Abigail "Abby" No Last Name didn't have a love story, not that that mattered. She only had invisible scars she thought she could share.

The wind was refreshingly cool as Abby and I whisked away from the church after morning mass. Abby governed the Maison greenhouse undisputed. She'd been living in the dormitory for the past seven years.

"My dad paid for me to live here," she disclosed as we walked at a slow pace.

A long pause crawled between us.

"I told you already, I came here on my own will."

When we met, Abby had difficulties trusting me. She refused to even talk to me.

"Ooo.. est..." My teeth ached as I clenched down trying to ask directions.

"Où est-ce?"A guy around my age repeated after me as he translated it to the man I had stopped along the way to the Maison.

His hand lightly gripped my shoulders as he asked with his eyes whether he'd understood me and my poor pronunciation. I shivered under his touch, uncomfortable.

I smiled softly and slipped out of his hold. "Oui?"

He let out a laugh, "Quelle langue parlez-vous?"

My heart raced as I tried to catch each word. I tried to ask nicely, "Reh-peh-tis s'il vous plait. Len-teh-ment."

"Len-teh-ment? Ah!" His fingers made a crisp snapping sound. "Doucement! Oui. Que-lle lang par-leh-vous?"

"Okay, okay. What language do I speak, right?" I waited for him to nod. "American English!"

The guy laughed, amused, I think. Obviously, it was English. I mentally slapped myself for the embarrassment.

"Il est bon, je vais l'aider." He directed to the other person.

Il est bon. It is good. Good what? Leh-dair? Leh. Luh-dare? L'aider—I flipped through the dictionary of my phone.

"So..." He grinned as my mouth fell open. "What are you looking for exactly?" His French accent disappeared and was replaced with a very convincing American one.

"What did you tell the other person?" I shut my hanging mouth.

"I told the guy I'd help you out. Are you here for vacation?"

I raised a brow, unsure how to answer the suspicious question. I wished for a moment for him to magically turn into a woman (as if that made any real difference) or for a woman to approach me instead.

I decided to shake my head. "Not really. I'm looking for this free lodging..."

He licked his bottom lip as he nodded. "So, where to?"

"Saint-Francois," my finger landed on a small dot on the map, "here."

I watched him run his hand through his short brunette hair and half-smirk to himself. "I don't want you to get scared or anything like that when I tell you..." He narrowed the gap between our heights. "Maison Saint-François, right? I'm headed there too."

"No..." I let my voice trail. "Really!" The enthusiasm in my voice had not been as convincing as I wanted it to.

"We don't need to go together," his voice echoed even at a busy street, "but it'd be easier for you. I'm not a suspicious person."

"Yes, because a suspicious person would never say that."

He nodded, "You get me!"

I laughed a little with him.

"Seriously though, it would be easier for you to go with someone who can speak... or," He turned his body and stepped over onto the street. "I can hail a cab for you."

"I hate taxis," I whispered. I puffed my cheeks for a second and frustratingly scratched the face of my forehead. "I-I would rather we go together."

"Good because a girl like you looks easily tricked."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm Ren—short for Clarence. You?"

There was a thrumming inside my skull, beating right onto my frontal. I placed my thumb right at the center and started to massage it in a circular motion.

"Phil," I lied, sort of. "Just like the girl in Anne of Green Gables."

"Just like, huh. So, Phillipa."

My dominant hand slapped my mouth as a fit of laughter overcame me. I was taken aback by his knowledge of my impromptu reference. "Yes but also no. It's short for Philomena." My grandmother's name.

"Beautiful," he responds.

The momentary joy washed right into the sewage of France. The beating of drums rebooted inside, this time, around my temporal bone.

"I have a small stopover—well not a stopover really, more like a stay-over."

"Stay?" I regretfully repeated after him.

"It's for work but don't worry—Abs," He called after a girl awkwardly staring at us. I hadn't noticed her earlier but it looked like she'd been there the entire time. "Abby, meet Phil. Phil, meet Abby. Abby here is a resident of the Maison. Phil is a newcomer."

Abby raised a brow. She pulled on Ren's sleeve, bringing him to her height, so she could whisper into his ear.

