my dress, straightening it. The dirt stains felt unreal, almost as if the night before had been a dream. As if the night had happened to someone else.
“No, Violet can take me.” I wanted him to argue, to insist. I wanted to feel from him what I had felt the night before—acceptance—and I wanted to see the reflection of my feelings in his eyes.
I had loved him ever since that night in the snow. But with space between our bodies, I felt rejected, small. Too young for this man.
He stood, but his eyes never left me. I could feel the weight of them. A thickness grew between us, a silence that seemed hard to penetrate.
He cleared his throat. “You have something of mine.”
My eyes snapped to his.
“Bring it back to me, Scarlett.”
I nodded, feeling the heat of my cheeks sting against the cold. He wanted the damn jacket—the leather jacket he had given to me that night out in the snow.
He pointed toward the door. “Time to go.”
The words were there, my lips parted and my mouth ready to shout them, but all I had been able to do was move with him, my hands balled into fists, the ultimate letdown as deafening as my own screeching thoughts. Or was it my emotions?
“Psst. Hey.” The guy next to me touched my arm with his pencil, bringing me back to the present with a jolt, like hitting your funny bone—it’s really not all that hilarious. “The teacher is talking to you.”
“Quelle?” I screwed my eyes up at him.
“I don’t know what that means. If it means ‘what?’ then—” he nodded to the front of the class “—Mr. Persons is trying to talk to you.”
“Oh,” I swallowed down the current of anger and hurt that had formed a ball in my throat, realizing that I had spoken French to the guy next to me. I had asked him “what?” I looked at the teacher. “Oui? I mean, yes?”
Mr. Persons shook his head and pointed to my hand. “Your pencil, Ms. Poésy. You seem to be angry with it.”
I looked at my pencil. It was suspended in midair, about to tap the desk again.
“You were beating the pencil against your desk,” the guy next to me whispered from the side of his mouth, rather unnecessarily.
Mr. Persons sighed. “Refrain from any more pencil abuse, Ms. Poésy. We must remember that all pencils were once glorious trees. That one has suffered enough, hasn’t it? Now…”
Not wanting to be singled out again, I set the pencil on the desk, sighing. In a matter of seconds, I had tuned him out again and was ready to start the memory over once more. This time, instead of obsessing over the ending, I would fall into the blissful parts of our time together.
Turning my face toward the window, I caught the first droplets of rain as they made their descent, and as they fell, I acknowledged the truth of the matter.
We had been in this place before, him and I. Now we were back again. Perhaps I had never left. Or perhaps I had but had somehow stumbled upon a similar situation in the thickness of the fog. Last night. The crux of the situation had presented itself as this: Brando Fausti had once again offered me a cage disguised as a golden escape.
“Scarlett! Scarlett!”
I turned to find Violet running toward me. I was at my locker, packing up for the day. Her eyes were focused on me, her lips set into a thin line, her hands waving when they were not shoving people out of her way. A few times she became lost in the crowd, only her voluminous mane of hair visible through the rush.
I quickly swapped out my books—the ones to leave, the ones to take home—and then locked up. In more ways than one.
On the ride to school that morning, Violet had been uncharacteristically quiet. I could feel the pressure in the car building until I thought she was going to combust.
Violet had tried many tacks with me over the years, from outright asking to tickling me until I called cease!, and now her eagerness had reached a point where she thought her mighty silence would drive my measly silence away and all of my tragic secrets would come rushing out.
So I had done her a favor. Or flavor, as she sometimes called it.
“We spent some time together, Violet,” I had said on a sigh. “It was nice spending time with one of Elliott’s friends.