Henley Smith was in a foul, angry mood. This was hardly surprising or a new development. In fact, Henley had been an absolute terror to deal with since the day her parents should up at her dorm with suitcases, bags and boxes and insisted she leave Buffalo for Toronto. The follow up announcement that she would be attending a boarding school for wayward girls only served to exacerbate the situation. In the weeks that spanned the gap between then and now, Henley vented her anger on anyone who fell into her sights and little, in that regard, changed with the scenery. Henley already sent her roommate bawling from the room they shared at the end of the hall and alienated not one or two but three of the girls who lived in the rooms around hers. If her goal was to ostracize herself so completely that no one spoke to her for as long as she was enrolled, Henley was off to a promising start.

She stalked alone to the communal bathroom, wearing naught but a towel and a scowl and carrying her pink plastic basket of bathroom goodies: shampoo, conditioner, body wash, face wash, shaving cream, a razor and a small waterproof MP3 player with earphones. The hallway was empty and Henley, in her mind’s eye, pictured the other girls on the hall cowering behind their doors, in their closets and under their beds as the big bad bitch trudged past. Like a monster movie, she thought, as a smile came briefly to her face. Henley rolled her eyes at herself. How fucking sad am I? she asked herself, Getting enjoyment at the thought of scaring my dormmates. It was unlike her, she knew that, but she was just so angry. Angry at her parents for not telling her she was adopted for nineteen years, angry at her birthparents for abandoning her, angry at herself for going completely off the rails and angry at whichever one of her friends submitted pictures from her Facebook account on College Humor – even if she did look hot in a thong.

The angry faced brunette leaned against the wooden door and pushed it open with her shoulder and momentum carried her between door and frame and into the empty, sterile bathroom. Henley sighed. She missed the loud, crowded, sometimes dirty bathrooms of her dorm at UB. It seemed wrong, to her, that she could go into a bathroom and find no one about. Who, she wondered, was she going to talk to while she showered? Shower gossip was, in her estimation, one of the key parts of a college experience. Though, she admitted to herself, the lack of boys would reduce the interestingness of said gossip.

Henley looked into the various private showers and picked the one furthest from the door and closest, she hoped, to the source of the warm water. The last thing she needed on this horrid, horrid morning was to run out of hot water mid shower. With a stall that suited, the brunette stepped inside, set her basket on the floor, closed the door and tossed her towel out where it landed on the tile floor in a heap. Behind frosted glass the shower comes on and as cold water poured from the head Henley jumped back with a, “Frick!” The water warms and Henley stepped trepidatiously under the spray.

Nude, Henley stepped under the spray and tilted her head back. Water rushed over her shoulders and upper back and rolled down her spine, over her butt and dripped down the backs of her legs to swirl around and down the silver drain. Satisfied with her wetness, Henley stooped down and picked her MP3 player from the basket. As she stood, she plucked the earbuds into her ears and kick started the player. Soon The All American Rejects’ “Give You Hell” filled her ears.

The brunette went back into the basket for her shampoo and applied a generous portion to the palms of both hands. Henley squeezed her eyes closed tight, to ward off accidental eye irritation and smeared the shampoo into her wavy brown hair and worked it into a heavy, thick lather.

Now Aegir had been busy with comtemplating today. He had been rather sluggish or feeling that way, the only hunting he did had been for food of course so when his node sent him a telepathic message about fresh meat Aegir passed up on the matter at first. He had ignored it for the time being even with all the updates that he had received about Henley.

Now normally he would have been interested but had been in a pretty blah state about life. So he sat on the knowledge and when he chose to act upon being Henley's welcoming committee to the island it had been a few weeks long enough for her to go through a trio of room mates.

It had been fairly late, the sun had proved brutal to his eyes so he had taken to those areas like the forest where the canopy of trees blocking out the sunlight. Tonight though he had been feeling a little randy and when he gave matters a degree of thought he found himself slithering towards the dorms of Shokushu.

His speed had been slow as normal though as he closed on his destination he spun an illusion about himself. He had transformed himself into the auburn haired Ryu who he had been familiar with. He had assumed that the familiarity with her wouldn't bat an eye with the other students.

He got to the security doors, looked through the glass and saw nothing. He felt nothing either, no close brain waves anyway so he used his teleknetic abilities to open the door and let himself in. He then proceeded to Henley's bedroom.

Knowing it from his node he went there, found the door locked, looked around and waited to be in the clear before springing open the door through telekinesis and slipping inside. Nothing. There had been no one present so Aegir stood their in thought for a moment.

She's gone ...

Showers, chimed his node in his mind. At least I believe so. She headed that way and had her toiletries with her.

