Chapter 1: A Trip
I had read a storm was coming but the sky above was cloudless, an expansive horizon that looked like it would swallow me and drop me in the depths of space. I’m not superstitious but today my soul (gut) was screaming if I continued to look up I would be ripped away.
Dreading the sight my eyes moved back down only to have the feeling worsen when I checked the weather on my phone. As if the world was gloating today wouldn’t go well the bright screen animated a dark cloud pouring large droplets.
Reluctantly I walked under the clear sky towards the door of my academy’s private bus. Today I was off to the mountains on a camping trip meant to forge the final moments as students of Hopkiss Institute before being thrust into the world. I scoffed when I learned the trip was mandatory but now my mind is on edge in anticipation for final days of the trip. Not because it meant the trip would be over, but because there would be a special day with the person I love.
How the trip would go in terms of anything else was the last thing on my mind. Like its been as far as I can remember my mind is focused on the single person, the savior of my soul, the saintess holding the light of my world (and I’m sure I’m holding hers), Alice.
Taking a glance behind me I clicked my tongue knowing the two raincoats and extra tent tarp would be useless as I head into the spacious bus. Climbing the illuminated steps I saw familiar plush seats of a bus never used to bring students to our school but one used to drive students to trips in luxury. With a final step, I was greeted with the sea of faces of my fellow students instilling in me… nothing even after considering this would be the last I see of them before graduating.
My eyes looked over my peers as I walked down the center aisle, I kept my face bright while feeling the utter lack of connection to them below. While I cared little, if at all, for most my eyes were drawn to one of the few people I did care for, Alice, my cousin.
She was a person I don’t exactly have a good relationship with at the moment, which was sad considering how much I love her, but I am fine with the way we are. While it hurt at first it was necessary that I’ve grown to be indifferent to her freezing gaze. I understand why she feels the way she does.
The reason starts with my parents (if I could call them that) never returning from a foreign wilderness they were filming leaving their only child, me, with nothing. They had been riddled with debts to various production companies. Luckily those debts couldn’t be passed on to me, however, it meant I would have been orphaned if not for Alice’s family taking me in.
Don’t get me wrong my life with them is fine, great actually, my aunt and uncle are wonderful people filled with kindness I wish were inheritable. When they are around at least. The only problems, for my conscious, was their horribly expensive lifestyle, their inability to be there (much like my parents), and the weight of the feelings I have for their daughter.
My uncle George is a director at a large firm. He had been barely satiating the overindulgent lifestyles of his small family of three. But like a chip in a flywheel when I arrived their lifestyle had lost its delicate balance. I put a strain on their finances, it was easy to spot the differences once I had come. No longer did they drive a newest cars or wear the latest of clothes from foreign designers. Gifting me all too often too many things as if I were their own son. Going as far as placing me in the same academy as Alice seeing as we were about the same age differing in a few months.
Of course I had said no many times, but they could not accept changing. Not after moving to an estate located lower in the hills, selling a few of their cars (except the ones they gave me), or letting the staff they didn’t go.
My aunt and uncle made every effort to hide the fact the lifestyle they had was unsustainable. Alice, however, made it very obvious she was not happy with the situation. Whether it was a scornful glare when I walked along our academy’s halls with the only friend I had or a long annoyed sigh as I walked through the front door after spending the night at said friend’s home.
I understood Alice’s view. I understood this pretense she used of stealing her home’s happiness because I understood what I did to her. I treated her like a stranger pretending to have forgotten all the time we had spent together.
We use to be open with our feelings for each other. We were all we had. We spent every single moment of our time that we could together. Being the only two who had acknowledged each other it felt like we where in our own world. We didn’t need anybody else. Warming a place for one another, protecting each other against the cold we had gotten use to. Giving each other the affectionate touches we never received, appreciation for our existence we longed for, and the embraces that saved our sanity. We were one in many forms.
They say codependency is an illness but for us it was our lifeline.
In my defense pretending it had never happened was necessary. It was the best option I had. I didn’t want to risk her parents realizing just how we felt about each other so I had no other choice. I’ve promised myself to repay them once I could and do whatever to fix the bond Alice and I had.
In the bus Alice sat on the window seat, beside her was Amelia, a girl that proclaims herself to be her best friend, followed by our class’ vice president, Edward. The two of which who were strongly inclined to do anything they could to make my life here harder than it should be. One doing it for what she considers retribution for Alice (thinking I purposely ruined her home) and the other in a thin attempt to relieve his feelings of jealousy.
