“Hi Ros-,” the principal said. The tall, thin man smiled.
He looked so big, from Rose’s perspective, even sitting down.
“Can I see?”
She had to step up to the desk to hold out the foolscap. He took it and smoothed it out where she’d crumpled it a bit out of anxiety.
“Mrs. Wells phoned while you were walking down here. She says you’ve been working very hard on your printing.”
Rose hesitated, then nodded.
“It really shows. You should be proud of yourself.”
She allowed herself a smile.
“Do you think it deserves a sticker?”
She nodded.
He opened the drawer of his desk, and he pulled out a thick roll of stickers, as large as a roll of duct tape. He peeled one off, and he pressed it down onto the foolscap paper.
“How’s that?” he asked.
She took the paper back. Her eyes went wide. The sticker was holographic! Shiny! The super-realistic image of the frog on the page opened its mouth, tongue starting to stick out as she looked at it from different angles.
She smiled wide, happy enough she could barely contain herself.
I pulled my attention away, but in the doing, caught other thoughts and reflections, associated to it. A warmer memory, of mom seeing the paper, and giving her an awkward sort of hug, if it could even be called that. She didn’t bend down, but just put a hand on Rose’s back as Rose hugged her, a pat and a short rub, then the work with the shiny sticker going on the fridge.
“Good job,” mom said. “Look at that. Do you think we should show this to grandma, the next time we see her?”
Rose shook her head.
“Okay. But we’ll show daddy when he gets back from work, how’s that?”
“Yes.”
After mom left, Rose approached the image on the fridge, moving left and right to watch the image move. Still excited, still proud.
Her face still a fractured mess, a reconfiguration that only resembled a girl. The Barber hadn’t needed to be too careful, there. It was a memory. Flaws were to be expected.
I caught a thought from an older Rose, thinking back on the memory while she lay in bed. Abstract, wondering why the school had done it. Trying to build more positive relationships with students? Or was it because she was a Thorburn, and the school had seen several other Thorburns pass through? Were they striving to do this one right, where others had been disasters in their own way? A more cynical line of thought.
One event could do so much. So many individual things had been removed, destroyed, or moved elsewhere, to create two incomplete wholes. How much had we been steered in our own individual directions?
I looked at an associated memory, a defining moment, on the far side of the fracture. It was, on a level, an extension of me, as if I simply flowed into the landscape, as much liquid as solid, filling the available void. The only difference from real life was that I was viewing things with different senses.
A shiny holographic image, our second, less important, but still, it should have been pleasing. Except all that remained of that second memory was the sticker itself. A bird on a branch, wings opening as I looked at it from different angles. There was none of the academic pride, none of the surrounding memories. Only the sticker, alone, at the edge of the fracture, something I had liked.
I heard Conquest’s voice, a whisper.
This time I was grounded enough to look for the source.
It came from above and around. As if the sky was talking to me.
But the sky, as I looked at it, was only more distant images and scenes, structures.
I was, it dawned on me, making a fundamental error. I’d tried to rise, I’d tried to navigate, but my surroundings were a shifting kaleidoscope collection of scenes, moving as Rose and I each focused on different things, even grating against one another as we did so, with some damage resulting, fragments of our selves being lost to the fracture. Swallowed up and gone.
Given time, we might grind each other into dust, as we instinctively shifted pieces of the larger puzzle around, trying to fit things where they didn’t fit.
I’d tried to move around, to look up and down, even altered my focus, looking at things in different forms, to view the pillars as what they were.
But I was small, and I was looking at things in a small way. A large part of the reason it didn’t make sense, was that I was studying a complex organism on what amounted to a cellular level.
I pulled back.
The kaleidoscope remained what it was, though not rainbow hued, but more muted colors. The colors of Rose and Blake’s life. Being a raw spirit, intertwined with my surroundings, my vision didn’t suffer for being further away or for me being bigger.
I was a share of the landscape here, at least in part. I only had to own that reality.
Rose’s body was hers. It was solid, a largely unchanging state. I couldn’t occupy that domain. Not easily. Not without suffering for trying.
Her thoughts were more malleable, her memories all the more so.
Once I figured out the landscape on the macro sense, I was able to find her consciousness. It moved like a roiling storm, too many factors and variables to take in.
Rose’s boots crunched through the snow as she approached the waiting group, Alister, Evan and Green Eyes in her company. Peter, Ainsley, Ellie and Christoff all stood at the ridge above the hole the house had collapsed into. Ellie and Christoff sat a fair bit further back than the others did.
“Peter,” Rose greeted her cousin. Ainsley pulled away from under Peter’s arm to approach and hug Alister.
“Your hand,” Ainsley said, shocked. “Oh my god.”
Alister shook his head.
Ainsley hugged him again, fiercely this time. “I’m glad you made it out. Everyone’s been so worried.”
“Not everyone made it,” he said.
Ainsley nodded. “I heard.”
Rose glanced over at Ellie. She offered a tight smile.
“I’ll try to relay what happened after,” Alister said.
“After a night’s sleep,” Ainsley said. “Seriously.”
It was family looking after family. Rose watched Alister’s eyes, and she tried not for the first time, to reconcile her feelings on that front. His face was almost punchable, sometimes, especially the periodic smirks. Attractive, but punchable. She wondered if it would become something endearing or if she’d grow to want to strangle him. He was so casually confident, almost smarmy, at his worst.
But attractive. She’d never been one to join the other girls in fussing over the boys, but now and then, she’d been able to think that one boy or another was certainly attractive. Alister was one such boy.
Seeing him dealing with his cousin, his almost restrained patience at dealing with Ainsley’s mothering and concern, Rose felt like there was a possibility there. A place in this marriage-to-be where she might be comfortable with him. If not comfortable, at least not wanting to actively murder him.
She looked away before she could get caught staring.
Rose met Peter’s eyes.
“You look like shit,” Peter told Rose, in a marked contrast to Ainsley’s gentleness and care.
“Probably,” Rose said. “You have no idea what we’ve been through.”
“The stickman didn’t make it out?” Peter asked.
“He did, in a manner of speaking,” Rose said, her voice soft. She tapped her collarbone.
Eerie, to step back from the scene and look at it more abstractly, to see how the entire storm that was Rose’s awareness briefly focusing on me, searching for and finding me within her.