Aegir headed there ensuring that he locked up behind himself as he went down the hall only to slip into the restroom. Once he knew that he had been alone here he added things to his illusion, such as a basket of toiletries and having no clothes on but possessing a towel wrapped around him and some night clothes in the basket to slip in.

He went to the stall next to her own, he could feel the anger coming off of her as he sensed her mind so close to him. He took the shampoo out of the basket before setting it down on the bathroom floor before slipping inside.

The towel had been loosened and tossed over the door as Aegir turned on the shower. The hiss of water hit the floor while Aegir stood their as he dug into her mind in an attempt to pry even further into her head.

There was something all together soothing about a shower and Henley felt her bad mood mix with the soapy water, roll down her back and swirl down the drain at her feet. A long, exhausted sigh followed. It was incredibly hard work maintaining the angry all the time façade but it was that or break down on the side of her dad’s - adopted dad’s, she mentally amended - life highway. Anger might lead to the darkside but, like adrenaline, it kept Henley going when every instinct was to ball up in a corner and cry. But that was tiring and it was made worse by the fact that Henley had been thrust into the midst of a dorm full of strangers. With no one around she knew and trusted Henley had no one to show her vulnerability to. After all, she thought, I’d rather be Super Bitch then the girl who’s all weepy. Whether that was a smart, long term decision remained to be seen.

Henley stood under the falling water and rinsed the last of the shampoo from her brown hair. Then, like she had every time she’d showered since she was young, Henley took a half step forward, pulled her hair into a ponytail and wrung the excess water from it which hit the tiled floor with a distinct, watery ‘splurt.’ The water fell on her shoulders and carried its warmth over her naked body, steam built up and her feet and rose inside the stall and Henley began to feel very much like she was in a cocoon or, at the very least, at home in bed, wrapped in a fluffy down comforter.

Henley caught herself nodding off thanks to that sense of peace and safety and forced her eyes open, turned her music up to a (likely) unhealthy level, forced herself to shiver and added an inaudible to her (thanks to the music’s volume), “Woo.” Reinvigorated, Henley turned and faced the shower head; the water struck her breasts, rolled over her stomach and between her legs and puddled on the floor. The brunette bent over at the waist and grabbed her body wash from the pink basket at her feet.

The bottle made a rude ‘thbbbt’ as she squeezed the side and squirted a handful and a half of the viscous, sparkly pink gel into her hand. A white soapy head formed as she rubbed her hands together and began to wash her upper body; like always she started with her upper arms, shoulders and armpits and worked her way south. Henley paid no particular special attention to her breasts, though she did tweak her left nipple between the fingers of her right hand. I should have pierced it, she thought.

At some point during her scrub down another girl entered the bathroom and took up in the stall next to Henley’s. Thanks to her music, Henley hadn’t heard the girl enter and was unaware of her presence until she glanced over the adjoining wall and noticed a towel hanging on the door. In that moment, Henley was incredibly thankful she’d never succumbed to her urge to sing. That, she said to herself with a rueful smile, would have been embarrassing.

Henley’s soapy hands moved south and she washed her butt, thighs, knees, calves and feet and all the while her mind wandered. Odd random memories spontaneously occurred to her: the “disappointment” of not getting a pony for her eight birthday, her first make out session in the stairwell at St. Thomas Aquinas, the note from her birth mother, the first time a boy asked her to dance, breaking her arm when she was eight, prom pictures, the tenth day of the second grade where nothing particularly memorable happened, the break up of her first serious relationships, discovering masturbation...

There was no concrete theme to the memories. Some where good, some where bad and some where memories she wasn’t sure why she remembered them. Whatever, she thought as she shook her head and snapped herself back into the hear and now.

Now Aegir had thought that he was going to have to do something about the music. He had been in the stall, the pattering of water from the shower head splattering against the floor and over his illusionary form. He had been about ready to do something, perhaps alter Henley's perceptions that the music had eroded away, no charge? He considered this when he felt her recognition of his presence given the presence of the towel.

So, as it were it had seemed as if he had to do nothing to make her aware of his presence. Still he had assumed that she would make the first move though with the anger rolling off her that had not been a given.

He pretended to wash, at least if she had a look at his silhouette he would have been doing so though he had been busy at the moment ruffling through her thoughts as he chose to get better acquainted with her and plan accordingly for things. Unseen a smile filtered across his face as he closed the case file of her life. It only took a few moment's to "download" these thoughts, his compound mind already scheming though he had not been one to take many chances.

Thus her music began to drag as if it were a recording where the batteries in the tape deck needed changing. From dragging out the album skipped a little here and there then cut off all entirely.

The power button faded out too ... in truth their had been nothing wrong, the power had been fine, the music still playing but her perceptions to it had been changed as he snaked into her mind altering both her visual and audio receptors slightly to pull off this illusion.

