After what Ronin did in front of Cheech, things had to change, and Cheech was going to make sure they did. See, all of the guys in the dorm treated me as if I was a cute pet. They saw me whining about a girl, saw that I couldn’t land a lay, and they just dismissed me. They had a habit of calling me adorable, made a habit of disrespecting me and laughing at me. They interrupted me when I talked and showed me no regard at all.
At the beginning of the semester, I had a roommate named Justin. A country boy, cocky, hilarious, gorgeous. He was cool and he made friends with everyone instantly. He was a big guy who had spent his life throwing hay around, and as much as I tried to hate him, I just couldn’t. He made fun of me for losing Bekah, he told me I was punching too high when it came to Draconic, and he just treated me as if I was a goblin.
Now Cheech bought all kinds of snacks, ramen and drinks that college kids can’t afford, and he kept them in his room in a huge stack set against the wall. Anyone on the floor was welcome to come in anytime they wanted to and get whatever they needed, no questions asked.
Me and Cheech were watching Indiana Jones when Justin walked in. He walked past me, mussed my hair and growled out, “Hey little guy, how ya doing?”
I had my hair in a ponytail and it was ruined, so I pulled it out to set it back, and Cheech jumped to his feet.
“Take your fucking hands off, Justin!”
Justin had just grabbed a Yoohoo, jumped and almost dropped it. He turned to Cheech confused.
“What, man? What’s going on?”
Cheech pointed at me and snarled at Justin. “That shit stops now. No more treating him that way. He deserves better.”
“Cool,” Justin said. He looked at me cautiously and held his hands out. “Just playing, man. No disrespect.”
“No fuck you, disrespect meant and taken. You tell everyone that that shit ends now or they can all fuck off and take nothing else from this room.”
Justin lifted his eyebrows, looked at me with a chuckle. “Okay, whatever you say, Cheech.”
“You have no idea what this fucking guy could do to you if he wanted. You have no idea how dangerous Jesse is.”
Shadow hung his head. “Cheech, it’s okay.”
“No the fuck it is not,” Cheech said. “This guy is the most—” He pointed at me and was near tears. “He is the most—”
“Cheech, it’s fine.”
“I saw him take a man apart the other day. Broke so many bones and kicked his ass so fucking hard. It was like a fucking action movie,” Cheech said. He ran his hands through his hair and pulled them out as fists. “He broke his wrist, his arm, his leg, almost ripped his arm off and he did it…” Cheech turned and looked at me. “How did you do it that fast?”
I looked at Justin, and Assassin stepped forward. Justin stared for a long time before he stepped back. “Alright, dude,” Justin said. “It’s cool.”
“Tell everyone. Tell everyone that this guy,” Cheech pointed a trembling finger at me. He turned and looked at the window he had covered with a blanket. “This guy— man, fuck!”
“Okay,” Justin looked spooked. “Jesse, I’m sorry. I didn’t know, man. I’m sorry. Look, I’ll let everyone know not to mess with you anymore.” Justin looked at Cheech. “You okay, man?”
“NO!” Cheech yelled. He turned his back and started to cry.
Justin made for the door, closed it gently behind him.
“I’m sorry,” Guardian said. “I don’t know what happened. One minute he was hitting her, and the next I was standing over him and he started to scream.”
“Don’t say you’re sorry. You helped my friend. The guy was a woman-beating piece of shit that would have gone on doing it all his life.” Cheech turned and looked at me, wiping his eyes. “That man will never touch a woman again. That big mutha fucker will never hit a woman a day in his life. What you did was beautiful, but it scared the shit out of me. It scared me to death.
“You just walk around like that all the time. You just walk around with all that ability and speed and—” Cheech shook his head and wiped his eyes again. “He hit the ground broken so many times and it happened so fast that he didn’t have time to scream until he was on the ground catching his breath. How the fuck do you do shit like that?”
Guardian shook his head. “I had a hell of a life, and I can’t stand for a woman to be hurt in front of me. It’s kind of like a vow.”
“Okay,” Cheech said. “I’ll let it go. She came back again today and I had to send her away. She is obsessed, dude. You have to talk to her.”
I dropped back into my seat. “Wouldn’t know what to say.”
Cheech grabbed a Little Debbie and ripped it open. With a mouthful of oatmeal and cream he said, “You can start with ‘you’re welcome.’”
Ronin.
And Cheech stepped back. He looked at me and held his hands up.
“You never had to fear me, my friend,” Ronin said. “And I am incapable of saying you’re welcome for a job that obviously needed to be done.”
No one fucked with me anymore. But Justin was pissed. He had looked into Assassin’s eyes, and he had been scared. It took him about a week to figure out how he was going to make me pay for it.
I was walking the hall on my way to the commons area when a girl grabbed me. She hugged me. “You’re okay. Thank God you’re okay. We have all been worried about you.”
Shadow pulled back laughing. “I’m fine, just a little fucked up in the head.”
“Well none of us understand why you did it. Why did you write that?” she asked. She looked frantic.
“Tragedy?”
