Chapter Text
Snow collapsed onto the university grounds like an omen. The blinding mass of it seemed poised to cover each blade of the shrivelled up grass, and with it take everything autumnal remaining. The first snowfall befell on the second week of December, and by the middle of it, lay a vitreous body on the ground, on the roofs, and on the heavied tree branches. The weather reporters said it was the biggest precipitation in years.
As the snowstorm hailed through the building corpuses on Wednesday, the remaining classes were cancelled. In the same email, it was advised not to leave accommodations for longer than half an hour, lest be made to dig yourself out.
When Rosalyne’s phone pinged and she looked out the window, she saw four figures wafting through the powdery volley, resembling pupae with their heavy coats and scarves. In the darkness of the December evening, they looked like doomed explorers.
Peruere left a day before, her side of the room – a neat, perfect absence. She had kissed Rosalyne on the cheek briefly before leaving, proving just how French she was, and told her to text if anything comes up. Thank God nobody told first-year Rosalyne that tall, stately women with perfectly styled hair would be kissing her on the cheek; she would have probably withdrawn her documents out of sheer inconceivability.
Three minutes later, Childe, Mona, and two other people were shaking snow off their scarves and boots on the threshold of Rosalyne’s room, while Rosalyne was busy deciding whether she had lost her mind. What appeared a delusion at first glance turned out to be fact at second: the two unknown newcomers shared a face. In fact, they shared most of their features, so signally that the only thing keeping them from being exact copies was the length of their hair. They were both blonde and short. They both looked at Rosalyne with a kind of chastised, unexplainable look. The girl spoke first; she said,
“I’m Lumine,” and Rosalyne startlingly failed to place her accent. And the boy said,
“I’m Aether. Hi,” and Rosalyne decided that they both were, by the very definition, weird. Perfectly strange, bordering on unfathomable.
The pair traipsed into the room, their motions airy and unhurried; a minute chill went down Rosalyne’s spine. The chill, however, was immediately transformed into a full-blown shudder as she felt Childe’s arms encircling her in a firm hug.
“Signora,” he said, lengthening the o-or, as Rosalyne convulsed. “Where is Peruere?”
Rosalyne wormed out of the hug, her nose – a fallen victim of the acidic body spray. The twins observed the display with anomalous silence.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she hissed. “She left yesterday.”
“No-o! I was hoping she would come with us.”
Childe moved past her, patting her on the head. Before Rosalyne had a chance to say the myriad of nasty rejoinders she held prepared, she felt another pair of arms wrap around her delicately.
“You’re so warm,” said a feathery voice into her collarbone. “It’s so cold out there, it’s death!”
The soul untethered from the body. The mind demoralised.
Suddenly, there was nothing coherent left in the brain. Rosalyne’s hand placed itself upon Mona’s back, almost at the waist, her fingers tangled in the twilit black hair just a bit. She was still not used to this wanton familiarity, to the way Mona gave out affection without a hint of equivocation. Rosalyne counted to three, then allowed herself a four, and stepped back.
Mona’s face was reddened by the cold, strands of her hair wet where snowflakes melted in. One strand was stuck to her forehead in a capricious swirl. Rosalyne’s fingers tremored. She cursed at them internally until they stilled. Mona looked her right in the eyes, smiled quickly, sort of boweredly, and walked past into the room in a manner of running water, at which the air filled with a sharp scent, like frost and roses. Rosalyne turned as if on a leash.
Childe was sitting at Rosalyne’s desk, in the chair but turned the other way around, so that his front pressed against the inside of the chair’s back, fiddling with his phone. The twins stood eerily still next to Rosalyne’s bed, not even a forearms length apart, and Mona placed herself onto the bed’s coverlet with a puff of her skirts. At that, the girl twin, Lumine, raised her arm and with her pinky finger removed the strand stuck to Mona’s forehead, carefully, a miniature tug on the corners of her mouth. The air in the room changed, or maybe it was just Rosalyne’s breath that stopped working.
Childe’s phone dinged, vibrated, dinged again.
“So, is he going to be there?” Rosalyne didn’t care to know, not really, but she needed to say something before she got unkind. “Childe?”
The afforquestioned looked up from his phone, only a little startled. He said, “Yes, yes,” but the words weren’t solidified, muttered more like an afterthought. His eyes had changed, had become a complicated canvas, foxed and distant. In a span of a few minutes, from the door to the chair, his whole demeanour remoulded somehow, and Rosalyne did not know what constituted such a change. Maybe the chair was uncomfortable.
