#2

It wasn't a noise that pulled me from my slumber. It was silence.

Umberger 105 was practically empty. I had slept not only through 50 minutes of death and destruction delivered via our professor's cliched monotone, but through the reading assignment, the end of class, the slamming of closing textbooks and the mass migration of students out of the rooms two main exits. Rip Van Winkle would be proud.

The next class's professor was logging in to the projector terminal, and a few early birds had already taken their seats. I never took any notes or anything, all I had to do was shoulder my bag and walk out the closest door, the front one, unnoticed. Then I realized my professor was talking with him, right in front of me. If he saw me walking out now, he'd probably realize that napping was involved, and that wouldn't help me should I need to beg him for extra credit come final exam day.

"No problem," I told myself, "be quiet and calm and he won't realize you slept through his lecture." I couldn't turn around, that would draw attention. Just kept moving, and moving, and moving. I was completely unseen, hell, I was a ninja.

My stealth was my undoing, however, when I made it to the front door. I had been so concerned to be calm and unnoticeable that I failed to watch for the half-foot drop that lies right outside the door of the classroom, and suffered a sudden loss of altitude while the spring-loaded doors closed behind me.

I got back up just fine. The scratches on my jeans, the water and mud on my hands and knees, and the stamp of concrete on my cheek were displeasing, but I was out of the classroom and home free.

Walking on campus is simple. Stay to the right-hand side of the path, just like driving. Avoid eye contact and keep moving, and no harm shall come to you. Usually.

I was southbound on the wide sidewalk that runs pretty much directly from Umberger Hall to the Student Union, the same one I had taken to class an hour before, and traffic was flowing fine.

I couldn't do any reading; my paper, still moist from the weak drizzle earlier on, was in my backpack to keep from getting any wetter. The poor excuse for precipitation that had be prevalent before class had developed a spine and beefed itself up into a thunderstorm. I would have to wait until I reached a table in the Union before I read the columns.

Kansas rain, as well as Kansas weather as a whole, is a lovely thing for it is ever-changing. You could spend your entire lifespan in this state and never see the weather do the same thing for more than a day. The sounds of the drops impacting my nylon hood seemed to form a melody that quickened and slowed as I sauntered forward as different parts of the storm eased by.

I looked down during the greater part of the journey, part to stay unnoticed, and part to enjoy the sight underfoot. The rain had washed away all the annoying chalk advertisements from the path, and for once, I could see concrete. True, it was wet and dark, but there were no irritating and gruesomely-misspelled notices there to bother me. Just a simple, clean slate.

I had a lovely thought when I rounded the corner of Seaton Hall and walked onto the Bosco Student Commons. I imagined that a bolt of lightning would lunge forth from the turmoiled heavens and nail that eyesore of a clocktower that also bears Bosco's name, and stifled a childish giggle.

Don't get me wrong, Bosco is a great guy. I just hate that damned clocktower, almost as much as my bedside alarm back home. It's this giant, steel-tubing monstrosity with a clock on each of its three rectangular sides, and for some reason, a sundial on top.

Now, if it was a sundial that cast a shadow on the ground for students to read, it would be cool. But it's not. It's face is at the top of the tower, more than twenty feet above the heads of passing students where it is completely useless. Well, useless to everyone except for Russian spy satellites, but since when are we responsible for their chronological needs?

Each day of classes, there are always a few mindless suckers milling about the plaza hocking some product or championing some cause to anyone foolish enough to acknowledge their existence. When the weather is decent, they space themselves out on the concrete to have a better chance of getting someone's attention instead of having to compete for people.

The weather was not decent today. It was rather harsh, and especially inhospitable to the cheap flyers and pamphlets being distributed by you-know-who, so they had all crowded under the awning outside the north entrance of the Union.

A person couldn't get through without physically touching two of them. I pulled my arms in close and pushed my way through the gauntlet and made it inside.

It took me three steps before I realized something was different. I put my hands in my pockets, and felt violated when I discovered one of them had planted a credit card offer on my person. You have to hand it to those people, their persistence can be awe-inspiring.

But that didn't stop me from throwing it in the first garbage can I saw.