Charming by Haig Moses (1st Draft)

Chapter Nine

LOST AND FOUND

The sky was ominous as we cut across the Montecito coast and the man steering the car reaches backwards to tickle my child length leg. "Are your eyes closed Ettie?" he asks. "You gotta keep 'em closed."

There's a warning caught in my throat, but my five-year-old self doesn't know how to articulate it. It's as if I'm split in two: my body recalling in vivid detail the trauma that's to come, but my mind is caught in the present, blind to what the future holds. The words, despite being there, aren't yet strung together and when the man turns around, I see his face is just a blank slate of ivory flesh.

He looks nothing like me.

"Close your eyes Ettie," he says as a horn of an oncoming truck knocks the wind out of me. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. "Ettie close your eyes!" His hand, once a source of comfort, has turned into shackles against my ankle. The impeding horn vibrating every cell in my body. "I said close your eyes, now!"

My throat swells as I try to pull my leg from his hold. I turn to see Emeka and his sister Rebecca now seated on either side of me. "Close your eyes," he whispers as the blinding white light overwhelms us.

"Harriet."

My groggy mind reforms back within the contexts of reality as the library and its studious students to take shape once more. "You looked like you were about to have a conniption." Tatiana watches me as I wipe the evidence of my nap from my face.

"I'm fine," I say recommitting to the second draft of my International Politics of World Regions essay. "Just haven't been getting much sleep."

While Spring Break was just around the corner, so were midterms and while usually I performed better under stress, something about this semester had felt off since the beginning. "Have you talked to him?"

"Who?"

Tati pursed her lips in a way that said, you know exactly who I'm talking about.

"No, I haven't, and I don't need to either." Nowadays, it seemed I couldn't go anywhere without running into either Alexander, who wasn't speaking to me as much as I wasn't to him, or Sebastian, who was still hoping I'd change my mind about divulging Kappa secrets to him for his article. Then, on the off chance I did run into Elliot, who had returned from his family emergency, he seemed more upset than usual which always led me to believe he knew of his flag's disappearance and suspected me.

"That's not true," she sang. "The last time I checked you two were still partners."

"Historically, people have finished projects without ever having face-to-face communication and if I'm lucky enough, we'll be able to follow in their glorious footsteps."

She shook her head and pointed her finger at me. "You're shameless you know that."

Flashing her a smile, I vacated my seat in pursuit of yet another book to add to my sources. My assignment was to compare past historical events to current ones and to map out the potential outcome of them. I was comparing the United Kingdom's Brexit to America's sixteenth century revolution. So, far I could come up with one main commonality, both countries were succeeding from larger entities. For America, this seemed to work in their favor, but for a while, just like with Britain, it left us without allies.

Fingers skimming the spin of books, I allowed my mind to wander. Had my mother walked these very aisles? Had her hand skimmed these books and her thoughts focused on whether or not she would find what she was looking for? Did she hope, somewhere in the back of her mind, that her daughter would walk these aisles too?