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eight

It’s an old house that has been modified to keep all the animals. What should be the living room is now a reception, with a desk and someone at the phone, some armchairs and a sofa around a coffee table with magazines and pamphlets. I hardly doubt someone lives in this house. All the decoration is animal-inspired, with pictures of cute dogs and cats that don’t seem to be by a professional. Maybe they are all animals that have been here. The cushions are animal-print and I wouldn’t normally like that —too flashy— but it looks appropriate in a place like this

I walk up to the desk where a young girl is still talking over the phone so I wait patiently with all the things I’m carrying still hanging. The bag with books, my purse and the camera. I don’t mind waiting so in the meantime I look around a bit more. I like that there are so many pictures and all the frames are animal-related, with some cat or dog thingy in a corner or with the full shape of an animal.

“I’m so sorry,” the girl says and only then I realise she’s hung up. “May I help you? I’m Alicia.”

“Hi, I’m Maca and uh… a friend sent me here. I think they are expecting me…?” I finish in a question, quite unsure about it. At the café and the fair people were actually waiting for me but I’m not sure about here. I don’t think they have time to fool around in this place.

“Oh! Maca, right, right. R— I mean he sent you here. I see,” she says and my eyes widen. She was about to say my stranger’s name… weird, she started it with an R but I thought the first letter was H. Maybe he meant first letter not as the one with which his name starts but the one with which this game starts. It’s an option. Or maybe she was about to call him by a nickname. “Yes, we’re waiting for you. I’ll call Rosie right away, just wait a bit. It’s really nice to meet you, he’s talked about you a lot.”

I feel the heat in my cheeks that you always feel when you find out someone has been talking about you; also that nervous feeling because you don’t know exactly what that person has told the others.

“Don’t worry, Maca, only good things. He forbade us to tell you his name, though. That weird lad,” she speaks cheerfully as she taps the screen of her screen quickly. She’s typing. “So, do you like animals?”

“I love them,” I say with a smile. “I’m really excited to be here.”

“Wonderful! Rosie is on her way. Why don’t you give me the books you’re carrying? I’ll keep them safe you can come back for them later. I know you’ll have other places to visit today.”

“Thank you, Alicia,” I reply giving her the bag with all the books I got in the fair. She keeps smiling as she puts the bag under the desk.

“So, what do you do? You look young, are you in Uni?”

“Yes,” I answer trying to keep my smile. I’m not used to smile for so long and to so many people in one day. “Linguistics and English Literature. This is my last year,” I add before she asks.

“Oh, that’s lovely! And complex. I bet you read a lot. No wonder you carry so many books,” she laughs. “And what do you do later with that?”

I lose my smile and look down for a bit because that’s a question that haunts me constantly. All my friends studied the same but they all had different goals. Mila and Moni want to be writers, Havi went more for the linguistic field and in fact she’s getting a Master’s Degree in translation. I, on the other hand, have no clue of what I’m going to do with this. I just love English literature and I wanted to study that, but I don’t know what I’m going to do. Most of my classmates become teachers, but I don’t want to do that. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with my future and thinking of that overwhelms me.