The Color of Darkness COMPLETE NOVEL

Cold

A whole month went by and Nova acted like nothing had ever happened.

Granted, we hadn't seen each other much since that night. School kept us both busy, and with Elbright's near-constant essays and vocabulary quizzes, the only time we had alone was spent reading and correcting each other's stuff. Still, I wished she had at least acknowledged what had happened.

I thought about telling Rick, but he would either freak out or underreact. Instead, I just kept it to myself and became "even moodier than usual" my dad observed during dinner one night. October had us scrambling to prepare for our midterm essay in English, something that Elbright said would be a "surprise". Nova and I didn't like the sound of that, so we got together the day before to look at our notes over some piping-hot apple cider that was her Aunt Sandy's specialty.

"Hey Puck."

"Hmm?" I looked up from an old essay on Spenser's sonnets, on which I was trying to decipher some of Elbright's doctor-ish scribbles.

"Have you ever thought about what you're going to do after high school?" Nova was looking at me peculiarly, another one of my essays sprawled out in pieces in front of her. I had an A (barely), but Nova was frustrated beyond belief with her B, and had decided that studying my work would get her the A she wanted.

"Uh, I'm not quite sure," I admitted. "It's still a long time away, though."

"A long time? We're already more than halfway through school!" she said, tone rising a little.

"Woah, what's got you so worried?" I took a sip of cider, effectively disabling my taste buds for at least an hour.

"Nothing." She said dismissively. "Hey, have you ever considered becoming a writer?"

I froze.

"Um, no. Why?"

"Well, you know, this stuff is pretty good. Have you ever tried it... creatively or anything?" She was giving me a look that made me a little uncomfortable and I knew she was getting at something.

"Well, no," I lied, trying to seem uninterested. "Hey, did you see the new vocab list? He said we'd need to know it for the midterm."

"Yeah, I've looked it over," Nova pulled up a wrinkled old piece of paper out of her back pocket and tossed it over to me. "I also looked this over, I found it in your room last week. Care to explain?" Puzzled, I opened it up with fumbling fingers, hoping against hope that it wasn't something horribly embarrassing I had hidden away ages ago. Words, less than a dozen of them pumped out by what must have been a typewriter, jumped out at me off the old yellowed page.

At first I was horrified.

Memories came flooding back in a cascade of blocked memories of a solemn knock on the front door, a funeral, and the utter look of loss in my dad's eyes when they broke the news. Sadness washed over me just a moment before the anger. I didn't usually get angry, and almost never like this. For just a split second, I had the urge to storm out, to never look back, and to never look at that smugly smiling face ever again.

"Where," I said, struggling to control myself. My voice broke a little, though, and something flashed behind those eyes. "Where did you get this?"

"It was scrunched up in the bottom of your desk drawer," she said quickly, reaching for my arm. "Look, Puck--" I pulled back, getting to my feet.

"Why would you do this to me?" I tried to level my voice, but I was failing miserably. My heart had dropped into the pit of my stomach and I stumbled backward onto the carpet, hand clutching those deadly words tightly in my fist. First the kiss, then ignoring me, and now this. Nova was just playing with me, batting me around like some stupid little ball.