Half truth

Chapter One

The air was thick with fog and a cold chill that seemed to flow through the turning leaves and straight into my chest. I reached for my inhaler out of the pocket of my jacket, shaking it a few times before pushing three times to inhale–two to open up my chest and one for good measure. Asthma was an affliction I’d recently been diagnosed with. Mild asthma, but asthma nonetheless. I guess that’s what I got for trading the concrete jungle for some nature. Now, even after moving back to my home state, I couldn’t seem to get rid of it. I stopped walking at the end of the sidewalk and waited for the group of people in front of me to finish looking at the campus map before stepping up to it.

The only thing worse than transferring to a new university was transferring to a new university your senior year. I didn’t know where anything was and this campus was so big it had its own zip code—literally. Even in my thoughts, I shouldn’t have been complaining. It was an Ivy League university people would kill to have the opportunity to attend, and technically it was the one I was supposed to attend before I decided to follow my boyfriend to Duke instead. Now I was boyfriend-less and following my father’s and brothers’ footsteps instead. My mother joked that I’d swapped herds, trading one boy for another, as if I was a sheep. I found it difficult to argue her point, even if hearing it upset me.

One thing I couldn’t argue with was the fact that my father had been right about a lot of things. Like when he told me I would regret following a boyfriend to college and that the minute we broke up I’d run home crying and begging to enroll here instead. The breakup wasn’t exactly what made me run home crying and begging to transfer, though I couldn’t deny it playing a part. It was my brother’s accident that had done it for me. My brother, who’d been my best friend my entire life and the most vibrant person I knew, suffered an accident that made him miss graduation, give up being captain of the hockey team, and run home with his tail between his legs. Since his return home, he’d been put on anti-depressants and was going to the therapist three times a week. A therapist, who was my mother’s colleague, and was constantly giving the news that my brother still wasn’t speaking to him. That made it worse. He’d only discuss certain things with us, but nothing of substance, and definitely nothing with relation to the accident. It was as if he’d blocked the memory out completely, or was trying to. My parents broached the subject carefully at first, but had now moved on to not saying anything at all, out of fear that they’d trigger him. Behind closed doors, when I knew he wasn’t listening, I asked my parents questions about that went unanswered and ignored and further perpetuated my curiosity and the turmoil I felt over it.

Nevertheless, my journey to this school had taken a long essay, countless letters of recommendation and my father calling the dean incessantly whilst telling me he told me so every single time he hung up the phone with him, but I’d managed to make it here. Now, I was determined to do quite a few things. Graduating was high on that list, but finding out what happened to my brother—what really happened to him—was my priority, as well as finding out what happened to Lana Ly, the student that seemed to vanish without a trace. The media coverage on her was at a minimum these days, and maybe it was because she’d gone to our high school and it felt like her disappearance hit close to home, but I wanted to at least gain that attention back.

After all, people didn’t just vanish. Especially not people like Lana Ly. Shaking my head, I picked up the pace. I needed to get to the headquarters of the school paper sooner rather than later. I was already ru

Just as I thought my ass was about to meet the ground, hands reached out and caught me, straightening me upright. I held on to muscled forearms, blinking up at a cutting jaw and sharp green eyes that looked like they were slicing through me. He had the kind of skin people who liked to sunbathe lusted over, the perfect shade of golden brown, but he didn’t strike me as someone who would lay out in the sun. He didn’t strike me as someone who liked much at all, with the way he was scowling at me and holding my shoulders as if I was contagious.

“I am so—"

“Maybe you should reconsider those heels.” He looked pointedly at my shoes.

“Maybe you should reconsider your ma

“But you bumped into me nonetheless and I’m ru

“So am I.” I threw a hand up and started walking past him. I needed to get there before they shut down for the day and this conversation was going nowhere quick.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” he shouted.

I had half a mind to stick my middle finger up, but I just kept walking, refusing to acknowledge him any further. If he was in such a hurry, he shouldn’t be bothered with what I was doing or what kind of shoes I was wearing, though I had to say, my feet were killing me. I’d swapped out my flats for the heels when I was on my way over here, not realizing how much I’d have to walk to get here.

When I finally arrived at the building that housed the newspaper office, I paused up front. The campus in its entirety felt like a mixture of progress and history. Even though a portion of the campus had been built in the 1800s, most of the buildings I’d been to today were sleek and modern. I’d envisioned the newspaper to be in one of those. This building was quaint, made of brown bricks and white doors, with green ivy that clung to the face of it like a wet toga.

Because it looked more like a house than a place of business, I paused at the door, wondering if I should knock or just make my way inside. I decided on the latter. A few people were walking by from left to right and right to left, none bothering to take their eyes off the pages in their hands to acknowledge their new intruder. I walked around, hoping to catch someone’s attention. Finally, a woman in a navy pantsuit walked from the back of the building and greeted me.

“May I help you?”

“I… yes… hi. I just transferred here and was wondering if there were any openings in the paper. I was going to apply online, but I was in the area so I figured I’d just drop by. I’m a double major, Business and English and worked for the Duke paper for the last three years, so I have experience.” I paused, aware that I was speaking too fast for most people to follow. “So, yeah. That’s why I’m here. My name is Amelia by the way. Amelia Bastón.”

“Any association to Felipe Bastón?”

“Um.” I hesitated. “Maybe.”

“Maybe.” The woman smiled wryly. “That’s definitely a Bastón answer. Felipe was my boyfriend for a short time while we were here. Great human being, lousy boyfriend. He left me for his current wife and they’re still married, so I guess maybe he was just a lousy boyfriend to me.”