Henley’s shower continued.

A thick blanket of steam completely enveloped her legs and crept up past her waist. The brunette, attention fixed on the music in her ears, operated on auto pilot. She rinsed her hair a second time and grabbed the pink conditioner bottle from her pink basket. Henley applied a liberal glob of the thick, creamy white liquid to her hand and immediately thought how similar it looked to jizz. She laughed, snorted really, and shook her head. Oh my god. You are such a whore, she thought to herself. The thought elicited another snort of a laugh and Henley smeared the conditioner into her hair and worked it around.

Henley backed away from the falling water, just a bit, to prevent accidental rinse-age and grabbed the face wash from her basket. Before she had a chance to start, however, her MP3 player cut off. She reached through the shower to the ledge where she placed it, grabbed it and looked at the LED. The charge icon blinked rapidly, indicating that the battery was low. Henley gawked in disbelief. “I just unplugged it,” she muttered. If it’s broken, she thought...

How hard would it be to replace?, she wondered. Henley fell asleep on the flight and had no idea how long it would take FedEx or UPS or whomever to deliver a new one. There was simply no way she could last until a holiday occurred and she could go home and get a new one without her music; it would be like asking her to go without breathing or some other necessity.

Henley pulled the buds from her ears, wrapped the cord around the player and set it back on the ledge near the shower head. Maybe, she thought, my parents will feel like they’ve made their point and let me come home and go to UT. Neither had ever really been disciplinarians and, more often than not, Henley’s punishments had been shortened for just such a reason so it wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities. And it certainly seemed better than having to stay at this place where everyone hated her, she assumed, there were no boys, no parties and, so far as she could tell, no fun and her MP3 player was busted.

“This sucks,” she whined.

All the while Aegir knew what had been going on. He monitored the stream of thoughts that had gone through her head and even the minute thought there about her MP3 player and having just plugged it in. An error on his calculations but not a fatal one. Of course not a fatal one.

Henley seemed to rationalize things out herself, however, and all the better for it. He let the water rain down on him, choosing to ignore the chortles of laughter emitting from her at her wayward thoughts. Aegir pretended not to her then spoke up when she had been speaking to herself.

"What sucks?" As if Aegir didn't know, he could steal that state of being out of her mind, figuring out quite well that she had been muttering about the MP3 player at the time. His silhouette remained that of a student as he began to lather illusionary creams, body washes against soft skin as the water thundered away the suds that had formed up on his skin.

Henley was tempted, serpent with an apple tempted, to fling the bottle of conditioner and scream a little scream of me.

She didn’t.

Not out of a sense of decorum or a recognition that such behavior was, by and large, inappropriate for anyone who wasn’t four but because throwing a bottle within the confines of the shower stall where she stood was stupid because a flight of less then four feet would lack any sort of real emotional impact. Instead, Henley stomped her feet, sighed and pouted. It was, considering the location and circumstances, a fairly impressive little tantrum; one of which Henley could, if she wanted, be proud.

And it would have continued, though not necessarily escalated, had a voice not interrupted and caused Henley to pause, mid foot stop, and catch hold of herself.

“What sucks?” the female voice asked.

For a second, Henley had no idea where the voice came from. Then she remembered the towel and that another girl was in the stall adjacent to hers. And I was just stomping my feet like a brat, Henley thought, poor impression secured. It was, she admitted to herself, odd that she should care at this point about the impression she’d made on the girl. After all, Henley had not cared a wit whether or not anyone liked her while she was on an angry tear through the girls on her hall but that was “strong,” stomping her feet and sighing and pouting was decidedly less so. Making the girls think she was a mean, heartless, evil bitch was one thing; making them think she was a pouty, pouty princess was something else entirely.

At least, she thought, I didn’t start crying. In and of itself, that was a small wonder. Given recent events, Henley was surprised this latest disappointment didn’t result in sniffles, sobs and snot. And while she would have felt totally justified breaking down in such a fashion it was not a picture she wanted anyone to see. Henley might not have been British, descended from a Brit or liked fish and chips but she had the stiff upper lip down pat.

The girl’s question hung there as Henley formulated an answer that, without being rude, would end the conversation and temper any curiosity the sounds of a tantrum might have engendered and a silence settled in the bathroom that was only broken by the soft sound of falling water on tile and naked flesh. Her initial instinct was to say ‘nothing’ and leave it at that but she knew ‘nothing’ hardly warranted the reaction the girl overheard and, as a result, her curiosity would not abate. Henley realized she was going to have to give a legitimate answer, otherwise more questions would certainly come.

Ultimately, that answer turned out to be longer and more in depth than she intended.

