Starry Eyed

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty

If you're wondering why I don't really like talking about my parents and I over the holidays, it's because life was so boring and tired over school vacations again. I have a story to tell; you've heard half of it by now. It's not about my family and I. It's about what happened at Huntley that year. And Christmas felt like that, if you know what I mean. My mind was flitting about. I would be sitting on the sofa with a dorky Christmas sweater on, listening to my grandmother and my aunt arguing over whether or not dying young was 'too romanticised', and I'd go wandering back into my dormitory to ask James how Bridget was. I'd stumble into Principal Huntley's office in a nightmare, screaming about fire, wondering why half of his face had melted and scarred. I'd wake up dozens of times beside Star, and then I'd open my eyes and realize I'd been dreaming of waking up there. My mother saw I was dazed. I was showered in gifts, in special dinners and stories of Jesus below the Christmas tree, from my religious grandmother as she read all of the atheists in her family the nativity. 

My mother was actually holding my hand the whole way as we drove to school again after the holidays. She was all bundled up in a stripy pink scarf and a bulky coat, singing to her Christmas carols CD she still had in the car stereo. The new year had dawned and nothing had changed  but me. 

She knew everything about the fire. But not a thing about the tragic tale of Harlem Potts. She thought I was still dazed about smoke and flames; I was, sure, but every vacation seemed to haunt me with the thought of going back to greet a school's cold-blooded killer. Nobody had been struck by a murder, of course, since Harlem. We received an e-mail from the academy in the middle of the holidays, in the middle of a blizzard on Boxing Day, saying the fire had been caused by a dropped lighter. Nobody mentioned the fact that teenagers were running around with lighters, or that the school wouldn't name names on who dropped it. Dad had been hacked off when he first read it. But I remembered the cigarette abandoned in the bin of my dormitory, and I must have looked ghostly. He didn't say anything once he'd seen my face.

Mom parked the car in the same place Finn had parked his truck on that day. The gravel crunching was both a comfort and a horror. She popped the boot for me, offering to take my trunk to my dormitory, but I insisted I'd do it myself. I wouldn't have wanted her to walk in on Star in my room, or James combing his hair or anything. It felt weird to weave my family and my friends together into one. This whole parking lot situation was strange enough as it was. 

"Keep calling, okay?" She smiled, pulling me into one of those goofy mom hugs beside her towbar. There were a couple of kids milling about with their suitcases again. They stared. 

"I will." I would keep the promise this time. She pecked my cheek like a bird with bright pink lips, and we parted ways, me waving goodbye on the doorstep of the student dorms. It was a bittersweet farewell from a romantic movie, but it was an automatic love. Family love, not true love. True love was nothing like this.

A girl from my chemistry class greeted me with a sober face in the foyer. She'd never spoken to me before. I saw Audrey swallowing some kid's face, too, up against the walls in one of the corridors as I climbed a staircase. When she paused to breathe (possibly a first time thing), she caught my eye and smiled. People were being friendly. It was corny, but it kind of felt like people were a little closer again after the event. 

The e-mail said four students died. 

The dormitory was empty when I unlocked it, and James' stuff was nowhere to be found. I started hauling my things back into their assigned drawers and spaces around the room, and amused myself by dancing over the imaginary line James and I had set at the beginning of the first semester. It didn't really matter any more, in all honesty; neither of us liked eachother, but we didn't run to war every time somebody wandered across into the other army's territory. It wasn't surrender or official peace. But it was a truce, and that was a start.