I sit by the open window in my bedroom, the early morning hours are dark and I read by the light of the moon because I don’t want to wake Freya.

I don’t know what is wrong, only that something is. I feel a strange restlessness building inside me; as if I should be somewhere, or be doing something. It disquiets me, I cannot sleep, cannot even sit still. I fidget on the narrow sill, a book lies beside me, discarded. My hands start to shake and I feel the beginnings of an emotion not dissimilar to fear.

I have to do something.

Leaving my window side vigil I tiptoe out of the room. The sitting area looks the same as it always has but still I feel the uneasiness deep inside. Shivering I silently pull open a large draw. Inside are a myriad of objects, all shapes and sizes, pieces of wire, old buttons, hinges, screws…all metal. In another draw are half finished sculptures, tiny models of strange shapes, metal twisted with metal, woven, bent – all made by me.

I pull out some random pieces and set my fingers to work. A hidden clock ticks somewhere inside my apartment. My fingers blur as they move over the metal, I work faster and faster. Something is still wrong. A finger slips and a stray piece of disobedient wire slits the entire length; the blood and pain make me pause. Then I dash to the bathroom and retch noiselessly into the toilet; a heaving mass still heavy inside me.

Autumn has finally engulfed the city. It is noticeable only by the change in temperature, lengthening of the shadows. The lack of vegetation was one of the things my parents missed most when they lived in the city…my foster parents. Sometimes I think about them, and the life I used to lead…but I can’t allow those thoughts to continue, in case I drown in waves of regret.

“Eva? Shall we go in?” I blink; my feet have carried me to the school gates but no further and Freya is still by my side, I try to smile,

“Sure, sorry.” She looks so concerned; I know I look dreadful, deep bags circled my mirror image that morning as I had been unable to sleep and though my finger is carefully bandaged, I feel pain from something else, something completely indescribable.

We walk into the classroom together and immediately feel the tension buzzing in the room. I glance at Freya; she is watching the room, one eyebrow raised in contemplation,

“You!” Her hand shoots out like a snake, one of those poisonous ones that strike like lightning, paralysing their prey before swallowing them whole. The unfortunate boy leaps into the air and turns,

“Yes?” He looks understandably nervous, Freya’s scowl is ferocious and her reputation, pretty much as black as it could get.

“What the hell’s going on?” But before the boy can answer a group of girls push past us, they hear the question and immediately they excitedly impart all they have heard,

“Someone’s died!”

“It’s unbelievable…”

“Some girl in the year below wasn’t it…”

“I don’t know…”

“Yes wasn’t her name…”

I tune out their voices involuntarily; my whole body feels cold, terribly, horribly cold. Shivers race across my skin, leaving goosebumps and a wave of dizzying nausea in their wake.

I whirl about, leave the classroom. My feet move almost independently of my mind, the steady pounding on the corridor floor, then the stairs, then the rough surface of the tarmac, blurs with the painful thumping in my chest and head. I race along a corridor; I am in the junior building, across the playground from our classroom. I see the familiar door loom ahead of me. I have lurked behind it so many times, watching her silently and, as I skid to a halt, look inside, see the shocked and pale faces of a class that sits in silence…everything inside me resonates with a devastating clarity.

Freya doesn’t catch up with me until I’m in the junior bathroom, rinsing the taste from my mouth.

“Eva? Evie? What, what’s happened?” I can tell from her quiet voice that I’m scaring her. I want nothing more than to turn and fling myself into her arms, to tell her that I lost one – that I failed; to be comforted and consoled. Instead I keep my eyes downcast as I scrub my hands, refusing to meet her eyes in the mirror.

“Eva.” Her voice is cracked slightly and now I know that she is the one that needs comfort but I hurt so much inside, that I cannot bring myself turn. I keep scrubbing, as if trying to eradicate her presence from my mind. A hand grasps a thin, pale, waif-like wrist. I blink in surprise and watch silently as the soap and blood trickle slowly down that thin, pale hand. I realise that it is mine. But I feel nothing.

My knees buckle, and I sink into merciful blackness.

I reawaken, hours later, in a cold, sterile bed, in the nurse’s office. Light blue curtains fall in waves to the floor around where I lie, still, corpse-like. There is an open window outside my cocoon; a breeze rustles the barrier between the world and me and allows the gentle murmurings of departing schoolchildren to reach my ears.

My breathing is steady, my pulse, calm. There is no sickness, no pain and yet the deep ache of guilt lies thick upon me, yet no longer suffocating.

Everything is so clear now.

I should have gone to her. It’s true, I never intervene directly unless there is no other course of action; I had felt the symptoms of the need that night, but I had not known what they had meant. I had sat in silence, wasting and praying the hours away, even as she took her life. My visits to the hospital, the flowers…could I have done more? Or is the real question, should I? I doubted, no, I feared, that I could not lay the blame of this at the feet of the glowing figures. I had accepted responsibility for her life, and I had let it slip through my fingers, almost like discarded remnants, negligible, requiring but a little more of my time to salvage them.

The human mind is a curious organ. I hate myself, for not feeling the pain, but it has numbed it and in time I may even forget the remorse, her face as she bent over her mother, so still in the hospital bed.

“You’re awake.” I smile mockingly, I had been so busy philosophising that I hadn’t noticed Freya slip through the slit in the curtains.

“Yes.” It seems the only truthful reply and I pray she asks no more of the tired, small, mousy-haired girl with soul-shattered eyes that lies, so utterly defeated, before her.

She doesn’t and yet sits at the bedside, and as I half-rise to meet her (a sign of how far we have come) she grips me in a vice-like hug and buries her face in my hair. I sigh, relax and feel a sense of peace; this is not over, it may never be over, even after I visit the graves of her, her mother, her family, the brightly coloured carnations a symbol of my guilt as much as my remorse. Yet for that moment, I felt life could go on. Surely I was making some difference? I now saw so few of those creatures and I would recognise the signs, next time.

I let my eyelids slide open, to peer affectionately and blearily at the crown of her head as she squeezes me tight.

“Don’t you ever scare me like that again! Do you hear me? I absolutely won’t forgive you!” I squeeze her back even tighter with shaking hands, so scared my heart feels like is beating a blazing path out of my very chest.

I stare, transfixed with hatred and horror, at the very faint outline of a shimmering hand resting on Freya’s back.