"Coffee, my dear?" Professor Campbel - James, Elena reminded herself - asked. At her nod, he bounced to his feet and bustled over to the tiny coffeemaker perched on top of a teetering stack of papers.
He brought her a cup of coffee, creamed and sugared, and settled down happily in his chair, gazing across his crowded desk at her with an expression of innocent enjoyment. "I think I have some cookies," he offered. "Not homemade, but they're reasonably tasty. No?" Elena shook her head politely and sipped her coffee.
"It's very good," she said, and smiled at him.
It had been a few days since she had told Stefan and Damon she needed to take a break from them. After a much-needed sob session with Bonnie and Meredith, she had done her best to be normal - going to class, having lunch with her friends, keeping up a brave mask. Part of this attempt at normality was coming to James's office hours, so that she could hear more about her parents. Even though they couldn't be there to comfort her, talking about them offered some solace.
"My God!" James cried out. "You have Elizabeth's face, and then, when you smile, Thomas's dimple comes right out. Just the same as his - on only one side. It gave him a certain raffish charm."
Elena wondered if she should thank James. He was complimenting her, in a way, but the compliments were real y directed toward her parents, and it felt a little presumptuous to be grateful for them.
She settled for saying, "I'm glad you think I look like my parents. I remember thinking when I was little that they were very elegant." She shrugged. "I guess al little kids think their parents are beautiful."
"Well, your mother certainly was," James said. "But it's not just your looks. Your voice sounds like hers, and the comments you made in class this week reminded me of things your father would have said. He was very observant." He delved into his desk drawers and, after a bit of rummaging, pul ed out a tin of butter cookies. "Sure you won't have one? Ah, Well." He chose one for himself and took a bite. "Yes, as I was saying, Elizabeth was extremely lovely. I wouldn't have cal ed Thomas lovely, but he had charm. Maybe that's how he managed to win Elizabeth's heart in the end."
"Oh." Elena stirred her coffee absently. "She dated other guys, then?" It was ridiculous, but she had kind of imagined her parents as always being together.
James chuckled. "She was quite the heartbreaker. I imagine you are, too, dear."
Elena thought unhappily of Stefan's soft, dismayed green eyes. She had never wanted to hurt him. And Matt, who she had dated in high school and who had quietly gone on loving her. He hadn't fal en in love, or even been real y interested in, anyone else since then. Heartbreaker, yeah.
James was watching her with bright, inquisitive eyes.
"Not a happy heartbreaker, then?" he said softly. Elena glanced at him in surprise, and he set his coffee cup down with a little clink. He straightened up. "Elizabeth Morrow," he said in a brisk businesslike voice, "was a freshman when I met her. She was always making things, particularly amazing sets and costumes she designed for the theater department. Your father and I were both sophomores at the time - we were in the same fraternity, and close friends -
and he couldn't stop talking about this amazing girl. Once I got to know her, I was sucked into her orbit, too." He smiled. "Thomas and I each had something special about us: I was academical y gifted, and Thomas could talk anyone into anything. But we were both cultural barbarians.
Elizabeth taught us about art, about theater, about the world beyond the smal Southern towns where we'd grown up." James ate another cookie, absentmindedly licking sugar off his fingers, then sighed deeply. "I thought we'd be friends forever," he said. "But we went in different directions in the end."
"Why?" Elena asked. "Did something happen?" His bright eyes shifted away from hers. "Of course not," he said dismissively. "Just life, I suppose. But whenever I walk down the third-floor corridor, I can't help stopping to look at the photograph of us." He gave a self-conscious laugh, patting his stomach. "Mostly vanity, I suppose. I recognize my young self more easily than I do the fat old man I see in the mirror now."
"What are you talking about?" Elena asked, confused.
"The third-floor corridor?"
James's mouth made a round O of surprise. "Of course, you don't know al the col ege traditions yet. The long corridor on the third floor of this building has pictures from al the different periods of Dalcrest's history. Including a nice photo of your parents and yours truly."
"I'l have to check it out," Elena said, feeling a little excited. She hadn't seen many pictures of her parents from before they were married.
There was a tap on the door, and a smal girl with glasses peeked in. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, and started to withdraw.
"No, no, my dear," James said jovial y, getting to his feet. "Elena and I were just chatting about old friends. You and I need to have a serious talk about your senior thesis as soon as possible. Come in, come in." He gave Elena an absurd little half bow. "Elena, we'l have to continue this conversation later."
