IRVING //a short story//

3.

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The boy with all the colours.

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WREN IRVING MATTHEW OTHER

School wasn't anything different than it had been before Irving arrived, at least that's what Wren told herself.

She knew her routine, avoiding her old friends (who now glared at her from a distance), collecting more bricks, making more excuses and imagining something else. Some days she was on an expedition to the Amazon; surround by strange and exotic beings, others she was drifting in space...alone. The only thing that was even vaguely different about the place was the boy. He stuck around, following her, talking even if she didn't talk back. He annoyed her. With his stupid toffee hair and smiles, but he stayed no matter how hard she glared at him.

On a Tuesday Wren finally spoke to him. It had been during P.E and the sky was the kind of cloudy where the sun kept appearing and disappearing, throwing everybody into dark shadow and dragging them back out again into the light.

She didn't exactly know what game they were playing, she knew the rules, but the name had disappeared into the murk of her mind, like a ghostly smoke, fading away in a cold storm. She'd only fallen into her head for a minute (or at least she thought it was a minute), imagining herself a knight, trapped in some enchanted forest with no way of escape, but then Wren suddenly found herself knocked to the ground with a bleeding knee.

"Matthew! What the heck was that?!"

She was half-aware of the teacher screaming at someone in front of her, but couldn't quite focus on what was going on. She was still getting over the initial shock of finding herself sprawled on the ground when she could've sworn she was in a fully up right position. A face appeared before her, concern painted across it. She vaguely recognised the odd eyes before her.

"Are you okay?"

Instead of answering she closed her eyes and lay down and listening to the wind, singing through the leaves of the trees. The boy laughed and somewhere in the distance the bell shrieked the end of class.

"Wren? you okay in there? Class is over y'know."

Wren sighed, and concentrated on the image in her head, the shining knights armour, the gnarled roots of trees and the green blocking her path like a labyrinth, before opening her eyes.

"Need a hand up?"

"What're you doing?"

He seemed surprised, after all he had been trying in vain for weeks to get her to talk to him.

"Well umm...I...I guess I'm apologizing? After all I did knock you over in the first place"

Wren didn't react.

"What's your name?"

"Matt, Matthew" he offered her his hand up, but she got up by herself and tried pathetically to dust the mud off, she didn't bother with the grass stains.

"Well then Matthew, I'd like it if you left me alone"

Matthew just smiled at this, looking at her and awkwardly placing his hands in his pockets.

"Where would the fun in that be though?"

"I'd really like to be alone"

"I don't think anyone really 'likes' to be alone."