Where?
Pick you up?
How does he know where I live? I reread the messages. Wait, he doesn’t. He isn’t saying that. It’s just a question to which I extrapolated an answer. Maybe he’s just excited to see me and assumed I’d meet him there, forgetting I don’t know where there is.
Or maybe not.
Why am I thinking about this so much?
The three dots flicker letting me know he’s typing.Just need to know where to get you.
There it is. He doesn’t know. I breathe a sigh of relief and text him back to meet me at a monument of some guy on a horse that’s just outside my building, not telling him it’s my building.
See you then.
I let out a little yelp and rush to get ready. I’ve never showered and shaved my legs so quickly in my entire life.
Applying makeup and the finishing touches I suddenly hear a knock on my door.
Reaching for my phone I grab it to check the time. Wow, even with my Speedy Gonzales impression I still ate up twenty-five minutes.
But who’s at my door? Certainly not him.
I try to be as quiet as possible, glad I didn’t turn on music, but my little act doesn’t seem to work.
“Police. We know you’re in there, Miss Watson. We just want to ask you some questions.”
My body goes stone still as my heart does a summersault and then starts pounding a mile a minute. My stomach ties into a knot as my eyes look every which way. I scan my room for some kind of trouble. What I don’t know, but I don’t want the cops seeing something they shouldn’t, which would almost certainly be my roommates, and then try and use it against me.
“Miss Watson?” A second voice asks.
“Coming,” I say. I grab my roommate Jessica’s vapes, never fully sure what she’s smoking in those things, and slide them under her pillow before opening the door.
Taking a deep breath, I smooth out my cut-off top and wipe my hands on my jean shorts, figuring Sam already saw me dressed up nicely last night. Tonight I’ll give him fun, let’s just grab burritos on the fly, me.
But when I open the door, expecting to see a couple of campus cops, I'm shocked to see that, “You’re actual cops?”
“That’s right, ma’am. We just want to ask you a few basic questions and you can be on your way to wherever you were heading off to,” the officer says, taking note of how I’m somewhat made up, although his comments are professional, not sexual or anything at all.
“Questions about…what?”
“Mind if we come in?”
Turning I look behind me. “There’s not really a lot of space in here, but yeah. No problem.”
Extending my arm they step over the threshold, their boots and belts squeaking, their weapons holstered but very clearly there.
“Where were you last night, Miss Watson?”
“I was out, celebrating my birthday,” I state matter-of-factly, still kind of surprised trying to understand where this is going.
“Where did you go to celebrate?”
“A bar in West Hollywood.”
“And were there any other witnesses there who can verify your presence? Sorry, I mean friends?”
Witnesses? Then he corrected himself and said friends. This sounds very serious.