Jessica Hayles
January 03, 2022 6:05 PM
Goodbye, but only for now (Sadie) by Jessica Hayles
I am not going to get sentimental, Jessica told herself on the last morning of school. Seriously. I cannot and I will not get sentimental about this place. I'm not going to entertain the thought of missing it.Looking around her dorm one more time just to make sure she hadn't lost anything, she imagined she knew why she was suddenly struggling to remember why she was supposed to be glad to see the back of this place. She'd been unhappy here far more often than not, but just the same - she'd spent far more time here for the past seven years than she had at home. It was where she was used to being. And it hadn't all been bad, after all....
There was no point to dwelling on that, though, any more than there was in thinking about the life she'd had planned the last time she'd lived with her parents. She enchanted her matched set of baggage to float behind her and walked out and closed the door without looking back.
She did, however, have one last thing to do before she left for good, and so she stopped a few doors down, idly noticing how odd it felt to wear a skirt which only reached her knees after so long in uniform. As a sort of nod to the sentimentality she wasn't engaging in, she'd put on a short-sleeved red dress for her last trip home, albeit one partially covered by a bracelet-sleeved tan jacket to tone down the boldness of the look. That would have to go as soon as she set foot in Georgia, and her hair was almost certainly going to go up as soon as or before she wrestled her way out of the jacket, but for now, as she knocked on Sadie's door, it would do.
"Hi," she said. "Got a minute?"
She would have been as much annoyed as secretly pleased, herself, if an older friend had done something like this with her, but Jessica had learned the dangers of expecting other people to think and act the way she did, and she felt like it was both likely to go over better with Sadie and that it was more...necessary, maybe, for Sadie. She smiled kindly at the younger girl and said, "so - you're going to keep me up to date with all the crazy goings on around here next year, right? I don't know what I'd do without regular updates on the epic grapevine around here." She put out her arms to offer a hug. "Still friends, right?"
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Jessica Hayles
Goodbye, but only for now (Sadie)
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