Everything I couldn't tell you

Chapter 5

Days pass. Ksenija can finally do all the things she thought she wanted - spending all her time with Feliciano, skipping classes to eat donuts in the park, watch funny youtube videos way past bedtime, muffling their laughs so her mum doesn't hear.

And things are... fine. School sucks and the weather sucks but Felicano makes her laugh and things are fine.

He still does Blades essays.

"I can't wait until high school," Feliciano says and turns on his bed, squints at the ceiling. The days are getting longer and grey light spills through the blinds even though it's after six. "Ale never has homework."

"How would he know if he did? He never attends." Ksenija chews at her pen and frowns at her math book. "Does he even remember how to get there?"

Feliciano cackles.

"At this rate he's probably forgotten which school he goes to."

She snorts.

"What about Fabio? Is he ever going to graduate?"

Feliciano rolls around, twists the blanket until he becomes a burrito.

"Does it matter? They'll just work at the pizzeria."

She bites down on the pencil.

"Yeah, them family businesses," she says. "Very convenient."

Feliciano tilts his head, intense eyes studying her.

"I'm not gonna be at Paviano's forever. As soon as I turn eighteen I'm out of there. This is not the seventeen hundreds, you don't have to inherit your father's job."

She thinks of the cottage, of rows and rows of skulls and blood and fangs, of the dragon staring from above the fire mantle.

"Yeah," she says. "I know."

He still watches her. Always watching her.

"High school will be awesome. Drawing all the time. Think of all the lunch places! No more cafeteria." He collapses back on the bed. "Can you imagine? We'll have garlic naan coming out of our noses."

Ksenija can have garlic naan with a snap of her fingers, but it always tastes better when someone makes it by hand. She smiles.

All she has to do is grit her teeth and put her head down and work. Push through. It's just another semester. Just a few months. And then things will be... the same? What exactly is she expecting to change anyway, apart from having to start commuting and having new classes with new people taught by new teachers?

Ksenija focuses on the stupid equation. There will be an end to this semester and there will be an end to high school. Graduation isn't something that just happens to other people, they will experience it as well. But for some reason, the thought isn't as comforting as she hoped.

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Everything is a blur - the surrounding forest, the horseback underneath her thighs, the dragon slithering away in front of them. The scene fades and warps. The dragon lays at her feet, a gaping hole in the eye socket. A bleeding heart in the palm of her hand. Blood flows down her arms and soaks into her clothes. When she looks back down, Feliciano lies there instead, the same hole where his eye used to be.

Ksenija wakes up. Cold light filters through the blinds. Her room looks the same way as when she went to bed - a pile of clothes on the chair at the foot of the bed, an open notebook on the desk by the window, her backpack halfopen next to her closed door. It takes her a moment to remember that Feliciano is still alive.

The day ahead weighs heavy on her. Getting up, doing all the same things she did the day before and the one before that and the one before that. The shitty food, the same old conversations, the constant grey fog that blankets the world and seeps into you, until you're all grey inside as well.