs side, he passed by a room with large windows and “Office” printed in small black lettering on the glass.

Louis breathed a swift “Finally,” as he let himself in. The young Hispanic woman in a bright red dress shirt at the front desk typed a few last words and then looked up from her computer as Louis approached the desk. She smiled an impatient smile.

Louis let it slide, for he was impatient too. “I seem to have lost my book bag. Could I look in the lost and found box?”

“Sure thing,” the woman replied as she pushed her chair out and crouched down.

Louis stood taller to watch as she slid a large cardboard box out from under her desk. The woman heaved the box onto the raised portion of her desk that faced Louis and pushed it closer to him.

“There are a few bags in here,” she said. “Hopefully one of them is yours.”

Louis had to stand on his toes to see the full contents of the box. He rummaged through them for a while, examining each bag, to no avail. His was not among them. Louis set his heels back on the floor and pushed the box towards the lady.

“It’s not there,” he explained as he turned and started towards the door.

“Oh, sorry,” the woman said taking the box off the counter.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Try Campus Security,” she bid as Louis opened the door. “They have the campus-wide lost and found.”

Louis held the door open for a moment, a bitter taste on his tongue just from hearing the words.

“I’ll consider that,” he muttered and left the office.

The campus security office was an area indwelt by Summer and Louis considered the potential hazard of encountering her. But his book bag and its priceless contents were on the line. Louis pushed the main doors outward with a vengeance and traveled as fast as his surprisingly long stride took him towards the larger parking lot and the campus security office that bordered it: no doubt placed there to catch traffic felons without leaving their desks.

He approached the small square whitewashed building and casually peered through the barred window in the door to see who was sitting at the front desk. Louis reasoned that if Summer was there, he could get Adam to check for his bag instead, explaining that he had a big test in ten minutes or something like that. The body at the desk was a man, so Louis discarded his accumulating list of excuses and opened the door.

It was unnerving walking into such a small room with so much power. The more serious campus security officers, the ones with actual uniforms and guns, stood around off duty, drinking water from the water cooler. Louis tried not to look at them as he approached the desk.

Following the same process as before, the man at the front desk set a larger box out for him and Louis sifted through the misplaced objects. There were more interesting pieces in that box than in the science building one. Car keys, half a dozen student ID cards, a wallet, even a can of mace. However, Louis’s bag was not there either.

Louis left the office, and walked to the lot he had parked in and sat in his car. Again, the taunting question hit him: what now, genius? Maybe he had left it at home, somehow. It didn’t make logical sense, but it was the last option on his list of possibilities.

He had produced those sketches and notes; if worst came to worst, he could start from scratch… Start from scratch? Louis wiped a hand over his face at the prospect of losing the last four years of work. However, not even that frustration was the worst of it. That bag held the potential to shine an unwanted spotlight on him and the conference. Louis didn’t know how well the Death Angel, the CEO and sponsor of the conference, hid it. It had been held annually, without being exposed, for over fifty years: there must be some effective method in place to keep the real goings on covered. Surely there had been other, clumsier attendants.