"I don't suppose you're a serial killer in disguise?" Ren roared with laughter.

"Excuse me?" I stepped back, my hands up at my chest.

Ren pointed at Abby, "She tells me there's no newcomer named Phil—not even if it's short for Philomena. So, either you're a serial killer or you were lying about your name or both."

I bit my bottom lip. Maybe I could trust these people... still, I couldn't shake off the thought that I could be walking into some crazy trap. They were both strangers to me. This Abby could just be reading me, my smallest of expressions, micro-expressions some TV show called it.

Father Peter rose a hand up. "You thought they were bad people?"

"In my defense, Ren was too eager to get to know me."

Mother Ani chuckled, "dear, that is common human interaction but it was better for you to have made sure. You can never be too safe, I suppose."

I nodded in eager agreement.

"What's my name then?" I settled to ask them first.

"Georgiana Stella Mendoza." Abby recited my name with a fluent Spanish tone and continued with, "La nouvelle fille."

I let a heavy breath escape my lips; was everyone going to be so darn skilled? Not that I'm one to speak. If I put my mind to it, I can pick up accents pretty well myself.

"I'd prefer just Georgie and not that whole thing," I waved my fingers around, "or 'new girl'."

"So, it really wasn't Philomena—"

"It kind of is," I interrupted Ren. I hadn’t lied when I said it was my grandmother's though I didn’t exactly tell him any of that.

Abby pulled her hair back as the wind swept it out of place, the sun highlighting her honey blonde hair like a halo. I noticed the slight discoloration around the face of her right arm. Her hand swiftly dropped to her side as she caught my line of sight.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Immediately the image of David Tennant sprawled on a chair at wand-point flashed in my head, another reference... Our Dark Marks... The pain we wore in flashing red, it branded us in ways we loved in defeat and hated in happiness.

"Allons-nous bientôt? Il est presque le coucher du soleil." Abby shifted her body away from me. "Clarence, avant qu'elle ne commence à poser des choses."

I picked up a few of her words like 'allons-nous'—are we going—or 'le coucher du soleil' which meant something along the lines pertaining to the sun, possibly the setting of it. I even caught words like 'avant' meaning before and 'commence a poser' is starting to ask. I figured, she wanted to go before I started berating her about the lines etched on her wrists like mantras, which I didn't want to ask about, just the same as I wished she'd never ask me.

I won’t show her mine even if she showed hers.

That was the problem with Abigail No-Last-Name. She believed that if she shared a part of her, it's only right she be given a little of the other person. I thought she was stupidly naive and an oxymoron for being impurely innocent. For someone who'd built a wall around herself, she didn't feel like a broken girl.

Father Peter rose his hand again, "Is there only one type of broken?"

I wanted to first tell him we weren’t in class so he didn’t have to raise his hand but appreciated his patience. He seldom interrupted. I didn’t say anything about it though.

Broken glass. Ripped paper. Whatever the material, it was still no longer whole. Broken for me was a pain I had to run away from. With Abby, broken meant shame, unadulterated shame that made her want to hide forever. Regardless, we were both looking for peace of mind.

She was full of shame, shame I couldn't understand for a while.

"I told you how much I love flowers, yes?" Abby unlocked the door of the greenhouse but didn't enter.

"I remember."

Flowers are fragile creations of Mother Nature. I thought so too. Once they're crushed, they're never the same again. If people are flowers, Abigail was a makahiya or mimosa pudica.

The legend briefly goes: A girl by the name of Maria was born obedient, kind, and shy. Maria had a garden she tended to lovingly. One day, her father catches wind that a band of thieves would be coming to their home. Fearing that his beautiful child would be taken as well, he quickly hides her in the garden while her mother prayed to God that she be kept safe. When the thieves came and went, her mother quickly went to look for her but found no one in the garden. Grief-stricken, she fell to the ground and wept. Where she wept, a flower bloomed. This flower resembled Maria in every aspect. Thus, Maria's mother believed that God had transformed her into a flower to save her. In the end, she remained a flower tended by her parents.

Abby was a flower who didn't want to be touched.

She suddenly turned to look me straight in the eyes for the first time.

"I was raped."