Excerpt: Dark Alley

Dark Alley

Part 1 – Bridging Gaps

When Simon Sellers walked from his faculty parking space to Ithica College of the Arts University English Department building, the one thought crossed his mind, as it was wont to do every morning to himself and the horde of mostly undergraduate students that did not want to wake up for any type of class at eight o clock in the morning, was often a stray thought, one that was swallowed away with the bitter yet tasteless morning coffee.
The trendy way to die around here is to jump off the bridge. Fuck it if it was supposed to be exclusive only to Cornell University.
Simon knew as a student, and feels it more as adjunct faculty, the department's rising star despite what some of the older professors would call controversial, or even alternative reading, or course content, the pressure to succeed on this isolated ivy league campus. He saw the drug use among his peers years ago, too many years ago, Simon thought to himself as the advanced age of thirty two began to creep upon him in the new year's piling slush and snow.
Maybe, he should just jump if he can't hack it. He knew full well, however, that this would never be the case for a long time, if ever. His type a personality would never allow it for anything in the world.
As the movie marquee read so long ago, and his friends would tease him, the world would never be enough for Simon Sellers, adjunct faculty to the English Department at Ithica College of the Arts University, and top researcher and writer, when he finally made enough of a stipend or salary to shy away from pornographic short novellas under a vast array of pen names and the occasional free lance assignment. It was an idyllic life despite the high pressure study environment for Simon Sellers as he walked the distance from his red volvo to his desk squished and put off to the side some might argue within the department proper. Being Adjunct faculty, and very recent adjunct faculty at that, Simon did not have an office of his own, but one could tell right away which of the many cramped cubicles belonged to him. theThe first impression to any casual observer was array of cheap gargoyle statues, some picked up at drugstores on Halloween, or even around late August, when Halloween supplies start to peek out of store shelves, others a little heavier and more carefully crafted and expensive, picked up in Salem, Massachusettes, and other small boutiques, what would be called 'head shops' to various tourists, witch shops for the dabblers, if a practitioner were to feel especially critical, or moody, as most tended to be, driving them to the deeds in the first place.
What his students tended to see first was the man behind his stone watchers of various makes, models, stores of origin and therefore class if you really want to sit down and think about it.
Simon was a slight man, probably perfect for marked goths, of which there weren't many, not on the campuses, and not so many in the immediate area, though there were a smattering of venues in the upstate area. Simon hid his tattoos, and other oddities, extra earrings included for work, not so much to appease any of the raised eyes of the tenured faculty, but to quell the curious questions of otherwise perfectly normal students.
His dark hair was not as long now as it was when he was in his twenties, and for some reason, the straight mass framing his high cheekbones, the nondescript thin framed glasses perched on a straight nose and pursed lips gave him a more professorial appearance, albeit, a maverick professorial appearance, as he doesn't opt to pull it back.
He reached the department, and as his morning routine dictated, he stopped at his little gargoyle desk within the smaller hallway offices. The other two adjunct professors would not be there until well after nine thirty, granted that they were even awake by then. The Chaucer scholar spent a little too much time playing grab ass with some of the incoming freshmen. What amazed Simon was that Stanton was not only after Simon's job, but all but a shoe in for the Rhodes Scholar award.
He tried not to think of Dale Stanton, a reptile of a man, to the tips of his faux snake skin boots as he collected papers from his mailbox. He turned to see her at his desk.
“What can I do for you, Jessica.” Simon tried to hide his surprise. He had after class office hours,but most students opt to meet in the early evening, often before the bars start happy hour.
Simon Sellers was the polar opposite of Dale Stanton, and always maintained a courteous distance from his students. He would listen if need be, but his natural aloofness turned them off to such things. Then again, some, at least the girls would have Stanton to turn to. Simon dreaded the thought of his earning tenure. Then again, he pontificated on the Wife of Bath a little too much during the one lecture of his that he witnessed.
