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Naomi had been gone for about a quarter of an hour when Olivia noticed that none other than Dylan Rimmer had come in with a bunch of his bros.

One of them was wearing a traffic cone on his head like a witch’s hat and the rest of them were cracking up.

Dylan, a fellow sophomore, was in Olivia’s honors creative writing class and was known as kind of a stoner. But a pretty gorgeous one, she thought as she looked at him grinning at something his friend was telling him. Fair-haired and scruffy, he looked a bit like Bradley Cooper.

And wait a second , Olivia thought, watching Dylan as he knocked his buddy’s orange witch hat cone off his head and put him in a fake headlock.

Isn’t his current girlfriend, Kimberly Peck, the Lamb Duh Society chapter co-president?

She watched Dylan belly up to the bar a moment later. Why was she watching him? she thought. She wasn’t even into him.

Or was she?

When he was done ordering his drink, he turned and then suddenly smiled as their eyes met.

“Hey, Olivia, what’s up?” he said as he came over. “I was working on a William Carlos Williams–style poem this afternoon. You ready? It goes, ‘I’m so very terribly sorry I drank all the beer you were hiding in the back of your grandmother’s old hippie van. I was thirsty and well, I really, really wanted to get drunk.’”

Olivia laughed politely.

“Needs work,” she said, mimicking their droll writing teacher, Professor Riboni.

Dylan laughed back at that. He played the trumpet in the school band and did really stupid and funny dance moves with it at the basketball games during time-outs. Some good-looking guys could be jerky jackasses but he was fun. And he was a good writer actually.

“I didn’t know you came here, too,” Dylan said. “Wow, you look, ummm...”

She gave him an innocent, fake puzzled look. She knew how she looked. During the day, she wore her glasses and was all business but Thursday nights, the contacts were put in as she went all out.

“You look pretty ummm yourself,” she found herself saying over the music before she could stop herself.

His big blue eyes went wide. They both looked over at the DJ booth as the Black Eyed Peas standard “I Gotta Feeling” started up.

“What are you drinking there, Olivia? You’re looking a little low,” he said as the bartender came over.

The crash of glass—a dropped bottle of beer or something down the bar—made them both turn.

Now to make my hasty retreat , Olivia thought.

“I, um, have to take this,” she said, quickly lifting up her phone and heading for the door.

Take that, Kimberly Peckerhead , Olivia thought, smiling to herself in the cold of the empty parking lot outside. While you’re busy being a jerk to my friend, I’m just going to have to go ahead and, uh, flirt with your hottie boyfriend a little, okay? Yeah. Thanks.

Guess who I’m talking to? she texted Naomi.

Waiting for a reply, she turned as she actually heard the soft click of the traffic light on Route 4 a couple of hundred feet to her left. She smiled at the red light as she thought about what Professor Riboni had said that very day about writing skills being so much about being a good observer.

She turned and looked off in the dark. The first structure her eyes hit on was a closed gas station down the street. The one light of its rain shed revealed a small, squared off, lonely building with a glass door. With the dark slabs of its pumps and its worn strip of concrete, it looked...boring.

The next business down the road on the right was a coffee shop and in the parking lot light, you could see flowers along the path in front of it. They were black-eyed Susans that had died in the autumn night cold, she noticed.

In the cold of the autumn night, the dead black-eyed Susans looked... Olivia thought.

Like a swarm of spiders? she thought squinting. Or no...flying spiders? No, shit, that really sucked.

“Needs work,” she mumbled.

It happened as she was still standing there waiting to hear back from Naomi. When Olivia glanced over at the traffic light again, she saw there was a car stopped underneath it. Not a car actually. An SUV. A huge one. Was it a Cadillac Escalade?

Then her mouth dropped open when she saw the shining silver hood ornament and looked down and saw the New York plates.

Watching the huge Rolls-Royce make the left turn into the college onto Lawton Road where all the top faculty lived, Olivia suddenly remembered something with a click, like the click of the traffic light.

“Wait,” she said as she watched the lights of the SUV disappear up Lawton.

“Wait just one tiny little second,” she said.