Chapter Text
David finds out at around midnight, that it’s already around midnight.
He hadn’t planned to stay out this long, but it seems the more time he spends at the library, the more assignments get added to his class registry and every day sweeps through like a Russian roulette of despair for someone who's not so eager to write essays on jurisprudence and constitutional law. This last week has been a flurry of papers, projects and unfinished study plans and his already bony sleeping schedule has turned quickly into a pointless affair as soon as Rachel had showed him her “infallible concentration ritual”, which consists of a half hour power nap followed by the downing of a red bull and coffee concoction that would send any nutritionist straight into their grave.
So his original plan was to stay out about two hours and have dinner with Rachel afterwards, but as the sun started hiding behind the hills David decided to turn off his cell phone and let himself feel the thrill of spending the night writing paragraphs that he’ll inevitably re-read and throw out as soon as he finishes.
And now, it’s almost midnight.
David folds his reading glasses and sets them on the table in front of him, letting his palms rub the tiredness away from his eyes. His vision turned blurry from having to stare at a book for half of the afternoon so he lets his eyelids rest for about ten seconds before whispering “fuck it” quietly and storming out of the study room, leaving a mess of pencils and books on the table.
The night welcomes him with an eerie gust of wind and David regrets leaving his bomber jacket on the backrest of his chair. It’s almost surreal how quickly his hands find the stray cigarette perched behind his ear and place it between his lips.
But then he fishes in his back pocket for a lighter and finds out he left it in his other jeans, the idiot. The moon looks at him like he just said the funniest joke ever and David flips her off.
“Last night I was so upset, I could hardly sleep.” The voice hits David like a rock bouncing on the surface of a lake, echoing around his ears muffled by the cold. He’s been studying for so long that he flinches as the words reverberate a tad too loudly inside his head.
“Does that ever happen to you?”
The voice belongs to someone David has been avoiding for a while now. Big blue eyes, brown hair that tousles boldly across his forehead and David can’t explain it but he looks like an owl, a little. He’s seen the guy in his classes, the halls, the cafeteria and thrown against lockers. He’s everywhere all the time and he seems like the type of guy who uses words with people who don’t know what words are, with a social awkwardness that could only be attained by a six year old child trying to give an acceptance speech at the Sundance Film Festival. He’s blinking frantically, David wonders whether he’s just a weirdo or if he's actually trying to repeat his question in morse code. And he’s… a bit too close.
David clears his voice and takes a step back, leaning on the cold brick wall of the library. He folds the hems of his flannel shirt over his heart to try and make himself a little warmer.
“Uhm, sometimes. I guess. Do you have a lighter?”
“Yes,” the guy says with a big smile “there you go. I’m Nicholas, by the way.”
The flame dances weakly between his cupped palm and David’s mouth.
“I’m David.” He mutters with the cigarette lit and hanging between his lips, and Nicholas smiles even more widely, if possible. He’s wearing a pair of black leather boots that struggle to match with the rest of the outfit, a navy blue pinstripe suit that’s too light for late October. It seems like nobody was expecting the weather to change so suddenly and now the two of them both shiver under the nocturnal cloudy sky. “Aren’t you curious to know why I was upset yesterday?” he asks simply, and David had almost forgotten what he had said in the first place.
“Not really,” David doesn’t know if it’s advisable to entertain this conversation, but he decides that anything is better than going back to his half-written essay on Constitutional law. “But you can tell me anyway.”
“Okay, get ready.” Nicholas moves like he’s been waiting hours for this moment, clumsily unfolding a piece of newspaper that he apparently kept under the left part of his jacket. It’s the first page of a popular local gazette, a paper that David has read thousands of times to keep himself busy and because in the second-to-last page he always finds the hard sudokus that he cannot find anywhere else. But this last week felt like a haze and he hasn’t even found the time to read the main page titles, so today’s headline takes him by surprise to say the least. It reads in bold black letters: Third girl to disappear this week around the Yale campus in New Haven, Connecticut: Halloween Mystery or Killer on the loose?
“I believe in the Killer theory. Serial killer, to be exact.” Nicholas says so bluntly it almost sounds like a confession. “It’s all over the news. Has been for like, three days. ”
David hasn’t heard a thing about this, not even Rachel had mentioned anything but, to be fair, the two of them have barely found the time to talk this week and even during lunchtime on Wednesday she seemed too busy and too tired to give attention to any topic that’s even remotely unrelated to her history degree. He takes the paper from Nicholas’ hands and reads through the article, thoroughly following every line with the point of his finger.
It’s a grim story about three young students who disappeared recently around New Haven, one of them looks a little like Rachel if only she was a redhead and had a wider mouth and the other too are three years younger than her: their pictures stress out David so much that he tries not to look at them and just focus on the printed words. There must be a strange red thread that connects the three of them and that he can’t figure out on the spot, but just by thinking about the whole ordeal he understands why someone would call out Serial Killer. David takes a long drag out of his cigarette.
