Part 7.

I'd more-or-less gathered my wits before we entered the Student Center, an open glass and steel cube with six floors of rooms and offices looking onto the ground-level atrium filled with tables and benches scattered amid a forest of container-grown trees. The smell of grease, pepperoni, and burgers wafted from the fast-food stalls as we wove through tables of students towards the stairway.

"What room?" I asked, breaking the lengthy silence.

Circe took out her phone, a sad LG Android, and scrolled through several screens. "Second floor, room two-oh-three."

We mounted the stairs.

"Thanks for listening to me bitch," I said. "I mean, I wanted to buy you lunch, but I lay all this heavy shit on you, make you work. So I still owe you."

She smiled. "It's therapy, what I do. Hell, I better get good, and fast, because I'm done with coursework in two, maybe three semesters depending. And then, it's licensing and completing my dissertation."

I halted. "So, you'll be a doctor, a real shrink?"

She nodded. "That's the plan."

We walked, and I remembered the lunch conversation. "So that was therapy? Just me talking? Interesting. I thought it would be like the Doctor Phil Show. You know, emotional fireworks followed by waterworks and a 'eureka!' at hour's end."

She giggled, punching my arm, sending a jolt through me. "Doctor Phil's a reality TV star, dumbass."

I rubbed my arm. "I gotta remember not to provoke you. You have a mean right hook."

"What can I say, I'm Irish." We stopped at the door, and she waved as several women entered. "Anyway, not saying that Doctor Phil's bad, but the show is not realistic. No one can shrink those hard-core head-cases in an hour. And I mean, NO ONE. So the show's more like the media's illusion of what therapy oughta be." She motioned over her shoulder. "Gotta go."

I spat in shock as I followed her gesture and read the meeting title written on the dry-erase board outside the room. "What the fuck is the University Pagan club? A joke, like the Church of the SubGenius? One of my Omega brothers joined my senior year, and he dragged me to a meeting. What. A. Gas. Sad to say, I had an internship that semester so couldn't join."

She shook her head. "So sad, the road less traveled by. Stilted your spiritual awakening. Tragic."

I grinned, my heart buoyed by her pixie-like smirk. "Yup, devastating."

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"Anyway, back on Planet Serious, no this isn't a joke. I'm a Pagan, a witch. Sort of passed from my great-grandmother, to my mom, and from Mom to me."

A nervous, high-pitched laugh exploded from my diaphragm. "You mean, like a pointy hat and a broomstick and a black cat sort of witch?"

"Well, in the main, yeah."

My heart leaped to my throat. "Wait, so... so you, what, worship the Devil?"

"NO!" Circe said, her palm facing me in the universal gesture for 'stop.' "Witches do NOT worship Satan. Instead, we worship nature spirits, the Old Gods, and Goddesses. The early Christian patriarchy demonized people like me, mostly peasants tilling fields or fishing, celebrating the God and Goddess and the Wheel of the Year back then...." She checked her Swatch. "Anyway, it's convoluted and complex, and I've no time."

"Now I really gotta buy you dinner, for you to fill me in."

She started speaking but snapped shut her mouth as if thinking twice before snickering. "You are a sneaky one, Ulysses. But charming. Anyway, don't get your hopes up because I'm strictly dickly, and don't do girls."

A mischievous grin crept across my face. "Good thing I'm a dude, then. Though I'm trapped in a woman's body, I'm one-hundred percent, grade-A, all-American male."

"Sneaky, charming, AND relentless." She sighed, long and heavy, her eyes crinkling as she waved. "Bye, Ulysses."

"I'll call you," I said as she entered the room, a swish of magenta and black, her mop of rose-pink extensions shaking in mock-despair.

After returning the wave, I spun, fishing in my handbag for keys. My heart leaped as I rammed into a dirty-blonde in a flowing brown burlap hippie skirt who groaned as she crumpled, arms flailing for balance.

I snagged her, steadying. "Sorry."

She grimaced. "No worries, my bad." Her peaches and cream face relaxed as she tilted her head sideways. "I assumed you were zigging, but you zagged"

"Do I know you?" I asked. "You look familiar."

She shrugged. "You too, sorta. You a student?"

I laughed."Hell no. Graduated three years ago, but maybe you know my brother, Fenton Garrity? Partied at our house in McKinley? I mean, he's thrown several doozies there, summers when our folks are away."

She shrugged palms up, her expression a quizzical knot. "Never heard of him. Sorry."

"What about, you ever party at Omega house, his fraternity? I do, time to time."

She giggled. "Ah, a frat rat. Not my type... Wait, you said Omega?" Her face went round with shock for a flash before shutting down, expressionless. "I may... never mind, gotta go, the goddess is calling." She whisked past me, shutting the door behind her with firm decisiveness, leaving behind a miasma of cloying perfume.

I walked away, shaking my head, unable to assign her face a name, or remember where I'd met her but certain I had. The thought rattled in my brain as I hustled towards my car. I gunned the engine, and in a flash, her face and spicy perfume clicked together in my mind like puzzle pieces.

Cloves. She smelled of cloves.

That hippie chick was slutty sixty-nine from Omega's homecoming party. And that night, cloves cloyed at my nostrils. I'd assumed it was Circe smoking those nasty clove cigarettes emo chics seem so fond of, but I've never seen her smoke one.

Instead, it was hippie perfume in my nostrils. "Go figure," I said, popping the car into first-gear and heading home.