Midnight Memories

t h i r t e e n // p a r t // t w o

"We are who we choose to be." - The Green Goblin

It seems so sad to me, how easily love can be lost.

How after all the tears, all the effort put in, the battles that were fought for one another.

All we end up with is a war against ourselves.

As I stared out the window at the crowded streets below, I couldn't help but feel as if I had lost someone, as if they had died. But, in a way, hadn't he? He had once been my constant, my infinity, and now almost as quickly as he had come, he was gone again. But this time there wasn't the lingering hope that he would come back. No, this time it was for good.

When I lost him, I lost myself too.

I had been sitting around all day in my bedroom, my initial high worn off. Where I went from here, I wasn't quite sure. I was angry, too angry to even think about where to begin. All I knew was that I was ready to make all the people who had wronged me pay for what they had done.

I pushed myself up off the window seat, where I had been staring absentmindedly out of the window for hours, and padded over to the bathroom. Leaning my hands against the cool marble countertop, I stared into the mirror, ringlets of hair falling into my blotchy face. Maybe my problem was that I was too predictable, I never changed. I barely looked any different than I always had, and it infuriated me. I wanted to be different, I wanted to leave the past in the past, where it belonged. Maybe my reluctance to let things progress as they should was the reason that history seemed to keep repeating itself.

I pulled open the drawer where I kept all my make up, barely touched, and took out a pencil of black Urban Decay eyeliner. Before the notion that I had no idea at all how to apply it could even come to mind, I was rimming my eyes, over and over again, until they were fully outlined in black. I followed this with mascara, and the darkest shade of eyeshadow I could find, desperate to form myself a new mask, a fresh facade, rather than the transparent, worn out one I had been using for years. By the time I was finished, I barely recognized myself.

Good.

I went to my closet, dressing in a pair of leather paneled leggings, a black blazer, and a pair of Louboutins so dangerously high that I had never before dared leave the house in them before. But today was a new day, and a new me.

I grabbed my favorite Chanel boy bag and my keys, heading out into the living room. Ash, who was sitting at the counter doing homework, did a double take when he saw me.

"Jesus, Stel." He asked, surprised. "Where have you gone?"

"What are you talking about, Asher?" I asked irritably.

He was looking at me as if I was some sort of circus animal. "It's just that I can't see you under all that make up you have plastered on your face."

I frowned. "I don't remember asking your opinion. I'm certainly not a child Asher, maybe it's time you stopped treating me like one."

"I wasn't trying to offend you!" He said definsively. "You just look different, that's all. Stella, you should know that I, more than anyone, do not think of you as a child. Now that that's been cleared up, am I at least allowed to ask where you're going?"

I flipped my hair back over my shoulder. "Derrick Vanderbilt's."

A look of sheer dissaproval crossed Ash's handsome face. "The hell you are."

I death glared him. "Excuse me?"

"You're not going alone, looking like that, to Derrick Vanderbilt's." Asher shook his head. "That'll happen over my dead body."