/ January /...........
/ Previous /For Gerald, grief took the form of silence. At first, he was simply too shocked to know what to say. Death, to him, was something that happened to other people--the old, the infirm, the careless... strangers. He had never had someone within his immediate sphere of influence die, especially in such an unexpected fashion. He had no idea how he should react. So, as rumor spread and people began approaching him with condonlences, he said as little as possible. They seemed to accept that, at least. As often as he could, he would avoid people entirely. The first week of classes, he was a pale ghost of himself.
The shock wore off eventually, and more and more, Gerald found himself angry. Angry at Verdi for acting so rashly. Angry at himself for not reacting in time to stop her. And, sometimes, angry at himself for being so overwhelemed with emotions over the death of someone who wasn't even really supposed to be his friend. At times, the words of the Headmaster haunted his thoughts.
"I'm not certain how much she meant to you..." Gerald didn't know either. He neither had nor needed friends. So, why couldn't he just move past this? Why did he keep second guessing himself, replaying it over and over again in his mind? Was there something he didn't notice? Could he have predicted the events more accurately? His worst days, the anger and frustration crystalized into a vague rage against everything,
everyone. His face kept the practiced blankness, but something about him was harder. The silence became a protective shell that few dared to approach.
Despite that, he began hearing the whispers, catching the glances thrown his way.
"Didn't he know that girl?" "He doesn't look too good..." "Wonder what happened..." He ignored them. He didn't care what they thought. Except when he did. A few times, people approached him. They opened with a statement of sympathy, but he could tell they were fishing for information, curious about the horrible events of that night. Gerald hated them for it. Something glinted in his eyes that warned them from prodding him further. He had no intention of telling them anything. At least, he didn't until the day he overheard a girl named Susan Benton whispering after their Current Events class had ended.
"She was kinda weird, wasn't she? I mean, I heard she ran right at that thing. Like she
wanted to die or something..."
Something snapped inside; the rage boiled over. Gerald took a breath and reigned it in. There was no need for a direct confrontation. It took him only a few minutes to come up with a plan. A part of him had known it would come to this eventually anyway. That evening, over dinner, he told his story for the first time.
He whispered to people he knew would believe him and people he knew would repeat it to others. He told them all about the night of the Winter Ball, how an evil spirit had been drawn into the crowd. He told the secret of the dead girl's strange gift. He told how a small group of teachers and students had somehow vanquished the monster too late to save her life. The whispers spread across the campus, a wind of change. He accepted the stares, answered the timid questions, and crushed all disbelief with a certainty that few dared to challenge outright. The pale, retiring boy, the one who knew the dead girl, had an odd, unshakable calm about him that made people think he was telling the truth. Not that there were many others who claimed to know anything about what had happened anyway.
Through Gerald's story, Verdi was transformed into a tragic heroine. The brave girl with the strange talent, so misunderstood by her classmates, who had sacrificed her life in an effort to protect them all. It didn't matter that he didn't believe it. Part of him still hated her for being so foolish as to think she stood a chance against that monstrosity. He never told anyone that nor mentioned the encounter in Moliné that had started it all. Everything he spoke made Verdi into someone who deserved to be remembered. And if Susan Benton also happened to be painted as petty and ignorant, well, that was just icing on the cake.
After a while, the whispers stopped following him, all but died out. Everyone had heard the story, and they either believed it or they didn't. More and more, Gerald found himself able to focus on things again. There were classes to be attended and work to be done, after all. Life went on. Still, Verdi came back to him at odd moments. On more than one occasion, he caught himself scanning a crowd for her green-streaked hair. Old habits died hard. Whenever he got a sudden chill walking along a path at night, he wondered what Verdi might have seen if she had been walking there with him. When his reading on the side discovered a reference to an old monastery, he found himself thinking about her last quest, a book in Hebrew for the ghost of a monk. He wondered for a moment if the library held that book, and suddenly, he was angry all over again. What would it matter? Without the spirit-seer, he had no way of getting it to the monk's spirit anyway.
There were moments when his anger turned inward again. No matter how many times Gerald told himself that he couldn't have predicted Verdi's actions that night, part of him still wondered. The nightmares attested to that. Once or twice, he vividly dreamed of that night, tried to grab her and stop her only to have her slip through his fingers. More often, his dreams were dim and blurry mazes where he was trying to find something, trying to get somewhere, always running out of time. They left him feeling as though he hadn't slept at all the next day. Still, he kept going. More than emotion, logic ruled him, and that logic dictated that he should keep studying, keep observing, and keep living. If his smirks became even rarer and the shadows under his eyes a bit darker, no one seemed to notice anyway. Life went on. Nothing lasted forever.
Before he knew it, a month had gone by. People stopped talking about the Winter Ball, but he wondered if they still thought about it more than they dared to say. At least once a week, the young man found himself sitting in the Oak Grove, the dead of winter upon it, blankly staring across the barren landscape. The silence was never as comforting as he hoped it would be.
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