For all of his aloofness, Simon Sellers could not completely ignore Jessica Cale's blond beauty, the honey colored streaks with a few hints of caramel brown, sun kissed in the stale and gray landscape and not the cheap platinum blond he started seeing everyone from the average bar skank to even a few goths affect. That kind of natural rarity, oblivious to any kind of fashion made him stand up and notice. His friend, Sal Klausen would often shake his head, mohawk twitching just a little bit over his pitch colored eyes as he said time and again that you, Simon Sellers, had a thing for troubled women.
Jessica Cale of the honey and caramel hair, that cascaded over her shoulders and still remained bright over the stark pallor of her face. Ordinarily, he would have ignored her, or put her at that student teacher distance, talking only of the subject matter at hand. Jessica was always one of his better students, a history major only minoring in English and taking most of his classes as she was focusing primarily on modern American Literature, a subject that Stanton leered to her was a waste of words in the larger scheme of education (and he pretty openly expressed on the education he'd like to give her, yet wonders how a modern minded freak like Simon Sellers could possibly be tenured first, not to mention how he would get the first pick of cubicles). He would have liked to have encouraged her to take a double major, not so much that he would have missed seeing her in his classes, he would, but she was a credit to the department, always participating in class, and always making points on the stories that were not parroted from other critics. It is doubtful she even read many criticisms on some of these writers. The true challenge of hers and any student's knowledge came when he played his controversial or alternative card and assigned novels from more recent writers such as Bret Easton Ellis, a favorite of his, one that has not had many critiques of his work published, the few being especially hard to find and absorb, as opposed to reading the actual story and getting something of his or her own out of it and sharing for itself as opposed to any fame, credit, or money as the case may be. He suspected a few resented her for the points she made, and the careless delivery of that one who is not in the department. Maybe a few resented her looks, but that was not for him to worry about. What bothered him immensely was the stiff way she walked and the circles under her eyes, stark purplish black against her face, which appeared gray when she shifted her head to the side to jerk her body toward her blue messenger bag to retrieve a sheaf of paper. It had to have been the recent assignment that was supposed to be due next week.
“I wanted to turn it in early,” she said now, her words quiet and a little blurry, “I'm not feeling so great and I don't think I'll be in class today.”
“You don't look very well,” Simon blurted. She looked as though she were going to faint. “Are you ok, Jessica? Do you need me to call the infirmary?” The last request seemed hollow, but she had since slumped into the nearest chair as she handed in the paper. It seemed to have taken all the strength she could possibly muster to drag herself to the office and hand in this paper. How was it even written, Simon had to wonder. If she had been like this for awhile, it was very unlikely that paper was not written with her usual care. Now that he thought of it, he tried to remember her behavior for the past two or three class sessions. She seemed quieter than usual, but she looked normal enough, and nowhere near as ill as she appeared now. Wordlessly, she nodded yes, her head nodding off as though she were about to faint.
Before she slumped her way off of that cheap office chair, Simon grabbed her. His body fell into a kneeling position, his upper back having one of the tingling spasms he started to experience as a teenager as he tried to catch the girl before she hit the floor.
He managed to catch her and over the din of noise, he finally noticed the oddity he had failed to see those past few weeks. It was not that she was quieter, an therefore not her usual self. She never really spoke that much to begin with, even though she probably had more to say than some of the students that semester after semester made him realize that he could very well become as jaded with time and tenure.
She dressed fairly conservatively, often in simple sweaters, lighter knit tops or blouses for the spring semester. She often wore blue jeans and boots, without jewelry or any accessories. Lately, she had started wearing scarves, often dark colored. This morning was no exception, but as she fell and fainted, he couldn't ignore the two bruise marks at the bottom of her throat, bite marks that brought to mind the most likely reason as to why she started wearing scarves in the first place.
“What happened here?” one of the older professors, Fairmount, called to him from the doorway.
