English Love Affair

Chapter One

A warm breeze brushed through my hair as I glanced nervously around campus. I opened the map on my phone with a sigh.

"I don't know where this is," I grumbled to myself.

I threw my head back in frustration before looking at the same map again. Surprisingly, it hadn't changed in the five seconds since I last checked it. The tiny blue dot still insisted I was standing exactly where I needed to be, but unless my speech class was secretly being held in the middle of a flower bed, it was lying. The campus had seemed much smaller when Shay and I toured it months ago. Back then, there had been bright arrows taped to the sidewalks and overly cheerful upperclassmen stationed at every corner to tell us where to go. Now, all the brick buildings looked identical, every path split into three more paths, and the signs appeared to have been placed specifically where no one could see them. I looked around the courtyard again, hoping the classroom would magically appear or something, I guess. The only things I saw were a crowd of upperclassmen walking around like they owned the place and a few other people staring down at their phones, clearly just as lost as I was. At least I wasn't alone. That should have made me feel better, but most of them were lost in groups. I was the only idiot wandering in circles by myself.

A group of girls passed me, comparing class schedules and laughing about something one of their roommates had done the night before. They moved with the confidence of people who had already figured out which buildings were which. I stepped out of their way, pretending I had stopped beside the flowers on purpose. My phone said it was 9:08. My class had started eight minutes ago.Perfect. I had left the dorm twenty minutes earlier than I needed to because I had been terrified of being late on my first day. Somehow, all that extra preparation had resulted in me being later than if I had simply followed Shay out the door.

I walked around the building one more time, searching for the 'Garden Walk' that would supposedly lead me to my speech class. I found plenty of gardens and plenty of places to walk, but nothing identifying which combination of the two counted as the Garden Walk. When I reached the front again, the only thing that had changed was that there were no longer any students nearby.

"Just me and the flowers, I guess," I mumbled. I lightly kicked a rock across the pavement and looked down at the map again. Maybe if I zoomed in far enough, it would finally reveal whatever secret passage everyone else apparently knew about.

"You're late."

I jumped at the voice behind me, nearly dropping my phone. "What? I-" I turned toward the source of the voice and stared.

The man in front of me was far too old to be a student. Not old, exactly, but definitely not nineteen. He was tall, with dark hair that was slightly greying at the tips. Glasses sat near the edge of his nose as he glared down at me, and his cold blue eyes made me feel like I had been caught doing something much worse than getting lost. He wore dark pants and a button-down shirt with the sleeves pushed partway up his arms. There was no backpack hanging from his shoulder, no phone in his hand, and absolutely none of the first day panic that everyone else seemed to be carrying around. Either this guy was someone's grumpy dad who had just finished moving his kid into a dorm or, probably more likely, he was a professor.

"Freshmen never learn. This is why they offer tours," he said flatly.

Okay. Definitely a professor. "I, um..." I glanced down at my phone, even though the useless map clearly wasn't going to rescue me. "I don't know where I'm going," I admitted, while slightly lowering my head. I hated how guilty I sounded. I hadn't intentionally gotten lost. It wasn't like I had woken up that morning and decided the perfect way to begin college would be by wandering around a courtyard while my first professor marked me absent.