Olivier Westley
August 18, 2015 3:46 PM
Best laid plans always go awry. by Olivier Westley
Despite his well-polished outer character which he had never let down to expose his more caustic interior save for one instance with Tobias Reinhardt (which he only kind of regretted slipping up) Olivier didn’t really have any friends. As they had been preparing to go to Sonora, Olivier had been the one who was supposed to be able to make new friends easily—his excited, bubbly manner of speaking to everyone, so reminiscent of what he’d been like when he was a very young child, always charmed the people in the village closest to them. It was funny because now that they had been at Sonora for the past few years, it was the quiet, day dreaming Lena who had found herself friends. Though Olivier knew his sister to be a wallflower who only bloomed around him, she had found in Library Helpers, Clark Dill; in Tobias Reinhardt, a ball date; in…but Olivier didn’t want to think about the various guys his sister had been talking to, the various guys who couldn’t keep to themselves…especially that Aiden O’Neil with his harem of witches. Olivier just knew he was trying to add Lena to it by sitting next to her in Charms last term. “Dirty, sniveling, poor excuse for a weasel…”
He gripped the sink, muttering, his brow sweating like it never had before. His mouth tasted like bile. He ran the tap and splashed water onto his face, groaning as he wiped his face dry. Olivier was standing in the bathroom, unable to move, frozen with disgust. The thoughts that ran through his head made him sick to his stomach, so sick that he had spent the past twenty minutes retching, the last five had been pure stomach acid after the rest of his dinner had already left his stomach. Olivier cupped his hands under the faucet and brought some of the cool water up to his mouth to drink, letting it wash away the painful taste coating his mouth and throat until all that was left was a slight burning. He turned off the tap and walked into the dorm room, tossing his homework from his bed onto his desk so he could lie down.
He had been getting so sick lately, he didn’t really know what had caused it and that angered him. Olivier wasn’t used to now knowing. He also wasn’t used to being separated from Lena, and ever since the start of that year she had been distancing herself. She was a main factor in his staying at Sonora—the other one being that despite not wanting to be there he knew that in order to be able to protect himself and Lena once they were older and grown he needed to learn as much as he could now, even if the professors were the sort who liked to think they were smarter than they actually were, the kind who liked to pry into students lives if they didn’t exhibit “normal” behaviors. Olivier didn’t have actual confirmation on this last supposition but he had heard enough rumors of teachers in general interfering he knew that the good people at Sonora were likely to fall into that category than the sort who would stand by and watch students fall apart.
What that all meant was that Olivier needed to be on his guard even more than usual. He had gotten so good at fooling others, he sometimes even fooled himself into thinking that things weren’t really that bad, but then he would take weekly trips to the MARS room to sit at the grand piano and just touching the ivory keys everything would come back to him—the wincing, the screaming, the bruises, the worry…the disappearance. He raised a hand now to pinch the bridge of his nose, his forehead contorting as he tried to block everything out.
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Olivier Westley
Best laid plans always go awry.
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Olivier Westley
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