“No, that thing you wrote on the bathroom stall,” she said. “No one has seen him since it went up, but he is going to want to kick your ass.”
Shadow looked at her with concern. “Wrote what? I didn’t write anything on a bathroom stall. What are you talking about?”
She grabbed my arm, pulled me into the commons area, and the entire room looked up. The whole place when silent. She pulled me to her friends and spoke in low tones, but everyone was crowding around.
“The Nazi,” she muttered. “Jesse says he didn’t write it.”
“What floor?” Shadow asked.
“His floor. Last bathroom stall. Everyone has seen it. It has to have been you.”
The Nazi lived on the second floor. I lived on the fourth. Every floor had one communal bathroom with eight stalls, eight sinks, and eight showers. I turned and walked to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“To look at some graffiti, I guess.”
“You’re not going alone,” a group of girls said. They followed me, and I felt like a child being escorted by my mommies. I walked to the second floor as they all talked. They chattered. Every one of them drew close, each touching my back and whispering that I should not be there. I walked into the bathroom and they all followed me in. There was no one in the bathroom so I went to the stalls, slamming them open and searching the walls. I got to the last one and saw it.
Written in big black marker were these words:
Bald headed Nazis have tiny dicks
They spend their days sucking themselves
Off and wishing they were hung
Like us long haired studs
There were only two guys in the dorm who had long hair. Me and Justin. I walked out of the bathroom, as the doors in the hall opened, and everyone stared out. They started talking to each other, whispering in low tones and staring at me.
I went to Spy. Spy was a tiny gay guy with a beautiful face and gypsy-like clothing. He was the dorm’s seer with his tarot cards and his meditations, and he knew everything that was happening in that dorm. Who was fucking who, who hated who, and who would do something like this. He spent all his time, when he wasn’t in classes, in the common room at a table in the corner. I walked up to Spy. He waved a hand to the person sitting across from him, and they got up. I sat down.
“I’m assuming it wasn’t you?” he said, shuffling his cards.
“Who did this?”
“Should I try to talk to our Nazi friend?”
“I don’t need you to talk to him. I can handle it myself, but who wrote the graffiti?”
“There used to be two men with long hair in this building. Well, besides the desk worker, but he is not a suspect.” He carefully stacked his cards and took a tiny sip from his Mountain Dew. “You and Justin.”
He rubbed his eyelids for a moment with the tips of two fingers, then he opened them. “I can say that everyone has been talking about what Cheech is doing on Fourth, and a lot of guys aren’t happy about it. I can also say that I saw Justin today and that long, beautiful, black, shaggy hair of his… well… he chopped it off to a respectful length, goddamn him.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Girlfriend’s dorm. Freddy.”
“What floor?”
“First floor, room 120. Hurry. Curfew drops in one hour.”
I got up and a host of girls stood with me. “No,” I snapped. “I’m doing this alone.”
I stomped to Freddy, which was next door, and pounded on door 120. Nothing. More pounding and Justin came to the door naked with a sheet wrapped around his waist.
“Jesse, not cool, man. I’m in the middle of something.”
“You wrote it, didn’t you?”
“Wrote what?” he said with a chuckle.
“You wrote that shit on that bathroom stall.”
“Oh yeah, I heard about that. I went to look and it is definitely my handwriting. I must have been drunk, though. Oh shit!” His eyes widened and he stepped back. “He is going to think it was you. No man, it’s okay, I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him it was me and him and his friends will beat me to death. It’s cool.” Justin smiled. “Oh wait. It’s no problem if he believes it was you, though. You being such a badass and all. Shit, you can take the hit for me, can’t you, partner?”
Bekah lived in Freddy, and I went upstairs to her dorm and knocked.
She answered with a smile. “Hey honey, what are you doing here? You wanna come in?” She looked at me with that hopeful look her broken heart was giving me all the time.
“Got a problem.”
She wrapped her arm around me and led me over to her desk chair. “What’s up?”
“You can’t come see me until I have it worked out.”
Her face fell and she nodded, defeated.
“I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She picked at her fingernails.
“There is a Nazi looking for me.”
Her head jerked up and she stared at me. “What? Why? What happened?”
“Graffiti in a bathroom stall talking about how small Nazi dick is and how big long-haired dick is.” I leaned back in my seat.
“That was not you that wrote that,” she said. Her fear was rising.
“It was Justin. Justin, who got a nice short haircut today,” Guardian said. “The entire hall is talking about it. No one has seen the Nazi, but they know he can’t let it lie.”
“Are you worried?” she asked.
“I heard a few stories about him. He is about my height. He has short cut black hair, but not shaved. He wears a fatigues jacket everywhere he goes, and combat boots. He is not quiet about the fact that he is a Nazi, and he has a reputation for being fearless.”
She ran her hands through her hair and stood up. She walked away and walked back, then dropped into her chair.
“What kind of reputation? What did you hear?”
“Well, he was at a bar the other night and there were about eight, maybe nine, black guys. He walked over to their table, called them the N word, and told them he was a Nazi. Said he would meet them outside. Stood out there all night but they never stepped out of that bar,” Guardian said. “He stuck his head back in close to closing and called them pussies and walked home. People saw it and told Spy.”
