Break Away (Away, Book 1)

by Tatiana Vila

  She half smiled. “Yeah, I know how afraid you are of ghosts, that’s why I’m telling you this.” Her voice hushed as if talking to herself. “You’re afraid of me.”

  “I'm not,” I said immediately. But seconds later, a big fat uncertainty settled down in my head. Was I afraid of my sister? Of being alone with her? We were different in almost every aspect, yes. But there was that connection deep down inside ourselves that always brought us together, even if our worlds collided. It was that soul-rooted link that compelled us to seek one another from time to time, to need one another.

  Since our parents died, however, an odd necessity to build a brick wall between us had transpired. Not having that connection was easier somehow, and I wanted to keep it like that.

  But sometimes little sacrifices needed to be made.

  “You are,” she insisted with that small voice.

  “Okay… to prove to you that I’m not afraid of you—lie—as you think I am, I promise you that from this day on, I’ll try to be nicer and spend more time with you.” Just as I’d promised to Gran.

  Her eyes narrowed and she spun toward me. “Is this more of your subzero bullcrap?” she asked dubious and a bit irritated. “Because if it is, I won’t take more of it today. I’ve had an overdose.”

  I was about to retort more of that subzero bullcrap when, surprisingly, I snapped my mouth shut and let the nice one speak. “You won’t have any more of it, really.”

  Her brown eyes widened. “I think you’re actually serious,” she said, surprised.

  “I am.”

  “Wow.” She blinked several times. “Okay.” She said it as if she didn’t know what else to say, and then, “Since I don’t know how long this new shiny Dafne will last, you have to promise me one more thing, right now.”

  I took in a deep breath and readied for her request. “Go ahead. Ask.”

  “Promise me you’ll never, ever, call me Buffy the Vampire Slayer again.” She pointed her sharp eyes on mine.

  I couldn’t help it and laughed.

  “It’s. Not. Funny.”

  “I agree, it’s not funny. It’s dead funny.”

  “That’s because you weren’t named after a crappy movie. I mean, what was Mom thinking? Did her neurons explode while searching for a name? Obviously that didn’t happen with you. You got a rocking German name and all. So unfair.”

  “Hey, at least you’re not a nymph transformed into a pathetic laurel for life. You’re a hardcore kick-ass chick with a really hot vampire guy in love with you—at least in the TV series,” I added.

  “What about one of the most important gods chasing your butt?”

  “Apollo isn’t as hot as your fanged guy.”

  She paused to think about it and smiled, flipping her blonde waves to the side. “Yeah…I think you’re right. But you haven’t promised me the name thing yet.” She glared at me again.

  I turned and placed both hands on the steering wheel. “Sure, I promise,” I said a bit unwillingly. I loved to use that name to banter with her and letting it go was a pity.

  I looked at the digital clock on the middle of the dashboard. We were so going to be late. “What I won’t promise, though…” I put the car on reverse. “…is to let go of my speed crap today. Fasten your seat belt.” I commanded, looking over my shoulder

  “Oh, no,” she looked at the time. “Only five minutes to get to school. Mr. Ludlow is going to kill me. Drive. Fast!”

  I pulled out the car from the driveway with a smile on my face and speeded down the long gray road.

  CHAPTER 2

  “I can’t believe this!” Linda shouted, snapping the thin blue door of her locker shut. The weak metal protested with a sharp, dry echo. “All this time assuming he was keeping his almighty promise, and I was here, waiting like some stupid puppy. I should’ve known better than that.” She let out a soft snort. “Now I belong to the lame circle of the cheated. I bet people can see it flashing across my forehead.”

  I leaned my shoulder against the wall and settled my eyes over her disheartened profile. “First of all, they would need a powerful X-ray vision to see it, better than the one that guy in blue tights—Superman—has. And why do you care about the others? If they obviously don’t give a damn, why would you?”

