× Horan

A bottle of alum, a beaker with tap water, a pencil, a small spoon, filter paper, a ball of string, and a hot plate sat on the table in front of me. The Chemistry room was dark except for the single rectangular florescent light I had turned on above me.

"You're so predictable," a voice said from the doorway.

I was in the middle of tying a small piece of string around the pencil when I turned and saw Lynn. I wasn't sure what I was more surprised about, that she found me or that I didn't even hear her open the door.

"How did you know I was here?" I asked as I lifted the plastic goggles to the top of my head.

"Because I know you," she said simply, walking into the room and looking around. "But if it makes you feel any better, I probably would have checked your dorm first, but I don't know where you live anymore since you moved out..."

I turned my back to her and continued my experiment. "Shouldn't you be with your brother?"

"He crashed a half hour ago. Jet leg and everything," Lynn explained. I could feel her more than hear her as she walked up closer to me. "Besides, it would be rude of me not to say thank you to the person who brought him to me."

I tried desperately to tie the string around the pencil, but Lynn's presence so close was distracting me. Her peppermint aroma swarmed around me and my whole body tingled by her nearness.

"Can I ask you something?" I questioned.

"Only if I can ask you something," she retorted, looking over my shoulder to see what I was doing.

"Why don't you want people to know what happened to your parents?" I asked, keeping my back to her and continuing my struggle with the string and pencil. "I mean, people already know your parents died. What does it matter if they know they were killed in a house fire?"

"Because there's more to the story than just a house fire." I felt Lynn step away from me and walked to one of the many windows of the room, peering outside. "If I tell people, then I would feel obligated to tell them everything. And I'm just not ready to cross that line yet..."

More to the story? I tried to remember everything she had wrote in her essay, but there wasn't anything in there that told me that there was more.

Then Lynn turned away from the window and walked over to the lab table I was working on and leaned against it.

"I also know why you took my paper," she confessed. She pulled out a stool and took a seat, grinning at me. "It must be hard for you to admit this, but you care."

"Care about what?"

"Me."

"I know I've been the one to get beat up, but have you hit your head recently because now you're talking crazy."

"So were you lying when you said you cared during Halloween night?"

I sighed and looked at her. "I cared that you took those pills."

"See, I don't think that's a hundred percent true." The smile on her lips widened. "That's why you took my essay in the first place. You couldn't stand not knowing what happened to my parents. You wanted to understand why I would keep something like that to myself. None of my friends bothered to find out for themselves, but you did. So, you're either stupid enough to cross me, or you care. And I know for a fact that you're not stupid."

It made sense, I suppose, even though I didn't know that was the reasons when I was taking the essay off Professor Lawtherd desk. At the time it was just pure curiosity, the nagging tick in the back of my head as I stared down at the paper on his desk so many months ago.

But I knew better then. That wasn't the whole reason. I wanted to know why.

It's one thing getting pity about your deceased parents, but it's an entirely different thing when you also lose your house - when you lose everything you ever had. Lynn and her brother were orphans with literally nothing but the clothes on their back. If I were Lynn, I wouldn't want the pity and the sympathy; all I would want is to have my parents back. All I would want is for everything to go back to the way things were before the fire.

"You're right," I agreed. "I'm not stupid."

I did care about Lynn, a lot, actually. And in the beginning it might have been because she reminded me so much of Alina... but months had passed since then and now all I wanted was to make sure Lynn didn't hurt any more than she already had.

I've known Lynn for a while now, and ever since I first saw her on a small screen in Coach's office, she's been under my skin and in my head. I found it ironic and slightly horrific. The element mercury is toxic and when it gets on your skin, it will seep through to your blood stream and find its way to your brain. If I knew Lynn would have this effect on me, I would have steered clear. Now it was too late; I was too far gone.

"You were going to ask me something," I reminded her as I placed the pencil I had finally tied the string to on the lab counter. "Before I asked about your parents..."

She looked up at me then, her deep blue eyes looking into mine. I couldn't exactly read her expression, but that was probably because Lynn wasn't even sure what she was feeling at the moment.

"Your essay," she said as she looked down at her lap. "What did you write for your paper?"

Suddenly, I knew more than ever why Lynn would keep her parents death a secret. It was a big part of her, something that could easily make her vulnerable. I knew that feeling because, well, I had something like that, too. Very few people knew about my childhood and teen years because it wasn't a very good time for me. It wasn't anything I had nightmares about, but it was a time in my life I wasn't too proud of.

"You know the saying 'money can't buy happiness'?" I asked as I leaned my forearms against the counter. "Whoever said that was right, you're never truly happy; you just protect the sadness with the newest Ferrari model or a Rolex watch."

I could tell that her mind was reeling with the new information as the dots connected in her head.

"King Midas..." she whispered.

"He was content, the illusion of happiness all around him in golden statues, golden floors, even golden kitchen utensils..." I continued, remembering the time I had sat on Lynn's floor as she went to take a shower. The numerous webpages I had looked through to give me something, anything, to help me make the essay a little less painful. "Until he was starving, then he didn't want anything to do with the golden touch."