A blanched silence confined the room, lasted one, two, three seconds too long.
Mona politely cleared her throat from her place on Rosalyne’s bed – her place on Rosalyne’s bed, what a thought – and everybody turned to her, even Childe.
“So, it’s a fifteen-minute walk,” her fingers fiddled with the hem of her little flowy skirt as she spoke; Rosalyne’s eyes pinned on it like a lifeline, “and I don’t think we can get a taxi. So, we walk and we freeze to death – or we walk and we don’t. ”
The December blizzards could stop classes, halt traffic and interrupt broadcasts, but nothing, not even the nastiest, vilest hailstorms, could impede university students from satisfying their unquenchable desire for drunken intermingling. The upcoming party was a haphazard affair – the location decided quickly, and the word spread disjointedly. Rosalyne knew only two things for sure: the address and the identity of the inviter. When Childe called her somewhere before the darkness settled upon the sky, she thought it was a joke. A party on Wednesday, five days before Christmas, during the biggest weather’s hysteria in years. She almost said no, almost called Childe an idiot while she was at it, but then he mentioned that Mona was going. So, Rosalyne said she’d go. For no particular reason.
Then, Childe texted her to say that he was bringing two more people, not elaborating – furthermore, he failed to mention that he seemingly cloned them prior to that on campus. The whole plan was concocted so abruptly, they did not even have time to pregame.
Now, the only thing standing between all them and the second floor of the campus building – usually reserved for seminars and banquets, presently converted to a vice den – was a fifteen-minute walk in the face-slapping, gelid cold. The meanest part of Rosalyne wasn’t opposed to letting the girl twin, Lumine, wander off into the nearest snowdrift.
Rosalyne said, a little contemptuously,
“Well, we’ll just have to huddle together to preserve the warmth, then.”
“Like penguins,” supplied Aether. His tone was genuinely enthusiastic if a little unsure. Everyone beheld him, too stumped to voice dissent. His sister only nodded. Rosalyne wondered hopelessly where Childe found that odd pair.
“Yes… Like penguins.”
After that, Rosalyne went to her dresser, took out a bottle of liquor she kept stashed in reserve for bad days. Childe was still curved over the chair, with his taciturn set of the mouth, not a joke in the vicinity. The twins lingered on the periphery of Rosalyne’s sight, a hovering blob of off-white clothes and pale hair. When they saw the bottle, Lumine said,
“I can carry it, if you want,” as Aether took something mesh-y out of his pants pocket.
It turned out to be a bag, crocheted a little amateurishly, fit to carry exactly one bottle. The twins explained – in very few words – that nobody was taking anything bigger than a purse, and that nobody wanted to carry the bottle in their hands either. And the mesh bag could fit under a coat with no problem. Rosalyne thought it was annoyingly smart. She gave the bottle to Lumine, who smiled servilely, and Rosalyne hated that little smile. And with that smile, she hated herself just a little bit, too.
Meanwhile, Mona walked around the room, stopping where the papers and photos had been taped to the walls, the books stacked on the shelves above the beds. She even traversed Peruere’s side, pausing at the one single photocard hanging above the headboard. Rosalyne noticed that Mona’s dark, staid eyebrows lowered a little when she finished examining Rosalyne’s mosaic of printed pictures. She didn’t voice her thoughts, however, and as Rosalyne caught her gaze, accidentally, while putting on a warmer blazer, Mona’s eyes crinkled like the barbed filigrees of frost on the windows. Rosalyne filed the whole thing away for later.
It was a brief delight to dress in near silence for want of Childe’s jokes and quips.
Walking out into the cold, they were a uniform drove, probably exactly like penguins.
The luminous silver drape outside met them like a punch. It was impossible to discern anything. The buildings, the trees – everything was interrupted by the slashing curtain of snow like fizzling static. The wind was a hacking knife, and the sky above was an abyss.
In that turbulent hurricane of white, Rosalyne felt perpetually lost. What she could see of Mona was darkly solid yet wavering – the outline of a coat, the powdery, chalky film on the hat. What she could see of the twins was almost nonexistent – they appeared two grey shadows, alike in build and corporeality, both dithering illusions. Only Childe appeared unyielding before the tempest ahead. With his grey coat and flapping blood-red scarf, he propelled forward, leading the four through the blizzard like the terrain was his alone to conquer. At times, when Rosalyne looked at him, she could swear that his eyes glowed a hungry, incandescent blue.
