Page 112 of A Heart of Bluestone

Unlucky for me.

“Someone isn’t even talking in this one.” The clack of heels comes before the booth shudders with a fisted knock. “Hello? Others are waiting. Stop booth hogging!”

Booth hogging.

When a student takes up a booth for one call then tries to make another after. The rules are to rejoin the queue if there is one. Can’t just make back-to-back calls.

That’s not what I have been doing in here, in the thirty minutes since Father unkindly hung up on me.

I’ve been marinating in a box of my own self-pity.

Before I can even wipe the back of my hand over my nose, and rub away the snot and tears that gather there, the curtain whips open with a screech along the railing.

I sniff, a thick and gooey sound, then turn my bloodshot eyes to my intruder.

Asta eyes me over dully. Then, with a scoff that catches in her chest, she flaps her hand at me.

“Move, gimp,” she snaps. “I need the phone.”

I swallow, thick and wet.

No fight surges in me.

Father might as well have beaten me with a club, I feel so… defeated.

My breath is a shudder as I push from the bench. It creaks from the loss of my slumped, sagged weight.

I stumble past her, my shoulder knocking hers.

Asta gives a harsher shove in retaliation.

I hardly feel it.

I stagger, but I hardly feel much of anything in the post-sob haze that’s a cloud of numbness settled over me.

Opposite the booth, Serena leans against the wainscoted wall, picking at her manicured nails. The edges are chipped. The gloss has scraped off. She scratches at the clear varnish and lifts her gaze to me.

I turn and head down the corridor, deeper into the Living Quarter. Turns out, I’m not so hungry anymore.

I bottle the tears as I hurry through the corridors.

My face is hot, and it takes everything in me to not to boot out at Landon who, sauntering past me three times my pace, is already tugging off his tie and wears a weary look to him.

Like he has anything to be tired of.

I swallow back the tears I shed in the booth, the ones I have paused as my breath shudders through the corridors.

I turn for the hallway leading to the grand parlour.

Don’t let them see you crumble.

I’ll always remember when Serena said that to me, softly, a mere murmur in passing, but she was passing me huddled up in a bathroom stall, and my knee was bleeding. Her whisper came through the gaps of the door.

Don’t let them see you crumble.

Such simple advice.

It shouldn’t have struck me as fiercely, as deeply, as it did. But those words have carried with me through the years.

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