Chapter Text
Sasha, walking in the thin sunlight of a Tuesday afternoon, bumped into a trash can on Pickwick Street. Then she ran into the corner of a bus stop, and without further ado, tripped off of the curb. This was because she was in love, and as everyone who has read anything knows, alas, Love is blind.
Sasha was not prepared for this effect. She hadn’t known when she left her room earlier that she would fall in love and have to try to find her way home without her mental or sensory faculties, so she hadn’t thought to bring any special provisions. If she had, she might have brought an umbrella for instance (though why I’ve no idea). Or perhaps a stick to prop herself up upon.
It was certainly convenient that she had fallen near a bus stop at least—she had just enough change to let her ride the bus home and spare a traffic accident. Now if she could just remember where home was?
One absolutely cannot blame Sasha for never getting around to recalling that. We must not any of us think ourselves superior to the transfixing qualities of bus windows and an enchantment upon the world that makes one’s internal landscape something marvelous in a way it wasn’t before. But because of this it was some hours before Sasha was able to catch on to the fact that, while she still wasn’t quite sure where home was, it was certainly not this way. That gives us a few moments to catch up on what had set off this series of serendipitous events.
Sasha had set off that morning unsuspectingly enough; but had quickly had quickly begun to suspect that this would be a rather miserable day. What clued her in was the somewhat disheartening criticism (read, ‘unnecessarily vicious’, but Sasha would never believe so) she received on a piece of art she had intended as a gift, lost, and that had turned up as an (accidentally) submitted assignment; the classmate that had bumped into her and knocked all her paints to the floor right by the door to her school; and the impish wind that caught her favorite light colored broad brimmed hat as she stooped to pick them up and danced it rottenly out toward the busy street that had recently been rained upon and was consequently still muddy.
From these events, Sasha concluded it was going to be One of Those Days, as she waited unhappily and with great trepidation to see whether her beloved hat would be dropped squarely in a mud puddle or run over by a truck.
But in a move calculated to prove all grandmothers right when they wag their heads and say serenely, “you never know,” it was neither. Instead it was snatched from the wind’s clutches not five feet from her, by a certain tall, amber eyed, somewhat-tousled-black-haired class mate, whose name was Shiro.
“Oh no, what happened here?” he said pleasantly, ambling over to help her with the scattered paints too, as if he needed to do anything more. Shiro was always pleasant or ambling, except when he had fought the members of the campus Drama Club last semester. No one had ever figured out what exactly had set that off, but it had lent him the perfect spark of danger and mystery to keep him from coming off as bland.
“It’s nothing really,” Sasha stammered, not wanting to explain certain things about herself or place any blame on the classmate that had run into her (which, as subsequent events unfolded, proved to be a wise decision to avoid judgement of her own self).“Just an accident!”
Shiro handed her first her hat, then knelt to help gather up the paints, because his grandmother had raised him that way. Suddenly, Sasha’s day was looking unaccountably brighter, as she plopped her beloved hat firmly on her head, and then Shiro handed her her paints and smiled at her—and that was when it had struck. Shiro proceeded to open the door for her and, noticing her full hands and rather confused expression, carried one of her paint sets up to the second level classroom door for her, but if he had left Sasha did not know it, because her mind hadn’t moved past the sight of him snatching her hat. The image had somehow become wrought with a curious significance.
(Shiro had, in fact, left, and gone about his own classes with good humor and exceedingly high scores all around, then gone home and kissed his grandmother’s forehead to procure lunch.)
The most treacherous part of being in Love is not knowing you are In It. (The second most, in case you are curious, is knowing you Are.) Sasha for her own part, to judge by her symptoms, was only half aware—of most things at this point—and thereby avoided both pitfalls for the moment. But she daydreamed all through the much-longer-than-intended bus ride about flowers and shimmering streets and herself a princess, with a foggy prince making an occasional appearance to save her hat, managing to look uncannily like Shiro.
But I regret to inform you Sasha was not a princess; rather, she was Lost. When the half portion of awareness still allotted to her alighted on this fact, she alighted off of it—the bus, that is. “Oh!” She exclaimed, looking around the country lane where she had been deposited, because really what else is there to say when one has had such a day and finds oneself in such a place?
Gradually, the haze she had been in began to recede—she felt her feet upon the ground again, and began to turn to another more practical kind of wonder, which was, wondering where exactly she was. The road was narrow here, made narrower by the hedge-like bushes growing along either side. No flowers bloomed on them, but their leaves were growing crisp and dropping off the tail end of summer as it passed by.
A long autumn-adjacent evening would be falling in a few hours—the goldening light slanting low to peep over the hedges promised it. The last few birds, procrastinating their winter flight and hopping happily homeward, paused, apparently on other pretenses such as worms, to catch a glimpse of this newcomer in her broad hat and too summery green blouse, and wonder if she might perhaps spare a few strands of her strawberry hair for them to pad their nests with.