Seeing the terracotta body of the hunted building after fifteen freezing minutes was theophany. Walking through the unlocked glass doors – Rosalyne, along with her group and five other people, all having arrived at the same time – was like purgation. The warmth caressed her face, snow melting gradually into rivulets on her hair and face. Somehow, in that paltry tepidity, Rosalyne’s eyes immediately darted to Mona; the girl was shaking either from the cold or from the ensuing lack of it. She was stripping her sodden hat, then her scarf, unzipping her coat. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyelashes heavy with melted droplets. She was Circe made flesh. Rosalyne’s insides did something very complicated. She dragged her eyes to the twins, who just looked very wet, and her insides pacified.
Childe hadn’t said a single word throughout the whole journey, which was a blessing until it became just plain creepy. Rosalyne pressed her coat into Aether’s hands, smiling saccharinely like she’d seen Childe do, and said,
“Would you be so kind as to hang my coat? I need to talk to your date real quick.”
She expected more pushback. She at least expected to be validated or disputed on her assumption: Rosalyne was certain that Childe had invited one of the twins as a date – and that the other one had simply tagged along – but she could not yet tell which one it was. But Aether took her coat in silence, not betraying his reticence, nodded and went to the cloakroom, disappearing in the unlit shapes of the corridor, his sister trailing right behind. Next, Rosalyne caught Mona’s gaze – her eyelashes still curling up from the melted snow, God – but was not given a chance to say a thing. Mona came up to Childe, took his coat from his hands with a light expression. Said, “I’ll make sure they don’t get lost,” and vanished in those same shadows. Something in Rosalyne’s mind pinged troublesomely at that gaze, and her tone, something didn’t seem quite right.
It suddenly appeared extremely vexing that there were now four people whose countenance she couldn’t read. Well, she would redress and rectify.
Rosalyne took Childe cruelly by the arm and led him into the darkest corner where there were no hearing ears and seeing eyes, no one to witness the interrogation.
“What is wrong with you?”
The dimness of the corridor, the vice grip, the stuffy air of the building left Childe a penitent. Rosalyne couldn’t see his eyes; if she could, she wasn’t sure Chidle would admit to anything. He kept quiet for a few seconds, then said:
“Kazuha texted me that Kunikuzushi is going to be here.”
“Who?”
“Kazuha. The guy who invited us?”
Annoyance seemed to burrow a commorancy in Rosalyne’s chest.
“Oh my God, not him, I know who he is,” she raked her brain. “Ah,” September, the party, crestfallen Childe in the canteen. “You mean Scaramouche?”
Childe huffed something very similar to a laugh, and Rosalyne nearly became violent.
“You remember the nickname! Ouch, okay, okay,” he rubbed his pinched arm. “Yes, him.”
“But why–? Oh my God,” this was so pathetic. “Don’t tell me– God, Childe. That was three months ago. You never even talked to him properly. You saw him two times!”
Childe sagged his shoulders. Rosalyne would scold him for his theatrics, only his frame did look genuinely despaired.
“Besides,” she flicked her wrist, anxious to finish the conversation as soon as possible. “You’re here on a date.” Childe didn’t disagree. “And the guy probably doesn’t remember you.”
Was that a little mean? Hopefully. Childe didn’t say anything else. Rosalyne waited for five more seconds, but she was never a particularly patient person. With a swish of her hair, she turned and walked back into the light, feeling satisfied with her rectification, Childe dragging his feet a few steps behind.
The twins and Mona had already returned, starting in a semicircle, chattering mildly. Mona was talking, her arms making an orchestra of the bracelets she was wearing, and both twins were looking at her with an expression that was in the same quarters as polite awe. Probably. Rosalyne still couldn’t be sure. Ugh.
The corridor was a vast concourse laid from concrete blocks and glass, and metal bars. Divaricating into the darkness were several dark passageways, leading away from the hall like a maze or a metacarpus. The furthest one, lit by the single dimming LED panel overhead, was a grand, oppressive staircase. Concrete for the treads and metal curved bars for the railings. How Rosalyne hated brutalist architecture.
The other passageways lead to the cloakroom and three other directions that Rosalyne did not care about.