“Everything,” she started. “Life, the world, people, my parents, my friends, my ex-teammates, my coaches, my teachers, me, Miley Cyrus...” she said, her words picking up steam as she went on. “I mean, because it’s bad enough my birth mom ditched me but now my parents who ‘loved me so much they chose me’ got rid of me too...”

Henley knew she said too much or, at the very least, more then she intended and she sighed. There was, she knew, no taking it back and she knew, based on passed experiences, that in fairly short order everyone and their sister would know she was the girl who got rejected by her “parents” not once but twice. If things didn’t suck before... she thought glumly.

"Wow, that's some heavy stuff," Aegir stated. "Miley Cyrus? Well I can see hating her dad for that Icky Brakey Heart song ..." he paused as if he had been reflecting on the stream of words that escaped her mouth. Then she spoke again after a moment as if in reflection.

"What's really wrong? Abandonment issues? Sounds like it."

There had been a stretching sound, brief but audible over the stream of water that she could hear. The sound of running water diminished a little as if the girl cut off the water in her shower to hear better. Aegir grabbed the towel from off the lip of the door and began to dry off with it while staying in her stall.

"I can relate to that ... got ditched her by my foster folks. At first I got to thinking that my real folks didn't want me. Then started to think that the folks who had just got sick of me and wanted nothing further to do with me. I'm 18, a legal adult so they've washed their hands of any sort of obligations, right?

"I thought that way for a few months anyway, then realized that they wanted the best for me. Some of the programs here are fairly good and I don't have the distractions of old cliques to deal with or even boys, unless you count Professor Denmark, yum."

Aegir giggled a little at the last then after only a slight pause to quell him of this mirth he continued. "Then I thought that the motives of my folks really didn't matter. I could succeed to spite them. My foster folks for sticking me here and my real folks for giving me up in the first place. And I'm doing fairly well at that as it is, about 4 credits ahead of things as it is."

He wrapped the white towel around his illusionary form after drying. "So there are little things that you can do in order to deal with matters."

Henley bit the inside of her lip and mentally kicked herself for spilling her guts to a complete stranger. To add insult to psychological injury “getting it out” had not made her feel better. There was no feeling of catharsis or relief now that someone else knew her story. There was just more angst, more dread and more to worry about as she went forward. Henley needed people to validate her and she knew, or at least expected, she wasn’t going to get that now. Not when news of her mental breakdown spread through the dorms, locker rooms and classrooms of the academy. It was, she mused, a poetic sort of justice. In high school she’d sat on top of the social heap. Now Henley had the opportunity to see how the other half lived. It was not something she wished to seize.

The other girl piped up and offered her dime store, Lucy Van Pelt psychoanalysis of the situation. “What’s really wrong? Abandonment issues? Sounds like it,” the girl said. Henley exhaled slowly and kept her composure by the skin of her teeth. “I appreciate (she really didn’t) what you’re trying to do,” Henley said patiently, “but I don’t need to get to the root of the problem. I don’t really want to get to the root of the problem. I just kinda want to be mad aboot it.”

And there it was.

If there was a “root” that was it.

The girl continued and Henley was only half listening so when she admitted to being a foster kid Henley didn’t catch it right away. In fact, it almost went clear over her head. “Sure, I guess...” Henley replied but there was no sense of definitiveness to her answer. “I don’t now who that is,” she admitted. Thus far, Henley had not met a professor who could be described as yum but if one did exist it would make this sentence slightly more palatable; if only by a small margin.

“I don’t need to be free of distractions. My old life was fine. Ok, so I accidentally put pictures of myself in my underwear online... but an all girls prep school is a wicked huge overreaction,” Henley said. “I guess if I can just stick it out for a semester...”

But even that seemed like too much, at the moment.

“I just really want to go home.”

Aegir had moved a wet lock behind an ear, nodding as Henley spoke. "If you don't wish to rid yourself of things, if you wish to carry this chip on your shoulder it will be harder in a way. You'll keep everyone distant doing that, lashing out at everyone and biting their heads off. You could be here a long while so making at least one or two friends is good. Not a must of course, just speaking from personal experience though I happen to be introverted not extraverted so such things are prone to affect me more."

And as if reading her mind, and Aegir was, she added, "though mum's the word on things nevertheless."

"It's a shame you don't know Professor Denmark, he's rather new though I guess that's a relative term seeing that he's been around here for about three years now. You've probably seen him around too, young blond looks to be in his 20's though he's probably in his 30's, walks with a slight limp from a car accident he was in a few years back."

That explained Aegir went quiet for a moment. "Of course you can remain how you are. Your 'rents will probably cool out after a year or so, probably not before the end of the semester though. Things still being fresh in their minds and all.

"Let me guess, sending the pics to a boy? If that's all you're guilty of then no big deal there."