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WHEN THE CAR PULLS TO A STOP in the parking lot in front of her high school, Violet doesn't immediately get out. Students milling about peer into the tinted windows of the familiar sedan (halfway through the school year and one might assume they'd be a little more accustomed to the positively gleaming car containing a coldblooded girl made monster by privilege and madness, but they still continued to stare, like the hopeless little pigeons they were), but give up once they realise there's no way to see what's going on in there from the outside. Paying them no heed, Violet's fingers fly over the keyboard of her phone with the fury of a hurricane. If Luka could see her, he'd cock his head, twinkle in his soft-sun eyes, and ask: where's the fire, Vi? And, in response, she'd shoot him a rude gesture with her hand she'd learnt from one of his friends who works behind the counter of the skate shop that might send her mother into an agitated verbal coronary. For a moment, there's a blanket of static silence, permeated by the rumbling purr of the sedan's smooth engine, the sticky smack of gum being gnashed viciously between Violet's teeth as she jams her thumbs against the buttons of her phone.
In the rearview mirror, Aaron tries to catch her eye, but to no avail. Violet keeps texting. The driver fights the eminent eye-roll. Typical teenager. Granted, there hasn't been a day that Violet's been this attached to her phone, so much so that she's ignoring how her knee's bouncing with an impatient, agitated energy. There's no decrypting the micro-expressions pulling at her features like strings attached to her face. A sharp tug sends her eyebrow arching for a nanosecond, another makes a corner of her lips twitch ever-so-slightly, but, as always, her face smoothed back into the marble mask of sharp-eyed indifference, so quickly and so efficiently you'd begin to question whether you'd imagined it at all.
Her phone buzzes once more with a text.
Paul: nope. not going to school today. you should come over tonight btw. there's a bonfire, and there will be food. a lot of it. kit says she misses you
Violet scoffs, earning herself a surreptitious glance from Aaron in the rearview mirror. Something had shifted between them. Two nights ago, Paul had come running to her house in the middle of the night just because she'd been spooked. They'd talked all night. About everything that mattered and all the nothings that could've been. Until she'd forgotten about her mother and the glowing yellow eyes in the dark, until Violet's eyelids had grown heavy with exhaustion, until her mind had stopped its racing, until time melted into nothing and the shadows fell away from the corners of her eyes and she hadn't realised until much later, when the sun rose and soaked her hardwood floors in rum-coloured rays, when the left side of her bed was vacant of Paul's heat and the covers had been pulled up to her chin, that, in the growing rift of what she should feel and what she didn't, a light had been switched on.
What she realised was this: she wasn't scared anymore. And she didn't know if it was because she wasn't alone at the time, or because of Paul, specifically, but she knew something had changed and she didn't understand it. She didn't know if she liked the change or not. That's what's been bothering her for a good part of the week since he'd left her in her room, climbed out the window and disappeared into the dark. That's the new itch in the back of her head, sitting right beside the voice that'd been muted each time she thought of the boy-wolf with his molten eyes and heat-kissed skin and the perpetual scowl etched on his chiselled features.
