Chapter 4: Valentine’s Day is for Girls


“Oh, it’s so cute!” a familiar voice squealed.


As this very unwelcome sound penetrated her brain, Miranda groaned 
and rolled over. In her eighteen years of life, Miranda Inamorata 
had come to the conclusion that there are three awful ways to wake 
up. One was to the song, whose name escaped her at the moment, which 
started, “Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the morning.” 
The second was to be awakened to her old alarm clock that sounded 
like a plane crashing. And the third was her roommate’s cheerful 
squeal.


“And it even has a pink ribbon,” the voice chatted on.


“Ugh,” Miranda uttered and she forced herself upright. “What time 
is it?” she muttered quietly as she tried to make her eyes focus.


“Oh, you’re up.” Funny how her roommate Sierra was never as excited 
about interacting with Miranda as she seemed to be about everything 
else. The usually perky redhead pointed to the room wall clock and then 
picked up her backpack. “I’m leaving for class. Lock the room when 
you leave,” she shared and with that, she walked out the door.


Shrugging her shoulders, Miranda looked at the one wall clock in the 
room. “Oh, no,” she whispered.


Ms. Inamorata’s reaction wasn’t because it was 7:30am and she had an 
8:15am class. It wasn’t because it was Monday, which was her busiest 
day of the week. The expression of dismay was because she had also 
glanced at the calendar next to the clock and realized what the day 
was. 

It was Monday, February fourteenth. Valentine’s Day. 


The date was almost enough to drive her back into bed for the rest of 
the day, but hiding in her room wouldn’t make the day go away. She 
sighed as she slowly got out of bed. “Let’s hope that Dr. Crushingham 
leaves me alone today. His plans, on top of everything else, is the 
last thing I need.”

******

Meanwhile, across campus, Andrew Champion was startled by a knock on 
his door. Opening it, he found Tyler and James on other side. “You 
ready to go? Breakfast awaits,” Tyler said.


“O…kay,” Andrew said slowly, “but why are you both here? We usually 
just meet at the dining hall for breakfast.”


“We decided that you’d need bodyguards today, so we figured we’d just 
show up at your door,” James shared.


Andrew shook his head. While the idea of Tyler serving as anyone 
bodyguard, especially since he was actually wearing a bow-tie that 
morning, was amusing, James would inspire the kind of fear a bodyguard 
would need to. Into extreme sports, the 6’2” brown haired young man was 
buff and scarred. Add to this his preference for metal music and leather 
jackets and he just looked like a dangerous bouncer. Few people actually 
knew that James was really a soft touch and one of the nicest people 
you’d ever meet. Andrew guessed that the idea to “guard him” was Tyler’s 
and James was just dragged along for the ride; Tyler was very good at 
guilt and James bent over backwards to help friends.


“Why would I need protection? We did win our last water polo game, sure, 
but the fans aren’t that rabid,” Andrew asked.


“Dude, have you looked at a calendar? Don’t you know what today is?” 
Tyler exclaimed.


“Looked at a calendar? What do you-“ Andrew began to ask…


Only to be cut off by James. “It’s Valentine’s Day, Champion.”


“Exactly,” Tyler confirmed as he lightly punched Andrew in the shoulder. 
“And someone is going to have to beat the rabid girls off of you so that 
you can get to class. So, are you ready, Mr. Dreamboat? All of us have 
eight-fifthteens this morning. Chop, chop!”


As he was being dragged out the door, Andrew’s mind began to settle on 
the date. Amazingly enough, Miranda came to mind…followed closely by Dr. 
Crushingham. Hopefully the professor would leave them alone today. Having 
romance pushed down a girl’s throat was really not a way to win her over. 
Andrew decided not to ask himself why or when it had occurred to him to 
try to win Miranda over.

*******

At about ten that morning, Suzette was in her room working on her Physics 
lab write-up. “I hate science,” the young woman moaned as she tried to 
figure out how to phrase a sentence about her findings. It was odd that 
she was working on the lab so early, but if she was honest with herself, 
she’d admit she was doing schoolwork to avoid something else. ‘Maybe 
giving one to Mira was a bad idea. But it would have been bad to leave 
her without one, too. I mean, the whole hall would notice, or Sierra 
would say something, and then…Ugh! I hate second guessing myself.’


As Suzette tried to return her attention to her half finished lab write-up, 
there was a knock at her door. Puzzled at who it could be, as most of her 
residents were in class now, she stared at the door for a second before 
responding to the knock. “Come in,” she said.


The door opened and Miranda stuck her head in. “Suzette, do you have a minute?” 
her friend asked.


