Vanilla

Chapter Twenty-Two

Dedicated to Varsha for the fan art on the side.

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            I stumbled through the next few days in a state of insentient numbness.

            It was a peculiar feeling: not like anything I’d ever experienced before. Usually, in situations of such hopelessness, I bared the brunt of my emotions for days on end, the stinging plague of thoughts a mental torture. It had never happened quite like this before. I’d never been left in such a strange state of lethargy, finding it difficult to work up the energy to care about what was going on around me. Instead of sobbing until my eyes were raw, as I had done on the first evening, I found myself curled up in bed for hours and hours, my attention span too short to occupy myself for any length of time. The only trips I made out of my room were essential.

            Even Nora’s departure hadn’t affected me as badly as I thought it would. I’d been upset, of course, that my main source of comfort was relocating one hundred and fifty miles away yet again, but the event of her packing up her belongings and setting back off for London was much less distressing than I’d anticipated.

            “It’s going to be okay, Flo,” she’d said, as Lenny piled their suitcases into the boot of the waiting taxi. “This’ll all blow over, and everything will turn out fine.”

            The smile I managed as she pressed her lips to my forehead was weak; even her heavy perfume failed to evoke a significant emotion from the depths of my head.

            The thing was, it would’ve been nice to fool myself into believing my sister’s reassurances, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it anymore. What had gone down the night of Gram’s exhibition was not something that could just ‘blow over’, as much as I wanted to believe it. Daniel and I together, let alone as we had been, was now nothing more than a faraway memory, as well as an unattainable future.

            My relationship with Gram was only marginally better; while the words we exchanged were civil, they were undeniably limited – there had been no more pressing matters to discuss than “Dinner will be ready around six, is that okay?”, and my answers remained clipped. She was aware of what a tragic mistake she’d made, the glaze of guilt visible in her eyes every time she looked in my direction. Still, she seemed to sense that I was not in a place to accept apologies – and at least that way, it saved both of us from the awkwardness of trying to talk something out that ran much too deep.

            Here I was, suddenly closing in on the three day marker of mooching aimlessly around my room, trapped in my weary, unfeeling state of mind. It had been much too long since I’d endured actual social interaction – or, at least, social interaction that was more than stilted questions and pauses tinged with heartache, of which I could gain my fair share just by walking downstairs.

            But then again, no way of spending the past three days could’ve prepared me for the moment, several afternoons later, that the tornado otherwise known as Erin Bolton came barging into my room uninvited.

            When the door swung open with enough force to send it bouncing off the wall, I sat up in bed like a shot.

            “There you are!” she declared, her voice an echoing foghorn in the quiet room. “Jesus Christ, I was beginning to wonder if you’d packed your bags and fled the country.”

            “Erin,” I started, still in a daze, “how on earth did you get in here?”

            “Your gran let me in, stupid. And I don’t blame her! I imagine she’s worried about you holed up in your bedroom like this, refusing to speak to anybody. What’s the deal with that, anyway? Are you planning on becoming a hermit, or something?”