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I hadn't known her long enough to feel anything like loss.

Amber stepped closer to Julie. Her gaze was hostile.

“Just because you're whoring around and now everyone's calling you a saint doesn't mean you can do whatever you want.”

Julie's expression hardly changed. It was unreadable, as usual.

She also took a step toward Amber.

“Stop me,” she murmured so coolly that goosebumps spread across my forearms. “I'd be very interested to see which element is stronger.” She fixed Amber with her gaze. “Earth? Or ice.”

Kelly yanked Amber back with a look of horror on her face, while Vivienna's cheeks drained of color. Amber's eyes, on the other hand, narrowed to slits.

“We should go and report to the Councils that she's hanging out with the Ruisangor girl!” Amber growled, a black strand of hair falling from her almost perfectly smooth hairstyle into her face.

“Amber, Vi. We should go,” Kelly urged, now eyeing me as if I were her worst nightmare, which was why I smiled devilishly at her to add insult to injury.

She quickly looked away, pulling Amber with her, past us.

“We're not done yet!” Vivienna muttered, staring at Julie as the shadow on her doll-like face grew deeper and deeper.

Then she too hurried past us.

It was a miracle that no one had flown down the hallway yet. If I were Julie, I wouldn't have just let that comment slide.

Longing

Gustavo Santaolalla

Julie just sighed, turned back around, and kept walking, following the bitches who were also taking economics with us, but allowing enough distance to grow between us and them.

“Julie?” I asked carefully, because I didn’t know how to behave around her. She seemed tough, but I knew what people like that were like on the inside. “I hope you know that Vivienna and Amber are such bitches because they never learned how to deal with their own problems.”

Julie laughed quietly, and it sounded sarcastic.

“Amber is like that because she has mommy issues. And Vivienna is like that because it's her way of repressing things.”

I stared down the hallway in front of us, trying to understand how someone could become like Olivia had become, and whether there was any justification for it. But I kept coming back to the same conclusion:

We decided how we dealt with the trauma of our past, what things we allowed to eat away at us from the inside, and whether we wanted to be strong enough to change, even if that meant being confronted with reality over and over again and perhaps never fully healing. It was about the chance. About the attempt. And not about the result.

“Your environment is so toxic,” I confessed, trying to suppress how much the realization I had just had was scratching at my facade. “Damn it, you have to get away from there. Far away. It’s best if you leave your family and move to campus entirely.”

“No chance,” came the curt reply, without Julie looking at me.

“What about the baby?” I tried to find words that would convey my concern without offending her. “I mean... Do you want it to grow up there?”

“I've thought about giving it away.” Something inside me tightened uncomfortably. A knot. “So that they'll never find out where I took it.”

I stared at her, trying to find justifications for her planned behavior as we sidestepped a group of rowdy basketball players who were loudly discussing the university elections and the next game.

I had grown up on the streets. Alone. What if the same thing happened to the baby? The thought alone stabbed me in the heart.

It wasn't my place to judge, because Julie's situation was undoubtedly complicated. But there had to be other ways, right?

“Did I say something wrong?”

Julie looked at me from the side, as if I were a mystery to her and not the other way around.