GREENE, Allison

[Allison Greene]

allison laurel greene
twenty-four :: june 22,1987
[ singer – songwriter ]
front desk clerk at the inn


A P P E A R A N C E

Eyes: They always say that eyes are the window into your soul. For Allison this has always seemed especially true. No matter if she’s been happy or sad; it takes one look into her eyes to know exactly when something is wrong. They’re a grayish-blue color that can look bright and inviting when she’s happy or like a stormy sky when she’s upset. They’re framed by thick, light brown lashes.
Hair: The young woman’s hair falls roughly to the bottom of her shoulder blades and she likes to keep it about that length. Her hair is naturally a light brown that she dyes blonde. She doesn’t really take to styling it a lot, but she blow-dries it when she gets out of the shower and will curl it for special occasions. Most days she puts it up into a ponytail just for convenience.
Height: 5’6”
Build: Allison’s build is about average. She’s skinny, but in a healthy way. She’s never paid much attention to her weight or what she eats. But she stays active enough that she hasn’t had to.
Style: While she’s always been about comfort over fashion, Allison tends to dress a little up for her day. She’ll generally be found in a comfortable pair of jeans or a skirt with a cute top. On occasion she also wears sundresses. She doesn’t accessorize often but she likes wearing scarves in the fall and winter, partly to help keep her warm, partly because they’re pretty. She wears makeup daily, though usually just too even out her skin tone and accent her features.
Other: Allison’s always been a rather pretty thing, with soft features and a contagious smile. While relatively average in height and build, she’s light-skinned. She’s not quite sure where this came from, but she burns easily if she spends too much time in the sun. Alli also constantly wears a necklace that holds a simple silver cross pendant.
Play By: Candice Accola

P E R S O N A L I T Y

Strengths: Allison’s always considered her greatest strength to be music and writing. She’s a very creative person, even if she rarely shares it with the world. She’s an avid piano player and it almost always singing some kind of song to herself. She enjoys writing her own songs, but never plays them for anyone other than herself either in the early morning hours or when no one else is home. She also writes in a journal every night.

The young woman loves to take care of others and displays that willingly in the way she acts around her friends and family. She’s the first one you can go to for advice, a shoulder to cry on, something to eat, or just someone to mend a pair of jeans for you. She feels very at home when she’s taking care of others.

Allison is a very social girl. She will talk to just about anyone, no matter who they are. She’s fascinated by others and learning their stories. She’s also a talker. She likes to be able to make others feel welcome in a place that isn’t necessarily their comfort zone. She also doesn’t let her personal feelings get in the way of her friendly attitude. Even when she doesn’t particularly like someone, she’ll still be quite nice.
Weaknesses: Allison’s main weakness is that she’s naïve and very trusting. She assumes the best in people all the time, and while that can be a good thing, not always. She’s gotten very lucky in her life that not many people have actually been out to hurt her. But she’s had a few incidents where people with less than pure intentions should not have been given a chance.

While not always a weakness, Allison is a chatterer. She’s almost always talking or singing, making some kind of noise. This tends to lead to rambling and sometimes oversharing information that shouldn’t have been shared in the first place. She can keep others’ secrets quite well, it’s her own that she has trouble holding in if you get her on the right topic.

When she’s not talking a lot it means that she’s upset. Also when she’s upset she tends to get a bit snarky and makes remarks that she wouldn’t normally. She feels terribly about them afterwards, but in the moment she doesn’t always think about how it’s going to make the other person feel, or how she’s going to feel about it later.

Allison doesn’t like having to tell people no, and usually avoids it. When she’s asked for favors, unless she physically cannot do it, she’ll agree. She’s a people-pleaser. She’d much rather make everyone else happy than herself.

