If Monica ended up with a bruise on that perfect face, there wasn’t any question about it.

2

Erica was right about the quack shack being the logical first stop; Claire got her ankle wrapped, an ice pack, and some frowns over the forming bruises. Nothing broken, but she was going to be black-and-blue for days. The doctor asked some pro forma questions about boyfriends and stuff, but since she could truthfully say that no, her boyfriend hadn’t beaten her up, he just shrugged and told her to watch her step.

He wrote her an excuse note, too, and gave her some painkillers and told her to go home.

No way was she going back to the dorm. Truth was, she didn’t have much in the room—some books, a few photos of home, some posters…. She hadn’t even had a chance to call it home, and for whatever reason, she’d never really felt safe there. It had always felt like…a warehouse. A warehouse for kids who were, one way or another, going to leave.

She limped over to the Quad, which was a big empty concrete space with some rickety old benches and picnic tables, cornered on all sides by squat, unappealing buildings that mostly just looked like boxes with windows. Architecture-student projects, probably. She heard a rumor that one of them had fallen down a few years back, but then, she’d also heard rumors about a janitor getting beheaded in the chem lab and haunting the building, and zombies roaming the grounds after dark, so she wasn’t putting too much stock in it.

It was midafternoon already, and not a lot of students were hanging around the Quad, with its lack of shade—great design, considering that the weather was still hovering up in the high nineties in September. Claire picked up a campus paper from the stand, carefully took a seat on the blazing-hot bench, and opened it to the “Housing” section. Dorm rooms were out of the question; Howard Hall and Lansdale Hall were the only two that took in girls under twenty. She wasn’t old enough to qualify for the coed dorms. Stupid rules were probably written when girls wore hoopskirts, she thought, and skipped the dorm listings until she got to OFF CAMPUS. Not that she was really allowed to be living off campus; Mom and Dad would have a total freak-out over it, no question. But…if it was between Monica and parental freakage, she’d take the latter. After all, the important thing was to get herself someplace where she felt safe, where she could study.

Right?