United

Into Dust You Shall Return

There was no sun outside but it wasn't cold at all. Or maybe I was so numb that I couldn't even fell the cold anymore. Two days had passed since Lucas' death and I hadn't been able to eat or sleep. Since we didn't have a church, the whole The Royal Conservatoire gathered to pay its respects to Lucas at the cementery. I was standing in front of his' soon-to-be eternal dwelling place with a sleeveless black dress.

Since the accident, the conservatoire had been on lockdown, and the faculty had been the definition of tight-lipped. I had spent the past two days avoiding the stares of the other students, who all eyed me with varying degrees of suspicion. The ones I didn’t know very well seemed to look at me with a faint hint of fear. Others, like Seth and Belinda, ogled me in a different, much more shameless manner, as if there were something darkly fascinating about my survival. I endured the probing eyes as best I could during class, and was glad at night when Stella dropped by to bring me a steaming mug of ginger tea, or Colleen slipped a dirty Mad Libs under my door. 

I still had this feeling the police wasn't over with me. That this wasn't over yet. But when it was though? It's just a never-ending cicle. Maybe, if I had died that night instead of Lucas. Maybe all of this would be over. No more people getting hurt, no more death, no more suffering.

I was sitting alone at the back, Stella haven't arrived yet. I prefered that way though, I wasn't the best company right now. I looked around scanning the sea of students when my eyes landed on one in particular.

Harry.

He was dressed impeccably in a fitted black pinstriped blazer, but his head seemed to hang lower than everyone’s around him. Even from the back, Harry managed to look devastatingly somber.

I thought about the white peonies he’d brought me. Randy hadn’t let me take the vase with me when I left the hospital, so I had carried the flowers up to my room and gotten pretty inventive, cutting off the top of a plastic water bottle with a pair of manicure scissors. The blooms were fragrant and soothing, but the message they offered was unclear. Usually when a guy brought you flowers, you didn’t have to second-guess his feelings. But with Harry, those kinds of assumptions were always a bad idea. It was so much safer to assume he’d brought them to me because that was what you did when someone went through a trauma. He just felt bad for me and felt pitty towards me. Nothing more.

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” a pay-by-the-hour minister warbled from the front of the crowd. “Till thou return unto the ground. For out of it wast thou taken, for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

This was a total wast of time. None of these people really knew him, they didn't spend his last minutes of living like I did. They didn't saw his terrified eyes when the shadows appeared. They weren't here to pay Lucas any respect by being here. This whole memorial seemed more like an attempt to teach the students how unfair life could be.

Just let Lucas rest in piece.

When it was over, I stood up from my chair, feeling weak with the unfairness of it all. Lucas had been as innocent as I was guilty, though of what I didn’t know.

As I followed the other students in single file toward the so-called reception, an arm looped around my waist and pulled me back.

Harry?

No, it was Jasper.

His intense blue eyes were scanning my face then set on my eyes. I bit my lip to keep from dissolving into a sob. Seeing Jasper shouldn’t make me cry, I was just so emotionally drained, teetering on the brink of a collapse. I bit so hard I tasted blood, then wiped my mouth on my hand.

“Hey,” Jasper said, smoothing the back of my hair. I winced. I still had a bump back there from where I’d hit my head on the steps. “Do you want to go somewhere and talk?” I nodded. I needed to get out of here. To get all this out of my system.