I pull out my phone. There’s nothing on the screen except the date in the top corner, and I do the math I’ve been avoiding all week. Ten days until the anniversary I spend the rest of the year having nightmares about. Seven days until I stand in front of a headstone and feel the cold that settled into my bones when I was a kid and never left.
I wear gloves to protect myself from that cold, yet it never goes away.
This year will be worse.
I know in my gut it’ll be worse.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AERON
June isn’t in Visual Studies today, and I can’t pretend I’m not insanely relieved.
She’s more aloof and actually giving me some space, but it’s not because she cares about how she treated me. She just gets like this every year around October. I don’t have the full story about the traumatic thing that happened to her because I was staying with Dad at the time. Our parents were starting to go through the divorce and had separated, and I lived with Dad for about a year. Once the divorce got finalized, he ghosted me and June, so neither of us have seen him in years (bastard).
Anyway, I was with Dad and he said something bad had happened with Dorien and June. And some other kid. I don’t know the details about how it happened, only that it did. Nobody talks about it, so I leave it in the past.
The way June and Dorien act this time of year suggests neither of them have left it in the past.
I have a heart, so I feel for my sister. But whatever happened when she was eight doesn’t give her the right to lose her mind on me in the basement. Dorien said it best. I’m an adult. I can make my own decisions. June tried pot when she wasfourteen. I know because I found the pipe in her desk drawer when I was thirteen,looking for batteries. She doesn’t get to stand on a moral high ground she burned down years ago.
I push her out of my head and turn my focus to Cinna.
She’s four seats ahead, angled just enough that I can see her profile. Her hair is different today. She has a loose, imperfect bun with curls spilling down the back of her neck. The projector light traces the line of her jaw, the curve of her ear, and stops at her collarbone where her sweater begins. Everything above the sweater is illuminated. Everything below…
I blush from thinking about how I know what she looks like nude, then I open my sketchbook.
It’s been over a week since the party. Over a week since we… well, everything. I haven’t talked to her. I thought about asking June for Cinna’s number, but that would mean explaining why, and June would turn it into a federal investigation. I thought about unlocking June’s phone because of course her passcode is Mom’s birthday, but stealing a number felt desperate. So I did what Dorien would do. I acted chill, like I hadn’t spent every night replaying the feel of her body against mine.
(I am not chill. I am falling apart.)
But today I’m asking her out. Enough time has passed, and I’m sure she’ll say yes because what we shared wasn’t just sex. She held my hand. She wore my hoodie. She let me see her cry. That was a real connection between us.
I sketch the cascade of curls. The soft graphite drags across the page and I build the shadow under each curl with short, layered strokes. Morrison is still talking. I don’t hear a single word for the rest of class. I’m lost in Cinna.
Chairs scrape, and I blink, just realizing the class has ended. Cinna is already shoving her laptop into her oversized bag and heading for the door. I snap my sketchbook closed and grab my stuff quickly.
She’s crazy fast today, rushing through the hallway and reaching the building exit before I can catch up. Outside, the air is cool and the sky flat. Cinna is ten paces ahead, so I jog to close the gap.
“Hey.”
She doesn’t stop.
I jog harder. “Hey. Cinna.”
She turns. For a half second her face comes close to alarm before she relaxes it. Her eyes focus somewhere past my left shoulder. “Uh, hey. What’s up?”
I thought I wouldn’t be nervous, but now my stomach is twisting in a way that feels like I’ll puke. “H-how have you been?”
(Chill. Be chill.)
She shrugs and angles away from me, clutching her bag against her side. “Fine.” I move my head to try to catch her gaze, but she won’t look at me directly.
I fumble in my jeans pocket and pull out a small Altoids tin. Inside, resting on bare metal, is a single dried violet. I plucked it from one of Mom’s potted plants. The petals had this watercolor bleed of purple into blue, like someone painted them wet-on-wet, and I thought of Cinna immediately because she keeps dried flowers. I’ve been pressing it between textbook pages to make it dry, checking on it carefully every night.
I hold it out without a word because my throat has closed. Luckily, my hand isn’t shaking.
She looks down at it, and a surprised softness flickers across her face, the start of a small smile. She takes the flower and turns it between her thumb and forefinger. The purple and blue catch the overcast light.
