~ Scared Child ~
I lay awake well into the night, worrying about what would happen. If we did go back to North Haven, would the Cinders still come next winter? Would there even be a way for Luke and me to write or call each other? Headmaster must have a way of communicating with his brother, I realized. It didn’t help.
I rolled over and planted my face in my pillow to cry. It was so scary. Tomorrow I could lose him forever. I felt helpless—absolutely alone. The part of me that had died with his absence before was dying again. I couldn’t imagine it had hurt this bad before, though.
A half hour or so went by like this before I decided I needed Luke. As I climbed out of bed and took the Cinder suit from my dresser, I felt myself becoming the scared child he once was when he woke up from one of his nightmares. Once I’d changed, I shoved my con into the one very small pocket and turned my arms inward so I could hide in the shadows.
When I left the room and took the stairway down, I was amazed, as always, when I looked down and saw right through myself to the floor. Halfway to the dining hall I began to wonder how I would find Luke since I really had no idea where he slept. I racked my brain for anything he might have said as I approached the gym where we always met.
Maybe Connie could tell me. I stopped and turned into the first floor bathrooms, somewhere I’d never been before. They were just like the ones Luke had dragged me into, but without the urinals. There were no mirrors and no electric lighting, only a torch by the door and at the end of the compact room, so there were plenty of shadows to make you feel like someone could be hiding in there. I took my con out, the light and Connie’s familiar face making me feel better. “You’re up late, Kristine. What can I do for you?”
“Can you tell me how to get to the Cinder boys’ quarters?”
“Of course. Exit the bathroom and turn right. Then take the first door on your left. Go through the door in front of you and take the stairway up four floors. You will enter the male Cinders’ sleeping quarters.”
“Can you also tell me where to find Luke Knight?”
“Let me see.” Neon green lines began drawing a floor plan against a black background. Hallways crossed here and there and little rooms came off of each one. One of these began blinking and Connie said, “Once you’ve entered the fourth floor, he will be the twenty-second room on your left.”
“Thanks. Kristine Con, return.”
My heart pounded as I left the bathroom and took the first door on the left. I kept thinking a Cinder would catch me sneaking around their terrain and call all the others out of bed to jump me, even though I knew no one could see me.
On the other side of the door, I was relieved to find myself standing alone in a long hallway. The only doors were the one behind me and the one at the very end. So I followed Connie’s directions and exited through the other door.
I entered the base of a winding stairway lit by torches rising along the wall and I began to climb. As I stepped onto a small second floor landing, I wondered if the North Haven girls were sleeping right on the other side of it. Curiously, I inched the door open outwardly, only to be met by a solid wall. When I reached out to touch it, it shifted with the pressure of my hand. It was only fabric. I managed to pull it to the side enough to see the very dark girls’ living quarters on the other side. A dresser was pressed against the bottom of a tapestry, so that meant this secret door was right beside a girl named Liz’s bed, since the only tapestry I’d ever seen in there was behind her dresser. As I let it go and closed the door, I realized knowing about this could prove useful one day.
“This is it,” I said when I reached the fourth door. I took a deep breath before opening it just enough to get through, because this time I knew there was a very real possibility I would find someone on the other side. But the dim hallway, stretching farther than I could see, was empty.
After walking past three doors, the fourth one opened and I found myself face-to-face with a bulky guy about my height. Petrified, it took me a minute to remember he couldn’t see me. I moved out of the way a split second before he would have walked into me. He yawned and let out a great belch. Then we went in opposite directions.
I tried really hard to calm down. No one can see me...No one can see me... But it was hard.
When I reached the twenty-second door and opened it very slowly, praying I’d counted correctly, I realized it was too dark to see anything inside. My breath became short as I pulled my con out with shaky fingers. “Kristine Con, silent,” I whispered as it began to open. Its light revealed a tiny room with bunk beds against one side of the wall.
Shadows hid the identity of the guy lying in the one underneath, but the above bed was empty, so I spun around—terrified—looking for the missing Cinder. The fact that I couldn’t find him only scared me more, because it felt like he was always standing right behind me.