While not knowing the cause, Allison gets sick a lot. She tells anyone who actually notices that it’s not a big deal, and she’s fine. Which is true. She’s just the kind of girl that catches any sort of virus that’s going around. She’s almost always seems to be bogged down with a flu, cold or bronchitis. She also has a dust mite allergy. She takes medication for it, so it doesn’t get too bad. But it’s part of the reason that even if she’s not organized, everything is almost always clean.
Likes:
Naps in the sun
Toes in the sand
Antiques
Cutting her little brothers’ hair
Taking care of her brothers in general
Cooking
Brunch
Warm rain showers
Snuggling
Good books
Dislikes:
Things crawling on her skin
Loud screams for no reason
That feeling you get when someone you don’t know is too close to you
The taste of beer after it gets warm
Being late or having to wait a while on others
The feel of wool against her skin
Habits: She chews on the ends of writing utensils, especially when she’s working on something and it doesn’t seem to be turning out right. Allison writes in her journal every night and usually for a good while as well. When she’s upset she bakes, everything from pies to breads. It’s something that soothes her because you have to measure everything just right and it all comes together perfectly even when life doesn’t. Either that or she’ll play with the cross pendant on her necklace, poking her fingertips with the ends and twisting it around.
Biggest Secret: Her biggest secret is the fact that she was institutionalized. As far as she can tell, it hasn’t affected her too much and she knows what people will think if they find out. They don’t assume it was because her step-father was afraid of her, they assume it was because she was crazy. On rare occasions she’ll wake in the middle of the night because of a dream that was all too real and think she’s back there. On those nights she’ll get out of bed and go to her keyboard, as the sound of the music always sooths her along with the pressing of the keys.
Most Prized Possession: Allison’s most prized possession isn’t so much a thing as a series of things. When she was around eight years old, she started keeping journals. At first they were filled with the sort of ramblings an eight your old would write. Soon she started adding pictures and little doodles, pieces of paper from her day, or flowers to press in between the pages. As she grew older she started writing longer entries and more often. By the time she was in high school she was writing every night and she would write a minimum of a whole page front and back. Each of her old journals is in rather bad shape and kept in a box in the bottom of her closet “back home”. Her current journal is a rather sturdy leather-bound unlined notebook with only a few of the pages written on. A few photographs stick out as well as a few sheets of music.
Reputation: Reputation… Allison’s reputation is more than likely something along the lines of “that cruel, American woman that broke Keiran’s heart” if they manage to know about the situation. Other than that, only people that were coming in to the pub or around her over two years prior would really know her or remember her.

T A I N T E D

Ability: [Telepathy or the ability to read minds.] When Allison first found she was tainted, it was like everyone, everywhere was talking to her at once. What she didn’t realize is that it was only about a half mile radius that she was hearing. In the early days, if she tried anything to quiet the voices, she would get large headaches or get extremely nauseous, on occasion throwing up. When she moved to the academy, the first thing she worked on with a trainer was turning off the voices. While she still hasn’t managed to turn them off completely, she can turn them down to a very quiet hum in the back of her mind without using too much concentration anymore. Her trainer then began working with her on expanding her radius, but Alli never really tried all that hard with that. The closer she is with a person, the stronger the bond, the easier it is to hear their voice in her head. When she has an especially strong bond with someone, she can generally hear their voice from about a mile away. She also has to concentrate a bit more to keep them out, just because it’s so easy to hear them in the first place. If she becomes surprised or emotional (either very happy or very upset) she’ll lose her concentration and the voices will come back. When she’s not pushing them down, all the voices seem to layer on top of each other and it’s hard to make out what each one may be saying. If she thinks about a certain voice, or the closer she is to them physically, the louder the voice. If the voice is on the far end of her range, it will be very faint, not quite like a whisper. Allison is very careful to keep the voices as quiet as possible, just because she thinks of it as an unfair advantage over others. If they can’t hear her thoughts, why should she hear theirs? When she’s inebriated, Allison doesn’t really have control of her power and will often answers thoughts before realizing that she’s hearing everything.
Beliefs: Allison hasn’t really gotten into the grand scheme of things with regards to tainted vs. untainted. Before she came to San, she thought of her ability as something that she needed to hide from people. Now that she knows there are people like her, it makes her not feel so much the weirdo. She sees the looks that some people give her after they find out, or the random thought she’ll accidentally hear from a not so friendly person. But other than that, she’s blissfully unaware that there could be people who hate her just because of how she was born.

