Of Mochas and Macchiatos

SPRING AWARDS 2020 WINNER //

The pale splatter of my coffee juxtaposed against the blackness of the bitumen road is striking. All I can think is that it looks so reminiscent of those white chalk drawings, the outlines that people draw of dead bodies at a crime scene. That could have been my dead body.

"Evangeline! Say something!"

I turn my back on the ghost of my coffee to face him.

"You owe me a coffee." Did I say that? My words seem mechanic, disjointed. Rafe gives me a weird look before he replies.

"You owe me your life."

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Evangeline Leger is a metaphorical mirror. Once a golden girl. Glimmering with aspirations, brimming with hope. Now she is broken. Her sharp, bitter fragments cut anyone who gets too close. A mere shadow of the girl she once was, she has become a shallow reflection of the person who used to own her heart.

And to top all that off, she feels as if her seven years of bad luck have coincided with the start of her first year of college.

Enter Rafe. Also known as Rich Boy Archer. When the universe (and a professor) throws the two of them together, Rafe and Evie become acquaintances, friends. Something more. And although Evie's sparkling façade does well to hide her dark past, she feels her mask slipping further and further with each growing moment she spends with Rafe. The ghosts of Evie's past still haunt her, threaten to spill into her new life.

Nobody can know the truth about it.

But, as Evie is about to discover, she's not the only one hiding behind a veneer.

Because in Astoria, everybody wears a mask.

And with dire misfortune and death following Evie as she navigates her new life in a game of shadows, somebody is bound to die.