“Call an ambulance and fast. My student just fainted.”
Professor Fairmount dialed nine one one in record time. Simon wondered if campus medical services were even equipped to even handle something like this. He was under their employee insurance plan, but that meant a smaller copay to the township hospitals and maybe a trip to the campus clinic for a migraine headache, or a hangover for some. Simon suspected that not even the Cayuga Medical Center based for Cornell University, had advances for the problem he immediately suspected.
But, that only happens in books, and the good vampire novels and legends were too old to touch his syllabus.
This did not mean, that they were not to touch his personal bookshelf at home, and what he did not own himself, he could probably attain from Sal without the pain of searching and shipping from Amazon.
This is ridiculous, he thought to himself. No way in hell were there vampires running around all over upstate New York. They weren't running around New York City, even though every other element known to everyone else lived and worked there, making the streets even dirtier and noisier, and to many, somehow alive in its disruption.
He was more than familiar with the living vampire lifestyle, and was familiar with it before he met Sal, who immersed himself in it for a number of years before he left his hometown in Connecticut and for whatever reason, moved to Albany for private investigation.
If Jessica were involved with something like this, it would be wholly consensual, and like the many doctors, students, professionals and drifters from any and all walks of life that might meet at clubs, bars, internet chat rooms and the like, which is more than probable to leave a mark, but to reach this level of sickness was next to impossible unless they did not follow safe donation practices? Was that what this feverish state was, a double life in clubs gone horribly wrong. He stuck to the goth clubs himself, going to fetish nights here and there when he had the time off to travel to New Jersey or New York City, but there were a tricking of so called living vampires that ventured to either or both. He wondered how out of line it would be to ask around for a moment, but he had a gut feeling that bad blood, to avoid the pun was not the problem. Even though anyone could enter any type of alternative lifestyle, it seemed very unlikely that Jessica Cale could possibly be involved in something like this, but this did not appear to be any type of ordinary flu, nor was there any explanation for the bite marks beyond the absurd, yet very obvious explanation.
This is still bullshit, Simon thought to himself as he laid the girl on her back and ordered Professor Fairmount to clear the immediate area for her and the EMTs hen they finally arrived.
It seemed a small eternity to Simon as he waited for the Ambulance to arrive. He knew full well that he was not going to make it to this morning's class session, that the class was as good as canceled and that there was a good chance that fifteen twenty minutes in, the students probably just left, rather than wait for Fairmount to call the department secretary to have some teaching assistant or other to inform the students that both Sellers and Fairmount's morning classes were canceled and to go home. Simon wanted his eyes, knowing that the minute some of those kids saw an ambulance from Cayuga and outside of Cornell at that, there would be nothing but talk, and a rush to find out who it was. If it were one of their own, and maybe a less than accepted member of their writers' circle, the gossip would be endless, and if they can plausibly suspect drug abuse, or even an eating disorder, they can.
And who is to say that such a rumor, even in its most vicious context, is that far off base. He had to get this out of his head.
The EMT's finally arrived and Simon was forced out of the office for a statement. He turned to one, an older man with a gut and a thinning thatch of silver hair. “She seemed sick when she came in.”
“Oh.” He nodded and noted this, gesturing to two younger men now lifting her onto a rolling bed.
Simon watched this operation distracted, then realized he still had to tell the other medic as to what was going on, “She had been quieter than usual in other classes,”
“I don't need to know any of that right now. When did she faint?” He cut Simon off.
“Anyway,” He tried to move on, “she handed in a paper, and tried to tell me something, like she wasn't going to come in. She sort of, well, slumped over in that chair over there. I was going to ask her if she wanted me to take her to the campus clinic, and that was when she just slumped over and fainted.”
“And you tried to catch her?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we'll take care of it from here, Mr. Uh,”
“Simon Sellers. I'm Adjunct faculty.”
“And she's your student?”
“Yes.”
“Little young to be a teacher here?”
