four golden days
"Hi," Kairi smiles, awkward but eager, "Where am I?"
It wasn't everyday that girls like her came marching up to ghetto crash pads, smiling like that, with model-bright eyes and pretty clothes. Hayner looks her up and down, didn't seem to mind what he saw. Pence stays quiet, his soft brown eyes thoughtful.
Olette gets to her feet, a sudden hunger pushing her forwards.
Maybe this was what she had been missing.
Four is Olette's lucky number.
Four is whole. Four is enough people to be even, not too many to be a crowd, and not too few to have someone left out. Four is perfect. Four is ideal.
She loves Pence and Hayner—really. She loves them because they were her friends and she had known them forever and everything between them was easy comfort and routine, golden days. She doesn't need to pretend with them.
(But sometimes—it felt like they were less than three.)
"This is sea salt ice-cream," Olette explains to the new girl, and passes over the aqua delight, sticky fingers wrapping around Kairi's. "You'll like it—"
"Whoa," Kairi pulls a funny face, nose scrunched and sneering mouth, but her eyes laugh it better, "This stuff is weird."
She laughs, sounding giddy and girlish and brilliant, and Olette's heart stings in a way she cannot begin to understand.
She can't begin to explain why she feels so disappointed.
Olette has sloppy shoes and casual grins, but her eyes burn emerald, and sometimes, it feels like the other girl is looking straight through her. Kairi scuffs one shoe against the ground, rolls Hayner's skateboard across the room, unbalanced and inelegant.
Every eye is on her, suddenly.
Kairi thinks the hairs on the back of her neck might've stood up a little too quickly. "What?"
It is Olette who pushes away first, "Nothing," she says suddenly, "Nothing, really."
Olette likes it when Kairi's quiet. She likes it when the other girl looks towards the sun, silent and pensive, and almost-not-quite there. She likes that. She likes that Kairi feels like something different, and the sense that she doesn't belong.
She thinks Kairi will leave her, one day, but can't explain why.
She doesn't like it when Kairi dreams.
She snaps her fingers, and Kairi jerks a little in surprise, not-blue-enough-eyes skittering to her curiously.
"What were you thinking about?" Olette asks, a teasing note flitting through her voice.
Kairi tilts her head to the side, a little curiosity darting through her own expression. She slides her hands under her thighs, pulls herself further back into the green couch and smiles. "My dream boy," she giggles suddenly, apparently amused with herself. "The one I never got to meet."
A little prick of foreboding blossoms in Olette's chest. She swallows, "What was his name?"
Kairi mouths a word that crackles like static and jolts her not-memories, stirs somewhere deep in her dreams.
"Roxas."
Hayner hits a bull's-eye.
She isn't surprised when Kairi leaves.
And sometimes—
(it was only a dream)
—she admits—
(i won't remember)
—four is an awful number.
(but three leaves you empty)