Being in this place was like walking through a graveyard. Except for tombstones, he saw the faces of people who were long dead in their time. Arlo thought the worst would be the face of his own mother but it wasn’t, it was his. He locks eyes with his best friend who was finishing up a conversation with a girl he didn’t recognize. But only for a moment and then guilt is making him look elsewhere. He’d just finished speaking to the Southern Belle who would one day be the mother to Olivier. Of course she had no idea who she was talking to, none of them did, but he knew and he could remember the last time he’d seen her.
He could remember her breath moving his hair, her chest rising and falling rapidly as they raced towards the door, and her strong arms around him until they weren’t. It was the last he’d seen her before she disappeared back into this house and never came out again, her body gone with nothing left to bury. Arlo hadn’t realized just how hard this would all be, forever cynical and cocky, and now he could barely look Olivier in the eye when he was the person that Arlo wanted to talk to the most.
Clearing his throat as his friend approaches, he shoves his hands in his pockets and glances down the hallway as the students disperse towards their classes. He sees the flash of a white stripe, a small woman who walked like she was much bigger. “This place gives me the fucking creeps,” he mutters as Olivier gets close enough to hear.