"Of course," Elena said, and rose, shaking James's offered hand.
"Speaking of old friends," he said casual y as she turned to go, "I met a friend of yours, Dr. Celia Connor, just before the semester started. She mentioned that you were coming here."
Elena whipped back around, staring at him. He had met Celia? Images fil ed Elena's mind: Celia held in Stefan's arms as he traveled faster than any human, desperate to save her life; Celia fending off the phantom in a room ful of flames. How much did James know? What had Celia told him?
James smiled blandly back at her. "But we'l talk later," he said. After a moment, Elena nodded and stumbled out of his office, her mind racing. The girl who was waiting held the door open for her.
In the hal outside, Elena leaned against the wal and took stock for a moment. Would Celia have told James about Stefan and Damon being vampires, or anything about Elena herself? Probably not. Celia had become a friend by the end of their battle with the phantom. She would have kept their secrets. Plus, Celia was a very savvy academic. She wouldn't have told her col eagues anything that might make them think she was crazy, including that she had met actual vampires.
Elena shook off the unease she felt from the end of her conversation with James and thought instead of the picture he'd told her about. She climbed the stairs to the third floor to see if she could find it now.
It turned out that the "third-floor corridor" was no problem to find. While the second floor was a maze of turning passageways and faculty offices subdivided from one another, when she stepped out of the stairWellon the third floor she discovered it was a long hal that ran from one end of the building to the other.
In contrast to the chatter of people at work on the second floor, the third floor seemed abandoned, silent and dim. Closed doors sat at regular intervals along the hal .
Elena peered through the glass on one door, only to see an empty room.
Al down the hal , between the doors, hung large photographs. Near the stairWell, where she began looking, they seemed like they were from maybe the turn of the century: young men in side-combed hair and suits, smiling stiffly; girls in high-necked white blouses and long skirts with their hair pul ed up on top of their heads. In one, a row of girls carried garlands of flowers for some forgotten campus occasion.
There were photos of boat races and picnics, couples dressed up for dances, team pictures. In one photo, the cast of some student play - maybe from the 1920s or '30s, the girls with shingled flapper cuts, the guys with funny covers over their shoes - laughed hilariously on stage, their mouths frozen open, their hands in the air. A little farther on, a group of young men in army uniforms gazed back at her seriously, jaws firmly set, eyes determined.
As she moved on down the hal , the photos changed from black-and-white to color; the clothes got less formal; the hairstyles grew longer, then shorter; messier, then sleeker. Even though most of the people in the photographs looked happy, something about them made Elena feel sad.
Maybe it was how fast time seemed to pass in them: al these people had been Elena's age, students like her, with their own fears and joys and heartbreaks, and now they were gone, grown older or even dead.
She thought briefly of a bottle tucked deep in her closet at home, containing the water of eternal life she'd accidental y stolen from the Guardians. Was that the answer? She pushed the thought away. It wasn't the answer yet - she knew that - and she'd made the very clear choice not to think about that bottle, not to decide anything, not now. She had time, she had more life to live natural y before she'd want to ask herself that question.
The picture James talked about was close to the far end of the hal . In it, her father, her mother, and James were sitting on the grass under a tree in the quad. Her parents were leaning forward in eager conversation, and James - a much thinner version, his face almost unrecognizable beneath a straggly beard - was sitting back and watching them, his expression sharp and amused.
Her mother looked amazingly young, her face soft, her eyes wide, her smile big and bright, but she was also somehow exactly the mother Elena remembered. Elena's heart gave a painful but happy throb at the sight of her. Her father was gawkier than the distinguished dad Elena had known - and his pastel-patterned shirt was a fashion disaster of epic proportions - but there was an essential dadness to him that made Elena smile.
She noticed the pin on his horrific pastel shirt first. She thought it was a smudge, but then, leaning forward, she made out the shape of a smal , dark blue V. Looking at the other figures, she realized her mother and James were wearing the same pins, her mother's half-obscured by a long golden curl fal ing across it.
Weird. She tapped her finger slowly against the glass over the photograph, touching one V and then the others.
She would ask James about the pins. Hadn't he mentioned that he and her dad had been in a fraternity? Maybe it had something to do with that. Didn't frat boys "pin" their girlfriends?
Something nudged at the edges of her mind. She'd seen one of these pins somewhere. But she couldn't remember where, so she shrugged it off. Whatever it stood for, it was something she didn't know about her parents, another facet of their lives to be discovered here.
She couldn't wait to learn more.