ADIEU » LES MISÉRABLES | ✓

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Something was not quite right. 

For starters, Éponine was nowhere to be found. Claudine crawled into the Bastille Elephant only to find a snoring Gavroche sprawled out on his thin straw mattress.

She shook his tiny shoulders roughly.

He shot up immediately, still half-asleep. Grunting, he brandished his knife from underneath his pillow and plunged it down - into nothing. 

Claudine smirked. She knew his habits, and had ducked before the knife could lodge itself into her heart. 

Gavroche blinked groggily, now fully awake. "What d'you want?"

"Where's Éponine?"

The boy shrugged. "How should I know?"

Claudine felt a surge of anger towards him. Why didn't he care for Éponine? It was the least she deserved. "She's your sister, Gavroche."

Gavroche leapt up onto his feet and started tidying up his home. "That doesn't mean anything. There is no love in our family - we've never been taught to love each other. Éponine loved our parents, once. She told me that was the biggest mistake she'd ever made."

"Don't you think she loves you?" Claudine asked, her voice small.

"No." His reply was almost instantaneous. "If she did, she would have come to find me after I ran away."

Claudine glanced up at Gavroche. His face was angled away from her, but she could almost see his lower lip quivering. The dirt on his skin were like shadows, veiling his saddened eyes from her sight. "It was me who found her. It was me who remembered. It was me who lo-"

He shut his mouth abruptly. When he turned back to face Claudine, he had already put on his facade of indifference. It astounded her how quickly he could do it; how quickly he could cover up his moment of emotional vulnerability. "Like I said, I don't know where she is. Good luck in finding her. She's like water. Sometimes, she evaporates into nowhere."

___

She crashed into Éponine when she was on her way to the Café.

"Éponine!" She cried out in delight, but the other girl just looked at the floor, unnaturally subdued. "What happened? Why weren't you in the elephant?"

Éponine seemed to have shrunk into the person she was when Claudine had first met her, all narrowed eyes and hollowed cheeks. She pushed past Claudine forcefully, pulling her brown cap further over her eyes. "Don't go home," she muttered.

Claudine stilled. Home? Did she mean the Court of Miracles? "Why not?" She asked carefully.

"Just don't," was Éponine's curt reply. She was walking farther and farther away.

"I'm your friend. You can tell me anything," Claudine called after her. She had hesitated before she said these words, because having a friend was a foreign concept to her. Was she being too invasive? Did Éponine really consider her a friend?

The answer to that question came rather straightforwardly.

"You're just making it worse!" Éponine blurted out, the words escaping from her mouth in a jumbled, agitated mess. She shoved her hands deeper into her coat pockets, hastened her footsteps, and soon, she was gone. It was like she'd never been there.

Claudine felt her heart turn cold. She had just lost her first friend in two weeks. Was she really that detestable, that everyone she met would turn away from her eventually? 

"Mademoiselle Claudine! What are you standing there for? Come on in!" 

Claudine snapped her head up to see a beaming Feuilly. There were nice creases around his eyes when he smiled. She realized, indignantly, that she didn't want to lose him, or any of the other boys, for that matter.