B A C K G R O U N D

Place of Birth: Massachusetts; United States; Earth
Languages: English; She knows songs in various languages, but she can’t speak them in conversation.
Family:
Father: Charles Greene, deceased
Step-Father: Daniel Ward, prison
Mother: Carol Ward, homemaker [September 27, 1963]
Half-Brother: Matthew Ward [October 19, 2000]
Half-Brother: Eric Ward [August 20, 2002]
Half-Brother: Joshua Ward [March 13, 2006]
Others of Note: Allison has a rather large extended family. Her father had six brothers and sisters while her mother has nine.
Pet(s): None.
History: I suppose like any great story, you really need to start at the beginning. This isn’t going to be great by any means, but it is the story of my life. Would it be fair to call it a memoir? No, it’ll be far too short for that. A summary than, a summary of the last twenty four years. There are good times, and there are bad. Some things that you expect to be terrible are really for the best. Some people enter the story just to play their part and then thankfully leave. My story is different than everyone else’s. Not better, not worse. Just different.

It was the twenty second of June when my mother entered the hospital to give birth to me, but only just. When she tells me the story she makes sure to remind me that I wanted to be born at one in the morning… but then kept her in labor until nine o’clock that night. Roughly twenty hours of lying in a hospital bed, at least half of it in pain. She always says that it was worth it though. When she held me for the first time she knew I was always going to be her baby girl. We were a family then. My mother, my father and me, a charming baby girl with a head full of hair and a smile that could melt the strongest man’s heart. At least that’s what my Dad said.

I don’t really remember the first few years of my life. My Mom would tell me stories of when I was young, which means most of my “memories” of my father are pieced together from her words. There are some things that I remember on my own however. Like the scruff of his chin when he would rub it against me to make me laugh. Or the way he smelled when he came home from work. We lived in a shore town and he was a fisherman. He would go away for days at a time, sometimes weeks. He didn’t work on a large vessel, the crew only being around five or six people. They caught enough fish to provide for everyone’s families.

When I was around two my father started getting sick, another thing I don’t really remember too well. Just that he didn’t go away for long periods of time anymore and instead we would visit hospitals. I didn’t like the rooms; they always seemed far too clean and neat. They smelled funny. I tried to bring things from home to make them feel better for my Dad. When his crew was in, they would come to visit him and then everything would reek of salt water and fish. I don’t think the doctors or the nurses appreciated it, but my Mom used to say that he always relaxed more when they were around. I think it was because he didn’t want to show them his weakness. My Dad was always the kind of man that could do anything.

He got better though, for a little while. We stopped going to the hospital so much and he started fixing things around the house that he had been neglecting. Mom says that he used to play with me all the time and we would take naps together reclined in his favorite armchair. I actually have a picture of that stashed somewhere. We were almost backwards, as some people would call it. Mom would run off to work every morning and Dad would stay home with me so we could play all day.

That was until just after I turned four. He had been healthy for a long time, what I thought was healthy. He went out on a fishing trip with his old crew. Probably just so he could feel useful again. I don’t really know what made him leave us. It was only supposed to be a couple of weeks. He never came home again. Mom told me later that he got sick while they were out and he couldn’t get back to go to the hospital because there was a storm. By the time they had gotten him to an emergency room, all that could be done was to make him comfortable.

We moved after that. The smell of the air reminded my mother too much of everything we had lost. We moved to a small town far enough inland that you couldn’t be reminded of the ocean, not even if you tried. Life after that took on a whole new meaning. Things were quiet, but not always in a bad way. We adjusted to our new surroundings and eventually my mother would stop crying just because she burned my breakfast in the morning or because they way the wind blew rustled her hair just right. I wanted to comfort her, but I couldn’t know how to begin. What can a four year old really do to relieve a broken heart? So we just lived, one day at a time.

I started school a year later and things started to look up. Instead of coming home to the same thing, I had stories to tell my mother, homework to ask her to help me with, art projects to proudly show off. Anything that could be stuck on the fridge with a magnet would go up and remain there for at least four months. The only way something would get taken down is if it was too bulky to have something hung in front of it and if it was old enough that I didn’t remember doing it anymore. It seemed to breathe the spirit back into my Mom like nothing else could. She attended P.T.A. meetings, parents’ day and my grade’s End of the Year program with gusto.