Did he forget that I’m her cousin? But his intuition was good because he wasn’t wrong.
These two were just the cusp of the many who were at her beck and call. No matter the person they were drawn towards my cousin. She had an ability to make people follow her words. A frightening ability, but I guess being in a school that was notorious for vicious harassment would develop it in a way that would allow Alice to have everyone under her thumb while coming from one of the poorest families.
Feeling a little proud of her as I walked past I offered her a smile, a genuine one instead of the one I had on previously, but received no change in her stare because she knew where and with who I was going to sit with.
“Why is he looking at you? Does he think you’re close at all?” Amelia opened her nasty mouth to ridicule then looked towards Alice like a dog awaiting praise.
Alice in response turned her head flipping the soft hair I miss entwining in my hands over her shoulder as she faced me, the person her eyes had been glaring at.
“Why does he? I wonder…” she said coldly.
Everyone could see the icy shoulder she was giving me but all I could see was a warm wistful stare. “Eunice2034” the password of the computer in her room, the name of our daughter when we would play house as children and the year we first thought of her. Her computer has everything, all that her heart had locked away the moment I introduced myself like distant family when I arrived.
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Alice, I know how you much you wish to run into my room every night and push me down.
I’ve reread the fantasies she’s written about us religiously. They’re my form of prayer. Chanting them over and over as I stroke the rosary made of my flesh. The way she imagines tying my hands and feet makes me weak at the knees. The way she wants me to drug me and rouse me awake as she makes me hers, make me scream out her name, make me beg for forgiveness for forgetting we were meant for each other makes my throat parched. I can only see this cold side of Alice as coy.
Alice really is the cutest.
No matter what she did or had others do to me at the academy I couldn’t hate her. She could strangle me in my sleep, lock me away in a cage, or remove my limbs and tie me to her bed as a pet. She could do anything and I would only feel her love behind her actions.
My expression towards her stood unchanged a warm gaze I would always give her no matter what. As for the other’s…I looked past their stares to Hayes, my shining armored knight. The person Alice despised more than anyone else. The person in her diary she wished she could torture then dismember before me, Hayes. He’s the beacon that made my school life, relatively, unproblematic. He was the only other person I had ever learned to care for.
Hayes sat chatting seated between his two childhood friends, Noe and Ester. Like many students here they were wealthy. Hayes’s family, while not the wealthiest, was old with roots deep and far. As for Noe and Ester they each where children of various prominent figures one in politics and the other the owner of various manufacturing plants. While their families had backgrounds in different areas all three had the air of nobility from being raised as extensions of their parents’ own wills.
Parents are always the start.
Hayes had been the first to befriend me (not because I was special in anyway but because it was his nature to do so with anyone) on my first day as a new transfer. It was his personality to quickly acquaint himself and due to his natural disposition it made people attracted to him — platonically or otherwise. Unlike Alice he didn’t have an ability but a natural gift, and it was that gift allowed him stay above Alice’s cloud of influence.
He was the captain for the soccer team and at one point was the ace of the judo team before quitting it for soccer. He was Hayes, Hayes Harroway attractive, athletic, gentle, harmless, caring, and in many ways perfect. Outwardly he had no faults. Everyone just liked him — me included— and because Alice knew she couldn’t control him or turn people against him she, like a clever snake, made sure to avoid him.
As for Noe and Ester?
I would consider us friends through Hayes is how I would describe it, but they were close to Alice’s circle of followers. I’ve never made an attempt to really get to know them well and I didn’t want to either. They believe I’m a leech off of Hayes’s good grace. Which I can’t rebuke because they weren’t wrong. Within the first week I could see how unaffected he was by Alice’s quickly spreading word about me. So I did exactly that and became a leech, making an effort to befriend Hayes because I knew it would let me have a calmer experience.
In the beginning he was just a someone to use until I graduated, but after getting to know him I was bound to see him as a friend. As we spent more time together (from the situations I created) little by little we got closer.