The building served as an event location during seminars, workshops and other important happenings, and as a warehouse during the rest of the year. Everyone who knew anything about anything had one specific fact immured into their mind: it was the easiest venue to book, the only downside being that the lights shut off at four and had to be turned on manually periodically. It was a perennial abode for delinquent student gatherings at least once a month.
Rosalyne had been there thrice before: during a second-year party, on a Better Business, Better Society Workshop, and during another second-year party. She did not remember what the inside of the building looked like with the lights on.
In the present day, the music was pumping furiously. The far end of the staircase, waning upwards, glowed like Heaven's Door, except that instead of the pearly white it flushed a burning magenta. People spilled out of it as if spat out, some sitting on the steps, some standing by the railings.
Rosalyne looked at her peculiar group. Childe, his hair a singed colour from the icy water, looking like a mannequin with the most ordinary guy as a title; the twins, standing close, shadows of each other with their braided hair, off-white clothes, and unplaceable dispositions. Maybe they were in a cult; they sure looked the part. Rosalyne raised an eyebrow when she noticed that Childe had moved closer to the pair, now standing an immersed-enough distance from them; however, his phone had appeared in his hand again.
As Rosalyne’s eyes found Mona, she felt a desperate thirst, a drying of the mouth. The girl was looking straight at her. In those dark, penumbral eyes lay a fierce, magenta throb. Her black lacey top looked a canopy upon her frame, delicate guipure curling over her sides and up her chest, weighted down by silver necklaces and pendants. And her lips were tinted a deep shade. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Rosalyne discovered the thought that if Mona asked her right there, right then to go into a dark passage of the metacarpal building with her – Rosalyne would not find it in herself to say no. The ramification of that thought she put in a box, and closed it, and hid it so far away that her mind erased the very conception of the thought as it was.
The fact that Mona was even talking to her was incomprehensible. After that disastrous rendezvous in the university canteen back in September, when they both had to bring Childe down from whatever breakdown he had been planning on having – Rosalyne never thought that Mona would continue talking to her. They exchanged numbers that day – well, wrong, they exchanged their Instagram profiles. Rosalyne had to pretend very hard that she hadn’t spent a whole evening once staring at Mona’s photo feed.
Then, Childe had invited Rosalyne over, and Mona was there, and Rosalyne said yes under the condition that they would not go into Childe’s room (ew). And there had been several other instances when the three of them ate together in the much-suffered canteen. At some point, Mona’s number made it into Rosalyne’s contacts. At some point, Mona started hugging her hello. At some point, Rosalyne let her.
They never spoke much to each other: Childe was always a buffer, and the opportunity had not yet presented itself.
Nonetheless, after three months, after countless collective quips at Childe, after seeing Mona smothered in sauce, Rosalyne still could not look her in the eye for long.
***
Twenty minutes later, all of them were nicely drunk.
They went up to the second floor, which turned out to be a gloriously huge room with a high ceiling and a plethora of mismatched tables put down with no apparent order or care. Music was playing somewhere from above, speakers pushed into the corners of the chamber. The space was stuffy with alcohol, dampness, and the general aroma of a long-unused building. Somebody even brought a smoke machine; it was gurking out boggy puffs of kaleidoscopic vapour, coloured by the swirling lights overhead.
There was a surprising rabble of people. Some were standing by the tables, some sitting down against the walls, and in the centre of the room was the terrible dance floor; an anthill in full swing. How the ordeal was managed – putting together such a party in less than a day – was beyond Rosalyne’s understanding. The number of people present – on a Wednesday, five days before Christmas, was that much more astonishing.
Rosalyne’s spirit swayed as the first step onto that second floor was taken: it was all a little too much. So, she deflected. She came up to Lumine, linked their arms, and said,
“Lead the way,” a tad sarcastically.
When Lumine actually went ahead and led the way, weaving the five of them to the nearest table through the crowd, not even acknowledging their intertwined arms, Rosalyne was unwillingly rendered speechless. They stopped at the table, its sticky plastic surface glistening all colours at once, took five plastic cups from the clean stack standing beside a bag of chips, and poured their drinks. The cups were tapped together with a dry clunk, and Rosalyne felt a weird, unbidden sense of camaraderie.
Childe said,
“Za zakinchenn’ia tret’egho klasu,*” and they all knocked back their drinks.
Thus, twenty minutes later, they were nicely drunk.