The next year of school was even easier. Well, it started off easier. Then “Bring Your Father to School” day happened. It really wasn’t a big deal. Neither my mother nor I had a problem with it. Children are often cruel however and the first one to ask “Why don’t you have a Dad?” in a nasty tone was punched in the nose… after which I ran from the classroom crying. I’m sure my Mom explained to everyone that he passed before coming to find me only because it took her a little while to make sure I was all right. But really, after a violent outburst, you have to explain to the teacher that your child really isn’t crazy. She was just upset.

The years after that passed much in the same manner. No more violent outbursts. But the longer I stayed in school the more my mother came alive until it was like it used to be. Like nothing had ever tainted our happy life. She even started to keep pictures of him up in the living room. We had a collection of framed photographs littering one of the walls and if you looked closely enough, between my school portraits and the time my Mom and I had ice cream all over our faces, you could see my Dad smiling out at you.

I couldn’t really tell you when Daniel started hanging around. Daniel Ward. He was an overweight man who smelled of cheap cologne and bar smoke. He always claimed that it was because he didn’t mind having a drink on occasion and bars were smoky places. In reality, the cologne was to cover the stench of the booze. It only worked if you stood far enough away, which for me was always. But my mother saw something in him, and they started to date when I was about eleven. You know how you pretend to like your friends’ boyfriends because you know eventually they’re going to break up and then things will go back to normal? That’s what I was doing with Daniel Ward. They didn’t break up though. They were married in late 1999. I couldn’t tell you how many times he asked me to call him Dad, I never did.

My mother kept getting bigger and bigger over the summer of the following year. It looked terribly uncomfortable. The skin over her belly was stretched so tight I thought she would burst if something touched it just right. The most amazing thing to me was that there was a baby in there, a growing baby. I had seen pregnant women before, but never from the start all the way until the finish.

Matthew came into our world the month after I started the eighth grade. He turned everything upside-down for us. I never thought I was going to want more than just me and my Mom, but when Matty was born. I don’t know. Something about him made me love him. I helped take care of him any time my Mom needed me to. I’d change diapers, give him his bottle, babysit. I didn’t care. Sure, I had a social life just like another thirteen year old girl. As soon as my Mom called me to help with him though, I was there.

I started high school when he was eleven months old. High School. Now that was a monster of a completely different sort. I hit puberty early so I was one of the few freshmen who actually happened to be… developed? I guess you could call it. I got attention, a lot of attention. Not all of it welcome. I joined the cheerleading squad. Which looking back probably didn’t help… but it was fun. We stayed in shape, danced, and were there for each other. The girls on the team were like the sisters I never had. We’d have sleepovers and stay up until all hours talking about anything and everything. We’d borrow each other’s clothes and then forget to give them back until months later. We’d talk about boys and comfort each other when our hearts got broken. Everything you’re supposed to do in high school.

Just before my sophomore year Eric was born. Daniel had a decent enough job that my Mom finally decided to quit hers and stay home with the boys. It was kind of amazing. I’d get off from school and be able to come home and talk to someone about my day. Yes, that sounds a little selfish. But I’d help her to get dinner on the table by playing with Matty while Eric would just kind of… drool in his playpen. So I helped. It stayed that way for a while. Eventually I started to play with Eric too, but in general life was just… easy. I’d even started to get used to having my step-dad around. He never smelled any less like booze, but I wasn’t so stuck on my first impression. He made my Mom happy and gave me my two half-brothers.

What’s that saying though? It couldn’t last? Something like that. I can tell you the exact date everything started going downhill. The day I found out I was different from everyone else. Not in one of those cool “Hey look, I’m double-jointed!” kinds of ways either. October 17, 2003. Two days before Matty’s third birthday. It was a Friday. It must have been a game day because we were wearing our uniforms to class. Cheerleaders were, not the school. I remember hearing “God damn, look at that ass in that skirt.” I had turned around to glare at the boy behind me only to realize that no one was actually there. Then it all hit me. Everyone, what felt like everywhere, talking to me at once. Except the words weren’t coming out of their mouths and most of it was things they wouldn’t dare utter aloud.

