PRECIPICE [h.s.]

Chapter Thirty One

☾☾☾

I'll get you out on the floor

Shimmering beautiful

And when I break it's in a million pieces

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Flashback. Harry is 16. Alice is 13.

Flashback. Harry is 16. Alice is 13.

There's something to be said about childhood crushes. Because when you're young, the first time you have affection toward someone it feels all consuming. You're told to love your family. You start making friends and you learn to love them.

The first time your heart decides that you could love someone in a new way, well it's indescribable. How can one expect you to focus on multiplication when there's a cute boy dancing around your thoughts?

But no one tells you about the first heartbreak that inevitably comes with a first love.

Alice's happened at the age of thirteen. The first time Harry ever mentioned a girl named Sarah.

Alice realized at a young age that all of these dinners could have taken place at the exact same banquet hall, and she wouldn't have known the difference. She didn't care about the place settings or the decor on the wall. What child would? Alice only cared about one thing: whether or not Harry was going to be there. Because whenever she saw Harry, there was no sadness for a good two or three weeks. It didn't matter how much her father yelled or how much her mother drank, because she could hide away and think of Harry. She would replay every moment and detail she could remember. She could ride that high for a long time. You could even track the pattern of the way her grades in school were better if she had seen Harry recently.

Alice quickly put together, that if she was Alice, Harry was her Mad Hatter. And while Alice knew this wasn't appropriate, she couldn't help but want him anyway. Because Harry had a way of making Alice feel like she was the most important being in the world when he was around.

So when the Hatter tells Alice that he has found someone else, it dims her light a little bit.

"So, Wonderland. What are your whispers of happiness this week?"

Whispers of happiness. Their one tradition. A way of asking what good things have happened since the last time they saw each other. Even though Alice's first thought was always to say, "seeing you," she kept her little lips closed until she thought of something that wouldn't expose her school girl crush.

"We're doing poetry in English right now. It's interesting I guess. I like it better than the long stories. There was this pretty one about birds. I can't remember the name of it though. What about you?"

Harry's lips pushed together. He knew what he wanted to say, but wasn't sure if it was okay to tell a girl younger than him about his own little crush. Especially since, he hasn't said the words out loud, let alone told anyone. It didn't feel real.

"I went to the library this week."

"You go to the library every week."

It was frankly quite silly to consider a middle schooler his best friend, but Harry didn't really know what those were anyway. All he knew was that ever since his mom turned cold around the age of 6, when they first moved to America, he wasn't allowed to have friends anymore. In fact, Harry didn't want to consider Alice a friend, because even at his mature age of sixteen, he worried that if his mother found out he considered Alice a friend, that she would be taken from him.