To Fly Away

Chapter Three

I don’t know what to say.

There is nothing to say.

They’re staring at me now, all of them, but I’ve forgotten about Azia completely. Diana might as well not exist.  

What did he ask me? What did Sebastian ask? Because he can’t have asked me what I think he asked me. But he did.

And there’s nothing to say.

“It was an accident.” The words are a choked whisper. Barely audible.  

I used to know a girl, and her name was Clementine. We were twelve back then. I had spent about a month already living in Lilac Falls, but I was still a freak to the other children. I was from a different pack and it might as well have been a different world. They didn’t hate me, no, but they were wary of me and they stayed away. Except for one girl.  

How do I describe Clementine? She was beloved. A practical angel by her own right. She was friends with everyone, even those twice her age. She was perfect. Beautiful. She cast a spell on everyone she met, warmed them with her glow. Clementine was that girl that no one could resist.

And she wanted to be friends with me! How could I say no to her? When she was so funny, graceful, smart. We became close instantly.  

I remember that it was raining the day I met her, like it always seems to be in my memories. It was recess, and I was alone, sitting at the bottom of the tube slide with my knees pulled up to my chest. I was trying to pretend that I wasn’t crying. I hoped that the rain would hide my tears, that no one would notice that I was sad and call me names. Like they always did.

At my old school I had had lots of friends. Daddy was the Beta, after all, and so I was popular.  But no one knew about Daddy here. The other children avoided me and whispered about me behind their backs. Even at that age I realized that it was because I was from a different pack. There aren’t such things as new kids when you’re a werewolf, and I was the strange and undesired exception.

Someone had drawn a smiley face in permanent marker on the inside of the tube slide. I remember looking at it, and wondering why it didn’t make me feel happy like it should. This is what I was thinking about when a shadow fell over me. I glanced up, and there she was.

“Hello,” the girl standing over me said.  

She had her short blonde hair in two tiny braids on the sides of her head. Her eyes were sky blue, beautiful. She was smiling at me. So I smiled back. It was only the right thing to do.

From then on, Clementine found me whenever possible, and she would talk to me even though I never had much to say back. I think maybe it was that she saw me as some sort of charity case, but that didn’t matter. I was too shy to speak for the first few days, but I slowly began to open up to her. The other kids still didn’t talk to me, but they stopped saying mean things about me when they thought I couldn’t hear, and that made me so happy.

I’m not sure when it happened; it’s hard to pinpoint the moment in my mind, but we became best friends, her and me. It didn’t matter that no one else would speak to me, because I had the most perfect friend in the world.

I was happy. The weeks that I spent with Clementine might have been the best of my life, but now thinking back on them it’s hard not to cry.

We went to the falls one day, and it was a Tuesday. Clementine never came back.

Azia scoffs.  “Accident?” Cruelty is laced into the word. “Please. I was there. I saw you push her, you little murderer.”

Her eyes are locked on mine, daring me to protest. Daring me to say she’s lying. She is. I want to. Azia had been there. And it had been an accident. But It wasn’t me who killed a girl that day.