Consequences Be Damned

10 ⇻ a damned attendance

A throat cleared above me as I flipped through the lecture notes I'd printed out. The first midterm of the quarter was today and I had to cram a bit more studying since I fell asleep watching season three of Stranger Things last night. (By the way, amazing season.) Class started in fifteen minutes, but I'd been sitting here since way before the previous class was dismissed so it seemed like enough times.

Also, this was just a GE class. It didn't matter all that much to me.

Someone cleared their throat again, with a small chuckle.

I didn't have time to wonder why they were amused, simply moved my legs to the side to make room for them to pass. But they didn't.

Feeling an odd sense of deja vu, I stopped flipping and looked up, surprised to see Luke holding two cups of coffee Smile blooming on my face, I reached up for mine and rolled my eyes back as soon as the hot caffeine went down my throat.

"You are a godsend, Luke Morningstar."

He laughed, shaking some dark hair out of his eyes and pulling out a pencil and scantron. "More like Hellsent. And, actually, my last name's not Morningstar."

"Oh?" I was distracted at this point, lecture slides running swiftly through my head as I followed suit in pulling out my filled out scantron and mechanical pencil. While I recited some more information, I double checked the things on my scantron, writing in the date and class.

"It's Dhillon."

"Dylan?"

"No," he said with a shake of his head, slanting his scantron so I could see the spelling.

"Oh. Is that your mom's last name?"

He nodded. "Yeah. My brothers and I all agreed having Morningstar as a last name was too flashy."

"I can see that."

"What about you?" he asked as I was about to flip back through the notes.

"Hmm?"

"What's your last name?"

"Villanueva."

"Father's last name?"

"Mo--" I stopped, not really sure if that was my mother's last name or not. Shutting my eyes for a moment, I tried to remember if it was my mom's. It had to be, right? My dad left a long time ago... Right? Shaking my head, I cleared my throat. "Um, yeah. My mother's."

"That took a while."

I licked my lips, a nervous laugh slipping out. "Yeah, I just--" I lifted the notes, "--test time. Taking up all my brain capacity."

"That's a mood."

Several more people trickled in while Luke and I drifted into silence. I wished I could say that I had been taking in the information, but that stutter in my memory--it bugged me for some reason.

Shouldn't that not have been something I forgot? Lucifer had said that I only forgot some recent memories, the irrelevant ones but my parents? Their names? Those shouldn't have been included in the memory loss.

I shut my eyes again, brows furrowing as I tried to recall my mother's face.

But all I could come up with was long dark hair.

Before I knew it, the fifteen minutes I had left to study had passed, the TAs were passing out the tests, and Luke and I wished each other good luck.

"See you on the flip side," he joked.

Thirty minutes later, I exited the class, tugging my jacket around my waist and tossing the empty coffee cup. The class usually took two hours, so being out this early was somewhat jarring. Especially because the lack of students bustling to get out of classes didn't fill the campus roads.