Simon didn't really say much to that beyond a shrug. He was pretty ancient to the early to mid twenty something student body that made up his classes. “I'm adjunct,” was all he could say over the grunted response.
It didn't appear as though the EMT's looked too hard at any bruising on her throat. No doubt that someone will be suitably suspicious over those marks.
Who knows. Maybe it was drugs. He saw people inject cocaine, heroin and who knew what else into their necks while at club after parties, and probably at the clubs themselves. Just because he avoided that kind of crap in favor of academics, this didn't mean that even his good students didn't have a habit.
Does anyone know anyone anymore. And Simon made a point of not getting to know his students on too personal a level, even checking around the club scene for students and thinking of ways to avoid them if at all possible.
This is bullshit and you know it, Simon thought to himself as the ambulance sped away, sirens flashing. As he thought, students, many of them in his classes were agape, and sooner or later, it would get around that Simon Sellers had to cancel his class because their classmate, Jessica Cale, had fainted in the adjunct office, right in front of Professor Sellers and had to be taken to Cayuga medical center.
If it isn't drugs, or a bad blood donor, then what the hell else could those bruises and bite marks be?
It wasn't his business, and she was now in the hands of medical professionals. They were bound to figure out what the problem was. He had half a mind to visit her in the next few days, just to make sure she was ok, that he was wrong. He had to be.
But if I'm wrong, Simon Sellers, adjunct faculty for Ithica College of the Arts' English Department, thought to himself as he left the building, then why am I still unsettled?
If then questions, the 101 level of logic and basic ass end philosophy, he thought to himself, the cell phone now twirling in his hand. He wondered if Sal was on a case, or his office. He didn't really want to make the drive down to Albany, but he had a feeling he had to make an exception, he thought to himself as he dialed Sal Klausen's number.
This can't be happening outside of a bad movie, he thought as the phone rang and rang. But, chances are something isn't quite right. He heard a click followed by the drawl on the other end.
“Sal Klausen.”

Dark Alley

Part 1 – Bridging Gaps

When Simon Sellers walked from his faculty parking space to Ithica College of the Arts University English Department building, the one thought crossed his mind, as it was wont to do every morning to himself and the horde of mostly undergraduate students that did not want to wake up for any type of class at eight o clock in the morning, was often a stray thought, one that was swallowed away with the bitter yet tasteless morning coffee.
The trendy way to die around here is to jump off the bridge. Fuck it if it was supposed to be exclusive only to Cornell University.
Simon knew as a student, and feels it more as adjunct faculty, the department's rising star despite what some of the older professors would call controversial, or even alternative reading, or course content, the pressure to succeed on this isolated ivy league campus. He saw the drug use among his peers years ago, too many years ago, Simon thought to himself as the advanced age of thirty two began to creep upon him in the new year's piling slush and snow.
Maybe, he should just jump if he can't hack it. He knew full well, however, that this would never be the case for a long time, if ever. His type a personality would never allow it for anything in the world.
As the movie marquee read so long ago, and his friends would tease him, the world would never be enough for Simon Sellers, adjunct faculty to the English Department at Ithica College of the Arts University, and top researcher and writer, when he finally made enough of a stipend or salary to shy away from pornographic short novellas under a vast array of pen names and the occasional free lance assignment. It was an idyllic life despite the high pressure study environment for Simon Sellers as he walked the distance from his red volvo to his desk squished and put off to the side some might argue within the department proper. Being Adjunct faculty, and very recent adjunct faculty at that, Simon did not have an office of his own, but one could tell right away which of the many cramped cubicles belonged to him. theThe first impression to any casual observer was array of cheap gargoyle statues, some picked up at drugstores on Halloween, or even around late August, when Halloween supplies start to peek out of store shelves, others a little heavier and more carefully crafted and expensive, picked up in Salem, Massachusettes, and other small boutiques, what would be called 'head shops' to various tourists, witch shops for the dabblers, if a practitioner were to feel especially critical, or moody, as most tended to be, driving them to the deeds in the first place.
