Crush

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Standing alone in the vast kitchen of Lockwood Orphanage, Daphne looked through the tall windows and watched the last light abandon the tree-scarred sky. A lazy wind whistled through the cracked glass, caressing her cheeks. The tall girl sighed with it, wondering why her skin could feel cold, or it seemed that she could breathe. Wasn’t all that for the living? Just what on earth, she wondered, were the rules?

Absently she glanced down and saw her reflection in the top of the long steel counter that stood in front of the windows. A sharp but pleasant face greeted her: smooth skin, bright blue eyes, curled auburn hair, her pleasantly sexy bare neck and collarbone peeking out from the unbuttoned collar of her striped men’s pajamas. Just for fun, she made her form fade in and out, testing to see if she could find the precise moment between being there and not.

What were the rules? Where were the lines? How much had death changed her, outside and in? She needed so badly to know, if only to shake a growing sense of guilt and dread. The guilt was for the way they’d been treating Anne lately, playing the bone game without her, abandoning her to the Headmistress. The dread was over the possibility that the three of them, Shirley, Mary and Daphne, had driven the dark-haired girl so far away they’d never be able to trust her again.

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