Like me, she was in her senior year. And, like me, she’d sent herself here her junior year, much to her parents’ dismay. That’s pretty much where the similarities ended.
Elisa was a figure painter’s wet dream. She was a theatre student, which meant that, unlike most of the kids in my own department, she cared about her looks. Her long brown hair was always perfectly wavy, even today when it flowed from under her knit hat like a waterfall. Delicate, almost Nordic-elf features, bright blue eyes, dimples. She did yoga and modern dance and could hold a modeling pose for hours. And, since she was my roommate, she often got roped into being my subject.
“Out with Ethan. After sign-in? What are we going to watch?” I wrote on the other side of the note. I folded it into a crane and tossed it to Elisa when Jonathan was turned around.
Last year, people were positive she and I were a lesbian couple. After all, we walked hand-in-hand to and from dinner, and spent most of our free time (well, the time I wasn’t with Ethan, which wasn’t too often) working together. Neither of us refuted the rumors, mostly because we didn’t care—Elisa was bi, and I was definitely not dating. We probably wouldn’t have ever clarified anything, but our hall counselor asked outright because having couples room together was against school policy.
Now she was dating a dance major named Kyle who, we were both pretty certain, also played both sides of the field. And I, as planned, was still resolutely single. I preferred the term “off-limits.” Ethan preferred the term “future crazy cat lady.”
I watched Elisa bite the tip of her pen in consideration of what movie to stream, but before she could write it down, Jonathan turned back around and addressed the class.
“As we’ve read time and time again,” he said, standing behind his desk, “the worshipers of pagan gods didn’t see their deities as untouchable creatures. The gods were living, breathing things, able to interact with mere mortals and disrupt their affairs. From the Celts to the Greeks to the Egyptians, the old pantheons were notoriously interactive with their mortal subjects. The Norse were no different in that worship—to them, Loki and Thor and Freyja were as real as their own kin. The gods were allies, albeit feared ones. It was the gods who blessed you with good crops, and it was the gods who took the innocent away.”
Jonathan had been my adviser for only a few months—my old adviser left to do a photo residency in Brazil after fall term—but we’d gotten on immediately. Like my drawing instructor, Jonathan had a penchant for wearing jeans and blazers. Unlike Andy, Jonathan actually pulled them off. He had curly brown hair and a short beard and wire-rim glasses. His blazers were often tweed with leather elbow patches. Some even had pocket squares. And he was maybe in his early thirties.
All of this paired quite well with the fact that he was covered in tattoos from the jaw down. I’d never seen most of them, just the bits that poked up from his collar and cuffs (birds up the neck, clouds and vines and figures on the forearms), but I’d asked him once what the grayscale tattoo was. He said it was a scene from Ragnar?k.
Gotta love the hipster professors. I was pretty sure 90 percent of the male and female student body wanted to jump his sexy-intelligent bones. I just wanted to be him, tattoos and nonchalant air and all.
“Over the next three weeks we will be shifting focus from Celtic folklore to Scandinavian mythos. As you’ll quickly learn, there is a great amount of crossover between the two pantheons and modes of worship. And, as I’m sure you expected, that will be the topic for your next research project.”
There was a collective moan throughout the class, which just made him smile. I wasn’t one of the kids whining, however. This sort of shit was right up my alley. Besides, any excuse to look up mythology could only help my painting thesis.
“We’re going to start by examining how the Norse viewed the worlds of men and gods. If you’d open up to the chapter titled ‘Yggdrasil’ and follow along?”
The name was a shot of adrenaline to my chest as I turned to the chapter. The print of a tree, black and stretched between the realms of man and gods, stared back at me. A stain. Ink on paper, blood on concrete. . . . I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath.
Something landed on my desk, and I opened my eyes with a jolt. I glanced at Elisa, who had flung the note my way while Jonathan was rooting in his desk. I tried to grin as I spread open the paper over the chapter header, quickly covering up the woodblock print of Yggdrasil, the World Tree.
“Let’s watch something bloody,” the note said. “Also, give Ethan my love.”