I needed to help him, but I was frozen in place. What the hell was happening? “S-Stop,” I whispered, too scared to approach him. Just as suddenly as they had started to attack him, the pieces of glass fell to the ground as inanimate as they should be.

Jack, uncovering his face with his hands looked down at the bits of glass. Some of the pieces had his blood on them. Shaken, he brushed the pieces off, unlocked the bathroom door, and took off running like they would reanimate and chase him.

Natalia came in a few seconds later. “I heard the yelling. Nina, what the heck happened between you and-” Her last words were consumed by the shock of seeing the state of the bathroom. “Never mind that, what happened in here?” She picked up a large piece of broken glass and dropped it into the trash by the door.

“I came in here and found it this way,” I lied. I tried to keep it together on the outside, but I was freaking out on the inside like I had been hit with a shot of adrenaline. She’d think I was a loon if I told her what really happened. “I-I need a hair tie.”

Natalia handed me something to put my hair up, and at that time, we heard a knock at the door. “Girls, are you in there? Natalia?” Damian’s voice came.

“We’re in here,” Natalia called.

“We’re coming in!” Damian said and walked in followed by Daniel. “Whoa, what happened in here?” He exclaimed when he saw the mess.

“She came in and saw it that way,” Natalia answered for me.

“I-I just need to pull myself together. I’ll meet you guys in homeroom,” I said quickly. My tie had yet to be tied and I wanted to put my hair up so it wouldn’t get in the way. Added to that, I needed to calm down. My heart was going a mile a minute and I needed a moment to process what I just saw.

Damian nodded and following Natalia out as I started to focus on tying my tie. It was a waste of time. My hands were shaking too much. Daniel hadn’t quite made it out the door yet and turned back to face me, taking my hands in his.

I blinked up at him. “What-”

“You need to calm down, you’re shaking,” he said softly. He pulled my hands away from my tie and begun to tie it himself perfectly.

“Thank you,” I told him genuinely. “We’re going to be late for homeroom.”

“We’re in the boy’s bathroom. You know that, right?” he asked as he turned to open the door.

I nodded. It hadn’t fully sunk in before because of my heated conversation with Jack, but I was aware. It would be the cherry on top of my morning if I got caught walking out. Daniel seemed to have the same train of thought, so he scanned the hallways before letting me out of the bathroom.

The rest of the day went by really fast, and before I knew it, it was the end of school. Natalia almost chopped me into pieces when I forgot to give her a piece of Leanne’s banitsa. Cheer practice flew by too. I got to sit out once I told Coach I wasn’t feeling well, but I made sure to pay attention while they went through the routine. I called Zayne as soon as school was over and told him to pick me up at the cemetery in an hour instead of at school. I hadn’t visited my parents in a while, and with the week I’d had, I needed to talk to them.

I started walking right after cheer practice, declining a ride from Natalia. The cemetery was only a fifteen-minute walk from school, for which I was glad. When I got there, I walked to their headstones.

“Hey Mom and Dad,” I said, sitting cross legged on the grass. “I’m sorry for not coming to visit sooner. It has been hectic. Let’s see,” I said thoughtfully. It only took me a minute of thinking before I launched into what my week had been like in as much detail as possible.

I talked about Leanne working way more than usual even though she didn’t need to. I mentioned how bad I was settling back into school since I lost them. I was always on edge waiting for a teacher to point out my lower than usual grade, but they probably still took pity on me.

Cristóbal was next on my list and I went on and on about how worried I was about him starting school again. He had separated himself from all his friends and none of them were going to Silver Stone like he was about to. He’d be alone and I also worried he was rushing it. He may want to prevent Leanne and I from worrying so much that he thought he needed to prove he was fine by going back to school.

Of course, I couldn’t mention Cris without mentioning Maria. It took everything in me to not clench my hands into fists just thinking about her. I got even more riled up when I brought up Jack, but calmed when I talked about Zayne being back.

When I was done, I felt so much lighter. I hadn’t even realized I was crying until a tear dripped from my chin and onto my sleeve. I didn’t know if it was the act of getting everything off my chest or feeling like I was talking to my parents but visiting them always made me feel better.

I picked up my bag off the ground and brushed the leaves off it. I hadn’t taken time to admire the leaves this year. I loved autumn. I loved the chilly weather and getting to layer up comfortably. It was such a pity that it never snowed where I lived now like it did in Bulgaria.

Just when I was about to walk away my phone buzzed in my pocket with a text.

Hey. I’m by the entrance to the cemetery. You can come when you’re ready. –Zayne

When I got to the car, Zayne was talking on the phone. He seemed rather happy. “Is that…?” I asked and trailed off. He nodded with a smile. “I want to say hi.”

“No,” he mouthed. I pouted like an upset child and crossed my arms. “I won’t be calling you tonight,” he was telling the person on the line. “Because you have an almost ten-hour flight to be on soon, you won’t want to get off the phone if I call, and it’s almost midnight where you are… Yes, I’ll be there to pick you up tomorrow after I leave Nina at school… Hey, we’ll be living together in the span of twenty-four hours, you’ll manage… I can’t wait to see you too… Bye.” He hung up and I smacked him on the arm.

“I wanted to say hi,” I whined.