I stayed home sick the next week. I had tried going back to school the next Monday, but the voices all came back. All of them. When I was at home there weren’t so many and it was just the voices of my family that I heard clear as a bell. Even hearing those sometimes made me shudder. Looking back on it, I really don’t know how I survived so long with that kind of secret. I thought I was going crazy. That something had to be wrong with me. I didn’t want to tell anyone, I couldn’t have told anyone. I didn’t know how to explain it.

It took me four months to work up the courage. I went to the person who had always been there for me, my Mom. She took it well enough. Neither of us really knew what to do. I told her that sometimes I could quiet them, but it gave me headaches or made me nauseas. It really wasn’t very long of a conversation. She started helping me any way she could though. If I needed to stay home for a day she’d call me out of school. If I answered someone’s thought instead of their words, she’d be there with a quick distraction. I was the freak that my mother had to cover for.

That was exactly what my step-dad thought when he finally found out two and a half months later. We had all been sitting at the dinner table and I was having a conversation with Eric. This doesn’t seem very out of the norm until you remember that Eric wasn’t yet two years old. I had been relying on the fact that Daniel never seemed to pay me much attention if Matty or my Mom were around. Not in a bad way, just in a … they took more of his attention kind of way. When he had turned to me he just kind of stared for a minute. Mom had to kick me under the table to get me to notice. That was my biggest mistake, letting my step-father know that I was different. I was in a psych ward a month and a half later.

I guess that wasn’t really explained all that well. It wasn’t a “Oh my goodness, she hears voices. She must be crazy!” thing that had me put into the ward. It was that Daniel was somehow convinced that this would lead to more bad things and that I was now… dangerous. Me, the girl who wouldn’t hurt anything even if it was trying to eat her, was dangerous. Maybe he’d watched too many sci-fi shows. If that’s the case, I really shouldn’t be complaining. He could have turned me into the government for testing. I might have lied to them though. I don’t like needles or the idea of my head being sliced open.

I was there for about seven and a half months. Just enough time to make you believe that maybe you really are crazy. In reality it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. My roommate was diagnosed as panic disorder with agoraphobia. She was someone who had been left there because she had a family that didn’t want to deal with her anymore. She was one of the sweetest girls I’ve ever met. The longer I stayed, the more I started to believe that maybe people really aren’t all that crazy. Maybe they’re just trapped in their bodies and their situations. Sure, some people truly are sick. But some people just need someone to help them.

Several drugs and doctors later I was introduced to my last psychiatrist. She didn’t look at me the way everyone else did, like there was something wrong and I needed to be fixed. She told me I was special, unique. That it wasn’t some deformity that made me different, but a gift. She tried to make it sound so fantastical. Then she told me there was a place for people like me, she could help me get there if I wanted.

Massachusetts to France. Now there was a flight I never wanted to take more than once. Stuck in a middle seat in coach. It was my first ever trip in an airplane. I ended up in Paris where I had to take another flight down to Marseille. After that it was a short bus ride to Sanglignée. It sounds simple enough, but it was an entire day of travel and I arrived in the small town late evening the day after I started travelling. I was exhausted. It was all I could do to make my bed before I crashed into it that night.

Coming to the academy was a completely different experience for me. Everyone was different in some way or another, they all had powers. It was strange to think that there were so many of them. The school wasn’t that big of course, but to me any more than… me was a large number. I took classes on Thursdays and Fridays to get a better grip on my talent, and spent the rest of my time exploring the school and the neighboring small town. The longer I stayed, the more it felt like home. People didn’t assume you were tainted, but when they found out they weren’t automatically afraid of you either. It was such a weird feeling.

Around October I started realizing that if I wanted to spend any money, I needed to earn some. The local bar in town was hiring and I started working there after an interview with the owner. It was an easy job; I would work in the mornings at opening until after the dinner rush had died down. The wage wasn’t much, but depending on how nice you were to the customers you could make some good tips. On top of that I started making friends with some of the people that hung around the Sticks that were my age. There was Thora, her boyfriend Zane and then their friend Keiran.

