I didn’t find Claire on the school grounds. I ran around aimlessly, trying to figure out where she could have gone. I had half a mind to walk to her dorm room and stand in front of the door until she showed up. But it’s been weeks since I’d been there, and the dorm buildings were veritable mazes, it’d be next to impossible for me to find the right door.

I stumbled around the grass and fell, scraping my knee. Why does this feel so familiar?

Yeah, this felt exactly how it was back when I had my “curse”. It was as if suddenly everything started going wrong in my life in a cascade of sequential disasters.

I hurt Claire, kissing Sam.

I hurt Sam, chasing after Claire.

And now I even hurt myself, falling and scraping my knee.

Go on and laugh. It was funny. My life was a joke.

I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to wait outside Mr. Thomas’ office. There was something he still wanted to discuss with me, whatever that was. And sure, he didn’t look mad when I talked to him earlier, but he’d definitely be mad when he found out that I disobeyed his orders.

Was there any way this could get worse? Maybe my family would show up and decide to tow me back to my hometown? Although, given the circumstances, that might not be the worst possible outcome.

“Nana?” a voice called me. I turned my head up to look at Agatha.

“Hi, Aggs,” I told her.

“What are you doing out here, all alone? Where’s Sammy?”

“Long story,” I said. “I’m not in the mood for it, right now. Where’s Ruth?”

“Law class. We heard about the incident in the refectory, and we tried looking around for you, but couldn’t find you. I’ve got this hour free, so I’m just walking around. Why won’t you tell me where Sam is?”

I took a deep breath.

“She’s in Mr. Thomas’ office. We… I caused a bit of a fight in the cafeteria. He’s talked to all of us already, except Sam. She should be getting out of there anytime now.”

“When you say ‘all of us’…?”

I sighed. I really didn’t want to keep thinking about this. All I wanted to do was to find an empty place, like a cave, and live there for a week, feeding on bats and mushrooms and hopefully not getting any diseases from it.

I started to enumerate: “Me… Sam… this girl from my hometown… and Claire.”

“So the rumors were true.”

“What rumors?”

“That Claire fought a girl for you.”

“I err… that’s not really…” I couldn’t say any more. Because if I stopped to think about it, that was exactly what happened. “Something like that,” I managed.

“Why do I feel like you’re hiding stuff from us?”

I felt outraged.

“I’m not hiding, it’s just… it’s really hard to talk about some things. I do talk to Sam, though, sometimes.” Oh god. I winced at the realization of exactly how cruel I had just been toward Sam. And she was my best friend. Was. She’d never want to be near me again after what I had done.

Agatha sighed. “Please don’t tell me you two are fighting again.”

“I wish.” I really did. That fight we had before was nothing compared to what was happening now.

Agatha furrowed her brows.

“Ana…” She called. I didn’t budge, refusing to look at her. “Ana! Please talk to me!”

“What?!” I turned to her, angrily.

“What did you do?!” she asked me, equally angry.

“What makes you think I’ve done something?” I bluffed. Agatha had nowhere near Ruth’s level of perceptiveness, when it came to human relationships, so maybe if I made something up she’d believe me and let it slide.

“I don’t know!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never seen you like this! I mean, I’ve seen you sad before, I’ve seen you cry, but I’ve never seen you like… like this!”

She indicated my whole body with broad gestures. She was right. I was a mess. And that’s not just on the outside, although there was dirt on my clothes and my right knee was bleeding. I was a mess on the inside too. Worse than a mess. I was broken. I had gone and done the worst possible things to the two people I most cherished in the world. I was broken, crumbled, and alone.

“Can you do me a favor?” I asked Agatha, suddenly deciding on something in the spur of the moment.

She nodded. “Shoot.”

“Go to Mr. Thomas’ office… Tell Sam I’m really sorry. Tell her… that she won’t have to worry about it.”

“Can’t you go?”

“Please just do this for me, Aggs. Sam won’t want to see me now, and I really need to tell her that. Just this once. As a favor. Please?”

Agatha shrugged. “Okay, I can do that. But next time I see you, I want to you to tell me what all of this is about, deal?”

“Deal,” I told her, honestly.

