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My plan isn’t going well.
Not at all.
It’s been a week since I came up with it and I have made exactly zero progress.
It’s like he has no weaknesses. Like he’s impenetrable.
Every morning he emerges from the cottage at the same time. He walks over to the school building with the same purposeful strides and always without sparing a glance for the group of giggling teenage girls who gather around in the courtyard to watch him. He then spends his entire time in the office before breaking for lunch that he gets from the cafeteria. He brings it back to his office, where he eats in solitude while working.
And that’s it.
That’s all he does. All day.
Well, he does one more thing: he keeps his promise.
Of buying me a brand-new sewing machine.
Purple and way more advanced.
Turns out, there’s no specific rule in the St. Mary’s manual about owning a sewing machine. Although even if there was, I don’t think it would matter much. Because he’s the principal, isn’t he? The lord and the king. The devil. And I’m his ward. So if he wants to buy me a sewing machine and have it delivered to the dorms, then he can and he does.
As promised, the sewing machine arrives at the dorm reception one afternoon and everyone goes crazy over it. They ask questions and gush over how sleek it looks.
I’m too busy to gush.
I’m busy being all breathless and restless and thoughtless even, to do anything else.
At the fact that he actually followed through.
Not to mention, I told him something so personal. Something so sacred about me.
Him, of all people.
The man I hate. The man I’m supposed to destroy.
How did that even happen?
“I can’t believe he did that,” Jupiter breathes, sitting beside me on my bed, staring at the pretty purple machine on my desk.
“I know,” Echo agrees, also staring at the machine.
“Wow,” Jupiter goes. “This is actually a very cool thing to do.”
“I think it’s more than cool,” Echo says while all three of us still stare at the machine. “I think it’s epic. Because he did it.”
“I think you’re right.” Jupiter nods before spookily adding my own thoughts, “Him, of all people. Him.”
Yeah, him of all people.
“And he told you to not hide,” Echo reminds us both.
They’re both talking in reverent whispers.
As if taking in the enormity of the gesture. The enormity of what I shared with them just now.
About how I spilled my secret to him when I’m supposed to be working on getting his.
Everything aside, it was a very cool thing to do.
It was also a freeing thing.
I’ve never experienced this kind of freedom before. This kind of weightlessness.
Or relief.
Yeah, I’m relieved.
That I can share this with people. That I can acknowledge the presence of all the sketches in my notebooks and texts. I can acknowledge that I spend almost all of my allowance on thrift stores, and now I have a brand-new sewing machine that’s going to make my life so much easier.
“Uh, so,” Echo begins, still looking at the sewing machine, “we’re still doing it, right? We’re still following through with the plan.”
“I mean, if you don’t want to,” Jupiter begins cautiously, “you don’t have to.”
I know that.
I know I don’t have to.
But the thing is that I do have to.
“I’m doing it,” I tell them firmly even as my heart twists in my chest.
Because it’s not as if things have changed now. After our accidental heart to heart.
It’s not as if he’s ready to let me go.
He hasn’t even let go of my detention.
I still go to his office at five every day and I still write that apology while he works on his things — conference papers, guest lectures, presentations; I asked and he told me.
The only difference is that at the end of every detention session, he asks to see my notebook. Every time he does, I get up from my seat, walk around the desk under his scrutiny and hand it over to him. Then I stand there, my hands folded primly in front of me, as I stare at him while he stares at my notebook.
And not at the apology-filled pages, no.
But at my dress designs.
The little doodles on the margins.
Well, they’re not little. They’re elaborate sketches, but still.
And they’re not in the margins. They’re at the front and center of mostly every page because I hardly ever take notes in class.
I remember my friend Wyn, who is an artist and has probably hundreds of sketchbooks, told us that her boyfriend, Conrad, likes to stare at her sketches all the time. And she has always felt extremely shy about it. Even now.
I never understood that.
Because I’ve never really been shy about anything in my life. The more outrageous I am, the better.
Except right now.
Except when I watch him flick through the pages, giving my sketches cursory glances, before settling on one randomly and staring at it for several minutes.
