Page 4 of Friend
“Hello.”
Bianca lowered her hand, jumped to her feet, and rushed toward me. Her cheeks were a light pink in the brisk morning air, and the gloomy morning no longer seemed so dark. Her shy smile chased away the last of my exhaustion.
“How are you?” she asked, glancing at the cup in my hand.
“I brought this for you,” I said instead of answering and held it out to her. “We’ve got a fancy new coffee maker, so I thought you’d like it.”
Her eyes flickered to mine as her blush deepened, and she curled her perfectly manicured fingers around the cup, taking the drink from me.
“Thanks,” she said, raising the drink to her mouth and breathing in the curling steam. “It smells like chocolate.”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “I put cream and sugar in too. I know you like your drinks to taste like candy.”
“I do not.” Her protest was weak, because she knew I was right, and she looked away from me as she took a sip. “It’s good, thanks.”
I swung my bag over my shoulder and stepped past her, heading toward the main entryway. “Better finish it fast,” I warned her, pausing only for a moment for her to fall into step beside me. “There’s going to be a new rule that we can’t have food and drink in homeroom.”
“What? No, there’s not.” She shot me a sharp look. “That would be inhumane.”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, not really caring one way or another. But at the same time, I hoped she did listen—I didn’t like to see her sad. The hallways weren’t very crowded this morning—we were running a little later than usual—so we didn’t have to fight our way through the rabble before we reached our conjoining lockers.
I pushed my afternoon books to the back of my locker and knelt on the floor to root through my bag, making sure that my morning classes were all accounted for.
“Finn,” Bianca said in between gulps, taking my warning to heart as she tried to drink her coffee more quickly than usual. Then she put it down on the top shelf of her locker as she, too, began to organize her books, “I saw something last night that I need to ask you about.”
I paused—there was only one book left to pack—and glanced up at her. She’d already finished and was hugging her backpack against her chest as she chewed her bottom lip nervously.
Whatever she was about to say was sure to be shocking—and possibly heart-attack inducing.
“What is it?” My internal alarms blared as a million scenarios raced through my mind. Had something made its way past the filter? But I hadn’t seen anything that might be scary.
But maybe something else happened, something I didn’t think was horrible. The last time this happened was when Abigail and Jonathon had decided to go on an overnight trip. That was the first time in years they’d left her alone for that long. Bianca, for some reason, decided to Google ‘schoolgirl all alone in a house’ and, when I finally found her, she’d been hiding under her bed, scared speechless.
It was then I decided that I could leave absolutely nothing unaccounted for. What had I missed now?
“I was looking for games for us to play during our next sleepover, and I was wondering, what’s a happy ending?” she asked.
I crashed my head into the corner of the open locker door as I jumped to my feet, and I fell back to the floor pressing my hands against the wound.
Damn it all, I’d forgotten that she stopped the search there.
“Why?” I asked, my voice strangled with horror and pain.
“Because…” Bianca knelt beside me but didn’t offer to help. She’s already learned from past experiences that if I managed to injure myself in her presence—mostly in similar situations to this one—that it was best to ignore my pain.
It was already embarrassing enough.
Still, I could see the concern in her gaze as she continued, “I fell asleep before looking, but I wrote it in my notebook of plans this morning. It sounds exciting, right? You know what it is, right?”
That’s right, hernotebook. The one in which she wrote down all the things we had to do every time we had a sleepover.
Which we did often. And it was torture every time. Especially lately.
“Do you want a happy ending?” she asked, cocking her head to the side.
My face grew hot as I resisted the urge to just say ‘yes’. Instead, I focused on the more horrifying, and somewhat sad, part of this situation.
The fact of the matter was that discussing anything sexual with Bianca was flat out risky, even within her therapy sessions. Dr. Kohler had said that as she repressed her trauma, rather than dealing with it, her responses were out of the ordinary. As a result, while Bianca unfortunately knew and understood how sex worked from personal experience, she had next to no knowledge of modern slang, lingo, or innuendo.