I’ll never forget the first time I heard Keiran’s voice in my head. I had been working with the trainers to keep everyone out for so long and it was working. I don’t know how he got through. I was rolling up sets of silverware in napkins and he was cleaning up one of the tables near me. Clear as a bell I heard “Allison”. I looked up at him expectantly but he looked at me like he had been caught staring instead of waiting to tell me something. After that he mumbled something about needing to go in the back and I could have sworn I saw his cheeks flush with a light shade of pink.

It stayed that way for about the next six months. I would go to work, go to school, hang around with Thora and the boys. It was fun, I was comfortable. Most importantly I was happy. Zane and Thora left for Italy that summer and you could tell that something was missing after that. Hanging out with Keiran started to get awkward, but not always bad. I had already started to like him as much more than a friend but now there was no one to act as a buffer. I had been taught that girls weren’t supposed to make the first move. Never ask a boy out. To be honest, I’d never really had to think about it. Instead I just tried to let him know that I liked him.

The next January I started singing in the pub. That first night was terrible, I was so nervous I think I screwed up at least half my notes. The regular act couldn’t make it and Jeoffri didn’t want to have another night of customers just playing songs from the Jukebox. It took a long time to find my balance between concentrating on the keyboard and concentrating on keeping the voices in my head quiet. I also learned that I would rather have polite applause than know exactly what everyone thinks of my singing. At least those first couple of weeks. I got better with public performing when Jeoff kept having me play. I was decent enough and he didn’t have to pay me extra.

Everything stayed the same until July 15th. Is it weird that I remember certain dates really well, but others slip my mind completely? It had been raining, one of those warm summer rains that everyone says they love when most of them don’t really mean it because they hate getting wet. Keiran and I were on our way to the pub, running and trying to stay dry. We stopped and ducked against a storefront to escape the rain for a minute. All I remember is we were laughing about something and then he kissed me. He had just leaned down and kissed me. While I, being the very modest girl I am, threw my arms around him and kissed him back as hard as I could. Only then did he ask me out on a date.

I started hanging around the pub more when I could, anything to spend more time with Keiran. Six months later he asked me to move in with him and Nona above the pub. I hesitated. I already knew that I loved him, but moving in with him? Something held me back. It took me a month to finally accept and two weeks more after that to get my dorm room all packed up and moved into the Sticks. Quite quickly we developed a routine and everything about living there with them felt like home to me. Like I had finally figured out exactly where I was supposed to be. Even when he started working longer hours, it was just part of the life and it was never something I resented.

It went like that for about a year. Everything being blissfully happy. But like everything in my life, the longer I’m happy the worse it is when it all comes crashing down. Keiran was helping Jeoffri move… somewhere. I don’t remember exactly anymore. My mother called, which I thought was weird because we normally just talked through letters. Something terrible had happened and she needed me to come home right away. Someone had to be there to take care of the boys, I was the only one that could help her. After some coaxing I learned that my step-father was now in jail. She was moving to get away from him and she needed to find a job, would I please come home and be her nanny? I didn’t know what to say. I left Keiran a note with Jean telling him that I loved him and to write to me and I was on the first plane back to Massachusetts.

The first couple of months back were… crazy, to say the least. Mom had moved a few towns over so no one would know exactly who the family was. Then she had divorced Daniel and applied for custody of the boys. I met Josh, the sweetest three year old ever. She had given birth to him about a year after I had left. We all adjusted to our new surroundings and the fact that Big Sister Allison was back in the picture. I don’t really remember much of that time only because the first couple of months were so filled with everything that it was hard to pull one day apart from the next.

What I do remember though… is not getting any letters. Not even junk mail. I tried to brush it off as nothing at first, but as the weeks wore on to months…. I guess somewhere I just had to give up. Eight months of waiting for something, anything and you would do the same thing.

