Fire and Ice

Chapter 24: Secrets of the Friends

My skin tingles at the sound of my pencil scratching against the paper of my sketchbook filling the still air of my little corner of the library. Biting down on the chewed edge of the pencil I run my hands down my goose bump-covered arms desperately trying to fight back the chill that has been coursing through me since I woke up. I sigh as look down at the now mostly-filled piece of paper. The rough drawing I have been working on for the past week has finally taken shape: a girl in an elegant ball gown dancing in an empty ballroom with her faceless lover. 

Ever since the dream I couldn't get the image out of my head so I thought that getting it onto paper would help. It hasn't. It most certainly has not. If anything drawing this image has only made my dreams more prominent. Every time I close my eyes, for even a second, his faceless figure appears and my heart is filled with love and the deep need to be in his arms. I haven't told my parents about this and I've been blowing off all questions from Mrs. Fallen during maths where I have fallen asleep in class more than once only to wake up in a panicky state and covered in sweat. Thankfully nobody has started spreading any rumours. Well, Carla tried to but Jade quickly shut it down even though she is still avoiding me. Nicci and Kim have tried to get us to sit down and talk about the argument we had but she clearly isn't going to listen to me and I'm not about to waste my time trying to talk to someone who isn't ready to communicate. 

I wish my sleep problems and issues with Jade were the only things that life was throwing at me. The morning after my father gave me a brief lesson both he and my mom sat me down at the breakfast table and told me all the different ways my powers would want to break loose and how I could stop them in case I was in public. 

"Your skin is going to feel like it's going to be ripped apart from the inside. That's the ice trying to get out and whenever you feel like that you need to go to a quiet place and do something to get your mind off of it. Draw, hum a song, read a book just do whatever you need to do to calm yourself down." 

My parents called these situations 'bursts' and I couldn't think of a better name than that. Raw explosions of power that always began with the itching feeling of my skin feeling like it was going to be ripped apart from the inside. Some bursts were mild, nothing more than accidentally freezing a glass or a pencil. But, there were bad times. Like the one morning, I woke up and there were ice crystals stabbed into my ceiling, my pillow was utterly frozen and there were snowflakes in my hair and dotted around my face. I screamed for my parents and they rushed into my room. My dad cleaned up the ice while my mom consoled me. Since then I have been training like a madwoman. We haven't been able to get me to the group training due to my parent's time-consuming jobs so I just do little things up in the attic either by myself or with one of them. I love training, every bit of it feels so natural and the more I do it the more I can see what my father means by my strength. 

"I heard you were good at art but I didn't believe it until now," a voice says from behind me. The sudden interruption causes me to jump and I turn around coming face to face with Jade. "Sorry about that. Probably should have made my presence known differently," she says while chuckling. 

"You think?" I snap as I slam my book shut and sheath the pencil in a pouch on the spine of the book. "What are you doing here anyway, I thought you hated the library?" I ask as I glance around the semi-empty room.

I silently watch as she shifts from side to side, her gaze firmly set on the floor and her hands rubbing furiously together to the point that the skin around her palms is turning red. 

"I... I just," she sighs and shifts her gaze to me, "I've been a bit of bitch to you lately and I thought it was high time we put this behind us." She stops and takes several deep breaths before saying, "Vega, you are a great person and a great friend. I have a bad habit of pushing people away and I... I just don't want to do that to you."