  “I don’t.” She turned and faced me. Her nose was tipped with a soft red and gleamed like a premature cherry. I knew that if I touched the skin over the straight bone, it would’ve been warm, like mine was when sadness threatened to break away from my eyes—something I never allowed in public. Tears only came out in solitude. They were inexorable allies in the privacy of my bed. Outside, those tears merged into my skin, leaving a hard mask to the eyes of others.

  And ignorance was what I craved.

  “Okay, tell me what happened.” I told her as softly as I could.

  She looked down and sighed. “I called to his dorm last night and…a girl answered. Her voice was all giddy and she kept repeating ‘stop it baby, stop,’ so I thought it was a wrong number and was about to hang up when…Brad’s voice came in and I…froze.”

  I grinded my teeth together. Men. Why couldn’t they just keep their hands in one cookie jar?

  “Please tell me you said something to him.” I pinned her with a sharp stare.

  “It’s over. I…I broke up with him,” she wavered and lowered her head.

  Poor Linda. She was such a nice girl, always trusting people when she wasn’t supposed to, claiming everyone deserved a chance. She believed in goodness and everything bright and shiny. That’s why people took advantage of her. And that’s why guys like Brad thought they could play with her like some dumb puppet. “Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you, Linda. College is the Holy Grail of sex for guys, with all the parties and the girls throwing at…”

  “Okay, okay, I get it, no more dating college guys unless you’re in college.” She looked at me with sadness in her dark eyes and took in a deep reassuring breath. She frowned, as if remembering something, and brushed behind her ear the longest side of her asymmetrical bob. “Isn’t Buffy’s boyfriend in college, too?”

  I swallowed back a hiss. “Don’t you dare mention that guy’s name to me.”

  She snapped her fingers. “Oh, yeah, I remember…Ian, right?”

  I rolled my eyes, a swirl of anger twisting my stomach. “Thank you so much for the nice reminder,” I said and pushed my feet down the hallway. “It’s not the same thing, and you know it.”

  “Yeah,” she said, following my quick stride. “But it doesn’t mean he’s not going to cheat on her just because he’s fifteen minutes away.”

  I stopped and turned to look at her, surprised. “Are you telling me not to trust Ian, Ms. everybody-deserves-a-chance?”

  That caught her off guard. “I, um, no. No. I’ve just seen him twice, so I can’t really…hey! Why are you turning this on me? You’re the one who doesn’t trust him.” She pointed at my chest, which was covered with a black “The Cure” logo and a picture of the band. It was one of my favorite T-shirts, white and tight, stopping an inch below my belly button to show a bit of flat skin.

  To Buffy’s eyes, black heeled boots were a fashion essential. To my eyes, not having vintage styled shirts was a fashion suicide.

  “Exactly, I don’t,” I said wiping my hands over my blazer, as if cleaning the thought of him from them. “But I have seen him more than twice, which, believe me, is enough to have a well-rounded opinion of him.”

  “I don’t get it,” she said with a soft shake of her head. “He seems pretty in love with Buffy. The times we bumped into him at your house and saw him, his eyes were, like, shinning all the time. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “I can’t follow you, Linda. Are you with or against the guy? I already told you the kind of person he is.”

  “Was.”

  “Is…was…whatever. Nobody changes just like that.” And especially guys like Ian who thought the entire female population was at their feet. Linda hadn’t been able to witnes
s all the lovely “encounters” out in the parking lot with him plastered on several girls’ faces, or even right here in the hallway. Since she’d barely checked into school this year—her parents had transferred from the University of Iowa to the creative writing department at Berryford’s preppy university—she’d only seen Ian’s best behavior now that he was with my sister and out of high school.

  Yes, he’d changed a lot from the time he’d started hunting Buffy—which must’ve been his fastest hunt ever. She’d fallen prey to his charms faster than a pissed off monkey running to reach his stolen banana. But I didn’t believe in this sudden change. I hadn’t forgotten all those hot and heavy scenes with him practically eating those girls’ faces last year. He was a player to the core. He never took seriously any girl. And, no, he hadn’t been exactly popular. He was just one of those guys who kept to themselves, hanging in one corner with a few friends, looking all mysterious and pensive, as if he would just pull out his guitar and start playing some tunes. That brooding, artsy vibe, I think, was what made him so irresistible to girls—besides his chiseled good looks, of course. He had the looks of James Dean and the spirit of Van Gogh—a dreamy combination of which he took full advantage.