Rosalyne liked the feeling; her steps felt smoother, and the lights blurred into an enjoyable multicoloured fog. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mona talking to Childe. She tried to discern the words, but the beats from the speakers were crawling up her ear canals. Neither of them seemed upset, however, even though Childe still had that slouching note in the set of his shoulders, so Rosalyne picked a victim to torment.
“So,” she twisted a ring on her fourth finger. “How do you know Childe?”
Aether and Lumine exchanged a perplexing glance.
“Why do you call him Childe?”
“Oh, dear, I call him many things,” at that, Lumine's silent mouth upturned in a pleasant way.
“Are you two together?”
“God, why does everybody ask that?” Rosalyne glared at the boy twin. “No, never, as if I would ever!”
“So, how do you know him?”
Lumine’s tone was odd, just like the rest of her. She sounded much more sure of her words than her brother: it was like, before talking, she took out each word, dissected it, stitched it together, put it back into her mouth, and only then voiced it. Rosalyne was beginning to have a sort of amiable feeling toward that blond palpable ghost.
The alcohol had apparently reached her bloodstream.
“We met under unfortunate circumstances, which led to an even more unfortunate outcome.”
“So why are you friends with him?”
“He keeps me entertained. What are you studying?”
“Psychology,” said Lumine in the same breath as Aether said: “Geography.”
***
Some amount of time later, a thin shadow warped over the twins. Rosalyne had been socialising with them, trying to gouge out any interesting information, unsuccessfully. The twins were as impenetrable as they were boring.
At some point, Mona and Childe joined the conversation, Mona speaking too little and Childe speaking too much.
The thin shadow turned out to be a guy, very layered and very, very high. He had a muted set of features, everything set too ambiguously onto his face. He was too inexact to be either pretty or unbeautiful. His clothes contrasted too harshly against his face and his bleached hair. The hair, however, was slashed with a rip of red. At first, Rosalyne thought it was a trick of light, or the deception of the liquor. Then, she thought she ought to call an ambulance. In the end, she realised it was just a questionable dye job.
The guy’s eyes were bloodshot red, eyelids so heavy they seemed a separate mass entirely.
Everyone looked at him. He looked at something existing probably in another plane of space and time. Childe took a big breath in, his mouth already forming a syllable when the new guy’s eyes focused suddenly on the twins, and the smallest smile budged his lips.
He moved as if propelled forward by the wind, perambulating across, throwing his arms around Lumine and Aether. To their credit, they looked only a little bit stunned.
Childe choked audibly.
Because behind the new guy, who Rosalyne understood to be Kazuha the Inviter, was Scaramouche. Scaramouche, who was standing so uncomfortably and looking so glum, like he much preferred the storm outside to whatever was happening in the building. Like he wanted to be erased from the face of the Earth.
Nastiness was Rosalyne’s most familiar cardinal sin. Among others.
Therefore, succumbing to profanation, she said:
“Hi, Scaramouche,” in the loudest, most viscous voice she could manage. She was at least four drinks in at that point.
Scaramouche turned his head slowly, as if having to operate it mechanically, and when Rosalyne saw his expression, she felt her whole being tugged upwards from elation. There was such pure loathing there. She wouldn’t have the thing she wanted, but she would have this: this bitter, comedic hostility.
Rosalyne had already thought up the entire conversation. The multicoloured air swirled.
Then, the thing she wanted took her by the wrist.
She recognised Mona’s hand around hers, the press of warm fingertips against the radial vein. She smelled roses, and frost, and perceived her own downfall – the steady, irremediable plummet that started somewhere at the back of her brain and came to its axis at the wrist beneath those warm fingertips. And while Mona tugged her away, her dark, silky skirt billowing behind her, Rosalyne’s drunken mind came to rest at the thought that she wanted that hand, those light fingers at her neck, instead.
It was a horrendous thought. A traitorous, disloyal, harming want.
Mona swirled behind a crowd of people, pulling Rosalyne along. Rosalyne glanced back; Kazuha was talking to the twins, a sway of pearlescent hair and earth-coloured clothes. The twins looked to be listening intently. And on the left from them stood Childe and Scaramouche, looking at each other, silent.
Then the mass of people strangled Rosalyne’s view.
The speakers blared overhead.
The prismatic fog seeped into Rosalyne’s eyes, into her nose and all her insides.
