October 21

For the next couple of days after that party, AJ pretty much moped around. He didn't get to bed until 3 in the morning and had to get up for six, so he was basically a basket case.



He and Kay didn't speak to each other. You could cut the ice between them with an ice pick.



I didn't know what to do or what to say to either of them. I was caught, trapped in the middle of a hopeless, desperate situation.
I feel like I'm partly to blame for this.



I have an art lab class with Samantha (she is a fine arts major and in the fashion design school), and she didn't say much to me, either. She keeps calling AJ, but he refuses to talk to her.



AJ has a long memory. He's refused to talk to Sety or even about him since they left Fort Starch, and he's refused to talk much about what happened while they were there. When he gets mad with you, he's mad for awhile. You do not want to get on his bad side. When AJ clams up, it is bad news for everyone. The last time this happened, he wound up in the hospital. I don't want that to happen again.

I have to say, it was a weird, weird week.




Whenever I need to make sense out of nonsense, I always go to my big sister, Satis.
Satis, of course, was adopted by my mom from Egypt along with my brother, Imsety, before she and my dad got married.
She knows way more than I could ever know and has been through way more than I could ever possibly go through. Only problem is, because of her crazy med-school schedule, I hardly ever see her.
So who else would I tell about the fire at the dorm, my dinner with Kyle and the events at Samantha's party?



"Wow," Satis said while we were running to the burger joint that evening when I ran into her, "things have been crazy over at your place."
"Tell me about it."
"Seriously, if I see another cut open llama, I'll scream."
I managed a chuckle.



"Let me get this straight. So Kayleigh caught AJ talking to Cheri and she slapped him in the face?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "Apparently."
"Why did she do that?"
"I don't know. The way she was telling me was, she caught the tail end of his conversation with Cheri, and she just snapped."
"Well," Satis explained, "something had to lead up to it. You don't just slap a guy in the face just because he has a conversation with a girl. From what you've told me about Kay this isn't normal behavior for her, and she's not a violent person. So something had to trigger it. Either Kay caught him cheating or he said something to her or to the other girl that she didn't like. Either way, though, this didn't just happen. It's been building."
"I don't know what to say to either of them, though. It's weird."
"I'll see if I can knock some sense into AJ's noggin, though if he's anything like Sety, probably not."
"You're going to talk to him?"
"Well, he has a class in my building, so probably."
I smiled. "Thanks, I knew I could count on you."