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walked in and stood beside her. His gaze was unmistakably all on her.  She fidgeted with the strap on her backpack.
    Don't get distracted. Good-looking guys think that they can melt a girl's heart just by throwing her a little attention. You've been burned before.
    Her thoughts brought flashbacks of her final year at Global Nation University. She had just finished tutoring Mikael, her infatuation at the time, for their final exam. During the tutoring session, he surprised her by asking her out for dinner. Of course when she told Harry about her big date, he had made a sarcastic remark saying that Mikael was a dumb shmuck only out for one thing. She remembered telling Harry to butt out of her love life in not so many words. Harry couldn’t understand her then and certainly didn’t understand her now. Unfortunately, the date ended up being a disaster just as Harry had predicted. Mikael did only want one thing.
    After a breathtaking kiss and some fondling under her shirt, Mikael whispered in her ear, “Hey, could you write my final term paper after this?”
    And that was the end of her twenty-minute relationship with hunky Mikael.
    Kerim chuckled quietly to himself, jolting Cristal back to the present.
    She raised an eyebrow and shot him a glare.
    “What’s so funny?”
    He looked down at his boots, obviously struggling to keep from breaking into uncontrollable laughter.
    “Nothing. I was just thinking of a girl I once knew,” he managed to choke out between laughs.
    The elevator lurched to a stop, the doors sliding open. Cristal took the opportunity to exit first and keep her distance from him. Okay so maybe he wasn’t laughing at her. But it reminded her of how awful she felt when kids taunted and laughed at her in grade school. Even after all these years, she still felt awkward and different. No matter how sophisticated she had become, she knew she was still a geek through and through. She preferred a good book to a night out clubbing. She liked hacking into secure networks just for the fun of it. She never understood why girls her age enjoyed shopping and hanging out at the mall. All these things meant that she didn't have many girl friends to hang out with. This was who she was and no amount of de-nerdifying her was going to change anything.
    Kerim followed Cristal a few steps behind as they walked down the dark hallway . She could hear his soft chuckles and the crackle of old incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling, the only other sound accompanying their footsteps. Even though he irritated her, she felt a sense of calm knowing he was there. He felt like someone familiar to her. And it didn’t hurt to have someone around because this place definitely gave her the creeps.
    Finally, they reached Gabriel ’s apartment door. She glanced up at Kerim briefly before knocking. He winked back at her.
    The door squeaked and she turned towards it . It opened a crack, before swinging wide open. An unshaven Gabriel, his dreadlocks tied up in a short ponytail, greeted her. He had his usual goofy grin on his face, but she could see that his dark brown eyes were reddened, probably from hours spent on the computer. Dressed in a worn grey bathrobe, T-shirt, and jogging pants, he looked like he must have been playing another “all-nighter.”
    Cristal opened her mouth to speak at the exact moment when Kerim, standing behind her, coughed loudly. Gabriel’s eyes widened, his smile quickly disintegrating into a grim line. He looked past her shoulder towards Kerim.
    “Who the hell are you?” he demanded. He was always protective of her.  He too had lost his father a few years back.
    “Kerim Ilgaz,” Kerim replied calmly. “Harry recruited me to the Truth Seekers last week.”
    Gabriel narrowed his eyes . He didn’t seem so easily convinced. “Harry never told me about you. And he never said you’d be coming.”
    Cristal was stumped. Why didn’t Harry tell Gabriel about Kerim? He was always careful about who he