I licked my dry lips as I moved closer to the bed. If that was Luke, he would protect me. “Turn around,” I told my con. A big shirtless guy was lying on his stomach with his head facing away, so I couldn’t be sure it was him.
Then I saw the two posters on the wall beside the end of the beds. The picture of Luke with purple flames burning at the bottom hung under a poster of Titus. This had to be the right room. And if the empty bed belonged to Titus, then he wouldn’t be returning to it anytime soon.
As I gently sat down beside Luke, my eyes were drawn to something pink. One of his arms hung over the bed’s edge beside me, and the other was clutching a wad of something—a piece of pink clothing, it looked like. Instead of waking him up and talking to him about what weighed so heavy on my heart, I leaned over and reached for his far hand to take what was inside and have a better look. All of a sudden, I felt the rising fear—greater than the one I’d felt all the way to his room or the one of having to go home early—that it belonged to another girl.
As I tried to pull it out from under his hand, he let go of it and grabbed my arm, shoving it against my chest as he rolled over and grabbed my throat, pinning me against the end of his mattress. I struggled and failed to draw breath. I could feel myself crying, but it felt like someone else was doing it, like I was hardly alive.
Luke’s eyes mirrored the horror he saw in mine as he recognized me. He let go to pull me into his lap. “You should never sneak up on a Cinder,” he said.
“How can you sleep when we might never see each other again after tomorrow?” was all I could think to say, tears falling against my chest as I turned to stare at the pink thing lying on his bed...dancer’s leggings, perhaps...
“Because of this.” He leaned over to pick up the bit of pink and hand it to me.
In spite of how faded it was, I recognized my old v-neck shirt as I held it up in front of me. The white number seventeen on the front was cracked and the whole thing was probably way too small for me now, but there it was—the shirt I remembered going missing not long before my mother died.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked.
“I took it from you years ago. It was on the bathroom floor when I was over one night. It always looked so good on you...I couldn’t help myself. There’ve been times when that was the only thing keeping my head straight.”
“And you sleep with it?” Picturing him sleeping with my old shirt every night kind of gave me a warm, glowy feeling.
“On the really bad nights. I always picture myself running into you and things working out like this...you loving me back...”
“Yeah—” I drew in a breath and let out a small cry. “—and now I might have to leave you. What then? What if there’s never another Winter Competition and I never see you again?”
Luke twisted my hair around his fingers and laid his hand against the back of my head. “Then I’ll take out one of our jets and come see you every weekend. You could pretend to be sick and stay here some weeks in between. No one would ever know if you wear your shadow suit.”
“But I don’t wanna do that. I want to see you every day and go to the Christmas dance with you. I liked being seen with you as your girlfriend this morning.”
“I know it sucks, but we would have had to do this in a couple of months, anyway. Were you planning to break up with me then?”
“No, I’ve been trying not to think about it.”
Luke took my face in his hands and kissed each of my eyelids lovingly. “Look at it this way. No matter how crappy being separated is, it won’t be half as bad as the past three years have been. At least we’ll each know where the other is and that we’ll be together again. Seriously, I’ll take a jet to see you every single weekend. I finally found you after years of pain and loneliness. And hearing you say you love me like I love you and getting to kiss you the way I’ve dreamed of almost every night since I met you is something I didn’t think I’d ever have. I’m not letting you go again. I survived five years without you; I can survive five measly days out of each week, as long as I know you’re mine.” He pulled my hand to his lips to kiss it and then wiped my tears away.
“Every weekend?” I asked. “You promise?”
“I promise.”
I leaned against his chest and reached around to hold him for a moment. “Can I stay long enough to watch a cartoon with you?” I knew it would help take my mind off the possible upcoming separation.
“Stay as long as you want. No one’s going to bother us with Titus in the hospital wing.” He pulled me with him as he lay down, leaning away just long enough to pull a blanket out from under the bed and pull it over us.
“Kristine Con, please play a Jimmy Neutron cartoon,” I said.
In spite of what he said, I clung to Luke as it began to play, knowing things wouldn’t be the same when I had to return to North Haven.