Hayes is amiable and upright to the public but in private was surprisingly, and adorably, in need of constant affirmation with insecurities like a black hole. He lived at the bottom of a deep pit that no matter how fast he ran it chased him in its toxic spiral choking him under the extreme stress of forever keeping his perfect exterior up at the cost of his body and mind. He drowns in the shadows of his older brothers. It didn’t take much for me to see this and when the opportunity came I became the spider’s thread he could cling to in the dark of his despair. I want him to forever believe that he could only let me see the imperfect side of him or else the life he had built up would fall to ruin. His life teetering at the edge of ruin wasn’t far off considering the physical abuse he took from his father and the mental abuse from his abuse enabling mother.
I cherish him and I know he feels me the same. The days we spend idle or the days we spend active are all wonderful.
“Henry!” Hayes took notice sending me a familiar smile.
“Hayes!” I smiled mirroring the same gentle face he naturally produced. “Are the seats behind open?”
“Yeah! Sit before someone takes them.”
I placed my hiking pack in the empty seats behind the three taking the one by the window.
“You almost missed the trip. What, did you plan on skipping out?” Hayes smirked looking back at me as I settled in.
“I wish,” I said defeated “but if I tried I would end up on this bus someway or another. And, you know, I kinda want to graduate.”
I was sure no one wanted to be on the bus at the moment but it was a requirement.
A mandatory field trip for all those attending our private school. “A place to temper young souls” is what they called this. Which was ironic considering dealing with the devils being taught here is where the real tempering happens.
It was an old tradition of this old institute. The month before a student finished their final year they would go off on a camping trip for that time in our national forest. I didn’t mind camping here at all it’s a beautiful place, I’ve camped and hunted there a countless times, but from the two semis parked behind the luxurious bus I was sure this “camping trip” would have very little actual camping involved.
There really was no point in me bringing anything other than clothes.
Though I won’t complain much, the foods that will be involved probably had no expense spared. I’ll enjoy it and spend my last few days as a student with Hayes before we were both off to different universities. I was headed to one top rated in engineering and Hayes a private one saved for those truly in the upper echelons.
I looked to Hayes who was still turned back with a mischievous grin. I didn’t know the exact details about the trip so he probably didn’t tell me because he knew I would bring what he called “delicious commoner foods,” crafty guy. Hayes moved his eyes to my bag before he smiled cheekily back to me as the bus began to move.
No one ended up sitting next to me, which wasn’t surprising. I would be more surprised if someone was willing to go against Alice destroying the social credit they built up in their years here. A credit that didn’t expire after graduation considering how well connected all families here were. There were exceptions like Hayes or anyone close to him.
As the bus continued on the road I was familiar with when I would come alone I spoke to Hayes for a bit. However, the conversation was led away from me by his two seat mates but I didn’t have much else to say so I retired myself to scrolling on my phone. And just like my conversation the two girls also ended up quieting down. Naturally the conversations in the bus also died — everyone either fell asleep or browsed through their devices.
Within the silent cabin the hours passed as I watched random videos and listened to music. It was only when I heard the electric motors begin to whine from the stress of the steep mountain road that I moved the window curtains to see outside.
“Oh? How long has it been raining?” I was surprised to see how dark the day had become.
The asphalt was shiny with a layer of wetness and the skies were filled with clouds rolling overhead. The pouring bringing a cool relief to the unknown anxiety that had been forming.
Maybe everything will go well on this trip.
“Ester look!” Hayes took a peak after me reaching over Noe to look at the window.
“It’s ra—”
Hayes was about to say something but his words were drowned out by a violent screeching as the bus swerved into the left tossing me into the seat beside me to avoid an oncoming car. Fishtailing left and right the brakes pulsated loud enough to be heard as it tried its best to correct the sudden movement but I could tell it was no use on the road coated with fresh rain.
It had only taken a moment for me to realize a driver had been rushing down the mountain road on the wrong side, just like it only taken a moment for the bus to drive through the guardrail as if the posts were toothpicks.
Time felt slow but the despair raced in as my mind prepared itself for death looking back on the life I lived. Ignoring my resignations I at least wanted to die looking lovingly at the person I adore most in the world. My eyes darted to my darling, my world, Alice. Gazing over I found her already looking back at me trying to say something but within the shrill screams mixed in chaos of the free fall I couldn’t hear. She was mouthing something in a panic, unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to lay my eyes on the lips I relentlessly desired as there were too many heads in the way to see clearly. Seeing I couldn’t understand, her beautiful eyes turned glossy in frustration reddening while we locked them on each other. Without knowing the words I knew she was trying to relieve the fear of me dying thinking she truly hated me.
You truly are the most adorable, Alice.