"I promise that I'll never fall in love with you. Cross my heart, hope to die."
"Here's to hoping."
Harper Young was sure that moving in with her aunt would be an improvement. It wasn't. This was all due to three tiny little problems.
1) Embry Call...
" That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show. "
- Ada Lovelace
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The Art of Avoidance
As November bled into December Harper could feel them pull away from her. Paul, Jared, and Sam had been spending less time in the Young household and more time doing whatever they do. Run around shirtless? Deal drugs? Who knows, honestly. The two teenagers even skipped school. Harper couldn't care less, but the other Young couldn't care more. Emily had been on a stress baking marathon and while the scents coming out of the kitchen were heavenly it was starting to worry Harper.
Embry had been weird since the party. Jake and Quil had told her about his, uh, drunken tell-all asking about his flaws the day after Mike's killer parter. Harper hadn't realized asking him if he would stop being so anti-social would cause him to clam up and completely avoid her. Despite that, they both killed the presentation. They got an A.
Oddly enough, he still hung out with her after school. Every day he would get a ride from Harper and they would spend a couple of hours walking around the forest, following the map to the areas that usually had the most tracks, and then he would skate away to go home after making sure she got out of the woods safe.
It was frustrating, to say the least. Every time she would show up at the lunch table he would leave or refuse to look at her. He wouldn't even bother during biology or their shared math class to give her a single hi. But as soon as the bell rung dismissing us from school it would be like normal.
And while Embry recession from Harper's life was confusing and hurtful she had begun to hang out more with Sage during lunch where the two started going back to the library again. Her flirtationship with Eli was still going on strong and she had even been invited to hang out more with their group. Bowling, movies, video game nights at Mike's place, were the extent of the activities she was invited to hang with and she readily took each one. Harper decided it was nice to have a lot of friends. Much better than in Neah Bay. She was also a stuck up stone-cold bitch there, but still.
Harper kept seeing Mina everywhere, actually seeing wasn't the right word. It was more or less a sense of foreboding. There was a constant presence hanging over her shoulder. From her walks in the forest, where she had yet to even see one of the mega-wolves, to her shifts in the diner. Sometimes when she would go to clean a table she would find a pair of sunglasses sitting on the table with a note written on the table. It was always something so frighteningly accurate.
The first time it happened was December first. She and Eli had just started to close up and Harper began her duty of cleaning the tables. She started on one end of the restaurant to the other, going methodically and with absolute focus.
