CONTINUATION OF FLASHBACK:
He does the same thing as before. He keeps his distance but he follows me home. I can tell that he is very upset and somewhere deep inside me it breaks a couple of bones.
But then I think of Alison and I think of breaking my own bones.
What a thing to tell someone you love them after you stab them in the back.
It doesn’t take long until I am standing outside my house. I don’t stop walking. I open the gate and close it, signalling to Gabriel who has trailed behind me all the way from Alison’s house that he is not welcome.
So he kind of stops at the street corner and I do my best to try and ignore him as I open the door, go inside and close it.
I can feel the temperature in my heart drop a couple of degrees.
I have never shut him out like this and it physically hurts so badly and maybe I’m just insanely horrible or something like that but I can’t bear to see him. I just can’t bear to.
Because I don’t want to turn around and see the devastatingly hurt and damaged face that would only shatter me into pieces. Cause when Holbrook is hurt and he wants you to know it, he leaves nothing off his face.
And it is heart wretching.
I don’t sleep that night just the way I never sleep most nights. I don’t have any mother to put me to bed or father to read me story, not that they did that ever in the first place.
When I get up in the morning for school I avoid the front door. I already can hear the engine of Gabriel’s car parked out the front to drop me off just the way we did everday.
Instead I climb over backyard fences looking like the solemn ghost that I am, all the way until I hit school. I look like a train wreck. One of those ones where it is the drivers fault for the trains destruction. A suicidal train going off course. Foreshadowed to death.
No one says hi to me.
I don’t think I look very welcoming.
I’m late.
But it is okay because when I walk into class the teacher is not here yet. Just a bunch of students loitering in their seat. One of them is Alison. She is sitting in the front row texting on her phone and blowing on her nails. Not one reminant of last night on her whole being.
I turn slightly and I catch eyes with the one and only Gabriel Holbrook, sitting three rows back. I look away too quickly but not before I see the pure pain in his eyes. Something catches in my throat.
But I shake my head and walk up to Alison’s desk. I can feel Gabriel’s eyes follow me all the way there. She looks up at me abruptly with no emotion on her face.
“Last night never happened, okay?” I say hardly.
Alison smiles politely with a twitch of her lips, “I don’t recall what happened last night.”
“Good,” I say abruptly and then take my seat next to her. I pull out some random files from my backpack and chuck it onto her desk.
She laughs, “New assignment?”
I nod. If you call Stevie Stilson an assigment. The file had every single thing to know about her. Her parents credit card number down to the last words her grandpa said while he died from cancer.
“You’re something Alice,” Alison says.
Yeah, something.
I manage to avoid Gabriel Holbrook for a couple of weeks but he goes went back to the way he was before. The subtle observation in the hall corridor, the moment when our eyes would catch each other’s briefly.
And I guess that was the period of time that Alison and I achieved the most now I wasn’t trying to hide the fact I was on the side of Alison from Holbrook.
Ten people were sent to the hospital. Fifteen to the school sick bay. And then someone killed herself.
I hate myself for that.
But ignorance is a beautiful thing. I can procrastinate self-loath for hours.
And then came that morning where I went to open the door to the backyard and ran straight into Holbrook leaning against the backyard wall.
I gaped at him.
His face had wiped clear of emotion.
“Can I please drive you to school?” he said gently.
I just stared at him.
It took me a few seconds to find my voice, “ Ah- Well – I prefer to walk.”
He stared at me and then after a bit nodded.
I sighed and started to move back to the front yard to walk along the footpath. Only I didn’t know that Holbrook took that as an invitation to walk beside me.
We walked together, silently. After thirty minutes of silence Gabe was the first one to speak.
“Are you just going to keep avoiding me?”
I never replied back.
Over the next couple of weeks he would attempt to make small subtle conversation in the school hallway and after school and I could tell that he was hurting.
I was hurting.
It is hard to remove someone from your life.
A few days later I was walking out of the last class when I walked into him standing and leaning against my locker. He was staring down at his feet with his hands in his pocket. He knew I was coming towards him, there was no point avoiding him now.
I walked up to my locker and shoved my notebooks into my locker.
“Ah- I was just wondering- well, would you like to go out for coffee, now?” I’ve never heard him sound so nervous. He couldn’t even stand to look at me.
“Ah,” I said, closing the door of my locker. “Well, I don’t think-“
He interrupted me, finally looking up so intensely that I had to look away. “Please, can you please consider it?”
I stared out the window for a couple of moments and nodded slightly. “Fine.”
***
If you see this, comment down below if you think that Alice is worse than Alison! ( I do ;))