What his students tended to see first was the man behind his stone watchers of various makes, models, stores of origin and therefore class if you really want to sit down and think about it.
Simon was a slight man, probably perfect for marked goths, of which there weren't many, not on the campuses, and not so many in the immediate area, though there were a smattering of venues in the upstate area. Simon hid his tattoos, and other oddities, extra earrings included for work, not so much to appease any of the raised eyes of the tenured faculty, but to quell the curious questions of otherwise perfectly normal students.
His dark hair was not as long now as it was when he was in his twenties, and for some reason, the straight mass framing his high cheekbones, the nondescript thin framed glasses perched on a straight nose and pursed lips gave him a more professorial appearance, albeit, a maverick professorial appearance, as he doesn't opt to pull it back.
He reached the department, and as his morning routine dictated, he stopped at his little gargoyle desk within the smaller hallway offices. The other two adjunct professors would not be there until well after nine thirty, granted that they were even awake by then. The Chaucer scholar spent a little too much time playing grab ass with some of the incoming freshmen. What amazed Simon was that Stanton was not only after Simon's job, but all but a shoe in for the Rhodes Scholar award.
He tried not to think of Dale Stanton, a reptile of a man, to the tips of his faux snake skin boots as he collected papers from his mailbox. He turned to see her at his desk.
“What can I do for you, Jessica.” Simon tried to hide his surprise. He had after class office hours,but most students opt to meet in the early evening, often before the bars start happy hour.
Simon Sellers was the polar opposite of Dale Stanton, and always maintained a courteous distance from his students. He would listen if need be, but his natural aloofness turned them off to such things. Then again, some, at least the girls would have Stanton to turn to. Simon dreaded the thought of his earning tenure. Then again, he pontificated on the Wife of Bath a little too much during the one lecture of his that he witnessed.
For all of his aloofness, Simon Sellers could not completely ignore Jessica Cale's blond beauty, the honey colored streaks with a few hints of caramel brown, sun kissed in the stale and gray landscape and not the cheap platinum blond he started seeing everyone from the average bar skank to even a few goths affect. That kind of natural rarity, oblivious to any kind of fashion made him stand up and notice. His friend, Sal Klausen would often shake his head, mohawk twitching just a little bit over his pitch colored eyes as he said time and again that you, Simon Sellers, had a thing for troubled women.
Jessica Cale of the honey and caramel hair, that cascaded over her shoulders and still remained bright over the stark pallor of her face. Ordinarily, he would have ignored her, or put her at that student teacher distance, talking only of the subject matter at hand. Jessica was always one of his better students, a history major only minoring in English and taking most of his classes as she was focusing primarily on modern American Literature, a subject that Stanton leered to her was a waste of words in the larger scheme of education (and he pretty openly expressed on the education he'd like to give her, yet wonders how a modern minded freak like Simon Sellers could possibly be tenured first, not to mention how he would get the first pick of cubicles). He would have liked to have encouraged her to take a double major, not so much that he would have missed seeing her in his classes, he would, but she was a credit to the department, always participating in class, and always making points on the stories that were not parroted from other critics. It is doubtful she even read many criticisms on some of these writers. The true challenge of hers and any student's knowledge came when he played his controversial or alternative card and assigned novels from more recent writers such as Bret Easton Ellis, a favorite of his, one that has not had many critiques of his work published, the few being especially hard to find and absorb, as opposed to reading the actual story and getting something of his or her own out of it and sharing for itself as opposed to any fame, credit, or money as the case may be. He suspected a few resented her for the points she made, and the careless delivery of that one who is not in the department. Maybe a few resented her looks, but that was not for him to worry about. What bothered him immensely was the stiff way she walked and the circles under her eyes, stark purplish black against her face, which appeared gray when she shifted her head to the side to jerk her body toward her blue messenger bag to retrieve a sheaf of paper. It had to have been the recent assignment that was supposed to be due next week.