She would probably not see me anymore, anyway.

–

I went to my room and started packing my stuff. I wasn’t in a hurry to leave. These last two months I had spent at Willow were really some of the best in my life. Most of it was due to Sam. Of course, I was still in love with Claire, but Sam was the one to stand by my side when the going gets rough. I was going to miss having such a close friend as that.

Yeah, I know. Call me a coward, ‘cause I am one. Sam’s wrong about me in that respect, I really am a coward. I still hadn’t decided whether I’d go home to my parents – where everybody hated me and saw me as a cursed girl – or if I’d just take the train to wherever it was going, and figured out what to do once I got there. All I knew for sure was that I couldn’t rightfully stay in Willow anymore. Not now. Not after what I did to both Sam and Claire. If it was just Claire… well, it would suck, but I’d still have Sam by my side to cheer me up. But without Sam, facing my heartbreak wouldn’t be easy, not if I had to see Claire every other day. And that’s not even considering that I’d have to see Sam in class, every every day. How could I talk to her, after this? How could I even look at her face, after I’ve hurt her like that.

Maybe having a curse was easier after all. Everything that was happening… that was all entirely and exclusively my fault. At least when I had the “curse” I could pretend that I wasn’t at fault, even if sometimes I was.

I stopped packing my clothes, and just stood there, looking at the half-empty wardrobe. That’s how I felt. Like a half-empty wardrobe.

–

I didn’t make any more plans for the day. There was no cafeteria food during lunchtime or dinner either, but I didn’t feel the slightest bit of hunger, so it didn’t matter. I don’t think I could even have forced myself to eat.

All through the afternoon, and into the early hours of night, I found myself just laying down on my bed looking at the ceiling, feeling broken and useless. After that had gone on for what felt like forever, I finally decided to get up and do something. I probably wouldn’t be leaving Willow that night, so I’d better go and get myself a bath. I was dirty, bloody, and altogether sweaty from the day’s activities. So I got up from the bed, and picked up my towel, soap, a change of clothes and my set of hair creams and shampoos. Then I unlocked the bedroom door and stepped outside.

There was someone sitting against the wall beside my door.

“Hey,” said the girl.

“Sam? What are you doing here?”

“Agatha gave me your message. It’s unlike you to do something like that, so I feared you might have been thinking of doing something stupid.” She turned her head around to look inside my room, where the half-empty wardrobe and my travel bag stood in plain sight. “By the looks of it, I guess I was right.”

I suddenly felt really ashamed.

“Sam, I– er… this is…”

“Why don’t you go take your bath, since you were obviously intending to do that?” she smiled at me, pointing at my towel and the other stuff. “Then come back here and we can talk. As friends.”

“You’re not mad at me?”

“Of course I’m mad at you. But you’re my best friend, Ann, and you know I’ll always be here with you when you need me.”

I couldn’t help the tears from falling. I tried to wipe them, and accidentally rubbed a bit of soap on my left eye.

“Shit!” I exclaimed. Sam burst out laughing. “Ok, sorry, now I really need to go bathe. I gotta take this soap off my eye. Ouch, it hurts.”

“Come on, I’ll take you there,” said Sam, still laughing. “In this state, you wouldn’t find the way if you went alone, and you’d probably trip on the carpet or something.”

That was borderline offensive. Yet, surprisingly accurate, also. “You know me better than myself,” I admitted.

“I am your best friend, Ann.”

–

It was next to nine in the evening.

Sam and I sat on the bed in my room, facing each other almost exactly like we’d done just some twenty-four hours earlier, except that this time we were on my bed instead of Sam’s. The piles of clothes that were once on top of my bed had returned to the wardrobe, but I didn’t bother with the travel bag just yet. I still had half a mind to leave Willow, anyway.

“So…” Sam started, “Let’s talk.”

I nodded.

“Don’t leave Willow,” she said, practically reading my thoughts. I must have looked really surprised, because she laughed and made fun of me. “Oh, come on. Everything you’re thinking is always written on your face.”

“I’m not leaving… yet.” I said.

“Don’t leave ever,” she told me, with a carefree smile on her face. “Or, well, at least don’t leave until we graduate. Not leaving at all would sound creepy, like a horror story.”

