REMOULDED

Chapter Nineteen

Earnest woke up with a weak yawn,then followed it with the deepest sigh and a thread of tears down his cheeks. The whatever drink he might have filled himself with had clearly finished its exorcising effect.

What he could now see was a bucket of vomits near the door of a small room,his wet clothes hung over a wardrobe and a painful heart thinking of how much trouble he had caused his poor maid and himself.

Why was he absent from the music practice that day,why could he not have suggested another day for the outing with Daisy and mostly why did he exchange hot words with Ms. Dake and beat up an innocent school mate.

It was all his faults,he left the door open for the troubles. He was the main cause of his own fall and it was much painful to admit that.

The entire house had fallen into the usual silence,there was no songs of the birds,no sounds of music or movies,no shuffling of legs which informed that it should be very much into the noon. It was a midweek and everyone had gone to work places or schools while Earnest begins his suspension from St. Avirns.

For a thousandth time,he hated the silence around the house. It made him all more sad,it made him mirror a real convict without the real uniform but with the real loneliness and quietness.

There was no sound for a count of fifteen minutes before a clang suddenly issued from the kitchen. It was too late for Susane to be dealing with the breakfast,Kemi would have gone and Mercy rarely takes her lunch at home,an eatery or friend's place filling that gap for her.

But the sound continued,forcing Earnest to wobble to a stand,dazzle for a minute and then find his way of the room through the support of the walls to the kitchen.

There,stood the maid in her neat apron and casual sandals,facing the dormer window with her back to him.

She was suspiciously standing still,eyes fixed on the hazy sunshine gliding over the window pane while her hands remained in action doing whatever they could with the plates in the sink. She was absolutely lost in some thoughts.

"Susane" Earnest's cracking voice echoed behind and she saw the face sharply cut across the window pane,the look on it telling that the person behind her must have been there for good aeon,watching her.

So,she just have to smile. A cursory smile as she spun to face him.

"Oh,Earnest. You're awake" Her voice took a pitch.

But Earnest did not say a word back. He just squeezed his lips closed and blinked his eyes. There was something abnormal with the nature of her response and the way she stares now...

And she tried to hide it,"You hate it on my bed,isn't it?" She tried with that simple joke but Earnest knew his Susane well and this was not time to talk about his sleep.

Yes. She was using a small mattress laid on a bare floor, typical for a maid but the truth was,nowhere would have brought comfort to him at the moment. It would even have been worse if he had slept on his foster bed with fears of a Kemi barging in to lash words on him.

"Is that why you were lost?" Earnest could not justify how he sounded but somehow he sounded steely even if he had wanted to be soft,the alcohol of last night still having a meagre effect on him.

He caught his face across the pane when Susane had made a sideways shift and what he saw were a pair of bleak and bulging eyes dangling over a lean figure that had vomited its full self out over the night.

"Lost" Susane chuckled,then spread arms in demonstration, "I'm here. I'm not lost" She said further, her smile growing ever wider,in perfect pretense.