“I wanted to turn it in early,” she said now, her words quiet and a little blurry, “I'm not feeling so great and I don't think I'll be in class today.”
“You don't look very well,” Simon blurted. She looked as though she were going to faint. “Are you ok, Jessica? Do you need me to call the infirmary?” The last request seemed hollow, but she had since slumped into the nearest chair as she handed in the paper. It seemed to have taken all the strength she could possibly muster to drag herself to the office and hand in this paper. How was it even written, Simon had to wonder. If she had been like this for awhile, it was very unlikely that paper was not written with her usual care. Now that he thought of it, he tried to remember her behavior for the past two or three class sessions. She seemed quieter than usual, but she looked normal enough, and nowhere near as ill as she appeared now. Wordlessly, she nodded yes, her head nodding off as though she were about to faint.
Before she slumped her way off of that cheap office chair, Simon grabbed her. His body fell into a kneeling position, his upper back having one of the tingling spasms he started to experience as a teenager as he tried to catch the girl before she hit the floor.
He managed to catch her and over the din of noise, he finally noticed the oddity he had failed to see those past few weeks. It was not that she was quieter, an therefore not her usual self. She never really spoke that much to begin with, even though she probably had more to say than some of the students that semester after semester made him realize that he could very well become as jaded with time and tenure.
She dressed fairly conservatively, often in simple sweaters, lighter knit tops or blouses for the spring semester. She often wore blue jeans and boots, without jewelry or any accessories. Lately, she had started wearing scarves, often dark colored. This morning was no exception, but as she fell and fainted, he couldn't ignore the two bruise marks at the bottom of her throat, bite marks that brought to mind the most likely reason as to why she started wearing scarves in the first place.
“What happened here?” one of the older professors, Fairmount, called to him from the doorway.
“Call an ambulance and fast. My student just fainted.”
Professor Fairmount dialed nine one one in record time. Simon wondered if campus medical services were even equipped to even handle something like this. He was under their employee insurance plan, but that meant a smaller copay to the township hospitals and maybe a trip to the campus clinic for a migraine headache, or a hangover for some. Simon suspected that not even the Cayuga Medical Center based for Cornell University, had advances for the problem he immediately suspected.
But, that only happens in books, and the good vampire novels and legends were too old to touch his syllabus.
This did not mean, that they were not to touch his personal bookshelf at home, and what he did not own himself, he could probably attain from Sal without the pain of searching and shipping from Amazon.
This is ridiculous, he thought to himself. No way in hell were there vampires running around all over upstate New York. They weren't running around New York City, even though every other element known to everyone else lived and worked there, making the streets even dirtier and noisier, and to many, somehow alive in its disruption.
He was more than familiar with the living vampire lifestyle, and was familiar with it before he met Sal, who immersed himself in it for a number of years before he left his hometown in Connecticut and for whatever reason, moved to Albany for private investigation.
If Jessica were involved with something like this, it would be wholly consensual, and like the many doctors, students, professionals and drifters from any and all walks of life that might meet at clubs, bars, internet chat rooms and the like, which is more than probable to leave a mark, but to reach this level of sickness was next to impossible unless they did not follow safe donation practices? Was that what this feverish state was, a double life in clubs gone horribly wrong. He stuck to the goth clubs himself, going to fetish nights here and there when he had the time off to travel to New Jersey or New York City, but there were a tricking of so called living vampires that ventured to either or both. He wondered how out of line it would be to ask around for a moment, but he had a gut feeling that bad blood, to avoid the pun was not the problem. Even though anyone could enter any type of alternative lifestyle, it seemed very unlikely that Jessica Cale could possibly be involved in something like this, but this did not appear to be any type of ordinary flu, nor was there any explanation for the bite marks beyond the absurd, yet very obvious explanation.
