Leo Carter's alarm clock shrieked its cacophonous tune, a synthesizer of horns and whiny electronic beeping that sounded like an angry wasp. He groaned, swatting the snooze button with a practiced motion before rubbing his face. Morning sunlight streamed through the cracked blinds, draping golden slashes across his cluttered desk. On it, within half-filled cups of coffee and beneath a mountain of scribbled upon notes lay Julius Caesar written by William Shakespeare, wellspring of fascination and frustration from the past week.
The irony was not lost on Leo. It was a 21st-century English major reading about the fall of a man who once ruled the known world, only to become the subject of high school literature classes.
He ruffled his dirty hair, recalling his own tragic tale: an entire semester wading through the idioms of Elizabethan English for the sole reward of eye-rolls from his friends when he quoted Brutus's "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more." Leo's apartment was a mad jumble of things he had no use for but could not get rid of: old concert tickets, faded posters of punk bands, and piles of unread books that doubled as decoration. He stretched, the dull ache of sleep leaving him as he shifted to the mundane reality of the day.
The college's English Lit class was at 10 a.m. This would leave just enough time for a microwave breakfast burrito and half his coffee on the way out.
As he passed the cracked mirror propped by the door, Leo gave his reflection a twisted grin. "You got this, Caesar," he whispered, playing the tragic hero from the play as he pulled his old backpack over his shoulder. A chuckle slipped out as he fished in his pocket for his keys, but it was a nervous chuckle, the kind when you didn't know what was waiting for you. The campus was throbbing with that familiar murmur of people talking and moving to get somewhere. Leo pushed through huddles of students, all busy in their own universes. He saw Mara, of his Writing in the Digital Age class, balancing a stack of notebooks while typing with one hand.
She was a history major, always ready with an opinion that could take a casual conversation into debate. Leo knew she would have a lot to say regarding today's lesson on the Ides of March. His gut told him the discussion might hit a little differently this morning.
He nodded practiced, distracted, and said with a voice that was no more than a murmur, "Hey," and finally slid into the room, an old converted lecture hall with tall windows and graffiti carved into the wooden desks — to be sure, testaments to the many years of students who'd come before him. He chose a seat near the middle, one where he could daydream and occasionally nod in agreement without the professor's beady eyes catching him in the act.
"Alright, settle down," came the voice of Professor Hargrove, a wiry man with a permanent crease between his brows. He was as old as the university itself, a relic of an era when academia was revered, and his passion for Shakespeare was almost contagious. Almost. "Today, we're going to talk about the character of Caesar," Hargrove began, tugging his glasses up and squinting at the class with a look of someone who probably wrote a dissertation on the guy. Leo shifted in his chair, trying to concentrate. Still a little fresh in his head were the images of the bleary-eyed smile and what it had meant to say.
He glanced down at his book, laid open on a page which described the political intrigues and betrayals which had carved out Caesar's destiny.
Not even knowing, his eyes remained nailed on a page that gleamed faintly, all but invisibly. Subtlety enough to disallow it as a trick of the light, it lay there wedged between Brutus' plotting words and Caesar's last, fatal line: "Et tu, Brute?" The words seemed to be somehow shifting. They flickered in and out as if they were poised on the brink of revealing some hidden thing.
And then Leo blinked and shook his head, looking about the classroom. Nobody else was paying attention. The sunlight off the windows blinded him to a dull gold that caught his eye once more before Professor Hargrove's voice cut across the room, pushing them along. "Let's talk about power and ambition," the professor said, but Leo lost himself immediately, staring at a book clutched to his chest as the room drifted away from him.