  “Wow, I love Buffy’s blazer,” Linda suddenly said. “Where did she get it?”

  I turned around and chased her line of stare. “At Ralph Lauren, I think. What a preppy thing to buy.” I snorted, looking at Buffy crossing the bottom of the hallway with the double J’s. Their true names were Jessica and Jennifer, but since they sounded too run of the mill, I’d decided to give them a worthy moniker—one for the price of two. A great deal, really.

  As if sensing my thoughts, Jennifer glanced at me, and when she realized who I was, the casual look in her eyes filled with fierce disapproval. Her eyes narrowed and she turned around, tagging along with Buffy and Jessica, her rounded chin pointing forward.

  Had I said how much the double J’s disliked me? And how much I disliked them? It was a world of pure love down here.

  “Ouch,” a guy said with a hiss when he passed by me, waving his hand in the air as if he’d been burned. “Keep down the coldness, babe.” His other friends smirked and smacked hands with him in manly approval.

  See? Pure love.

  “Baboons,” Linda muttered, glaring at them.

  I glanced at her with a frown. “Baboons? Is that an insult?”

  “Baboons are vile.”

  I rolled my eyes. So much for having a saint-cursing friend. “Don’t waste your anger on them—which is obviously limited. Keep it for Brad instead.”

  “How can you put up with this?” she asked. “You’re not an ice queen, Dafne. Maybe you can be a little cold-blooded sometimes, but you’re not heartless like everybody thinks. I know you and…”

  “Linda,” I stopped her, holding up my hand. “I don’t care about what they think of me. They can call me whatever they want. And I don’t mind being an ice queen. It’s way better than being a tramp or a dumb cheerleader with two pompoms as a brain.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  What? I hadn’t mentioned her name, and then, “no,” I shook my head, realizing the major slip up I’d done. “I didn’t mean you, Linda. You ended with that cheering business a long time ago—thank God.” I added with a sigh, and then came back to my original train of thought. “Anyway, you’re not that type of girl. You’re light years away from dumbland.”

  Still, she didn’t seem convinced.

  “Come on, Linda. You know I wasn’t talking about you.”

  “Well…there’s only one way to know.”

  “Tell me, then.” I said, hooking my right thumb on the belt loop of my low jeans.

  She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “If you tell me which mascara you normally use, I’ll believe you.”

  “Not again,” I said annoyed, snagging my shoulders in a gesture of absolute weariness. “I already told you I don’t use any of that stuff. And what does it have to do with any of this?”

  “Nothing, I'm just using this weak moment of yours to convince you to share with your best friend your beauty secrets—because I don’t believe you. You can’t have those big, feathery eyelashes just like that. It’s not normal.”

  I sighed. “Okay, you found me. I'm an alien from the fourth district of Venus.”

  “Stop it.” She tilted her head, looking at me with exasperation. “You’re so selfish.”

  I didn’t understand why it was so hard to believe I didn’t use makeup to come to school. My eyelashes were big enough and curled already. The only thing I allowed myself to pick up in the morning was a dusting of pink blush to spread across my high cheekbones and chin—my skin was almost two shades below ghostly white, and the long dark hair on top didn’t help. The contrast only deepened the pallor, thus a little help was always welcome. But beyond that, everything on me was honest-to-God natural-born. All made in Mom’s belly.

  My throat clogged. It was the second time in the day I’d thought about my parents. Normally, the piercing memories were only acknowledged at night, when I was on my own and not in the public eye. Thinking about them during the day put me in a black hole, blocking my way to a free and easy road. And let’s just say that the road during the day was a lot longer than during the night, so doing this for a second time today meant sinking myself deeper into that shady hole while I still had a big piece of road ahead. I was breaking the rules. My rules to survive the day.

