Part II, Chapter V | A Pyrite Love

In the morning upon my last dream, the fog of Vergalis crept into my head and clouded my senses. It cast everything into a dark haze, and the gunk that gave my thoughts purpose went grey in it. It was that color in which I opened my eyes to.

Ms. Lyre came into my room soon after my waking, wearing white cotton pajamas and a droopy sleeping cap as she exclaimed how I had finally made it onto the main screen. “Get angry!” I screamed through her phone speakers. “You don’t deserve any less than anyone else!”

The memory of what I felt upon hearing this news escape me now, but I know that the natural questions occurred to me. Weren’t those words only said in a dream? How was that caught on camera? Deep down though, I knew the answer already, or at least the makings of one. Somehow and for some supernatural purpose, the events I either altered or created in my dreams came true in reality. And the result of my creation was this: brought up from near the bottom, Annamarie Kavesta was now ranked among the top twenty in the entirety of Jericho March’s Living Game.

It was a stunning truth that kept the fog with me for the days that followed. Suddenly, many more people spoke with me. I got along with my classmates. I gained more clients to counsel. Most of them had no real issues, seeming to only want to make conversation with me, but it wasn’t a bad feeling. Yet after a few days, my rank began to slide back again, and there was an unmistakable sensation in my gut while the fog enveloped me.

It wasn’t until the morning of the fourth day after, that the sensation of standing still and sliding back dissipated again. Oliver came through the counseling room door himself without warning. I greeted him, but he didn’t take a seat, instead opting to wander the room and touch everything he could see. At one point, he threw open the armoire doors and exclaimed, “Found you!” Thankfully, Ms. Lyre had installed a false wooden back from the inside once she realized Oliver had entered the room. Apparently, he was known for being particularly nosy and keen for things like this.

“Well,” he said, when he found nothing. “It’s only embarrassing if I let it be embarrassing.”

He still lingered there, so I asked him if he needed help with something in an attempt to distract him. My voice made his jovial expression vanish, and for once I did not feel confounded by it. Unlike so many others I tried to get to know, Oliver was an open book. His thread was already mine, and his thoughts with it. It was too easy to tell what he was thinking, and while the details were lost in the fog, I remember clearly the answer I had for the question he never asked.

“I can be your girlfriend.” It was so matter-of-fact and so unprovoked that it surprised both of us. Why was I so ready to offer myself? Why, when it made me think of Aiden Pitt, who I never technically broke up with? Aiden, who I couldn’t bring myself to kiss despite how much I liked him. And Oliver. What would make him any different? I looked at him now, and the features of his face were so soft that I was sure most people assumed he’d only ever lived an easy and happy life. That he would only ever be happy from now on too. I must’ve been among a select few who knew better.

One who knew how he was a boy of the stars, with his hair like night. If anyone were meant to return my lips to give again, it was likely to be Oliver. I was convinced of it. Because he was special. And it was because he was special that I felt he was my only second shot at having the normal romance I dreamt of. The normal romance that my autumn girl dreamt of. The normal romance that Sarah and Adam Areille already had.

He said yes to my proposition, but it felt like nothing changed. My heart didn’t pound and the world didn’t burst with color. It was a mundane exchange with a mundane result, but there was a part of me that was certain I’d be good for him. Better than Alina di Luca, who must’ve been special too, but for reasons I didn’t know and couldn’t understand.

He said yes, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t even think of it. The fog was strong and gripped me tight, but the week after I became Oliver’s girlfriend was the last week of relative normalcy I would have for the rest of the year. There are only three events of this week that still stand out to me in memory.

❧☙

THE NURSE’S OFFICE

The resident nurse was an old man with long white hair, and a beard so thick you couldn’t see a scrap of skin beneath it. He was occupied with treating someone, but I didn’t realize until looking closer that it was Ms. Lyre. There was something about her aura that seemed different here. Her blouse and pencil skirt were both folded neatly beside her, leaving her with just a white camisole and boxer shorts. A surprisingly masculine choice of underwear. A large bruise curled up from her back hidden to over across her shoulder. Its color was deep and purple, and she was hunched over, her face knitted with pain.

She sat on one cot among the rows of them, and I walked up to ask if she was okay. The tone of my voice came out more worried than I intended, and she gave me a reassuring smile. A smile that seemed touched I cared at all.

“It’s nothing serious,” she said. “Seems like I’m quite the rough sleeper is all.”

“In my experience,” I murmured. “The ones who act young despite their age are the ones who die first.”

She didn’t respond, and simply stared out into the distance, though a wall blocked her way. She was weary. Incredibly weary. Anyone could tell that much. It took her a few moments to regain herself, but when she did, she actually managed a smile. A smile that disappeared her weariness all at once so I could see nothing but her beautiful face and the youth that remained on her. “I’m only 27,” she said, and we both laughed. Suddenly, I wanted to see each of those twenty-seven years for myself. I wanted to dig through her memories and find out how she got here and where she was from, but Oliver called out to me, and I had to head out with him.

Oliver made this trip to the nurse’s office every day, and I never asked him why. He came to pick up some medication of some sort, but I never saw him actually use it. At the very least, I always offered to walk there with him, and he seemed happy I did.

❧☙

THE HALLWAY

One day, as Oliver and I wandered the academy halls together, on the way from bouncing from one club room to the next, I caught the eye of a particular witch, whose hat made her stand out as much as it always did. It was different this time, though. Usually, she adorned the brim with plants or flowers or ribbons of all sort, but today it was left barren. She smiled like a normal, friendly girl and stopped to offer a greeting, but her expression shifted as she glanced between us.