Lynn knew the story - she probably knew every myth in the book - but she didn't interrupt me, she just kept her eyes on me as I explained.

"The thing about growing up in a rich family is the ingratitude," I continued. "I was fifteen when I finally saw that I wasn't taught to do anything. I didn't know jack shit. I wasn't taught to do practical things because everything was done for me. I had lived with thinking that everything had to be exactly the way I wanted it, which was probably why I had lost all my friends."

Lynn sat watching me intently. Her caramel colored hair lay in waves down her back, the scatter of small freckles on her face barely visible from the dim lighting.

"I was just a spoiled rich kid - mean, ungrateful, demanding - had been all my life. Grew up with it, lived in it. I knew everything from the types of dresses the women wore to the types of wine that was on the racks.

"It was my nature; I didn't know any better. I was engulfed in my mother's success and I always had this forced ambition that I had to be as good as my mother when I grew up. She was always pushing me to become something big - she still calls me when there's an opening at her law firm. She's... she's power hungry; wants never ending money and will brainwash her children to get it. I soon recognized the value of feeling confident and building a purposeful life, but at that point, I was too late. Everyone was gone."

I looked from the counter top to Lynn. "Money doesn't buy you happiness," I said sadly. "And part of the reason for that might be that money itself distracts us from what we really enjoy."

"And what do you enjoy?" Her voice was soft, like if she spoke any louder, the walls around us might crumble.

"Football," I stated simply. "I mean, I was always a fan, but it wasn't until I was left with no one but my preoccupied mum, ignorant brother, and the mute nanny when I actually got involved with the sport."

I almost mentioned Alina, how she had helped me get out of the rut most of all. If I never had met her at fifteen, I probably would still be under my mother's spell, going to Harvard for Law or something "worth the time". She was the one person who saw me and not the rich tosser with a bad attitude. She looked passed that and eventually ended up pulling out the rotted part of my childhood and gave me some of the best times of my teen years.

"Once I was out of secondary school, I left and never looked back," I told Lynn.

She was looking at me oddly, like she had just peeled off a new layer and was looking at a new Niall. And I guess she was. She knew something else about me that not many people knew about. I tried to bury that past life deep inside my memories, but I should have known that I couldn't bury something like that without it crawling out of the dirt sooner or later.

"So that's why you have an expensive car..." she said under her breath.

I laughed. "I told you I didn't steal it."

"Where does your dad fit in all this? You only mentioned your mom."

The small smile left my face and I clenched my jaw.

Lynn saw my sudden change in mood because she leaned away from the table a little and held her hand up to her sides in surrender. "Sorry, I shouldn't have said anything."

I shook my head. "No, it's okay," I said, but did nothing to tell her anything about my father.

Lynn must have noticed that I wasn't going to give her an answer because she leaned into the counter and reached out, grabbing one of the beakers with the alum salt and peered inside it.

"So, what exactly are you doing here?" Lynn asked chirpily.

I grabbed the pencil with the string wrapped around it and another beaker with the alum. "I'll show you."

Gently, I placed the pencil over the top of the beaker so the string was dangling down into the water, and instantly it began to work. The alum salt started to cling to the string in small particles that grew and grew the longer it stayed in the water. Lynn had gone down to eye-level and watched it as the crystals grew larger.

Before they could get too big, I pulled the string out of the water and held it out so she could see it better.

"It looks like those rock candies I used to always get at the zoo," Lynn said as she looked at the clear salt crystals.

"I wouldn't want to eat this," I told her.

Lynn reached out to touch one of the minerals and it was like I was seeing her for the first time. There weren't any people in front of me blocking the way, there wasn't a field between us then, I wasn't blind with forced hate... she wasn't the girl I had despised, she wasn't the lost girl I had picked up at the airport, she wasn't the girl I tried to help out of the pool. She was just Lynn, a girl who lost her parents in a childhood home.

Her lips curved up at the ends as she looked up at me through her lashes. "Was your nanny really mute?" she asked.

"Yeah," I answered as I got eye level with the makeshift crystals as well. "Her name was Martha. If I ever see her again, I'll have to give her a huge apology. I was pretty shitty to her and she always put up with it. I was such a dick back then."

Lynn laughed. "Back then? You're kind of a dick now."

I chewed on my cheek and I looked at her through the beaker between us, making her face warp in the glass. She was still grinning so I knew she was just teasing. But nevertheless, she was completely right.

"Yeah..." I said. "So, are we okay then? Like, a clean slate?"

Lynn licked her lips slowly before biting down on her bottom lip as she thought. The simple action made me swallow hard and I couldn't help but think back to the two of us on the floor a month ago, heavy breathing and the feel of her hands on my skin. I can already sense my hands start to get clammy just by the thought of her under me.

"I suppose," she said as she pulled away from the beaker and leaned against the counter, arms crossed over her chest. "Friends?"

I blinked at her and pulled my hands to my lap as that memory flashed through my head.

"Friends," I agreed even though I knew it would be impossible to be "just friends" with Lynn Mercury.