The two years after that were all the same. I took care of my brothers and helped my mother with whatever she needed me to. I made lunches, drove kids to school, supervised sleepovers. I was kind of like a housewife… without being married and taking care of my brothers instead of babies.
Present: At the present time, Allison has just come back over from the U.S. and is living at one of the inns in Sanglignée. She’s only been in town a couple of days and hasn’t planned much past that. She’s hoping to be able to talk to Jeoffri and get her old job back as a waitress, maybe even perform a few nights if he’d like her too. She only knew that she wanted to come back to San, so she made it happen.
Future: Allison has no idea what the future has in store for her, and she’s not really looking at it too hard. Every time she thinks she has everything figured out, something changes. But still, she does like to picture what her life would be like in the next five or ten years. She always comes up with two scenarios. She’ll either be married with children on the way, or she’ll be playing piano in some fancy joint for others to enjoy. While she really wouldn’t mind either outcome, her heart tends to lean towards the former. She had a glimpse of what it could be like taking care of her brothers and she loved it.

O U T O F C H A R A C T E R

Name: anna.
Age: old enough.
Gender:female.
Location: eastern.
RP Experience: long enough.
Other Characters: jacqueline.
RP Sample: Everything had fallen apart. The last few days it had been easy to see that something was wrong or off between her and Luke. He hadn’t been talking to her nearly as often and when he did it always seemed like he was waiting for her to say something. Not just any kind of something, something he already knew. Verity didn’t play along however and it had come to a breaking point yesterday evening. The conversation was brief and more awkward than anything, but the last question he had asked… After she answered he had just walked off. She hadn’t been able to find him the rest of the night. She had even taken to lurking in the dungeons hoping to catch him anywhere. But that was it. It was over. Whatever their ‘it’ had been, there was no way he was going to come back to her now. Nor would she expect him to.

To be fair though, this entire thing hadn’t started just a few days ago. It was twelve days. Twelve days since Sam kissed her and she… well, she had quite willingly kissed him back. Even if she could go back to that day and stop herself, she didn’t know if she would be able to. There had always been something about Sam, her best friend’s brother. Saying it that way in her head gave her the little twinge of guilt she knew she should be feeling. But Shan had been… okay with everything. Obviously she wasn’t ecstatic about it. Then again, if she had been Verity would have wondered what was wrong with her. But after being told to stay away from him in the first place, she just couldn’t figure it out. If Shan was going to be fine with it anyway, then why?

That was the overall emotion Verity had this entire ordeal, confusion. She knew what she should have been feeling. Guilt, mainly. Above all she should have been feeling guilt. She had kissed Luke’s best friend. She should have been feeling sadness over the loss of what she had with Luke as well. Those feelings were there, in the very back of her mind, but even when she acknowledged them they never hit her too strongly. The more she tried to convince herself that it was just because she was emotionally stunted, or because she hadn’t been through this kind of situation before, the less she believed it.

Verity shifted her weight to the opposite foot. Astronomy class was slowly winding down to a close and she hadn’t gotten any work done on her charts. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. But the little bit of work she had accomplished could hardly be called productive. The girl was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that when the professor called for the class to be dismissed, Verity didn’t hear it. It took the man walking over and giving her a light tap on the shoulder to realize that that much time had even passed. She folded her charts in front of her, hoping that he hadn’t seen just how little work she had finished before asking if she could stay a bit late tonight, just to finish up a few more stars. After giving her a slightly wary eye, he had agreed. While the rest of the class continued to pack up so they could go back to their dorms and sleep, Verity leaned against the window’s ledge and straightened the charts back out on the surface. It had been an immensely long day and even though it was practically over, she couldn’t find herself tired in the least.

Verity scooted the edge of her textbook over enough to hold down the corner of her charts to keep them flying away in the gentle night breeze. Not that it would have been too much of a loss at this point, but any progress was some progress. She blinked at her chart for a good minute before leaning over to look through the telescope at her station, locating the next star she needed to mark the position of. It took her more glances than it should have to retain the necessary information and she found that when she picked up her quill she couldn’t remember where to put the actual mark. She was still too much in her own head. Breath in, breath out, Burton. Deep breaths. She needed to get herself together. There was only what, two months, maybe a month and a half left until the end of the school year? She wasn’t really going to spend it thinking about boys, was she?