Chapter 18: In The Library
JADE:
“What the hell are you doing, Kix,” I said as he went closer and hugged me.
It wasn’t a tight hug nor was it a light hug. It was the kind of hug that was comforting… so comforting that it made me want to cry from the want of it.
God, I had missed his scent and his warm embrace! He used to hug me so beautifully like this in the past whenever I asked for it…
Now, instead of reveling in that hug, I tried to push him away.
“Let go, Kix,”
I struggled, but my efforts were in vain. I made the mistake of taking him into this stupid crammed space to talk, hoping that we could really just talk.
I forgot that certain memories may have still lingered between us since we parted so unexpectedly and violently from before…
“Jade, I’m sorry,” he began to say in between my struggles. “Sorry for everything back then…”
Sorry… A word with five little letters like this doesn’t quite make up for all the four years of hell I had to go through because of him.
I pushed him more fiercely than before.
“If you are sorry, then stay the hell out of my life, Kix Sarmiento! I don’t need you, your family, or your stupid pack to ruin my life again!”
“Jade, you don’t have to worry about my family. They’re -”
“I don’t care what happened to them or to anyone related to you, Kix! Just stay away from me. Let’s just live our lives away from each other! If you don’t, I’m going to be forced to come to your leader or whatever and tell him you’ve come to harass me again. I mean it!”
As soon as I said this, I reached through the door with my free hand and scooted over under his arm, finally breaking free from his embrace.
Once I was outside that damned fire escape, I ran.
Just like what I had done that morning, I ran away from Kix. I didn’t care if I looked funny. I just ran and ran until I was sure he wasn’t able to follow me anymore.
When I came back to my senses, I was already near the school library. I went inside, walked towards the farthest book shelf and stayed on the floor, my head cradled in between my knees.
I wanted to cry, but no tears could come out. I simply sat there and contemplated about the conversation that we just had…
He mentioned something about seeing the face of the murderer… How the hell did he know I saw Marian’s killer? More importantly, did someone else like him know about it?
I knew Kix’s family were made up of influential people, but I didn’t know they were this influential to be able to access information that should only be known to the police.
If Kix knew about this, was it also possible that the killer also knew what I was trying to do? Was it possible that somehow he was also silently stalking me, watching my every move, and waiting for an opportunity to strike me down?...
I shivered. It wasn’t a very calming idea. Why the hell did Kix had to mention that and frighten me?
I stayed slumped in that spot, unable to move… unwilling to move, to be exact.
After a few grueling minutes of convincing myself that I should go back and find my friends in the cafeteria, I tried to stand up. Unfortunately, I cannot move my legs properly. I developed leg cramps due to staying on the floor for a long time.
Before I could have the strength to lift myself up, I heard the shuffle of legs nearby.
At least two people who looked like male students walked to the book shelf that was two rows before from where I was crouched.
“Tsk, I didn’t know that’ll happen to her… You don’t suppose we could be implicated to Marian’s death, right?”
“Shhh! Don’t say that out loud. Someone might hear you…”
“So what?… We’re innocent anyway… Wasn’t she the one who checked that website out by herself? That had nothing to do with us.”
“Yeah, but weren’t we the one who set her up for it? I mean we already knew she had a weird obsession with things of the occult nature… If we didn’t do that, she could have been alive.”
“Hey, shut up… It wasn’t our fault. She’s just a weird one… Now, let’s just return these books here so that no one would suspect us of being associated with her or whatsoever…”
I peered into the slits in between the books and saw them putting two or three books randomly back to the shelves.
I wanted to get a closer look at what they were doing, so I leaned a bit closer at the shelf before me. Suddenly, it rattled a bit and some books fell sharply down on the floor.
“W-What’s that?”
My heart stopped. They were going to walk to where I was!
Before I could even get up and hide, I heard someone come towards the two boys.
“Hey, what are you doing in there? Returned books are supposed to be surrendered in that section. Come and fill up the forms there…”
I felt a sigh of relief when I saw the two boys follow the librarian. I was saved…
Or not…
“Hey, why are you crouched down here?... Did something happen?”
I looked up from above and saw, to my dismay, someone I knew…
“Jade, why are you here? What’s going on?”
I sighed. Of all places, I met her here again…
Dianna was looking down on me, her expression was a cross between worry and disappointment.
Great… Now she’ll really think that I had gone nuts again.
I sighed internally. “It’s nothing… I was just looking for a book.”
“Looking for a book on the floor?”
“Yes,” I said in a bitter tone.
I stood from the floor. Dianna offered her hand towards me, but I didn’t reach for it, and instead clung into the shelf around me for support.
Once I was up, I walked past her into the row of shelves where I saw the boys return the books.
“Jade, are you still upset about what I said yesterday? Come on. How can you hold a grudge against me like that?”
Honestly, I wasn’t planning to hold a grudge against her too, but as I looked at Dianna and the way she frowned at me, I just realized I found something else to be angry about.
“If you don’t want me to be upset, then you shouldn’t approach me like that... Didn’t you think I had every reason to feel betrayed after what you told me yesterday?”
“Well, but I did have a point. Your obsession with Kix was on another level. I was just being an honest friend.”
I ignored her and blocked the words that came out of her mouth from reaching my ears by shutting my concentration away and into the book before me.
It was one of the books I saw the boys return in the shelves. I opened it and reached for the library card at the back of the book.
Thank God my school still uses the old library system… I wouldn’t be able to find this information if everything here was digitized.
I looked at the names of the borrower, and just as I thought, a familiar name popped out…
