Midnight Kisses| ✓

Epilogue

Novahk was released a few weeks after that and just in time for the event I have planned at school. Today is the first death anniversary of Emily and I am glad he is with me when we pull up to the school together.

I still don't have my car nor my license but Novahk's mom got enough money together with the help of the job her ladies support group helped her get, so that now Novahk and his mother share up a beat up Honda. Neither of us says anything and for a moment I think everything between us has changed, just like I had dread it would. But as soon as the thought occurs to me, I feel his hand in mine, as warm as I remember and as reassuring. "Let's go."

I miss seeing him from my window. His window is always locked, now that the only person who lives there is a drunkard who is barely at home. His new home is at an apartment downtown, it's small but there's cheery warmth in it, and we can only find in a place which is a home in the truest sense, not a building which binds us in its doors and windows but a place where sunlight streams in and laughter echoes in every room.

The bell rings just as we are walking into the main hallway. There are stares, lots of it and for the first time in my life, it's not directed at me but the boy beside me whose hold slacks as the whispers surrounds us. Novahk's face remains expressionless but I can already see an ocean rolling in his dark eyes. They'll always remember him as the boy who took a gun to his father's head.

I hold his hand tighter, even in an eclipse there is a penumbrae and I know in my heart we'll get through it, eventually. I hope Novahk knows it too, and I try to communicate it with the squeeze of my palm. Seth comes running towards us with a bunch of white flowers in his hand, and hands it over to me.

"Why are you giving my girlfriend flowers?" Novahk asks. There is mirth in his voice and I know he's joking but I can help myself when I look at him wide-eyed. It's been complicated between us from the beginning and as I look into his face, even though he is smiling, he looks at me with serious deep brown eyes. And I did confess I loved him, that day in his frontyard and not every part of it was un-platonic.

Seth ignores him and turns to me instead. "Kristina is just putting up the final poster now."

"Thanks Seth, you helped a lot. I owe you one."

"And what exactly do you owe me, Covalho?" Kristina's clack of heels preside her as usual. Another girl follows her and I am surprised to see it's Aria Maines. Kristina gives the other girl a shy smile before she turns back to me.

"Loads" I smile brightly. They take their own bunch of flowers with them while I hand Novahk some. "Mind telling me what they are for?"

"They are for telling those people you want to, that you forgive them, no matter what. I asked Principal Jenkins and he said it would be a good way to kick start the Positivity Week." The idea of Positivity Week came to my mind when Emily's mom Linda dropped off a neatly packed gift for me.

It was sitting on the couch on her lap when I came back from visiting Novahk. She was laughing at something my mom said and they were watching one of the serials my mom so loves. Even I had to smile. Linda looked so much better and she smiled genuinely at me when she handed the gift. "Emily would like you to have it."

I had opened the package on spot and when I caught the first glance of what lay beneath the brown wrapping, a lump formed in my throat. It was the photo montage of me and Emily, with my favorite photo, the one from the Spring Fling at the center. The same one that hung from the centre of Emily's room ever since I first gifted it to her on her fourteenth birthday.

I was so grateful to Linda that I gave her a pretty big hug and ran up to my room to hang it up in my room.

"And who are you giving?" he asks twirling a flower in his hand. I slip a rose each into every locker that we pass.

"Everybody in school, in my life, even maybe Dr Asenberg even though he made me listen to those god forsaken songs for a year." When I come to the locker that says Brad Hampton and Trisha Beckeley, I pause.

"Everybody?" Novahk asks, with a dark look on his face, probably thinking of his dad. He has pinned one of the flowers to the lapel of his front pocket. We all need a bit of positivity in our life, Novahk is mine. He helped me suck the poison that I had bottled in so long and holding on to it that had given birth to the demons.

And this time I think of him not as Supernovahk, not an unreal boy who leaped out of fairytales

He is my miracle, but in the end he is just Novahk, a seventeen year old kid just like me, who helped me find Krishna Covalho back.

"Everybody."

THE END

t|T