This is still bullshit, Simon thought to himself as he laid the girl on her back and ordered Professor Fairmount to clear the immediate area for her and the EMTs hen they finally arrived.
It seemed a small eternity to Simon as he waited for the Ambulance to arrive. He knew full well that he was not going to make it to this morning's class session, that the class was as good as canceled and that there was a good chance that fifteen twenty minutes in, the students probably just left, rather than wait for Fairmount to call the department secretary to have some teaching assistant or other to inform the students that both Sellers and Fairmount's morning classes were canceled and to go home. Simon wanted his eyes, knowing that the minute some of those kids saw an ambulance from Cayuga and outside of Cornell at that, there would be nothing but talk, and a rush to find out who it was. If it were one of their own, and maybe a less than accepted member of their writers' circle, the gossip would be endless, and if they can plausibly suspect drug abuse, or even an eating disorder, they can.
And who is to say that such a rumor, even in its most vicious context, is that far off base. He had to get this out of his head.
The EMT's finally arrived and Simon was forced out of the office for a statement. He turned to one, an older man with a gut and a thinning thatch of silver hair. “She seemed sick when she came in.”
“Oh.” He nodded and noted this, gesturing to two younger men now lifting her onto a rolling bed.
Simon watched this operation distracted, then realized he still had to tell the other medic as to what was going on, “She had been quieter than usual in other classes,”
“I don't need to know any of that right now. When did she faint?” He cut Simon off.
“Anyway,” He tried to move on, “she handed in a paper, and tried to tell me something, like she wasn't going to come in. She sort of, well, slumped over in that chair over there. I was going to ask her if she wanted me to take her to the campus clinic, and that was when she just slumped over and fainted.”
“And you tried to catch her?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we'll take care of it from here, Mr. Uh,”
“Simon Sellers. I'm Adjunct faculty.”
“And she's your student?”
“Yes.”
“Little young to be a teacher here?”
Simon didn't really say much to that beyond a shrug. He was pretty ancient to the early to mid twenty something student body that made up his classes. “I'm adjunct,” was all he could say over the grunted response.
It didn't appear as though the EMT's looked too hard at any bruising on her throat. No doubt that someone will be suitably suspicious over those marks.
Who knows. Maybe it was drugs. He saw people inject cocaine, heroin and who knew what else into their necks while at club after parties, and probably at the clubs themselves. Just because he avoided that kind of crap in favor of academics, this didn't mean that even his good students didn't have a habit.
Does anyone know anyone anymore. And Simon made a point of not getting to know his students on too personal a level, even checking around the club scene for students and thinking of ways to avoid them if at all possible.
This is bullshit and you know it, Simon thought to himself as the ambulance sped away, sirens flashing. As he thought, students, many of them in his classes were agape, and sooner or later, it would get around that Simon Sellers had to cancel his class because their classmate, Jessica Cale, had fainted in the adjunct office, right in front of Professor Sellers and had to be taken to Cayuga medical center.
If it isn't drugs, or a bad blood donor, then what the hell else could those bruises and bite marks be?
It wasn't his business, and she was now in the hands of medical professionals. They were bound to figure out what the problem was. He had half a mind to visit her in the next few days, just to make sure she was ok, that he was wrong. He had to be.
But if I'm wrong, Simon Sellers, adjunct faculty for Ithica College of the Arts' English Department, thought to himself as he left the building, then why am I still unsettled?
If then questions, the 101 level of logic and basic ass end philosophy, he thought to himself, the cell phone now twirling in his hand. He wondered if Sal was on a case, or his office. He didn't really want to make the drive down to Albany, but he had a feeling he had to make an exception, he thought to himself as he dialed Sal Klausen's number.
This can't be happening outside of a bad movie, he thought as the phone rang and rang. But, chances are something isn't quite right. He heard a click followed by the drawl on the other end.
“Sal Klausen.”