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It’s a memory she revisits more often than she would like. A picturesque tableau, the bare bones of a classroom filled in with rose-colored nostalgia.
There’s a part of her— the grown-up, the career woman, the dutiful daughter— that wants to be skeptical, who thinks of the past in dull sepia and muted, half-recalled sentences. It’s like watching a reel of an old forgotten movie, or flipping through a dusty photo album: the past stays where it belongs, and she’ll allow a smile (a little wistful, a little fond), telling herself it hurts less that way. Most days, Elaine listens to it. Some days she even believes it.
-
Today, though, she chooses to remember. She recalls how the sky melted into pale blue, then orange; how the light of the afternoon turned upon her cheeks and made them burn.
“It’s not childish,” Elaine protested, glaring at her lap, at the table. The half-finished drink offered no consolation, but it was a better sight than the boy sitting across her, his face no doubt turned up in amusement. Unearned, in her opinion: his own sweet tooth was a well-documented phenomenon, if his wallet had anything to say about it. “I just like the taste of vanilla, that’s all.”
Midterms had just ended a few days ago, and now the student council was back in overdrive. There was paperwork to fill out, flyers to print; posters to paint and hang up with colorful thumbtacks. Don’t litter, said one currently drying on a nearby table. Said another, cheerfully: Let’s make the school festival a roaring success! (It better be, she thought absently, with how much work for the student council it entailed.)
“Don’t fret too much about it,” Van said, tone light, abruptly snapping her attention back to the present. “Most people would find that cute.”
“W-Well, I’m not concerned about what most people think,” she said, too quickly, and by the time she had recomposed herself, it was in time for his smile to turn from faintly playful to something almost smug— his usual self-satisfaction at having caught her off-guard, though she noticed, too, the fond note blunting his edge. The way it knocked her breath away, as much as it made her hands tighten with restlessness, like a boat suddenly unmoored.
In this memory, like all the others, she doesn’t reach out towards him, doesn’t put her hand in the space between them on the table to meet his, or to tell him to stop teasing, or something.
He’s not going anywhere, she remembers thinking. I’ll see him again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll get back at him then.
She was so young, so naive. This part she’d rather not recall, but she does so anyway.
–
“Don’t push yourself too hard. Even I can tell your work is getting to you.”
He says it casually, too much so— like he never dropped off the face of the earth for five years, Elaine thinks, and for a second the sweetness of the hot chocolate he’s just bought her dissolves, giving way to a bitter aftertaste. But the note of concern in his voice is sincere, and there’s only so much of a cold shoulder she can stand to give him; even as her mouth pulls into a line, flat and indifferent, she can feel her own frustration slackening, little by little. Like a knot in her chest being undone, after so long pretending it didn’t exist.
“You should worry more about yourself,” she says. “Will that be all? Thank you for buying me that drink. It helped. I mean it.”
Van shrugs, though he keeps his gaze at her for a moment longer than is necessary. “That so? Glad I could help you ease a bit.”
She excuses herself. The interviewer overran his time; she has someplace else to be, someone to report to, a civilian in need of assistance, and as she takes one step, and another, it’s easy enough to slip back into her usual role, more paragon than a person. As the maiden bound by blade and duty, with more important things to worry about than picking apart decade-old memories, the moments rising up unbidden and still so crystal clear in her mind, despite everything.
But for a second, she forgets herself, and she turns to look at him over her shoulder, sitting halfway across the cafe.
It’s strange, she thinks.
After all these years, she should have remembered his back by now.