“Oh, is it you? Wait-” Nicholas rubs his chin with pale fingers numbed by the cold, “did I catch you red handed? And so quickly…” He seems genuinely impressed but David doesn’t follow his train of thought.
“The killer, I mean. Is it you?” his eyeroll syncs almost comically with a loud snort. “I think it’d really be a shame if it was you. Really a shame, David, because you're so... But you don’t look that surprised, and usually people do when they read this sort of thing, they gasp and cry and look horrified and you don’t and so I’m wondering-”
“Obviously I’m not.” David interrupts him curtly. “Didn’t even know this was happening. I'm shocked.” Shit. So that’s why the study rooms were all deserted before eight o’clock today. David thought he just got really lucky with finding a good spot but started wondering what was wrong as soon as the study halls emptied out by the time the sun set behind the hills.
Nicholas shrugs. “Okay. Well, I’m suspicious, but I choose to believe you. In any case, I want to get to the bottom of this.”
“By yourself?” David looks at the moon, pensive. “I’d tell you the police are more competent than a random student at finding clues and solving the case, but it’s probably not true.”
“See? I have the presumption to think that I really could do it. And I’m not random.” Nicholas stomps his feet, serious. There’s something quite endearing about his whole persona, something cryptic and youthful and unusual that makes David want to keep listening to him.
“Right, okay. Where would you even start?” he laughs.
Nicholas’ eyes go wide and round. “Do you have a pen?”
The neon light of the study room cuts Nicholas’ face in half, the same white that would look stale and awkward on anyone else’s skin lays perfectly instead on his pointed nose. He traces circles and lines on the newspaper page, precise and geometrical while David plops heavily on one of the armchairs and starts to fill out the first line of a sudoku.
He has an infallible method: first he starts the timer on his wristwatch, second he aligns all the ones and the twos and the threes, then he goes for the nines and the eights and he keeps the good numbers for last. The fours and the sevens usually fill out the quickest, giving him a surge of grand satisfaction, but towards the middle he starts to struggle and get slower, and he has to resign to the fact that he won’t break his time record today.
“I’m doing important work here, David.” Nicholas says, not letting his gaze break from the pages in front of him. He’s standing with his legs wide in front of the table like an FBI agent on a secret mission, with an uneaten sandwich in his right hand that’s starting to leave droplets of oil and tomato juice all over David’s homework. Luckily, he doesn’t care, he was gonna throw it out anyway.
“Aha. Are you gonna eat that or…” he points.
“Yes, David. It’s my dinner.” There's something curious about Nicholas’ choice to use David’s name so often. Not even Rachel says it out loud so much, so tonight David finds out he quite likes to hear it. Blame the psychological mechanisms in his brain and whatever fucking chemicals are involved in it, but David likes to hear his own name said out loud in someone else’s voice. Plus, Nicholas’ tone is nice and soothing but David doesn’t dwell on it too much because that would be kinda weird. “I haven’t had dinner yet.” he says instead.
“Well I would give you half my sandwich but I promised Anthony I’d give him some.”
“Who’s Anthony?” David asks, curious. Nicholas had struck him as the loner type, the kind of person who found it hard to make friends and keep them; he was the student who raised his hand all the time in class and earned himself a dozen of weirded out looks from their classmates. David had noticed him because he was always by himself at break and even during lectures nobody sat with him. Is this Anthony a friend of his? So he does have friends…
“My cat.” Oh, nevermind. “Well, he’s not mine. But he likes me a lot. He lives outside the library and I always have a little treat for him.”
“That’s okay, I’ll just get a slice of pizza on the way home.” David stops the timer, seven minutes and twelve seconds, and starts packing up his things. He drops the books in his bag and crumples up the rest of the stuff, a bunch of essay drafts that turn into improvised basket balls as he throws them into the most distant paper bin he can find. He exults quietly, trying not to wake up the library guardian who fell asleep about two hours ago, the only person there besides him and Nicholas. Then he puts on his jacket. “Hey man, it was nice to meet you. See you around?”
“See you around.” Nicholas smiles and takes a bite out of his fat sandwich. In his other hand, he’s holding one of David’s pencils, but David doesn’t tell him that. He reckons Nicholas needs it more than him right now, and maybe he likes the fact that Nicholas will probably want to give it back at some point and they’ll have to talk again in the future.
David leaves the library in a rush and with a gurgling stomach, he didn’t realise how hungry he’d been until now. He heads towards his usual pizza place, the one he visits regularly at least once a week with Rachel and while stopping at the road crossing he notices a black cat observing the cars drive by. “Anthony?” He calls out, but when the cat sees him he hisses and scurries away. Maybe it wasn’t him then.
David’s stomach throws out another bothered gurgle. “Alright, alright, let’s go eat.” He says quietly to himself as he crosses the road.