Page 58 of Caelum

It was brighter here, I thought. Perhaps because we were closer to the equator? I wasn’t sure, just knew that I would have to stop simply borrowing the boys’ things and start buying clothes of my own.

I hadn’t been tossed out of the Academy yet, so why should I now? And I desperately needed a pair of sunglasses like the ones Nestor wore.

“Iwassad,” I admitted, unsure why I told him that.

He nodded, not showing any smugness or self-satisfaction about being right. “I know.”

“Don’t you want to know why?” I inquired, my tone quite peevish when he fell silent.

“Dre’s awake. Dude’s got a tongue on him worse than a rattler’s bite.” Frazer shrugged, and when he did, his entire body seemed to jostle with the gesture. It was only then that I truly accepted how large he was. He was at least a foot taller than me, and even though I was round and pretty wide, he was even broader. “It was only a matter of time before you felt the sting.”

The irony being, of course, that Dre hadn’t exactly upset me. It was the prospect of not being invited to this Aboh place.

Why didn’t they want me to go?

Did they think I’d, as Stefan would say, cramp their style?

“Are you going to Aboh too?” I questioned, curious if it was a class trip or something.

He grunted. “Yeah.”

Well, he didn’t sound as happy about it as Nestor had. But I wasn’thappy either. Was it a boy thing? Could girls not go to Aboh? I wished I were friendly enough with the few girls in my year to ask if they were going to attend, but any overtures of friendship had been dismissed quite thoroughly over the last few weeks, so that wasn’t going to happen.

When the pebbled floor gave way to a patchy lawn that I could tell no amount of water would save from the scorch of the boiling hot sun, it was a relief to make it under the shelter of the garden.

There were plants and flowers here, but they were all covered with a bright blue tarpaulin that was strung up high to provide some shade.

The blue tarp went on for a couple hundred yards. The Academy wasn’t totally self-sufficient. I heard the plane taking off and landing every few days with supplies, but I knew the garden took off some of the pressure from the kitchens.

I’d yet to see someone working in here, though, and it made me wonder how early they worked to tend to a vegetable garden this size.

When I walked past a few rows of banana trees and then crossed paths with some tomatoes, I found what I was looking for. A solitary bench that overlooked the cliff.

“I didn’t know this was here,” Frazer stated, his surprise evident.

“Now you do.” I smiled at him, wondering why I was sharing my special spot when I barely knew him. “I found it those first few days when I needed some space.”

I’d never come here and found someone else using the bench, and I loved how solitary it was. I especially appreciated how there was nothing between us and the big blue yonder up ahead.

It was thrilling.

I could dance off the cliff and no one would ever know.

Not like that was how I was going to make my escape, of course, but the view epitomized freedom to me, and it sent tingles down my spine.

As we both took a seat, neither of us actually said anything, which wasn’t that surprising really. Boys could be quite boring. They barely talked unless it was about sports or games or a movie. Well, that was how it was now that Dre was back. Before, Stefan had talked about Romania, and Eren would tell me about the things his mother would make in the kitchen. Even Nestor had shared some of his tales of his life before Caelum.

Now that Dre was back, it was like he’d created some kind of blockage. As though he’d built a wall to purposely keep me out.

It hurt. And I wasn’t ashamed to admit it.

I hadn’t realized how much I depended on the boys until my interactions with them were being limited.

“It’s peaceful here,” Frazer said softly.

The crash of the ocean into the rocks whistled around us, belying his words, but I knew what he meant.

Fights were common in Caelum, and there was no whisper of the bellows that came from battle cries or the thud of fists into flesh, and the yelps of agony that reigned afterward didn’t pollute the air.

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