Page 89 of A Dead Man's B-Side
Paris’ smile grew wider, and my eyebrows flattened with each question. “Alright, alright! All valiant requests, but I have a question of my own.”
I leaned back and feigned boredom, my curiosity at its peak. “Are you going to get to it?”
She sat up and peered at me. “Have you ever been in love?”
The question threw me off, far from anything I’d been preparing for.
A flash of soft smiles passed over my mind, a forgotten memory I refused to look back on. “No.”
Paris’ smile quickly fell. “Well, that was anticlimactic.”
August threw his head into the bed, groaning. “You had the perfect opportunity, and that’s what you ask?”
“I’m only ever going to do this once and agree with August, really Paris?”
It was later in the night, when the faint glow of dawn was beginning to show and everyone else had lost their battle with sleep, that Paris lowered herself to her carpeted floor for a morecomfortable sleep, not that Marigold and August, curled up like cats, left her any space. She leaned her head against my shoulder and whispered, “It’s called truth or truth, Sasha.”
Chapter Fourteen
Alexandr Miroslav
1982
Thaddeus Saltford-Windsor wasn’t an ugly teenager, and I could draw that conclusion through his current face. Except, I would have always doubted whether it was an absolute fact until I saw it with my own eyes.
Today happened to be that day.
It had started out routinely, typical and mundane.
Wake up, get dressed, head to the Dining Hall for breakfast, listen to August drone about his latest academic endeavor, attend my classes, attempt to keep up, lunch, attend more classes, go back to my dorm, lay in bed and play with the idea of extracurriculars, have Wolf barge in and ask a question he didn’t need an answer to, usually under that guise to steal more cigarettes, study, head to the library for the society meeting, and that brought me here.
Here being August’s nosy antics.
However, I digress, he didn’t do it on purpose. Thaddeus was late, and with nothing to do, he began opening and closing several randomly selected books on the shelves, until he stumbled on the photographed records of previous Founder’s Society members.
It didn’t take long for his gasp to have the rest of us surrounding him.
“Look, that’s Thaddeus.” August pointed at what we were all already looking at.
“Oh god, he had a slicked-down side-part.” Paris cringed next to me, and I wanted to laugh at what she’d chosen to focus on.
“He looks like a sexy detective,” Ajax snorted out.
I pointedly tilted my head and looked around the second page; void save for the list of names.
Marigold pointed at the rest of the students in the photo and said in a soft tone, “Who are the others?”
The row of seven students photographed, reeking of wealth and power, even through the paper, consisted of five boys and two girls. They stood in Castle Hill attire, similar to ours.
None of them looked recognizable as my eyes roamed over the photo, taking in all of their faces.
Except…
I grabbed the book from August roughly, in too much of a trance to care about how I might be portraying myself.
“Hey!”
I walked to the table and laid the book out, sitting there on the floor and looking through each name, trying to match them with the faces. “Rain…” At my voice, she walked over.