Suzette sighed internally. ‘Welcome to the fallout,’ she thought to herself. 
“Sure,” she answered. “What’s up?”


The young woman quietly entered the room, holding a little heart-shaped basket 
with a pick ribbon. “I just….I just wanted to say thank you. As you know, 
Valentine’s Day isn’t the easiest day for me.”


Suzette nodded, although internally, her eyes rolled at the understatement. 
It was during one of their conversations in October that Miranda had divulged 
her angst with Valentine’s Day. It would have been one thing if Miranda’s 
issues with the day stemmed from not having a significant other, which was 
true of a lot of people, including Suzette herself. Miranda’s issues, however, 
had more to do with how she ended up in her aunt’s care and why she never 
talked about or showed pictures of her parents. One cute V-day basket could 
do a lot more damage to Miranda than to anyone else on the hall. And Suzette 
knew it.


“Wow,” the object of Suzette’s thoughts said quietly as she gazed across the 
room, “Put a little effort into these things, didn’t you?”


Suzette followed her gaze to the wreckage that was the other side of her 
room. Pieces of pink and red ribbon were scattered all over the floor. Empty 
candy bags sat in a heap. Extra baskets were overturned. In other words, 
a complete mess. Suzette shrugged; she’d clean it up later. “I guess.”


Miranda shook her head and sat down on the edge of Suzette’s bed. “And, 
if you add to that the angst that you probably put yourself through in 
trying to decide whether or not to give me one, I’d say you put in a 
lot of effort.”


“I did not angst about whether or not to give you one!” Suzette denied.


Her perceptive friend just raised her eyebrow.


“Okay, okay. I did angst about it,” Suzette admitted. “So…it was a good thing?”


“Mmm-hmm,” her friend confirmed. “This is the first valentine I’ve received 
since I was six. It was…nice. Made facing the day a little easier,” Miranda 
finished as she looked up from the basket to make eye contact with her friend.


If Suzette was worried that Miranda was just saying thank you because she had 
good manners, the look on her face changed all that. Sure, she wasn’t smiling 
in the conventional sense - Suzette didn’t think Miranda ever smiled in the 
conventional sense - but her eyes sparkled and she looked less burdened than 
normal. If that little basket did so much, Suzette thought to herself, she 
would not complain about the fifty dollars the whole V-day project set her back. 
“You’re welcome, Mira.”


Her friend sighed, “Now if Dr. Crushingham can leave me and Mr. Champion alone 
for a day, this would be a very good Valentine’s Day.”


Suzette snorted, “Leave you alone? His pet couple on the most romantic day of 
the year? Fat chance of that!”


“That’s what I’m afraid of,” her friend said as she smoothed out a non-existent 
wrinkle in her grey skirt. “That’s why I’m hiding from him.”


“And how’s that working out for you?” Suzette asked with a laugh, relieved that 
her friend was going to be okay.


Miranda put her head in her hands. “Don’t ask.”

*******

High noon and it might as well have been feeding season, as far as Tyler 
was concerned. Since walking to breakfast that morning, he and James had 
had to hold back at least forty girls so that Andrew could get to classes. 
It was crazy; it was almost like there was a full moon out or something.


“You weren’t kidding about Champion needing back up,” James said as he 
held back six girls so that Andrew could duck into the bathroom.


Tyler nodded at his companion, careful to appear as if he expected this 
kind of reaction from the female half of the student population. The 
truth was, he was actually kidding about Drew needing to be protecting. 
He had no idea he and James would actually have to run interference for 
Andrew. The sad thing was, without the two of them around, Drew wouldn’t 
even have made it to breakfast! On top of that, Drew needed someone to 
carry all of the Valentine’s Day “tokens” that he couldn’t bring himself 
to refuse. Only halfway through the day and Drew had been given six boxes 
of chocolates, two plates of homemade brownies, one pound cake, twenty 
cards, six baskets of Hershey Kisses, and an autographed picture. The last 
one had even thrown Andrew; he had stared at the picture in shock for a 
few minutes, obviously struggling to come up with something appropriate 
to say. The boy didn’t realize his own appeal.


“Are they gone yet?” Andrew’s voice whispered from the behind the door 
to the men’s room.


“Yeah. Let’s get you to chemistry,” Tyler confirmed as his friend emerged 
from the restroom.


The three young men walked in silence for a few minutes before Andrew 
said, “I feel like such a coward,”


“Not coward, cautious,” James corrected. “Women aren’t some kind of extreme 
sport. They are much more dangerous.”


