The Jinx by Jennifer Sturman

and little round glasses?”
    â€œWho? Oh—you mean Jamie. He wasn’t my boyfriend. He just lived in our dorm room. Because he hated his roommates. You know how that is.” Jamie would invariably sit on one side of me while Luisa sat on the other, each silently rolling their eyes at me when I passed them notes commenting on something Jonathan had said, or what he was wearing that day, or any of the other trivialities that are so important when you have a massive, hopeless crush on somebody who doesn’t know you exist.
    â€œYou’re kidding. I’ll have to tell Clark. He’ll kick himself, especially now that he’s married and has three kids.”
    â€œAnd just think, they could have been mine.” Jonathan chuckled. Little did he know how much time I’d spent dreaming of him and our three kids.
    â€œSo, the letters,” I said, once again having to remind myself why I was there.
    â€œYes, the letters,” he repeated. He used a key to open a desk drawer and pulled out a stack of folded papers held together by a rubber band. “Take a look,” he invited, handing the stack across the desk.
    â€œWhat about fingerprints?” I asked.
    â€œSo many people have handled these—Sara, Edie, me—I doubt that there will be any useful prints. And I suspect that whoever wrote these was pretty careful. They could have been typed on any computer and printed on any standard laser printer.”
    I freed the folded pages from the rubber band and opened the one on top, scanning it quickly. Jonathan was right—it was entirely typewritten on regulation letter-size paper.
    Darling Sara,
    I saw you today, at a distance, your raven hair bent over your studies, a pen grasped in your graceful hand, and my heart overflowed. I wanted to rush to your side and take you in my arms.
    I see you and hear the words of the poet:
    â€œShe walks in beauty like the night
    Of cloudless climes and starry skies”
    You are my night, you are my starry skies. But how can I confess my forbidden love? I cannot. One day, perhaps, but not today.
    I didn’t blame whoever had written it for leaving it unsigned—it was awful.
    â€œYeesh,” I said. “Are they all like this?”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œNauseating?”
    â€œYou think it’s nauseating?”
    â€œWell…” I cast about, trying to find a more appropriate word, but came up empty. “Yes. Nauseating. So gushy and gross.”
    â€œWhich one are you looking at?” he asked me.
    I handed it to him, and he skimmed it. “Oh. I thought this one was sweet. Romantic, with the Keats and everything.”
    â€œAre you sure it’s not Byron?”
    He looked at me for a moment, blankly, and then shrugged and grinned. “I was just an econ major—what do I know? I barely squeaked by in English 10.”
    â€œYou could be right,” I said. “It could be Keats.” But I was secretly tempted to get down his Norton Anthology and prove it wasn’t. That’s what Ali MacGraw probably would have done.
    â€œAnyhow,” he continued, “the Dean of Students asked me to coordinate the investigation with the police, and I’m planning on showing these to them. I’m going to make sure they leave no stone unturned. But I doubt that the notes are related to the attack.”
    â€œWhy not?” I asked.
    â€œThey’re love letters. Whoever wrote them clearly idolizes Sara.”
    â€œYes, but he’s also been totally invading her privacy. Edie said Sara found one on her bed.”
    â€œBut they’re not violent.”
    â€œThey aren’t on the face of it. But the fact that they exist, and that they keep showing up in personal places, is pretty scary. It’s sort of like stalking, and stalking tends to end in violence.” At least, it always did on Lifetime Television for Women, which was where I’d gathered what little