Unnatural Occurrence (An Anna Morgan Novella (Part 1)) by Peggy Martinez Page B

palm flat on his chest. My hand vibrated from the contact. “But, it doesn’t have to be who you are and it doesn’t have to eat away at you as it does now. Search inside yourself and you’ll find the strength you need to move past your fears, past your doubts.” I stepped back from the Detective, suddenly so tired I could barely keep my eyes opened.
    I laid down on the sofa and listened as one-by-one everyone finished their jobs and left me alone in the house. Even though Detective Patterson was hesitant, he too eventually left me. I didn’t have any other family and I was already eighteen, so there really was nothing anyone could do for me.
    I knew that my life had already been altered the moment my mother had been killed. And the moment I decided to open myself to see without restraint since I was a child, I knew I could never go back to the way things were before.
    To go back would be bliss, but not without a cost. To go back would be serenity in darkness, but what kind of life could I lead without the illumination of the truth? To go back would be to choose ignorance over my new reality. No. I would never go back…even if that meant moving forward into the unknown all alone.

There was one thing that I hated more than crowds, and that was crowds of people my own age and younger gathered in the name of higher learning. I snorted under my breath as I walked quickly up the steps of the building I was headed into. High school had never been my thing and I was pretty sure college was going to be even worse. But after several failed attempts to get a meeting with the man I wanted to talk to, the renowned Dr. Christopher Young, I became desperate. So here I was auditing a class at Duke University against my own sense of self preservation and sanity. After bypassing a group of guys chugging hot cokes and entertaining the idiotic masses by belching the national anthem, I slid into the classroom I was looking for and quickly found a seat in the far back-corner at the top of the amphitheater style room.
    The room filled rather quickly and I realized I’d been wrong in thinking this class wouldn’t have been a popular one to choose. I watched in horror as the majority of the seats were filled in the final moments before the class started. Just before class was to begin, Dr. Young came in with a leather satchel and took his spot near the huge chalkboard at the front of the class. It was immediately apparent to me what held the rapt attention of the class. The good doctor ran a hand through his disheveled auburn hair, pushed his just-nerdy-enough-to-be-sexy glasses up, and grinned crookedly into the crowd. He wasn’t my type, but I could see how some women could lose all their senses in his presence.
    “Well, looks like a full house again this year,” he said, his blue eyes raking across the classroom. The audience sighed audibly. Dr. Young had a thick British accent. Good God. I glanced around the room again and realized that about eighty percent of the class was female. Unbelievable .
    “I didn’t realize how full this class would be,” someone murmured next to me. I glanced over from behind the curtain of my hair. The girl was pretty, with wide, brown eyes and a light smatter of freckles across her nose. Her light brown hair hung all the way to her waist and looked like it belonged in a Pantene commercial. She wore expensive clothing and carried high-end designer accessories. I could feel the nervousness and unhappiness flowing off of her. I wondered what she could possibly be nervous about. She looked like she’d fit in anywhere and probably in any crowd she chose. She fidgeted and I realized she was waiting for me to reply. I shrugged. She turned back to the front without another word. Man, I sucked at socializing.
    “Let’s begin the semester with some basics, to give you some ideas of what we’ll be covering in this class, and more importantly, what we won’t be covering,” Professor Young said with a