“How reliable is that information?”
“Doesn’t matter. He has a lot of Nazi friends in the city. They are looking for me now.”
She grabbed me up in a hug and started crying. “What are you going to do?”
“Stay away from Wells dorm until you hear from me.”
“Can you meet me for lunch?”
“No. I can’t have any contact. He already knows too much about you.”
She kissed me, and she held me for a few minutes before curfew dropped and all guys had to be out of the girls wing. I walked home quietly.
I walked up to Spy. “I’ll be in my room all week,” I said. The entire commons gathered around. “Tell everyone.”
“You sure?” he said.
“Everyone. And keep everyone but him away from my room. I can’t have any of this shit spilling over and hurting anyone.”
“Classes?” He laid a tarot card down and frowned at it.
“I’ll be at my classes and you know what they are. Anyone asks, you tell them.”
“Anyone?”
“Anyone.”
“Be careful, darling.”
Guardian looked at him. “No one comes to see me.”
He laid down another card and crossed his heart. “No visitors. Do you want me to call if I see anything?” He frowned at the card and looked to his left, where a girl was listening intently.
“No calls about this.”
“No warning?”
“Spy, look at me.” He looked up at me with his big dark eyes and he sighed, cocking his head to the side.
“No warnings. I don’t want any of this falling on anyone else,” Guardian said.
Spy lifted a card and showed it to me. It was the six of pentacles. “Wanna know what my cards think?”
“No, Spy. Just help me protect the dorm. Please.”
“You got it.”
I stood up and started to make my way through the crowd.
“Hey Jesse…” I looked over my shoulder. “Give him hell,” Spy said.
I walked out to silence. The moment I was out the door, the entire commons room exploded. I heard Spy speak loud and clearly. “I need to talk to everyone. Get my girls down here. Things are going to get exciting.”
Bekah called. “I want to call the cops.”
“And tell them what? Nothing has happened yet.”
“Housing?”
“The man has not even made a threat to me. Not one word. I saw him a few times on campus and he looked at me. That is it. Spy has not heard from him. Nobody knows what he is thinking. I can tell housing, but they can’t ban him from talking to me when he has done nothing.”
“What are we going to do?” she whined. I could hear she was crying.
“You’re going to let me take care of this.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
“Be careful.”
Guardian shook his head. “I can’t.”
Monday, he was standing outside of the English building when I was leaving it. He stood in the middle of the ramp, leaning against the railing, looking at me as I walked out. Guardian, and we locked eyes. I kept walking. He didn’t blink. I didn’t blink, and no one looked away.
He was standing outside of my history class when I walked out. I had another class in the building in an hour. I sat at a table in the hall, propped my feet on an empty chair, and Guardian looked at him. Again we locked eyes. Again, no one blinked or looked away. He turned and walked slowly, methodically. I watched him walk, and I waited.
He was sitting on the stairs to the girls wing in the foyer on Thursday when I got to the building. I walked in and stopped. Guardian locked eyes with him for a minute before walking away.
On Friday, I felt them before I looked over my back and saw them.
There were three. All wearing combat boots. Two wearing fatigues jackets. One with a tank top, tatted up with a shaved head.
I opened my door, tossed my bag in, and locked it. I stood in the middle of the hallway facing them as they slowly stepped up to meet me. He looked calm with eyes of pure hate and no expression on his face. The guy to his left was his size, and he looked me up and down and cracked his neck. The big one with the tatts stared at me and smiled.
He pulled a mouth piece, stuffed it in his mouth, and bit down.
Cheech opened his door and looked at me. He looked scared to death. I waved him back, and he closed the door before they turned around to see what I was waving at.
“This might go bad for me,” Guardian said. “Your type are filled with rage and hate, so I’ll probably go down.” I held my keys out between us before stuffing them in my pocket. “I would ask that if you get me down that you not go into my room and trash my belongings.”
He nodded.
“When this is over, it’s over,” Guardian said. “This, whatever this is, when it is over, we are done. I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder all semester.”
He nodded.
I pulled my knives out of my pockets but kept the blades closed.
“Yeah, we heard about those.”
I tossed them over my shoulder. “I don’t want you guys to have any excuses.”
He looked at me, and if he was capable of a smile, I think I saw it. “You didn’t write it, did you?”
“Does it matter?” Guardian asked.
“It does.”
“I didn’t write it. I know who did, but I won’t tell you.”
“Grab a marker, scribble it out, and we are done,” the Nazi said. He started to turn.
“No, that is your mess. You clean it up,” Guardian said. “I had nothing to do with it.”
He stopped turning and looked the other way for a moment. “You know,” he turned around, looked me in the eye. “You’re the only one in this building that I respect.” He looked at his friends and nodded. “I hope the feeling is mutual.”
“It’s not,” Guardian said.
“Yeah, I figured.”
I called Bekah and she came over immediately. We made love, then went to watch a movie.
Spy knew it was over before I told him.
For more about the series Reality of the Unreal Mind, visit Amazon.
Jesse Teller 
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