Season III Prologue Part IV
Trey wasn’t paying too much attention to the television when he heard the news about another dead student. After all, what did some case thousands of miles away from his Boston dormitory have to do with him? School shootings were happening all the time these days and gawking at some screen wasn’t going to magically finish his multi-variable calculus homework.
“The third victim in what has been dubbed the ‘Dormitory Assassinations,’” the faint voice of the square speakers attempted to communicate, “was yet another heir of a wealthy Californian family who had been attending a private college on the west coast. Sources inside the Vancouver Police Department inform us that with this most recent killing done outside of California, federal investigators are now involved although official sources are still reluctant to link this most recent murder to the still ongoing investigations on the deaths of Carlos de Guzman, heir of the powerful Guzman family from Fresno, and Lara de Fronsac, the heiress of extensive San Franciscan estates.”
Trey shut off the screen and tossed the remote control onto his small bed tucked against the corner of the dorm closest to the window lest he might be tempted to activate the small flat screen display again. He needed to desperately get his multi-variable calculus finished if he wanted to work on anything else that evening and, he promised himself, he’d get his history essay done before his room mate Randall returned from the campus pub.
Although he wasn’t half bad at mapping spirals and all the other crazy mechanics of high math, his first passion was still—although a bit secretly—the study of history. He had even thought of changing his major from Law and Criminology to History—in fact, he wondered what he was thinking at all when he signed up for Law and Criminology in the first place… He shook his head with a sardonic smirk as he scribbled a few more integral equations into his notepad before a knock on the door interrupted him.
Trey looked up to the poster of St. Francis on the inside of his door—something his room mate had put up only a few days ago; he himself still had not completely settled in even though it was already two months into the semester. The box carrying his violin, for example, was still tucked underneath his bed. “Who is it?” Trey called out cautiously watching the doorknob as if at any moment the knocker would burst in without warning anyway. Trey fought back the sensation to recoil—something he had been doing for a while now, he reminded himself.
A voice responded from behind the door almost in the same spot where the right eye of St. Francis was posted against the archaic wood of the barrier. “It’s Avi,” the voice said, “Avi Teckhart.” Trey recognized him immediately: it was the RA. “I just need to do a quick maintenance check on your heating vent,” the man said from behind the door.
“Sure,” Trey relaxed a bit, “come in.”
The door wafted open unceremoniously and Trey took a moment to keep his eyes on the doorframe as if it may not have been who the man said he was. When he recognized Avi (they had seen each other during orientation), he relaxed into a greeting smile. Avi was older then Trey was. He was a graduate student and already probably twenty two, but he had a thin frame that hid behind casual Polo attire. Although taller, Avi slouched forward slightly—perhaps because he was used to always talking down to others. Glasses rounded about the young man’s features; they were oval shaped though not flamboyant and had the uncanny ability to deflect light to whoever was looking at him more often than it should.
Despite the small tilt of his body, Avi was not an unattractive man. Although Trey might have thought himself better looking, Trey was still more on the ordinary side. Avi, on the other hand, had sharp features that made him seem like a geeky supermodel. Avi gave Trey a small nod before finding his way to the opposite side of the room with a screwdriver already dangling from his fingers. “Have you been getting any trouble with your heating lately?” Avi asked as he loosened the screws with a creak; apparently the faded metal vent cover hadn’t been opened for decades.
“Not so much,” Trey replied taking a moment from his work to watch Avi investigate the inside of the box tunnel with a small flashlight, “It hasn’t gotten cold enough yet for it to turn on.” Trey saw Avi give a silent nod before Trey turned back to his calculations.
“I heard your first paper proposal for your history paper was rejected,” Avi suddenly said. His voice reverberated through the opening in the wall and reached Trey’s ears like some lost ghost. Trey’s pen stopped working and he looked at the curve of his “dydx” before answering.
“Yeah,” Trey replied as casually as he could while keeping his back to the RA, “Dr. Fitzgerald said that someone already published a paper on that particular subject before and he wanted me to write something more original.”
“I think that’s a lie,” Avi’s voice snickered. “What you were writing was just too seditious to put into the school’s history journal, that’s all. Fitzgerald wouldn’t risk getting the school into controversy over that.”
Trey sat still in his chair; those were exactly the words he had told himself when he was rejected, but he already had an inkling that it was going to end up that way, anyway. He turned towards Avi, however, only to be shocked to see the RA on his floor with his back against the wall and the open vent next to him sealed up with stark blue eyes staring Trey down with a grin. “How do you know it was so controversial?” Trey tried to say, nearly stuttering.
“Natasha told me; she’s Fitzgerald’s TA and she proofread your paper before handing it over to him,” Avi said. Trey immediately thought of the beautiful young lady always present in the classrooms with Dr. Fitzgerald. Her long black hair fanned out in his mind for a millisecond.
She read my paper? Trey thought to himself trying to hide a smile.
“Natasha’s a fellow editor of mine in the campus newspaper so we were talking about it,” Avi further explained while getting up with an exaggerated huff. His tall craning frame slowly approached the doorway once again.
“I am writing a new one, you know,” Trey found himself blurting out as if he needed to justify himself. Perhaps his instincts told him to challenge the embarrassment of Avi knowing about the paper—perhaps, unconsciously, he was still thinking of Natasha.
I should be working with her, his mind whispered to himself. Avi stopped at the doorway, but didn’t turn around. “It’s not going to be about Perpignan, though,” Trey explained, “I’ve decided to shift my focus instead to the 1640s… to the Dutch Rebellion.”
“Hmm…” Avi let out turning around. In the light of the hall, Trey could not see the RA’s eyes behind the infamous glare of his glasses. “So instead of the Empire failing at Perpignan, you’re jumping a hundred years ahead?”
“Yes,” Trey said with some pride starting to well up, “I’ve already gotten my research done. The new title is going to be: ‘A Change in Seasons: What if Spain Failed to Stop the Dutch Revolt?’”
Chapter XCIV: The Dutch Revolt (coming soon)
