I despised everything about her. From the violin cradled in her pale hands—a reminder that I hated music—to the way she never failed to notice my presence and smile at me each time. As if the world wasn’t an ugly place. As if she was genuinely thrilled to see me. And the way those huge green eyes of hers stared at me without a hint of pity or fear. I’d never seen that look beforeon anyone, at least not aimed at me. She was like a relentless pop-up ad, refusing to be closed. And that annoying greeting—
“Hello,” she said for the hundredth time.
You’d think she’d catch on, but nope.
Though she was probably around my age, she didn’t act like the kids from my school. That made her worse than any of them because her presence tugged at something inside my chest. It was new and not pleasurable—like an itch I couldn’t scratch, but deeper like it was eating at me from the inside.
My stepfather. The people from that shitty town. Humans in general. They were all ugly because kindness didn’t exist.
That was why I was watching her. I wanted to watch her until she revealed her layers to me. I usually needed less than a minute to make people show their real, horrible selves, but she never once did.
“What are you always doing up there?” the girl asked, coming up the stairs.
Why didn’t she leave? I wanted her gone. Why was she always trying to talk to me?
I stood and hid the miniaturized motherboard that I had optimized after removing it from my stepdad’s computer. It was either that or playing chess alone. Butterflies didn’t come in winter.
“You can talk to me, I—” She took another step closer.
“Dalia.” My stepfather, Patrice, didn’t want me close to her. She was the daughter of his boss, and I wasme. “Your father is waiting for you in the car.”
“Thank you, Sir,” she said, always so polite.
I snorted. Then she turned to me and smiled again like it was all she knew how to do. She took a bag of candy out of her bag and offered it to me.
“This is for you. They remind me of you.”
I froze, my muscles stiffening like I was caged in my own body. I had to force myself to keep my expression blank, trapping my thoughts along with my ability to pretend to be normal. Needless to say, I didn’t take the candies, so she placed them on the stairs.
“I’ll see you next Wednesday?” Her cheeks turned red, and she lowered her voice, “I hope you’ll watch me again.”
After she left, I snatched the candies, studying the bag to guess what was inside. On this day at school, kids exchanged candies with their friends. I tore open the bag, but they were all black licorice.
No one likes licorice.
It was the one candy everyone avoided like the plague.Like me.It was ridiculous. My mother came into my field of vision, and I dropped the candies. I crushed them under my foot, some scattering on the hardwood floors. But nothing. She ignored me again.
Before I could even get to the stairs that next Wednesday, Dalia left me a note asking to be friends.
I ripped it apart.
But on the next one, she purposely didn’t close the door of the music room so I’d hear her play from the stairs for the first time.
The melody of her instrument hit me like a stab in the heart.
And at that moment, I loathed her even more for a whole new reason.
14 years old
It’d be the last time I’d come to Mrs. Delombre’s manor.
The rain poured relentlessly, leaving my loafers dirty from stepping in puddles. I clutched the Cigno Nero tightly against my school uniform and glanced back at my father, still engrossed in a heated contract dispute over the phone in our car. He was always angry. We were twenty minutes past the scheduled end of the funeral gathering because he couldn’t get out of the office sooner.
The doorbell had been removed years ago, so I tapped my knuckles against the door with a single knock. A veil of silence enveloped me, and my heart quickened its rhythm.
Would he be there?
I grasped the doorknob, and the door opened with a creaking sound.
