CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO feels like fourteen carats but no clarity
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
WHEN THE SKY IS ONLY JUST BLEEDING from night-black to a roseate-robed dawn, Sawyer re-enters her dorm, her Walkman in one hand and a bottle of water in another. In an unsurprising turn of events, she had made good on her promise to show Oliver her muggle contraption, a gift from her father, of which he'd taken a liberal ten minutes admiring.
After their run—ten laps around the pitch, sometimes making small talk about the hypothetical, sometimes lapsing into waves of companionable silence washing over them with the serenity of dawn, a static white-noise blanket of screaming crickets and a distant, haunting howling, where it felt like nobody save the two of them were awake at such an ungodly hour—they'd sat in the stands for a little bit, legs sprawled on the bench, huddling over Sawyer's Walkman. The mixtape she'd brought with her had been composed a couple summers ago, while she'd been sitting by the creek behind her grandmother's house with her bare feet in the gurgling tide and soaking in its omnipresent coolness, listening to the water run until she forgot herself, until she was less of a body of flesh and bone and quick anger and more a sound put into the universe. These were songs that didn't make her throat feel so scrapped raw from screaming to be heard. Not hostile and resentful songs she typically listened to that fed the red perpetually clouding vision, the bleeding edges of second, third, of fourth chances, cut jagged by the world's cruelty and her mother's abrasive voice demanding to know why her daughter didn't function like she was meant to. It was only later that week when they'd returned to the city when she'd ventured out to actually assemble the cassette tape.
And now, she let Oliver listen to the curated collection of songs that pulled her back to a day she didn't feel like a bloodstain on her mother's wallpaper and she could've sworn the anger had been drained out from her blood and washed away with the rushing water, pulling away, away, away.
"This is so cool," Oliver said, grinning a little bit when the mixtape had run its course and the cassette tape made a clicking noise, demanding to be reset. There was a gleam in his earthy eyes, so different from the enthusiasm invoked by even the slightest allusion to Quidditch, not so much fire but the flash of a setting sun.
"You think so?"
"You know how my parents always ask me what I want for Christmas and I don't really know what to tell them because everything I want, I already get myself beforehand?" He handed her back the headphones. "I think I know what to ask for this time."
He told her he liked that one Morrissey song on her mixtape and her pulse felt like the beckoning pull of the rushing tide in the creek and her entire body had been submerged.
Neck cooling from the sweat drying on the nape of her neck from the run, Sawyer dumps her things onto her bed without ceremony, but just as she's about to head to the showers with an armful of her toiletries, a muffled sniffle from the other side of the room caught her attention. Sawyer casts her blank gaze in the direction of Quinn's bed. She blinks. It strikes Sawyer now that she's never seen the girl as anything other than cool and rigid and reserved, a house built from composure and quiet nights of companionship, of trust, of promising to listen. Now she is a caved-in roof, curled in on herself, clutching something indistinguishable in the last dregs of the dawn's darkness to her chest, ribs rising and falling in erratic hiccups, barely contained sobs gurgling past her lips as though she were trying to keep them all in but couldn't.