“Why do you want me here?” I asked her. “I hurt you.”

“I know,” she assured me. “I’m mad at you. I’m still going to whine about it and complain about it a lot, so you better be prepared. But for right now, there are more important matters to deal with. Like that travel bag over there and your stupid decision to run away from it all. Shit, Ann, we care about you. Me, and Ruth, and Agatha, and even Mr. Thomas, we all care about you. You don’t just up and abandon your friends, not the ones who love you, do you understand that? We love you. I love you. And we don’t want you to go away.”

“I th–… wait, you love me?”

“In… a best-friend kind of way.”

She was lying. She was blushing. And she was avoiding eye contact, like she was ashamed of feeling like that.

“Since when?”

She blushed even more. That was so cute. Oh god.

“For a while, I guess… I’ve been watching you since you came to school, the way you always sat alone and avoided talking to anyone. It looked really lonely. And then people started talking about that curse, and I thought ‘hey, maybe this is my chance to make friends with her’. So… about two months?”

“You knew,” I said, smiling in disbelief. “You sat on that table with me asking me why the others were avoiding me, but you already knew!”

Sam grinned, still looking sideways, really embarrassed.

“Guilty as charged,” she admitted.

“Did you already have feelings for me, then?”

“You know what? I’m not sure,” she sounded really honest, like she too had been thinking about that, unable to come up with an answer. “I’ve always kind of liked you in a way that was different from the others, so I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when my feelings changed, or whether they really had changed and not just grown bigger from the what they were at the beginning.”

She shrugged, smiling at me. To think that Sam could tell me all of this, right after I hurt her so much, and still earnestly smile. That kind of made me admire her strength.

“I do remember the moment I realized it, though,” she told me. “It was the morning after your date with Claire, and nobody knew where to find you. So I told the girls I’d look for you in the dorms, and halfway down the corridor to your room I was already running, eager to see you. I thought to myself, ‘this is just like being in love’, and boom, I realized it.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “That was ages ago.”

“Wasn’t it?” she giggled.

“But… if you’ve liked me all along,” I buried my face between my legs. “Damn. I made you listen to all of that stuff about me and Claire.”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t mind. I liked listening to you talking about your feelings, even if I wasn’t the one at the receiving end of them.”

“Didn’t it hurt you?”

“Look,” Sam took my face in her hands, and pulled it up softly so that I was looking at her. “Remember earlier today when you said you might want to be with me, rather than Claire?”

I nodded, ashamed.

“Well… that made me really happy, of course. But I was also really confused. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that I’d be great if you stopped looking only at Claire, and started looking my way more. But once that happened… it was like I was being offered everything I’ve always wanted, but I’d have to give up the thing I cherished the most in return. And that gave me mixed feelings.”

“What are you talking about?”

She sighed. “You’re really thickheaded, sometimes, did you know that? I’m talking about our friendship, okay? I love you, Ann, but I also love being your friend. So when you asked me to choose between one or the other, I got confused. What I’m trying to say is… I know you’re not in love with me. Not romantically, at least. You’re in love with Claire. You’re so stupidly, blindly in love with Claire that even Mr. Thomas could see it. And you know… I’m fine with that. Because I get to be your best friend. And if you ever break up, I’ll still be your best friend. And I think I’d rather take that, over having a romantic relationship with you.”

Wow.

I sat back against the wall. That was a lot to take in.

“So what you’re trying to tell me is…”

“I’ll support your relationship with Claire. If that comes to be, that is. And I’ll be by your side, rooting on your happiness, because that’s what makes me happy, as your best friend. So promise me you’ll get rid of that travel bag. Promise me you’re not going anywhere.”

I laughed, cried, and smiled, all at once.

“Thanks,” I told her, looking into her caring eyes. “I promise you.”

Sam smiled at me, then her face grew serious, and she averted her eyes again.

“By the way,” she said, “I heard news about your future girlfriend, and it’s a bit troublesome, so I really think you should hear it. Preferably right away.”

“Where is she?”

Sam winced, and looked down at the floor. “That’s the troublesome part.”