Broken Knight

I’d smiled at him. Really smiled, for the first time in a long time. He was charming and pleasant and normal. Yes. That was the part I liked most about him.

“Luna,” I’d signed, offering him my hand.

He took it.

“Josh. Joshua. Whatever you want to call me, really. Just as long as you do.”

Josh had then said he really needed to go get his roommate that soup before he got kicked out of his dorm room.

“You’re here a lot,” he’d observed, flipping his ball cap backward.

I couldn’t deny it, because Malory was going to make sure I’d be here, whether I wanted to or not. I shrugged.

“Mind if I invite myself to tag along sometime?”

I’d shrugged again, fighting the urge to shut him down. Vaughn was right. It was high time I made my own friends, and connections, and life.

After that, Josh had come every day, even when I wasn’t there. I knew because the baristas told me.

At the stables, I sometimes watched Josh teaching other kids who spoke sign language as I swept with a wooden broom. Sometimes, he’d buy me hot cocoa and put it outside the door, knowing how embarrassed I was to be given things.

We were just friends. I’d quickly made it clear I was still hung up on a boy from home. I told Josh Knight was my ex-boyfriend. It felt less pitiful than being desperately in love with your childhood friend, who was probably screwing his way to the top of a Guinness record for being the most obnoxious, desired teenager to ever live.

I’d tried to Skype Knight a few more times before completely giving up. We’d just see each other at Thanksgiving. Our parents always spent it together, so we couldn’t delay talking to each other much past that, no matter how much he dreaded it.

When I returned from my lengthy trip through my thoughts, April had thrown her head back on my bed and was rolling around and moaning Josh’s name to highlight how hot he was.

And he was. But he wasn’t Knight. Though I reminded myself that Knight seemed to have moved on. He didn’t have an active Instagram account, but sometimes, at night, I stalked the accounts of girls he went to school with and found pictures of him from parties and football games. He looked happy, and that made me unhappy. The fact that it made me unhappy made me even more unhappy.

“Don’t tell me.” April rolled to a sitting position and blew a purple lock from her face. “You don’t want to go because then Josh might finally kiss you, and you will lose the precious notion that the idiot back home is going to get back with you.”

April thought Knight was my ex-boyfriend, too. The lie had grown larger, wings bursting from its back. The more it matured, the less I was comfortable considering myself her and Josh’s true friend.

“Let it go, Luna. You’re going to spend the next few years away from this dude. It’s over.”

I swiveled in my chair and pinned her with a look.

“That is not what it’s about,” I signed.

Or maybe it was. But either way, social gatherings made me physically sick. However, I knew with Josh and April there, I wouldn’t be alone.

“Before you say no to Josh, I want you to consider something.” April sprang up from my bunk and sashayed over to my laptop, hovering above me. “I didn’t want to show you this, but I guess I have no choice.”

My heart jumped to my throat. April leaned down and punched an Instagram handle into the search bar, opening an account I was familiar with. It was one of the popular senior girls Knight went to school with, Poppy Astalis. He’d never mentioned her throughout our friendship, but of course, my weekly searches included her. She was an English rose, sans the thorns—all sweet, delicate, and trimmed where appropriate. Her father was one of the most well-known sculptors in the world, and after her mother had passed away, he’d agreed to take on a consulting job, assisting in opening Todos Santos School of Art, uprooting Poppy and her younger sister, Lenora, from their London residence.

Poppy was pretty, but she wasn’t made from the same velvet, tainted cloth of the rich Todos Santos girls. She’d always been nice to me during the two years we’d spent at All Saints High together, and she was a straight-A student. She played the accordion, skipped most parties, but attended the important ones, and from what I’d heard, she was always the one to drive drunk girls home before they did something stupid.

“Maybe this will inspire you to give up on the dickhead.” April clicked on the newest picture in Poppy’s Instagram, and my throat closed in on my heart.

It was a perfect Pinterest picture: pint-sized Poppy standing on top of Knight’s helmet in an empty field, her arms wrapped around his neck, both of them lost in a deep, passionate kiss. He was still wearing his football gear, dirty and sweaty and so alive he nearly burst out of the screen. Gorgeous. Victorious. Like a god who’d descended from the sky. Friday night lights shone on the beautiful couple, highlighting his glistening, disheveled brown hair. Against the backdrop of the black night and empty bleachers, they looked nothing short of high school royalty.

The caption read:

We Won! #StillLikeRealFootballBetter #NoItsNotCalledSoccer #KnightColeForPresident #MineMineMine The pen I’d been chewing slipped between my fingers, and I bent down to pick it up, hitting my head on the edge of my desk. I lost my footing. I didn’t even feel the fresh wound on my forehead. I patted it, confused, feeling warm, thick liquid between my curls.