Defiance: Perfect by Nature

Chapter One: They Come

Defiance

Chapter One: They Come

James hefted the last of his boxes onto his small, uncomfortable looking bed and tossed the lid off to find some of the clothes he had been missing from the other boxes. Sighing lightly, he put the lid back on and moved the box off his bed and into the corner of his extremely shallow closet. One thing he could never understand is why students in University, living on campus, were given so very little space. He was pretty certain inmates in a maximum security prisons had bigger rooms than he did.

To be honest, he didn’t even really want to be there, taking classes he had no interest in for a job he would never need. He had been coerced into post-secondary education, and it was still beyond him why he had ever gone along with it. Well that wasn’t entirely true: it’s not like he had been forced to attend NYU or anything. But he liked to see it that way when he was feeling a little down. His best friend, Amy, had begged him to apply to the same places she had, in the hopes they would find a school that would take them both. When their acceptance letters for NYU came she had been ecstatic and got on his case for nearly two straight weeks to accept the spot he had been given. It was extremely hard to tell Amy no, so after some time he finally did what she asked and now there he was, stuffing all of his things into a cramped space in a place he didn’t really want to be.

“You still haven’t unpacked?” came a soft feminine voice from the doorway behind him. Turning around, James saw his best friend standing there, looking as beautiful as she always seemed to. Her long dyed red hair was pulled into pig tails that hung over her shoulders, and her large blue eyes sparkled as a smile danced over her face. Even in his annoyance James couldn’t help but smile back at Amy.

“I just got the last of my boxes sent over today,” he remarked and pointed over to the unpacked boxes stacked in his closet.

“You do realize that classes start in two days right?” she teased and walked into the small room, the tips of her fingers gliding over the desk as she found a chair and sat down, kicking her long legs up onto his bed. “Where’s your roommate?”

“I actually don’t have one.”

Amy laughed, thinking at first he had been joking around; but when he didn’t show any signs of pulling the wool over her eyes she stopped and stared at him in disbelief. “How is that possible? Everyone has a roommate! This school is packed to the gills with students and there are barely enough rooms for everyone! God you're lucky!”

“Maybe the housing office made a mistake or something,” he lied. “I take it your roommate is no prize?”

“You have no idea!” Amy snorted. “She is some kind of crazy I’ve never seen before. She cries almost constantly, even when she is sleeping! It’s really kind of creepy.”

Sick of trying to sort through his belongings, James gave up and fell onto his bed, his head almost hitting the brick wall. “Why did you make me come here?” he asked.

“Don’t even try it mister! It’s not like I held a gun to your head and forced you to apply or anything. Besides, you’re a really smart guy; even smarter than me!”

“Now that’s really saying something,” he scoffed at her flattery, “but I think you give me too much credit Amy. you are about ten times smarter than I will ever be.”

It was true, they were both top of their class back in high school, but James did believe that she was smarter than he was. While in high school, when he would try to play down how smart he was, Amy would excel at everything academic and had even won a few awards for it. She was a pretty interesting person, all those brains wrapped up in a very attractive package made for a very dangerous young woman. Thankfully she had never really realized how gorgeous she was, or she did and just didn’t care; because she didn’t have that snotty ‘greater than thou’ attitude. She was actually a pretty grounded girl and James found that to be a little more dangerous than if she flaunted what she had.