Outside Salsbury High School

8:00am

Kevin stared at her. “Immortal?”

“Yes.”

“You aren’t kidding?”

“No.”

He sat down on the grass. She stared at him for a moment, and then sat next to him, smoothing her plum-colored long skirt. He looked at her again “Do you… age?”

“Not since we left Paris”

“How… how long ago was that?”

She thought for a moment, and then replied “Three hundred and seven years, I believe.”

His jaw dropped. “But… that makes you…”

“Three hundred and twenty three years old. I know. I was born in 1685, in Marseille, France.”

“Three hundred twenty three?”

“Yes. You are taking this rather well, you know”

“Well? I’m still in shock! How would you feel if the girl you li… I mean your friend told you she was three hundred and twenty three years old!?”

“My mother’s three hundred fifty four. Eternally thirty-one”

“And you’re…”

“Eternally seventeen. Until we return, that is.”

“So you can’t die?”

“No, we can die. In 1912, my father did.”

“How?”

“Witch hunters on the Irish countryside. They chased him to a cliff, and he fell. The next day I and my mother boarded a ship to America.”

“Wait… until you return?”

“LeBelles qui sont les belles y seront toujours/ avant que sur les côtes de France/ elles reviennent un jour”

“What does that mean?”

“LeBelles, who are the beautiful ones, will forever remain so, until they return to the shores of France”

“Ok…”

“It is a spell”

“And why…”

“It’s why we can’t return. We will immediately be as we should be.”

“And how is that?”

“We would turn to dust. We would die, and rot, and vanish in the blink of an eye.”

“You speak French?”

“I lived there for sixteen years”

“Do you speak… anything else?”

“Welsh, Gaelic, Italian, Spanish, and a little bit of Swedish and Russian- I learned it on the ship”

“Ship?”

“On the way here, I met three wonderful friends- their names were Fillip, but I called him Flip, Pitor and Ernesti. Flip and Ernesti were from Finland, and Pitor was from Russia They both died.”
“When?”

“When the ship sank”

“The ship sank?”

“Yes.”

“When… when was this?”

She thought back “I think… 1912”

He looked at her “What was its name?”

“RMS Titanic”

He sat back, in shock “Titanic?”

“Yes.”

“You were on the Titanic?

“But that’s… so cool!”

She smiled a wane smile “In a way, I suppose”

“Any other cool things I should know about you?”

“Besides the fact you are the only one other than my mother and a guy back in 1854 who knows about us, than no.”

The bell rang, interrupting his next question, and they ran in to biology.