Stitch Read Online Free PDF Page B

too.  It was like she knew him.  She just couldn’t explain it.
    Whenever she was in his presence, she desperately wanted to reach out to him, to tell him he wasn’t alone.  He was forever gazing out over some landscape that Alessa was blind to, hard lines of melancholy scored into his face.  But she just couldn’t bring herself to interrupt his reverie, held hostage as she was by her body’s impulses.
    The sound of footsteps approaching from down the hall brought Alessa back to reality.  She quickly closed the door behind her.  The last thing she wanted to do right now was exchange pleasantries with one of her housemates.
    She leaned her back against the door, spreading her palms against the cool wood.  Alessa looked up at the ceiling, releasing a deep sigh.  These encounters always left her shaken and emotionally drained, and she didn’t have time to deal with it today.  She had to get to class.
    She looked slowly around the room.  Everything was in its place – the oversized original fireplace mantle to her left, her twin bed and nightstand beyond it against the wall, then the double window and finally her desk and fridge across from the bed.  To her right was the large sliding door sealing off the double closet.  It was amazing how such a familiar place could for those few moments feel so foreign to her, like another world she didn’t belong in.
    She crossed the room and snapped the lid of her laptop shut, unplugging the power cord from the back of the machine as she awkwardly attempted to scoop it up with the other hand.  She regretted once again that she hadn’t splurged on a higher-end model constructed of lighter materials as she exchanged the heavy textbook in her backpack for the heavier computer in her hand and closed the zipper.  Looking at her bedside clock, she noted that she had 10 minutes to make it back across campus.
    Alessa turned towards the door and then she remembered the string cheese.  The scene inside her refrigerator was dismal.  The shelves were lined with half-rotted fruit and takeout leftovers from who knows when.  On the door she found a few cans of diet soda.  Checking the bottom drawer, she hit upon the package of string cheese with three individually wrapped sticks remaining.  She grabbed one and accidentally slammed the fridge door as she headed out, the adrenaline still ringing through her body.
    Springing down the stairs of the house, Alessa set a quick pace down the cobblestone path that led back to the quad.  She peeled the plastic back from the string cheese as she went, anxiously swallowing bites as she strode past ambling students.  Janie would throw a fit if she could see; she viewed not peeling string cheese into strings as virtually sacrilegious.
    A couple frat boys were tossing a frisbee across the quad while some freshman girls stood huddled under a tree, stealing glances at the guys and giggling to each other.  Alessa watched a comic looking professor in a classic tweed blazer replete with elbow patches hustle a stack of papers a foot tall towards the faculty offices.  On the far side of the quad, a team of facility workers were blowing fallen leaves into a pile and raking them into bags.  Taking in the ordinary college scene around her, Alessa began to feel almost normal again.
    It’d been a couple weeks since she’d last seen the ghost, and she had forgotten how unsettling it was.  It was as though for a few moments her whole world turned upside-down.  Ghosts weren’t supposed to exist.  She shouldn’t be wandering into her room in the middle of the day to find a strange man standing there, only to watch him disappear into thin air seconds later.  It was true that much of her life in the past year didn’t make sense to her, but at least it was still firmly grounded in reality, on a planet with clear laws of nature that no one could break.
    This ghost thing turned all of that on its head.  She was sure that what she was seeing was real,