  “It’s not selfishness,” I said, trying to ignore the thorn in the back of my throat while putting up a poised stance. “It’s being beautiful as hell.”

  “Arrogant much?”

  “Hey, I'm just telling the truth. Is being straightforward a crime?”

  “Not for an alien from the fourth district of Venus, I guess.”

  We laughed and moved on to our next class.

  The school here wasn’t that different from the one I used to attend back in Chicago. There were the same rows of blue lockers bracing the hallways, the polished floor scratched by students’ frantic soles, the classroom doors with lab-like windows, the long lights trailing after one another on the ceiling—maybe there was a slight difference on the size—okay, maybe it wasn’t slight. The one in Chicago was at least two times bigger. But this was a very small city after all.

  Actually, I could hardly call it a “city,” but together with West Berryford, on the other side of the Wabash River (where Ian’s preppy university was), this town-like place spurted to life, giving it a somewhat city vibe. A lame one, at that.

  The atmosphere in this school, though, felt entirely different. And it wasn’t because I’d changed from the time I used to wander hallways with more than one friend at my side, cheery and careless, with no care in the world but parties and hookups. It was because almost half of the people here could only think about reading or writing, which was kind of odd. There were always those who favored the library or some small spot under a tree shadow outside, but the cafeteria? The bathrooms? The hallways? The stairs? They were everywhere with a book sprawled open in their hands, or with an open notebook lying in their laps as if somehow they couldn’t unlock their eyes from the pages.

  It hadn’t been always like this, of course. But I couldn’t tell when it’d begin. It was, in fact, a wonder I’d noticed any of this. Usually, I was in my own world, surfing in the waves of my thoughts. Every now and then I stepped out onto the shore of reality to make small talk with Linda, but a few seconds later my mind was back on the surfboard, far away from those who surrounded me.

  This time, it was just too bizarre not to notice. Something was…off.

  “Bio was a pain today. We had to cut some…”

  “Why is everyone like this?” I interupted Linda as we passed by a girl leaning against the wall with her eyes glued on a purple book.

  “Like what?” she asked puzzled.

  “Like if there’s some life-shaking exam going on that I don’t know about.”

  “Uh, you lost
me.”

  I stopped before pulling open the exit door and turned to look at her. “Didn’t you see all the people reading and writing on the way?” I waved my eyes to the hallway behind us.

  She spun and looked with a frown. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, don’t you think it’s weird?” I pushed open the door and stepped outside. There was still a cold breeze brushing the air, like sprayed fresh mint over tap water. The tooth-edged leaves of small oak trees seemed to shiver, and the purple-pink flowers of redbuds deepened in color under the bright sun, as if the gold in the light fed the cashmere petals.

  But that wasn’t what I noticed first. Another guy was reading on the steps down to the parking lot, oblivious of the people walking down next to him. “Another one, huh?” Linda said when she spotted the lanky guy with a black hoodie seated on the edge of the staircase. “This is definitely weird.” She shook her head softly as we moved down the stairs.

  When we closed the distance with him, she tilted her head to the side, trying to catch what the source of bewitchment was. “Star Wars,” she mouthed to me, half rolling her eyes. “I guess that’s not part of some English exam,” she whispered into my ear, as if avoiding to be overheard by the sci-fi bookworm. But it was completely unnecessary. An asteroid of the size of Brazil could’ve been falling and burning the air with a huge tail of fire and acrid smoke, and he wouldn’t have even blinked.

  Or who knows? Maybe he would’ve taken out his hidden light saber and saved the day.

  “I'm telling you…there must be something going on,” I said, bringing to my mind all the puzzling images of people I’d noticed over the last two weeks. And the number seemed to increase while the days unrolled one after another. “Could there be a bug in the air that makes you, I don’t know, read compulsively?” It sounded stupid, but it was the only thing I had.

  “Well, that’s original.”

  “Oh, enlighten me, please. I don’t hear you giving any ideas.”