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Adam winced, the constant dull ache around his head finally breaking his concentration. He still had half a chapter of his sociology reading to go, but the stiffness in his neck and shoulders and the heaviness of his eyelids told him it was time for a break.
Rolling his shoulders, he looked up to the window above his desk. While he had been reading the outside light had faded, and his desk lamp shone brightly onto his textbook while the room was dark and moody. He had probably missed dinner in the food hall, and would have to have instant oatmeal again. There was a stash in his desk drawer due to all the times this had happened in the past and he’d gone to bed hungry; he could lose hours studying and never feel like he’d read enough, both his head and his stomach unsated.
He was supposed to meet Gillian for lunch tomorrow after his lecture, and he sighed loudly to himself as he made a mental note of all the things he needed to do before then, rubbing his eyes as they watered and massaging his temples.
Maintaining his “new school, new me” attitude was wearing thin. The core of who he was hadn’t changed, his morals, intellect and drive. But he had remade himself into New Adam, one he thought was worthy of an Ivy league school. He hadn’t counted on the weight of Old Adam being so hard to jettison from his new life, how intricately woven it was into his whole being.
Poor Adam, deaf-by-injury Adam, three-jobs Henrietta trailer park trash, fighting tooth and nail to earn his place in the world. He wanted nothing to do with that person and its abusive parents. He wanted a fresh start, to pretend that he had a happy home life, only studied a normal amount, and had enough disposable income to have breakfast at the new cafe off campus with the Crying Club. So far, he had pulled this off.
But Cabeswater Adam, friend of 300 Fox Way Adam, survivor, mechanic and magician - this was a person he couldn’t forget, even if he didn’t want to share it with his new friends. This part of Old Adam was the ballast that stabilised him in the nighttime whenever the anxiety of surviving both his studies and the distance between Thayer Hall and the Barns struck him. It felt sacred, unshakable. He gripped onto it with a fervour that New Adam should really be applying to the essay due next week.
If he lost his hold on that part, he was scared that he would also lose the only thing that really mattered to him outside his degree: Ronan.
It was a paradox that he had been struggling with since graduation - he wanted nothing more than to leave Henrietta and Old Adam behind, but since starting this thing with Ronan he felt like he had a home. He missed him with all his being but Ronan had made it crystal clear when he last visited - before he had trashed his dorm room - that New Adam was not completely to his taste.
The lies did not sit well with Ronan. He didn’t trust easily, and Adam had spent years building that trust, brick by brick. He could only hope that the foundations were strong enough to survive his attempt to reimagine himself as a person who innately deserved love and success.
When it came down to it, he really wanted to just be himself. But without Henrietta, Ronan, Cabeswater, and the energy of the ley lines, he didn’t know who that was. With those things, he didn’t know how to move forward and escape his past.
So for now, he was New Adam, forging his own way, doing fake Tarot card readings for extra cash, and hiding his skeletons to the best of his ability (dreamed murder crabs and hover board damage to his dorm walls aside - that was a hard one to explain to Fletcher). New Adam, with the scary boyfriend that was banned from campus, who he couldn’t even talk about anymore because of the looks his friends made.
Adam closed the textbook with a scrap of paper to hold his place, and clicked his electric kettle on after gently shaking it to see there was enough water. As the water boiled he picked at his cuticles, staring aimlessly out the window at the shadowy trees in the Yard.
He tried to empty his mind of all thoughts except his plan for the evening, to conserve his energy. He would make his oatmeal with a squeeze of honey, take a walk around the campus for some fresh air, then come back and finish the chapter. And hopefully after that he could sleep restfully and dream of wide open fields, endlessly-sleeping cattle, girls with hooves for feet and the embrace of someone for whom he didn’t have to reinvent himself.