The Blind Boy

31.

She feels like a fool for showing up to his Christmas party after what he's said to her. 

If anything, she should cut contact completely. She should. She is becoming haunted by fleeting kisses, by fleeting touches, and that just won't do.

There's only around five more months left in the school year, and then she'll be free. Free of him, free of the way he makes her feel. 

It's too much, the plethora of emotions that swirl within her. Far too much. He makes her feel everything, then pulls away in disdain. She knows the revulsion isn't directed towards her now, which should come as a relief, but it doesn't. Because it's directed at himself, and no matter how many times she expresses how lovely he is, how much she wants to be with him, he'll never believe her. 

Even if she doesn't graduate, she'll be eighteen, and with a retail job no matter what. Maybe she doesn't have to finish off the school year anyway. Her birthday is in March, so she could just drop out. 

A clean break is for the best, but here she is. 

Her stomach is in knots, but at the same time she is achingly numb. Worryingly so. She hasn't felt this empty in a very long time, like she's been rendered useless, a hollow shell. 

Ash also doesn't think she's ever felt this self-conscious before in her life. 

In short, this entire thing is a mistake, but Daisy is so excited, and Ash could not find the strength to call it off, to endure her friend's (her only female friend's) disappointment. 

And so she shifts on the snow-drenched porch in her golden heels, fiddling with the green bracelet Daisy had wrapped around her wrist.

She doesn't do well with dresses or anything fancy, really. Wearing anything more than oversized jeans and a baggy top never fails to spike her anxiety, to induce sweat-covered palms. 

It's not that she doesn't want to dress in pretty things. Lace and sparkles tend to catch her eye, but she can't afford clothes like that, and even if she purchased cheaper knockoffs, she's all awkward angles and boney hips.

The real reason, one that she desperately tries not to think about: when she dresses pretty, she worries it'll draw attention - 

The wrong kind of attention. 

The kind of attention she's avoided for years. 

The sort of attention that has led her foster brother staring at her like she's some kind of meal, no matter how many layers of clothing that she throws on. 

For the first time in her life, Ash thinks she looks pretty, and that just won't do.

It's a dress that makes her look beautiful and nothing like herself, with her short hair curled at the ends, her eyelashes long, her eyelids dark and sparkly, and her cracked lips painted over. Ash knows little to nothing about makeup, but Daisy (planning to be an art major) is nothing less than an expert. 

"A matte," Daisy had told her hours ago, after sitting Ash down on a stool in her bedroom. "My look is matte for tonight, yours is glossy - it suits you more -"

When Ash mentioned if they should invite Kyle and Louis, if it's okay that it's just the two of them going, Daisy's expression went a bit stilted. "Well, we just won't tell them. It's none of their business. Besides, if they get all cranky about it, they're hypocrites - they went to the Halloween party, remember?" 

Ash had wanted to protest, to divulge everything to the boys - Louis, especially, but she's been so tired lately, (and heartsick, so heartsick that Ash can feel it in her bones) so she lets it be.