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I liked the kissing a lot.
He graduated days later. I never saw him again.
I attained my goal and enjoyed a brief sense of empowerment. One that fell away almost as quickly as it arrived.
A week later, I was summoned to the general’s office in the middle of the night.
And avoided his silent stare for ten straight minutes.
He must have knownsomething, for he gazed at me with such deranged wrath. It was the only time I had ever seen the man untidy. Uniform wrinkled as if he’d been rushing to dress. Hair mussed, eye twitching, tense, he sat in his chair and seemed to go a little more insane by the minute.
He looked pointedly at the white couch as if to remind me what it signified yet said nothing else.
I know I must have looked pathetic in my adolescent uncertainty. Which broken rule had he discovered? For I had broken all of them in my rebellion against his tyranny.
Thinking about that poor, dead redheaded boy stirred up anger that had been growing for a year. Resentment for the unfairness of losing all my free hours. Bitterness that the general held all the power and I had none.
Angry, it was easier to finally meet his treacherous gaze. To really look at my tormentor as a person, not just a force of nature.
A person I did not like very much.
“Do you understand the consequences of consorting with the opposite sex after hours?”
I could be snide too. “Deeply, sir.”
“Tonight, a boy was apprehended on his way back to the boys’ dorm. There were signs of fornication. He had something on him that looks to be yours.”
Not only had I not been in the halls that evening, but I now knew how to make him just as uncomfortable as he was making me. “What is fornication?”
“Private, were you in the halls tonight?” He was in no mood for my games. “I smelled you in every room.”
Our sense of smell may have been slightly better than a human’s, but to blame me for a crime because he “smelled me” somewhere was absurd.
My adolescent years did not always lean toward the wisest responses, especially when faced with someone I loathed so deeply. “It’s my job to clean every room, sir.”
He barked an order. “Take your hair down.”
That one caught me off guard. “Sir?”
“Your hair. Take it down.”
He’d looked as if he was about to get up and do it for me. All bravado replaced with confusion, I looked around, unsure of what I was supposed to do.
“Well?”
Hesitant, my hands slowly moved to the knot at my nape. One at a time, hair pins were removed, some falling to the floor as the coil unfurled.
Half done, I gingerly stepped forward and set a handful of pins at the edge of the polished wood, then went back to unfurling the standard issue coil.
When it was done, hair brushed my lower back. And I had never felt more naked.
I knew I was blushing, that my speckling of scales would be glittering from the blood flow, and I couldn’t conceal how uncomfortable I was. But I cleared my throat, glanced at some random thing on his desk, and asked, “What now, sir?”
Without a word, he produced a thin braid of long brown hair and laid it out between us. Hair similar enough to mine, but not quite the same. Mine was a bit darker, a bit coarser. Sylvia’s hair was softer, and if it hadn’t been twisted into that sad little rope, it might have still had a little bounce.
The general watched me, eyes flicking over my unbound tresses as if searching for the clipped edges that might match.
And then I knew. She had given this to someone. To a sweetheart.