Sasha, meanwhile, had spied a gate in the hedge—two actually, one before and one behind. She could—thank goodness—also see the gables of an occasional house protruding above the hedges as well. She wound up going to the gate behind her, as it was nearer home, if only by a few hundred feet. It was open, so she went through it without thinking, before coming to her senses and desperately hoping no one would mind. The house it led to was tall and white and vaguely Grecian—a great house as if out of an old story—a house one could paint—with a fountain and parkland to boot. And it had tall windows.
It was in one of those windows Sasha saw a girl—or rather behind one of them, I suppose I should say, for this girl had the distinct air of being shut in. She was looking down, bent over something, black curls falling into her face. She paused to push up her gold-rimmed glasses, and that was when she caught sight of Sasha, who suddenly realized she was most certainly trespassing and wanted to scatter in all eight directions at once, or else pretend she was only the mail carrier. The girl would certainly want to know what Sasha was doing, and Sasha herself also wanted to know that. She was half way between turning around and digging in her pockets for something that might excuse her appearance when she finally came to and shook herself.
“What am I doing? Oh!” She marched up to the window. The other girl slid it open, and Sasha prefaced whatever she was going to say with a little wave. “Um. . .sorry to bother you! I’m lost.” She held out her hand to shake, supposing that was what one did.
“I’m Isolde,” the other girl said, cooly and quietly, putting her pencil down and taking Sasha’s hand. She never smiled.
“Oh!” Sasha said for the fourteenth time today. “Well—I’m not lost. I’m Sasha. I am lost though.” Trying again, she added, “Are you the Isolde from the Upper Levels? At Art School?”
The other girl was holding her pencil in both hands in her lap now, obscuring a delicately sketched landscape. If she had any thoughts about Sasha being there, Sasha couldn’t see them. But she said, “I suppose so,” and it was not unkindly. Only very reserved.
“I go there too,” Sasha hastened to explain. “I’ve seen your work displayed! Some of the professors in first year use it as an example. I haven’t seen you there before though, I don’t think?” She proffered tentatively. If it hadn’t been Quite a Day I doubt she would have said as much, but it had, and she was only now realizing she was talking to the equivalent of a campus ghost story. Everybody had heard of Isolde; but Sasha was trying and failing to remember a single person who had ever seen her.
“I . . .haven’t been well recently,” Isolde replied, and her voice sounded like she was a thousand miles away, or maybe a thousand years.
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that,” Sasha replied, dipping her head sincerely. “I hope you feel better soon!”
The smile Isolde gave her had the exact same effect as if she had burst into tears. It looked very much like the ending of Antigone. Sasha was taken aback.
There are moments in life where we come to resolutions so sudden and certain that we wonder if we come to them or they come to us. At the sight of that smile Sasha came to one of those moments. It dropped at her feet like a brick, and she knew immediately that she wanted one thing of the world and that was to see Isolde genuinely happy. It wasn’t pity—it was only the feeling that the world would never be happy in some way unless Isolde was.
Simply put, it was the blossoming of that investment in another’s joy called friendship. For the next few weeks Sasha found a significant portion of her remaining attention would be taken up in doing her best to find ways to be a friend to Isolde. But that thought made her realize she was running very low on time at the present, so she got back to the business at hand and asked for directions home; and Isolde gave them.
It was the first spark of curiosity Isolde had showed when she asked, “What are you doing so far from home?”
“Well,” Sasha said, screwing up her memory in an attempt to rewind. “I kind of took the bus.” That was the only part of “how” she was sure of.
“Oh,” said Isolde in return. “Will you be able to get back?”
Sasha hadn’t figured that out yet. She shuffled her foot a bit while trying to, but then Isolde said instead, “Mr. Richter can take you. I’ll have him pull the car around.” When Sasha looked up to protest that she didn’t want to be a bother and she was sure she could make the walk back just fine since the bus seemed to have spent a deal of the time going around rather than away from town and she’d enjoy the afternoon air, Isolde had already vanished behind the half parted gauzy curtains, her pencil and sketch vacated on the window seat.
So it was in about fifteen minutes Sasha found herself rolling up to the door of her student apartment in a shining black Bentley driven by Isolde’s mustachioed and statuesque Butler, who never said a word, and she was left to wander upstairs nearly dizzy with the events of the day, wondering why it was that everything always happened so much and all at once. Luckily, she began to realize as she went that she was hungry, and nothing is so grounding as hunger.
Her gerbil, the cat who had not eaten the gerbil, and her bird Zephyr who had in turn spared the cat all stirred as she entered her room, and after greeting them cheerily and apologizing for her tardiness, she found she was hungry for nothing so much as toast, so she began to make herself some, humming the music to a daydream as she waited and was pulled back into that enchanted state of mind that had earlier descended upon her, to the tune of a fair maiden and a hero tentatively resembling Shiro. She was interrupted when the toaster oven dinged, and she set upon her toast with relish (of feeling not of pickles) and then began to clean up the scattered supplies she had brought home with her. As she cleaned she wondered about Isolde, and, coming across the much maligned lost-gift-accidentally-turned-assignment, she wondered if she ever could be a friend to Isolde after all; because it had reminded her of one terrible and insurmountable problem that stood in the way. For you see, Sasha was afflicted with a curse.