Jessica Hayles
January 12, 2022 9:15 PM
Is it goodbye for good? We'll see. (Felipe) by Jessica Hayles
She had, Jessica thought resentfully, every reason in the world to walk away and shake the dust of...whatever her relationship with Felipe De Matteo was or had been off her feet as soon as possible. There was, after all, very little anyone could do to help him until he realized he needed help and was ready to accept it; Jessica's acquaintance with psychology went no deeper than daytime talk shows over her summers and a few books purporting to explain what this or that famous author had 'really' meant by a work, and even she knew that. She also honestly had no reason to care whether he let his psycho girlfriend push him over the edge again, not after the way he'd treated her in the middle years of their time at Sonora. She could say bye in passing on their way out of the building and be done, and that would be the smart decision to make.And yet.
Part of it, she assured herself, was completely selfish and therefore completely explicable and completely under her control. She liked it when people needed her, when she could take care of them, and Felipe arguably needed someone to look out for him even more than Sadie did. All Sadie really lacked was confidence, she thought, and/or being seventeen and therefore able to hex her evil stepmother of an actual mother in the face just once to redefine their relationship. Felipe, though, was even more screwed up than Jessica herself - his family was a horror show under a sugar-shell facade on the whole, his sister was totally cool with Frenching racists and also possibly a sociopath, and he'd cracked under the weight of the mere idea of responsibility. He didn't have the perspective he'd need to realize that he needed her to rescue him right now, but he might eventually get it....maybe. But there was also another part of it, one she didn't like, but had trouble denying, which was how she couldn't quite forget that for a year and a half, he'd been the one person she'd ever met who really seemed to understand. She didn't know if that meant she owed him something or if it was a more complicated obligation than that or even if it was just sentimentality, but whatever it was, it was there.
With all that in mind, she wrote him a letter. It was always a toss-up whether they could screw up the act of communication worse in speech or in writing, but with writing, at least, it was something he could keep - both because it was a physical object and because it was written in Spanish, which she would have bet her highest credit card limit that Zara had never learned to read and would never learn to read.
Felipe,
It's hard to believe it's been seven years since that night when you shared your snacks with a groggy, completely heartbroken little girl in the common room - almost as hard as it is to believe that we'll never sit there after lights out again, talking even when we don't want to because we'll go a little crazy if we don't talk to someone who can kind of understand where we're coming from. If ghosts are just imprints of the soul, then it seems to me we should be able to make them many times, whenever we go through these death-rebirth rituals like finishing school; I think I'd feel better about it if some version of us haunted the place once we're gone.
I know it's been a lot of ups and downs. I don't know if you think we're friends, or if I'm just somebody you used to know, or something in the middle - but however it is, you'll always be the first wizard who ever made me feel, for a little while, like I could have had a place here. If you ever need somewhere to be, then, well, you know where I live.
Whatever happens, don't let Anyone push you too far again, okay? I might be a lot of things, but I'm usually a better option than death, as long as you aren't someone I've sworn enmity to the death with, and somehow, you just don't stick on my bad side well enough to have ever made it onto that list.
Bye, at least for now,
Jess
16
Jessica Hayles
Is it goodbye for good? We'll see. (Felipe)
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