Tyler smiled at the insightful comment, “Just don’t let any women hear 
you say that.”


“Are you kidding? Do I look crazy?!” James exclaimed as he shuttered. 
“Seriously, Champion, how do you it? I mean, it’s flattering…in a stalker, 
restraining order kinda way, but flattering. You definitely have the 
attention of the ladies.”


The blond young man blushed. “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t know?”


At that Tyler had to laugh. He believed that Andrew really had no clue about 
his appeal, which, of course, was also a part of his appeal. “Bree was so right 
about you.”


His friend sighed. “I should have never introduced you to my sister. She’s 
enough to handle without you encouraging her.”


“Look! There he is!” a female voice shouted before James and Tyler could 
make a comment.


“Let’s move,” Tyler said before the three sophomores started sprinting down 
the hall to the safety of the Chem lab.

*******


Three in the afternoon and he was totally wiped out. What was it about 
Valentine’s Day that made so many women think that they could just throw 
themselves at him? “I thought Hallmark marketed guilt to men to make them 
spend a fortune on women during this holiday,” Andrew muttered under his 
breath as he slowly edged to the back of the classroom. He was hoping to 
slip out of the door in the back and hopes that no one saw him. Tyler and 
James had classes across campus now and, besides, they had run enough 
interference for him for one day.


The only upswing about the entire day is that Dr. Crushingham didn’t appear 
with a video camera. The down side of that is that he didn’t get to see Miranda 
either. Not that he’d know what to say if he did see her. That first meeting 
with the jeering crowd was surreal, and even then he didn’t have much to say. 
But he’d worry about that later.


Sticking his head into the hallway, he saw that it was deserted. Thanking 
every “power that be” that he could think of, he slipped out into the hall 
and quietly walked toward the stairs. So focused on the path to the stairs, 
he didn’t see that he wasn’t completely alone in the hall. For that reason, 
the soft, “Good afternoon, Mr. Champion,” caused him to jump.


“Oh, Miranda…I mean, Ms. Inamorata. You startled me.”


“Rough day?” the young woman asked, with what appeared to be a smirk on 
her face.


“What do you mean?” Andrew asked as he tried to nonchalantly put his hands 
in his back pockets.


At this Miranda snorted as she pushed her black hair out of her face. 
“Please. I may not be the most popular girl in my dorm, but I still 
live there. I’ve heard the conversations. You were one of the three 
targets today.”


“Targets?” Andrew asked


Miranda nodded, “Targets for affection. The other two were Dr. Splen, the 
young philosophy professor that looks like Tom Cruise, and Haywood Thorton, 
the English T.A. that sounds like Prince William.” The young woman’s eyes 
sparkled as her mouth lifted slightly. “It would probably have been pretty 
amusing to watch…assuming one wasn’t the target.”


Andrew sighed. “Okay, it wasn’t the easiest day in the world. But at least 
it is almost over-“


“And Dr. Crushingham hasn’t tracked us down, yet” Miranda added.


“Exactly,” Andrew said. Looking around at the still empty hall, the young 
man shrugged nervously. “Maybe I should go before another girl ‘locates the 
target,’” he said.


Miranda nodded. “Before you do, though. Think fast,” she said as she tossed 
him something.


Andrew caught it and looked down at what he held in his hand. A beautiful 
pink ribbon was tied around a roll of… “Rolaids?”


Miranda shrugged, “I figured with all the candy that’s been dumped on you, 
you’d need something to help settle your stomach. Happy Valentine’s Day.”


Andrew blinked as he looked up at the black-haired young woman. “Thank you…
but I didn’t get you anything,” Andrew admitted. Inside he was kicking 
himself. The most romantic day of the year and he didn’t even think about 
trying to get anything to Ms. Inamorata.


“Please, you didn’t have to,” Miranda insisted. “Besides, this is a trumped 
up holiday for Hallmark and you had enough to do ducking other members of 
the fairer sex today.” She looked him in the eye for a few minutes. Andrew 
wasn’t sure what she saw, but, after a few minutes, she added, “Besides, 
in some cultures, men don’t give anything for Valentine’s Day. They 
demonstrate their affections in other ways at other times.” With that 
she nodded and began to walk away.


Andrew stood looking after her for a few minutes. ‘They demonstrate their 
affections in other ways at other times…is she giving me a way to redeem 
myself?’ the water polo captain asked himself. Shaking his head, he watched 
her knee length grey skirt sway as she pulled her grey sweater tighter 
around her shoulders. ‘And does she own anything that isn’t black or grey?’


- to be continued -