“What are you two doing together?”

It had been about a week since I lost spoke with her, and her voice now tingled the back of my spine. How does one describe a voice? You could speak of its roughness or its pitch, its rhythm or its tone, but all is unlikely to communicate its exact sound. Just as it’s impossible to communicate a thing’s exact appearance, or an exact smell. What do you imagine when I say it was like a breeze along a field of wheat? I hear the rustling of the little grains as they knock against the other, the subdued noise of the leaves as they wave at the sky, and the breath of blue above it all. How could a voice sound like that? It couldn’t, and yet it did. Such is the indescribable nature of memory and biased perception.

The last time I spoke with Sylvia, I had felt an irresistible urge to pierce her. I know my eyes widened at least, when I looked at her now and saw an earring, just one in the same ear I had been fixated on. It was a little red and swollen around, but it was pretty. A simple silver hoop, small enough to be hidden by her hair if she wanted to, but I still noticed it. I think she wanted me to. But when she saw the two of us together, Oliver and I, she wore a pinched look of frustration that delighted me. I couldn’t explain it. But it compelled me to take Oliver’s arm and hold him closer.

“We’re on a date,” I said, to answer her question.

She glanced away, and her eyes crinkled, and she gave us a fake smile. Why was it that I could tell how much worse it was than Ms. Lyre’s? With one, I could not describe an ounce of pain within her, and with the other, it was all too obvious. “Is that so?” she said. “Have fun, then.”

Her feet dragged as she walked off, and when she finally left earshot, I released my grip on Oliver’s arm and hesitantly went to see what look he had on his face.

“I won’t say anything,” he said.

“There’s nothing to say,” I mumbled.

❧☙

THE KITCHEN

The main kitchen of Arys Academy seemed more like one you’d find in a comfy home than the dull, stainless steel sanctuary I had imagined. There were treated wood cabinets, decorative flowers, and a long dining table before all the sinks and stoves. By the looks of it, Kitchen Club must’ve been among the top clubs in the entire academy. There were maybe 40 students around, either goofing off, just eating, or actually cooking.

Out of all those forty, Oliver approached a girl engaged in none of those activities I listed. She was a girl who sat alone at the far end of the long dining table. I recognized her right away of course, because she was Loumelette Alkazaraha. She had skipped class that morning, so I hadn’t yet seen her. Today, her black hair was not curled into their typical drills, but instead in a single, very long braided ponytail. She still wore white satin gloves that climbed up from her fingers to above her elbows, though I hadn’t paid much attention to them until now.

“I’m here for the delivery,” Oliver said.

“Thanks, Ol—” She was in the midst of sighing in relief until she saw me standing behind him, and decided to hide her hands behind her back. “Why is she here?”

“Why not?” I kicked in.

She refused to meet eyes with me, and scoffed like she wanted to cough something up. “I mean, frankly, I can’t fathom why you would break your promise like this. That… well, it isn’t very number two of you. Whatever that means,” she muttered.

“I didn’t tell her anything,” Oliver said. He held the little vial of ointment he got from the nurse’s office and spun it between his fingers like a pencil. The deftness of the movement was hypnotizing and almost inhuman, its speed. He seemed entirely unburdened by how the girl panicked in front of him.

“Why won’t you look at me?” I pressed.

“Get her away from me,” she said.

“Louisa Alzara.” I stepped closer to where her eyes laid in hope of catching her gaze. “First daughter of the noble House Alzara of City Conda.” She flinched but still refused to look. “I thought something was off about your name the moment I heard it. What an unbelievable alias. What right do you have to judge me by my nobility when you wear the same cloth? Whether you deny it or not. Give me a reason. Why can’t you even look at me?”

She trembled like a wet kitten, lost and upset, as I seemed to ruin everything for her. I continued to pry her open, bit by bit, and took another step closer. With my proddings, the words came out for me to see, whether she spoke them or not. That’s how it was for people with me. They couldn’t help it. Especially not now, when the cold fog of Vergalis trapped me in a haze. A haze that made it difficult to remember how I thought, but gave me action and purpose like I never had before.

“There was a girl,” I said, catching bits of a story in the shivering words that escaped the lock she put on her heart. “And a cold climb.”

“Please stop,” she begged, and she looked me in the eye, so I did as she said. I stopped until her eyes no longer shimmered with imminent tears, and once it was so, I chose to speak again, not of her life but of mine.

“When I was five years old, my mother was killed in a terrible traffic accident. You know the story. The Collapse of Highway Babylonia. We were on our way back from a karaoke bar and an ice cream shop in the Ends. It’s been so long, yet I still remember how my mother loved the little shops there. I remember how she’d say how she still preferred the ones back home in Volhynia, as if she was old enough to have lived when people still called it by its old name.

“When she died, the people would whisper and wonder about what could have happened to me. My father let them wonder, and whispers were weightless to a man who owned the world. I spent the years of my youth an ocean away in Vergalis, in a small orphanage in the Undersea District that only ever got a visitor a week on good weeks, and none otherwise.” I had cornered myself with this story, I realized, but I kept on anyway. “At this orphanage, I met an older girl. A girl I came to love. I can’t remember her name or face, so I’ll probably never see her again.” It was an old story I’d only ever kept to myself. Finally telling it to someone felt like a weight off my shoulders. And the girl who called herself Loumelette Alkazaraha had her gaze still locked on mine, though the focus of them darted from one eye to the other, pondering my genuity. Searching for signs of deception.

Then she finally let go and stood to leave. “Why can’t you just let me hate you?”