But, like everything else about Asa, the hazel-eyed girl misinterpreted this, too.
“Wow, you’re so full of it.” She laughed incredulously, her head shaking in mild disgust.
This one was going to be hard to crack, he thought. But when had he ever backed down from a fight?
“How did you survive in this school so many years with this guy around?” She turned to ask her friend (Asa assumed) who was sitting at the desk next to her.
The other girl looked startled, not expecting to be dragged into the middle of their argument.
“We’ve never really interacted, you know,” the girl eventually said, her voice even and steady, not carrying a single trace of her startled reaction earlier.
“Lucky you,” hazel-eyed replied. “Why can’t luck be on my side for once?”
The other girl didn’t reply and just looked away uneasily.
“Are the three of you planning on staying here the whole day?” Mr. Edward’s voice cut off any further arguing. “My class has been over for some time now. Get to your fourth period classes. Go along now.”
The other girl slid out of her chair soundlessly, as if she’d never even been there, and walked out of the class. Hazel-eyed, on the other hand, stared Asa down for a good few minutes, which only caused him to widen his smile before she gave up and walked away, too.
Asa was just about to move away when his eyes caught something sticking out from the pocket underneath the desks. He reached for it, pulling out a hardcover spiral book, with a plain, dark-blue texture.
He grinned. Now he had another excuse to approach hazel-eyed.
Fingers gingerly trailing down the edge of the book, he opened it. Carmen West.
The name was written on the front page in an elegant calligraphic style. Carmen, he tested it out on his head. He didn’t know what to feel about the name. Somehow, it didn’t suit hazel-eyed and he felt a flicker of disappointment, as odd as it was.
Not that it mattered now; he had something of hers. And she’d have to converse with him somehow. Asa’s lips curved into a wicked grin at the thought.
“Carmen,” he murmured to himself, feeling the syllables roll off his tongue in a gentle manner. “Carmen.” He smiled.
He could get used to that name.
05.
A Broken Mind
Carmen watched Asa while she nibbled on her grilled cheese-and-ham sandwich during lunch. She didn’t know why she found it hard to look away while he sat there with a bunch of other guys and girls. Maybe it was his good looks, or the way he kept shaking his left knee when he got uneasy or bored. Maybe it was the way his nose was slightly crooked, a consequence of being in one too many fights.
She didn’t know, but she just couldn’t look away.
Carmen realised her eyes kept marvelling at the golden hue of his skin. It was the kind of tan girls went to the beach for but could never get to their heart’s satisfaction. And then there were those long eyelashes— eyelashes that she couldn’t help but feel were simply wasted on a boy. It didn’t look so wasted on Asa, though—not in Carmen’s eyes, at least.
Her eyes swept over his slanting cheekbones, landed on his eyes that reminded Carmen of the coffee she sipped at night when things got too loud in her head. And her gaze travelled upwards, watching as his bruised knuckles from a recent brawl ran through his dark cinnamon hair.
Her fingers throbbed. She needed to draw something. She needed to sketch. To fill in another page of her journal. Maybe it’ll be a coffee stain this time. Maybe grounded cinnamon blending into the sand, the way Asa’s hair fell across his forehead. She just needed to get it out, before shades of brown and golden were all that occupied her mind.
Carmen reached into her shoulder bag, her fingers feeling around for that familiar smooth but hard texture of her art journal. When her hand came up empty, she tore her gaze away from trying to memorise what it looked like when the sunlight shone on Asa’s eyes as it streamed through the canteen windows.
She placed the bag on her lap, opening it wide and peering inside for her journal. The movements of her hand turned frantic when her eyes didn’t spot the book right away. Abruptly standing up and almost knocking back her chair, she pushed away her lunch tray and took off down the hall, ignoring the calls behind her.
She needed that journal. She needed it to breathe. To find some quiet.
She was so used to screaming in those pages, so used to yelling and shouting and throwing her emotions in a hellish tantrum through wild splashes of colours, mundane sketches and just nonsense doodling.
It was part of her; it carried her heart and her soul and the broken shards of her dreams and fragments of an old life.
Carmen wasn’t Carmen without it.
Panic bubbled in her gut as she ran back into the empty classroom where she’d had AP Literature. Her lungs inflated, ready to release the breath of immense relief, but when she crouched down to check under her desk and found it empty, her chest constricted itself blocking her breathing.
It wasn’t there. The realisation pounded through Carmen with each frantic beat of her heart. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
It wasn’t there.
She shut her eyes, as if blocking her sight would keep away the pain, and rested her head against the edge of the desk.
If her art journal fell into the wrong hands, they’d see no sense in it and label her crazy.
And if it fell into the right hands, in possession
