*Watty's 2021 Shortlist*
Samantha Roberts and Ben Evans have one thing in common - they both attend Sir Robertson's School for the Gifted, an elite boarding school for the children of the world's wealthiest. Both scholarship students, they gravitate...
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I still wake up earlier than I need too, even though Rose is gone. It's become a bit of a habit, waking up and then checking her room. Just in case she reappears.
Just in case.
I have to be really quiet, so no one else notices that I'm sneaking into the empty dorm room at 7:15 in the morning. It's still empty. I don't know whether to be relieved that she hasn't been replaced or hate the fact that I have a glaring reminder that she's gone every time I walk past that door.
There's another part to the routine, something that goes a long way towards making my day bearable, and that's Ben.
At first, I had been worried that without Rose there, Ben wouldn't want to hang out with me anymore, or wouldn't remember why we had been friends in the first place. But instead, it was almost the opposite—without Rose, I became the girl he met on the boat. The first friend he made.
His best friend.
I honestly don't know what I would do without him. But I also don't know how to be around him—every day I ache to tell him the truth. But I don't know how.
There are little things in the way he acts, the way he talks and goes about his day that makes me certain that parts of him, deep down, are remembering her.
For example: he told me that he too, wakes up unnecessarily early now and has no idea what to do with his time. Hence, my current destination—the jungle.
Something that had fascinated Ben and me from day one here. We picked it as a meeting place, did some research, and scouted out a perfect location—a small hill behind campus that's still clear enough and high enough to get a good view of the ocean.
It's a beautiful place to sit and wake up, and if we've turned it into a bit of a competition to see who can get there first (read: hide and scare the other) well, it's fun. What else can I say?
It's already light out, clear and crisp, a perfect morning. I walk towards the jungle behind campus and keep an eye out for any other teachers. Technically, we're breaking the rules by sneaking out past the wall.
And yeah, it took a month of careful planning and research—and a whole lot of luck—before we found the door.
An old service port, as far as I can tell, the door sits hidden behind tangled jungle vines, on the stretch of wall directly behind Ben's dorm. When I first came here, after Rose, I used to like to walk the edge of the wall, to imagine what building it would have been like, what the villagers must have thought of it.
That's when I found the door. It was locked, of course: old enough to still have an actual lock instead of a keypad or scanner. Ben picked it, after I showed the door to him. I never asked him where he learned to pick locks, and he never volunteered the information.
I head there now, keeping an eye out for Ben or any nosy teachers. Like I said, we aren't really allowed out past the wall, especially not unsupervised. I mean, I get it. The jungle is dangerous, especially for rich kids who've never left the city. But I've read every book in the library on the local flora and fauna, and I taught it to Ben too.
