Nightfall ✓

Chapter 7

• chapter seven •

A month went by. It was October now, and the cold was slowly settling in, the chilly winds announcing the advent of winter. There were leaves everywhere on the pavement, the trees were almost bare.

I'd hung a painting on my drawing-room wall, which I called August Rain. I had painted it in September actually, when the rain was beating against the windows and there was nothing else to do, but I still called it August Rain because that was the rain I liked best — it was warm, and it actually smelled like rain, and somehow, the rain didn't make you feel humid at all, and the sky was always half-sunny, half-dark, very unlike the dark grey-clouded rains.

I loved the rain.

Sometimes, when it rained at night, I thought back to our hiking trip when we'd gone into the sanatorium. It wasn't a very good memory, and so I tried not to think much about it, until one day something happened which caused the memory to escape the deep recesses of my mind and come right to the front, making me wonder if the two events were somehow connected.

It was a Sunday.

After painting the sunset outside my window, I left the paints on my table and went to the bathroom. I put on a nice pair of jeans with red sandals and a red top, and then started brushing my brown hair. Yes, brown. Last week Ashley had taken me to a parlor, insisting that chocolate-brown hair would look much better on me than red. Then, when I was seated on the chair in front of the mirror, she secretly told the hairdresser to give me a new haircut called 'steps' or 'layers' or something like that. Without even asking me what I wanted, the guy picked up a pair of scissors and started chopping down my locks. I would've been angry at them both, but the new look suited me, so I stayed quiet.

Zack still couldn't wrap his head around all this. When I went to school the next day, he held a lock of my hair between his fingers and playfully said, "How dare you? I can't call you Reddie now."

"You can call me Brownie."

"No."

"You can call me Reddie, actually."

And so I was still Reddie.

But, back to Sunday. I brushed back my front hair and pinned them behind my head with a clutcher, letting the rest of the hair fall loosely about my shoulders, and then went out of the house where Liam was waiting for me because I still couldn't navigate my way around the city.

"Hi," he said, smiling that beautiful, happy smile. I still hadn't got used to seeing him without braces. It made his smile prettier, and his face more handsome. The setting sun lit up his face in an orange glow. "You look pretty."

I smiled. "You look handsome."

Together we walked to his house. I knew very little about why I was going to his house in the first place. On Friday, all Zack had told me was to come for a secret party at Liam's, saying that we were going to celebrate some soccer match. Then he'd run away to talk to some guy.

This was the first time I was visiting Liam's place. It was a nice little brick house with a couple of rose bushes in the garden. He opened the door. The drawing room was huge, but there was so less furniture there that it looked empty. A fire smoldered in the fireplace. His dad was sitting on a couch, wearing the clothes one usually wears when going out. Before I could greet him, Liam said, "This is Hazel and she's not my girlfriend, and we're going to my room."

He looked at me. His hair was black but grey at the roots, and there was a white stubble on his cheeks. He didn't look much like Liam, so I assumed Liam had taken after his mother.