“I’m Anneliese Alonso,” she introduced herself to the class with a clear voice that was a whisper shy of confident. And with just three words, she had me captivated.
Well, maybe it took more than three words.
It was ten years ago when I first saw her. It was ten years ago when I first saw her face, to be exact. The girl who walked into my history classroom almost an hour late for class could not be the subject of the century-old sketch I saw in one of the historical houses my father and I visited in my youth.
She might as well have been, though.
They have the same eyes, the same nose, the same smile, but I would expect the woman in the sketch to have longer hair. Then again, maybe they just resemble each other. It’s not like I saw the woman in sketch again, that is, if you don’t count my dreams. She made an impression on me when I saw her then and I haven’t been able to forget her since. But the human brain is an interesting thing. Over the ten years that have passed since I last saw her, my fantasies could have easily altered her image to make her more like the girls I encounter in my waking life.
“...University rules doesn’t tolerate tardiness,” the sharpness in our teacher’s tone snaps me out of my reverie. Damn. To get reprimanded on your first day. That must suck. I glance at her and see her smiling benignly while looking apologetic. A look of satisfaction passes our teacher’s face and he proceeds. A sparkle in her eyes tells me she noticed the grammatical error, but she’s already in trouble and knows when not to push her luck.
She quietly takes notes as the excitement owed to her late arrival slowly dies down.
I can’t concentrate on the lesson. It bored me the moment I found out it was an introduction to history. My father is a historian, after all. So, I busy myself with other things, pushing the lecture to the background buzz.
Almost automatically, I sink into my fantasies about the girl in the sketch, only this time, she had shorter hair and a baby pink backpack.
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