The four drinks she had reached crescendo; she felt herself a separate entity from her body, spilling out, fettered only by the wrist on wrist, fingers on vein.
Rosalyne and Mona stopped at a wall – wrong, Mona stopped at the wall, turned around, and Rosalyne rammed into her, her brakes temporarily inebriated.
They fumbled, Mona steadied her, placed a hand on Rosalyne’s shoulder. Said,
“Sorry, sorry,” even though she had nothing to be sorry about.
Rosalyne’s befogged mind allowed her to glance into Mona’s face, into her eyes, and she found that the girl was also drunk, which was a welcome relief. Her mystic eyes were lightly glazed.
“I want them to talk,” Mona said. She had switched to German, her timbre becoming much lower, her pronunciation a little rural.
Rosalyne willed her tongue to obey.
“Why?”
“Ajax is miserable,” she looked so tipsily serious. “Poor Aether– or Lumine. And Kunikuzushi doesn’t hate him.”
Rosalyne’s head spun, beats from the speakers pulsating inside her skull.
“What–? What? How do you know what Sca– Kunikuzushi thinks?”
“Oh, I talk to him sometimes,” she waved her hand around dismissively. Rosalyne wanted to ask more, but her mind had already barrelled past the thought.
It was surprising that Mona had such vivid involvement in this whole affair. Maybe it was Rosalyne’s unkind personality but she genuinely did not find everything that serious. Speaking truthfully, she had forgotten about Scaramouche entirely. And Childe had not spoken about him since– what, October?
It wasn’t quite interest that impelled Rosalyne’s tongue when she asked,
“Why do you care?”
The look that suddenly enamelled those caliginous, wonderful eyes rooted her to the ground. In them was such pure emotion that Rosalyne was lost in it for a moment, could not understand what it meant. Then, she read the scolding sombreness bordering on disappointment. It almost made her take a step back.
“Isn’t Childe your best friend? He told me you are.”
***
At some point after that, a girl approached them, whom Rosalyne knew and Mona did not. Xinyan, whose clothes were leather and clasps and spikes and who smiled up amply at the two girls who stood by the wall, talked at length and enthusiastically. Mona engaged, returning the enthusiasm twofold, all the while Rosalyne stood by that grey wall, utterly hapless.
Mona would look at her fleetingly, smile at her doubly so.
Rosalyne felt those looks and those smiles pass by her, and knew that she had been given the chance to offer amity, to prove herself with the right words and right reactions – given in her own language – and blew it.
The traitorous, disloyal, harming want writhed inside, anaerobic.
***
The twins, and Kazuha, and Childe, and Scaramouche approached in concert, cups in hand, distributing them as generously as priests at communion. Mona and Xinyan were exchanging Instagrams.
Conversations were struck up, Kazuha and Xinyan bonding immediately over next to nothing, Mona quizzing the twins over their connection to Kazuha, Scaramouche politely standing by.
Childe approached Rosalyne in his usual manner, with a slight drunken limp, but seemingly lucid enough. He looked at her and said, because he was the worst person she had ever known,
“O-ho, are you okay?”
She scowled.
“Did you two talk?” She did not care to keep her voice down. She pointed between him and Scaramouche, who glared at her.
“Yeah,” a light smile mottled Childe’s words. “I will tell you later.”
“Ugh,” said Rosalyne, and then: “Good.”
***
Rosalyne got home in the lambency of the receding storm, escorted by Childe, and the twins, and Mona. And Kazuha, who was smoking what Rosalyne thought was a cigarette until she realised that it was not.
She got to her room, took off her coat, and boots, and then her makeup. The alcohol, however subsiding, was still dulcifying her movements. Rosalyne looked at Peruere’s side of the room in all its perfect absence, and felt intense longing. Not for Peruere but for the order and sureness she provided.
Rosalyne got under the covers, turned, turned some more, until she could do nothing but look at the picture hanging right above her head. On it, frozen for eternity, was her – much younger, smiling, squinting kindly – and a boy. A boy her age with dark hair, dark eyes, and a pleasant smile. He had his left arm slung around Rosalyne, slouching slightly. In the lower right corner, scribbled in neat black handwriting was: “R&R” and a little heart.
Rosalyne looked at that photograph for a long time, at the boy’s dark hair, and his sepulchral dark eyes, and then Rosalyne said:
“Damn. God damn it.”
And then she cried, but only a little.