He simply stares at me with so much emotion that my knees get weak.
But I hold on.
Because I want to see him one last time, study him one last time.
I focus on his wicked jaw and sharp cheekbones. I focus on his tight broad shoulders. The sleek biceps, his muscular, powerful thighs.
The body built to be the best.
The Blond Arrow. Just Arrow.
MyArrow.
I reach my hand out and comb his sun-struck hair back for the last time. I lean in with my lips and kiss his cheek before whispering, “Because I believe in you too.”
And then, I spin around and I run.
I run, clutching the envelope to my chest as tears stream down my face. As my heart pounds and pounds in my chest and my legs, making me run faster than ever.
I run even when I hear him call out my name. Not once but twice.
In fact, I run harder.
I don’t wanna hear whatever he has to say to me because I know it won’t be what I want to hear: that he’ll stay.
So I keep going.
I scale the fence that I’ve done a thousand times before. I run through the grounds and race back to the dorm building and turn the knob again like I’ve done a thousand times before.
But when I get in, everything is different.
I haven’t seen this before, everything bright and loud, instead of dark and silent. Crowded hallway instead of a sleepy, empty one.
Up ahead there are girls, a large group of them.
All in their night clothes, their hair rumpled, faces turned away from me because they’re all looking at something.
A commotion of some kind.
There are voices and screaming and murmurs and gasps.
It takes me a moment to figure out that it’s Callie’s sweet high voice. “Can you just put that down? Is that really necessary?”
“Yeah, why are you being such a fucking bitch?” That’s Poe in her husky troublemaking voice.
“She deserves some goddamn privacy,” snaps Wyn, the soft and quiet one.
Crazily I think that it’s weird how I can tell all of them apart by just their voices. It’s a testament to the fact that I love them so much and I should go to them because they’re in trouble.
I would’ve too, if not for the nasal voice that raises itself above all else. The one that I hear in trigonometry class every week and in our one-on-one sessions.
Mrs. Miller.
“I’m being a bitch, Poe, because a student is missing. And if a student is missing, Wyn, then she has no privacy and yes, Callie, this is absolutely necessary. Especially when we’ve just found boxes and boxes of letters addressed to whom I can only deduce is the principal’s son. Who also happens to be the coach. And I know that you three definitely had something to do with her disappearance. Which means you’ll all be getting detention along with her. The girl cops are looking for right now, Salem Salinger.”
My name goes off in the corridor like a bomb. That grenade in the song that I’ve been humming for the past two days.
Maybe it should freeze me in my spot. Maybe it should chill me to my bones and make me pass out with shock.
