Roommates

Chapter 25

Shuffling through trash bags of her clothes and a mess of her once treasured items, Aurora groaned in frustration. She couldn't unpack everything because Evangeline is still searching for someone to take this room, but Aurora also needed new work clothes to wear for her shift today. On her first day, she was given two tee shirts and she had worn one shirt for an embarrassing number of days. It was beginning to stink despite her best efforts to wear deodorant and shower regularly. She couldn't find the second shirt!

Aurora was disgusted with herself, but it was pointless to be angry at her situation. After all, she'd been in worse conditions before. She gagged at the memory of going two weeks without a shower and still going to her classes at BYU. She probably reeked. It didn't surprise her that nobody wanted to sit near her those days. Even her lab partner in general education chemistry skipped out on class during those weeks.

Franticly, she dug into a bag leaning against the dark wood dresser. Her fingernail clipped the edge of the dresser through the plastic and she pulled out her aching hand, slipping her finger into her mouth. She had bent her fingernail back! She winced in pain, but her mind quickly became distracted by an idea. A horrible, horrible idea.

Curiously, Aurora ran her fingers of her uninjured hand against the cool, metal handle of the dresser in Evangeline's bedroom. Maybe Evangeline had left a work uniform in the dresser when she moved out of this room. After all her years of working at the grocery store, surely she had an extra uniform somewhere.

It wasn't Aurora's finest moment, but desperation took over her as she slithered her fingers around the handle and pulled the drawer open.

Before her was a single pile of nearly folded clothes. Tee-shirts and nothing else. Her eyes studied the graphic on the top shirt. It was another band tee, this time Pierce the Vail. Aurora ran her fingers over the warped and faded decal. It was Evangeline's, but it looked as if she hadn't disturbed the pile in months. The crisp folds were untouched.

Aurora closed the drawer and her eyes fell up on the drawer below it. Evangeline said she had cleaned out the room for a new tenant, so there was probably nothing in the drawer, but it was worth a shot. Aurora pulled it open and before her laid two books: the book she had caught Evangeline reading the other night in the center of the draw and a scrapbook tucked into the back corner. A dusty, old journal with Evangeline's name embroidered in pink thread into the cover of the tan book. "Evangeline Marie Porter?" Aurora whispered her name like a secret that could and should never be said out loud.

Her fingers traced the stitching and as her tips found the edge, she found herself lifting the cover. It fell open, revealing a photo of two infants in the arms of an older woman. Captioned near the bottom in elegant hand writing were the following names, Evangeline Marie and Elias Arthur. The date of the photo was scribed following their names; May 3rd must be Evangeline's birthday. The infants looked to be only hours old. Their tiny bodies were wrapped in hospital swaddles.

Overcome with guilt, Aurora slammed the book closed and shut the drawer. The dresser rattled and the decor on it's shelf toppled over and fell to the carpeted ground with chilling clatters. It was just her luck! Of course everything would fall when she was doing something she obviously wasn't meant to be doing.

Aurora backed away from the dresser and scolded herself. She slapped at her face, willing some sense to be knocked into her. She cursed herself.

Evangeline would never trust her if Aurora knew anything about that book. Evangeline didn't even want her best friend to know her legal name; she would have a tizzy if she found out Aurora had seen a photo of her mother on the day of her birth.

Gaining control over herself, Aurora grabbed her grimy uniform from the floor and hurried to the bathroom to get as far away from that dresser as possible. She needed to forget that she ever saw that scrapbook.