“What is with the two of you? Just wait twenty-four hours,” he begged. I nodded. “Good, now let’s go home. Cris must be bored out of his mind.”

When we got home, we watched a movie that I wished I’d had some warning for. It was about a girl who, after losing her virginity during a quick holiday romance, started a secret life as a prostitute. It wasn’t as censored as I thought it would be, but I imagined most French movies were like that. That there wasn’t an issue with exposing themselves in front of the camera. Nudity was natural.

When the movie ended, Zayne left the house to buy some things for his friend. I took another banitsa and went straight up to my room to do my vocabulary homework for my Art History class. We had started studying the paintings from the Italian Renaissance. I wrote my journal entry for Leonardo da Vinci: A Renaissance Man, and filled out the vocabulary, which took longer than I expected it to.

I went back downstairs to get a drink from the refrigerator and saw Cristóbal asleep on the sofa with the TV on. I woke him up and turned the TV off, making sure he got to his room without walking into any walls. He looked so tired. After, I went back to my room to do some reading. It was more than I had accomplished in days, but I still wanted to do more.

What Jack had said really bothered me even though I knew he was saying those things to hurt me. His words bothered me because they were true. I allowed everything I wanted to be pushed aside and when I wasn’t doing that, I was coasting along on cruise control. If I were to stop being driftwood, I needed to start piloting my life again and it started with getting a better handle on my grades.

I woke up a few minutes before my alarm the next morning, but I didn’t wait for it to go off. It was Friday, and I woke up the most refreshed I’d felt in days. When I finished my shower, I went to turn my alarm off before it woke Zayne up. He had sneaked in when I was still doing schoolwork but had been very quiet so as not to disturb me.

Feeling better and rather generous this morning, I decided to prepare breakfast for everyone. I made French toast, a vegetable mishmash, an omelet, and started coffee and tea. When everyone came downstairs half an hour later, I was finishing up the setting of the table.

“I should oversleep more often,” Leanne said as she descended the winding stairs to the ground floor, followed by Cris and Zayne. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” I replied. “I wanted us to have breakfast together.”

“Good, because I’m starving,” Zayne said and sat down.

Halfway through breakfast Zayne excused himself to go upstairs to get things for his trip to the airport.

Zayne had been giving me rides to school for a few days, and I obviously hadn’t thought my day through. He had to go to the airport to pick up his friend a few hours after he dropped me off at school. I hadn’t prepared for a case in which the air conditioning in the buildings would malfunction, and all the students would have to be sent home early.

So, there I was, sitting in the parking lot, alone. Everyone had gone home already to my knowledge, and it did not make sense to walk home. I wouldn’t reach my destination until next week. I was just going to call a cab when I heard a car horn. “Hey, Nina, do you need a ride?” someone asked. Damian was leaning out of the passenger seat window of a black SUV.

“Umm… No thanks. I was just going to call a cab,” I said, waving my phone in the air. Something was off with the Catalano brothers and for some reason, anxiety was building at the very thought of being in a car with them alone.

“It’s going to rain and get colder, you know. Repaying me for gas would be cheaper than calling for a cab. And faster.”

“I don’t want to be a bother,” I said. I had barely finished my sentence when I felt a drop of rain on my arm. I looked up. “You have got to be kidding me,” I mumbled to myself.

Damian chuckled. “Well?”

I stood there, phone in hand, contemplating what I should do while the rain fell lightly on me. Damian had a point. I heard a door open. “Get in,” Daniel said from the driver’s seat. Those were the first words I’d heard him utter all morning.

“I’m not-” I was cut off by the sudden heavy downpour of water from the clouds. Without another thought, I got into the back seat and pulled the door closed behind me. The inside hadn’t been spared by a few drops of rain which I quickly apologized for.

“You are one stubborn girl, you know that?” Damian asked rhetorically as his brother pulled off campus. The place was beginning to get foggy, and I could hardly see anything through the windscreen.

“I’ve been told,” I mumbled.

“The heat is on, but if it gets too warm, just let me know.”

“Sure.”

“Nina?” Damian asked curiously.

“Hmm?” When I looked up, he was looking back at me in the rearview mirror.

“We don’t make you uncomfortable, do we?” he asked slowly. “You can be honest.”

They had a weird vibe, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say they made me uncomfortable. It might just be because they’re still new to me and I hadn’t gotten to know them well enough yet. “Not really,” I answered, hoping they wouldn’t be offended.

Aside from eating lunch with Natalia and me, the twins usually kept to themselves, always by each other’s side. Even though Damian was the outspoken one, he didn’t speak in the classes I shared with him. He was always gazing off or scribbling something down, but he never seemed to pay much attention to what was going on around him. Daniel was worse. He never smiled and rarely spoke and seemed just as aloof as his brother.

I was so caught up in my own thoughts that I was startled when the car came to a stop. I looked out the window, but it was so foggy that I could barely make out the shape of an old diner outside. Damian got out of the car with an umbrella and waved before turning and walking towards the diner.

“Do you want to sit up front?” Daniel asked.

“N-No, thanks,” I said too quickly.

“I have to make one stop before I drop you off.”

“Where would that be?” I asked.

“My place,” he said. “It’s close by here.”