A Beautiful Fate Read Free Page A

dorm, and your suite is on the twelfth floor.” She took the map out and marked Socrates with an X, then used a red marker to trace the way to it. I nodded and thanked her for the help as I turned around to leave.
    I drove up the road to the parking lot closest to the building labeled Socrates and walked a short path to the dorm. I took the elevator to the twelfth floor and when the doors opened, I was pleasantly surprised.
    The floor was bisected by a wide hall that served as a commons area. It was quite large and outfitted with comfy-looking couches and chairs. There was a flat screen TV mounted on one of the long walls. In the center, there was room for a pool table and an old upright piano. A door at the far end of the hall opened to a kitchen that had two of everything.
    There were six doors on one side of the hall and six on the other. All but two of the dorm doors were decorated with pictures, dry erase boards with different quotes, and posters. The two blank doors, one right next to the other, were labeled AVA RM 1202 and ARI RM 1203. On Ari’s door, the paper had clearly been attached for quite a while – it had yellowed over time and there was a rip in the corner. Evidently, he was not the ‘decorate your door’ type. Good. I’m not either.
    I opened the door to my new home. It was not as bad as I thought it would be. Actually, the room was really nice... small, but in a cozy way, with dormer windows overlooking a quad. The floors were clean and covered in a soft carpet. The walls were painted a light blue with a white trim. A bed pushed against one wall was flanked by a desk on one side and an overstuffed chair with an ottoman at the foot of the bed. There were a few white shelves above the desk and one over the bed. The closet was an all right size; I thought I could probably squeeze my clothes in there if I tried hard enough. The best part was that the windows actually could be opened, with the quad down below and, beyond, acres of treetops rolling out to the shining sea.
    The school had thankfully given me a single room but I would have to share a jack-and-jill bathroom with a girl next door to me. The bathroom was just as nice as the bedroom. There were two sinks and lots of storage to unpack my belongings. I plugged my phone and my MacBook into chargers and as soon as they were charged enough, I put on my music, playing it more softly than usual – I didn’t want to make any enemies on my first day at Dana Point.
    I live and breathe music. I listen to everything from Louie Armstrong and Bob Dylan and Paul Simon to MGMT and The Foo Fighters. But I like to listen to it loud. Music has a way of speaking to my soul, reaching much farther than skin deep for me. It is my absolute best form of therapy, but here in the dorm I would have to temper my therapy a bit.
    After I finished putting my clothes away, I opened a box of mine that contained photos of back home and my thoughts began to move towards the loss of my mother. My eyes began to swell with the threat tears when I heard a small rap on the bathroom door. It opened slowly and a curly head popped in.
    “Hey!” a small freckly girl said with a smile. “You must be Ava.”
    Very quickly, I wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands and I smiled back at her, “Yeah, that’s me, come on in.”
    She took a seat in my chair. “I’m Emily Martin, your suite mate,” she explained.
    “It’s nice to meet you, Emily,” I said, truly meaning it. Her distraction was quite welcome.
    She told me that the dorm was quieter than usual because most of the people on the twelfth floor live in the area and go home on the weekends. She herself is from northern California, and so goes home only about once a month.
    “So what part of California are you from?” she asked.
    “Well,” I said, “my grandmother is from L.A. but I just moved here from Chicago.” I attempted to be vague on the details, not wanting to open up about the loss of my grandfather, then mother