Chapter 19 #3
Bella nodded, and Yasmine watched her in the water’s reflection.
The pond was crowded with people and animals and storefronts on wheels.
A newsstand, a hot dog seller, a bride and a groom and their wedding photographer, and a gaggle of children chasing ducks.
It was so loud that Yasmine had to reluctantly move closer to hear Bella, the two of them pressed knee to knee.
“Kind of,” Bella said, looking between them, where their legs touched. “When I was growing up, the woman who cut my hair said I liked my hair cut short, but really it was just more convenient for her to cut it that way. That sort of thing, you know?”
Bella ran her fingers through her hair; it was long enough now that it splayed over her collarbones.
“I have to admit, I don’t,” Yasmine said quietly. “I always cut my own hair off with a knife.”
Bella laughed, her eyes squinting into the sunlight. Yasmine thought that might have been an unempathetic thing to say, but it didn’t seem to land that way.
“There wasn’t really room for me to have that sort of autonomy,” she said.
“Only forty people lived in my village, and my mother was the queen bee. I was taught very little, only sewing and knitting and thankfully Latin, because it was the tongue of the nobles. Logic and mathematics and science were all far away concepts, basically fairy tales. My mother didn’t view having thoughts and opinions and worldly knowledge as pertinent to my job. ”
Yasmine wanted to ask what she meant by her job, but she didn’t press.
“So when I got the opportunity to come here,” Bella trailed off, taking a breath in.
“To Boston. I essentially arrived with nothing except passable English I’d learned from television.
I fed this local human librarian a whole half-fabricated sob story, and she gave me a place to stay, and she tutored me until I was ready to enroll in the local high school in Walpole.
And God, once I got there, it was… exhilarating.
My classmates were so encouraging, and bright—far more bright than any vampires I knew, who were two millennia their senior—and I learned so much so quickly.
I was a sponge. And I had fun. I was even the prom queen senior year. ”
Yasmine felt a tight warmth in her chest imagining Bella spinning around in a dress, laughing, having fun. “Of course you were.”
Bella snickered.
“I was always aware that I wasn’t actually a teenager, and these people weren’t my contemporaries. But it didn’t matter. For the first time in my life, I actually felt like I was growing into something instead of running into brick walls.”
Yasmine’s heart strained, thinking back to that nightmare.
Had Bella really spent two years trapped in a broom closet?
And worse even, had it happened multiple times?
The more she relived the memory, the more furious for her she became.
But all that trapped resentment puffed out like a cigarette when Bella began speaking again.
“And it was so funny, honestly, how some of the things they were going through—crushes, unfavorable parenting, poor courtship attempts from boys—I had lived through a hundred times. But with other things, like figuring out what to do with their short lives, it felt like these seventeen year olds had much more wisdom than me. They were so certain in their direction. They felt as if nothing inhibited them. It made me feel silly for living two thousand years without having a plan.”
Bella’s hand settled on Yasmine’s knee.
“But then I learned about you,” she said, with a glassy look in her eye.
“I’d known about you vaguely before—my mother likes to gossip—but one of my science teachers mentioned your research in class, how he’d just come from a conference you’d been speaking at.
He couldn’t shut up about how magnetic of a speaker you were.
And God, once I put two and two together about who you were, I couldn’t get my mind off of you.
A vampire who cared about something other than themselves. Frankly, you sounded impossible.”
Yasmine snorted, covering her face with her hands. To her shock, Bella quickly pried them open, then took them in her own, intertwining them.
“And then I actually met you,” she said, giving her fingers a squeeze. “And contrary to everything I’d experienced, you were exactly like I imagined you to be.”
“Arrogant?” Yasmine said stiltedly, hoping to distract from the rapid beating of her heart that Bella surely could hear. “Self-absorbed?”
“No. Unbelievably charitable and kind,” Bella said instead, and it made Yasmine feel like a ship that had just been hit on several sides, and was now rapidly taking on water.
“First you invited me to live with you, and then you came to my lecture, and you liked my lecture—and God. I told myself I’d work with you because it was the fastest way to solve my own problems, but really—I think I just really needed to be around a vampire who saw me as… intelligent. An equal.”
Bella’s voice trembled. She cleared her throat, and finished, “I don’t want you to think about who I was before I got here. The best version of me is who you’re seeing right now.”
“Bella…”
Yasmine’s heart clenched. When she didn’t answer immediately, Bella covered her face and groaned, as if she was embarrassed with herself.
“Which is why I’ve been so secretive. And cocky.
And overzealous. I’m not here to destroy you.
I just wanted to impress you,” she said, her voice muffled by the palms of her hands.
“And it’s not exactly impressive to say that I learned algebra for the first time at the age of two thousand and fifteen. ”
This time, it was Yasmine prying Bella’s fingers from her face. Bella never looked more beautiful, her eyes a little watery, her lipstick a little smudged.
It was all too much.
“I don’t care when you learned algebra, Bella.”
Bella laughed once, and wiped her wet cheek. “You don’t?”
“This might surprise you, but that is not the barometer I use to decide if I’m going to be friends with someone or not.”
And as stupid and childish and silly as Yasmine felt, talking about friendship and holding hands in Central Park like a couple of twenty-somethings on a first date, it was all worth it for the wolfish, shit-eating grin she got in return.
“So we are friends.”
“Don’t push it,” Yasmine warned. “I’m letting it happen. Trying something new.”
“Does this mean I get to take all your money now, interest-free?”
Yasmine rolled her eyes. “No. I only have room for one leech.”
Bella laughed, and wrapped Yasmine in a hug that took her by surprise. It was tight, and long, like Bella really needed it.
After a moment, Bella said quietly in Yasmine’s ear, “I’ll just have to find my own unique lane, then.”
Yasmine’s hands froze by her sides, taking in a breath before lightly reciprocating, patting Bella once on the back.
“I think you’re already carving one,” Yasmine muttered. “With a shovel and a pickaxe.”
Bella laughed; she was about to say something when her phone vibrated, and Yasmine saw the name flutter across the screen again. Sabina.
It wasn’t a text message this time.
“I… I should take this,” Bella said, a fear and an urgency in her voice where it hadn’t existed a moment ago. “Meet you back at school?”
Yasmine’s eyes darted from the phone, to Bella’s face, and back again.
She was suddenly reminded of a rare memory from before she lost everyone.
When she was a kid, and her little brother would hang over the side of the bed; his face looked so strange upside down, his lips uneven and too large, his nose misplaced.
It was as if he was an alien doing an impersonation of a human being.
Back then, she’d pushed him off the bed, and told him to never do it again—it made her feel scared—but now, she didn’t say anything. She just held it in her chest.
“Sure,” she eventually said with a nod. “Say hi for me, to whoever that is.”