Page 13 of Haunt Me

If I get this piece dirty, then I will have to tear up my uniform’s sweater. And this is so not a Billie Eilish song. Well. Not yet.

What am I thinking?

I fumble a bit, but then quickly tie the bandage around her knee tightly, so that it stops bleeding. She has stopped crying completely now, stopped moving. Almost stopped breathing. She’s still hiding behind her hair.

I can only see the tips of her fingers—they are thin and delicate. Clean fingernails, not painted. Her skin is porcelain-white, like the skin of a princess who has never seen the sun in a fairytale. Why on earth am I thinking of fairytales and princesses right now? The chick is weird and obviously more than a little messed up.

My hands drop from her knee.

The urgent need to touch her has overtaken my entire body, paralyzing me momentarily, but I resist it with everything I have. I did not even get my fingers dirty—I was careful. I don’t need to wipe them. I don’t know what to do with them. With myself.

With my suddenly 0n-fire body.

We just sit there, suspended in time, breathing in tandem until both our hearts calm down. Together.

Are you lost?I think at her.Are you as lost as I am?

She can barely look at me from behind her black hair; I have no idea what she is thinking.

If you are lost, then I can’t get you un-lost, but we can be lost together, I think at her, but the words can’t come out of my mouth.

“Are you ok?” I ask her instead.

She shakes her head and I shiver. She replied to me. Kind of.

I reach out to fix the bandage on her knee, and my hand accidentally brushes the bare skin of her leg. I go hot all over, then immediately light-headed.

I think I lose sense of where I am for a second.What just happened? Did I almost just faint while touching her skin?Except this wasn’t fainting.

I am flushed and hard and hot all over, all within the blink of an eye.

I go weak in the legs just thinking of how I put the bandage on her knee a minute ago, just the memory of the brush of my fingers against her skin sending jolts all through my body.

“What’s your—?”

I don’t even get a chance to ask her name.

She jumps to her feet and turns around. She starts running like a scared doe, but she is too badly hurt to run. She sways and nearly falls in her hurry to get away from me, and I leap after her, grab her arm to keep her upright.

Big mistake.

The minute I touch her, the same weakness overtakes me, the same electricity. Her wrist is like a twig in my hand, thin and fragile, but there is strength to it too, as she pulls it away from me. I let her go at once, and she runs away as fast as her legs can carry her.

I don’t stop thinking about her all day. And the next.

…

I meet her two days later at lunch break. The minute I’m free from classes, I run to the woods. She is sitting under the same tree, her hair pushed back into a thick braid—almost tamed, but not completely—strands escaping to trail around her slender neck, eyes huge and golden with honey.

She is not crying now. Her face is sculpted out of angles and looks white as marble. Perfect as marble too. A bit too perfect. I can’t put my finger on it.

There is something cold about her that sets me on fire.

“What’s your name?” I ask her.

“Eden,” she replies calmly—you wouldn’t think she was the same girl who nearly bled out in this same spot yesterday. “But some people call me Pet.”

Her voice is deeper; she must be older than I thought. My body stands at attention at the sound. It’s hoarse and velvety smooth, but there is a huskiness to it that makes me want to capture the timbre and listen to it over and over again. I want to make it into a song and play it into the night.

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