30 Jan: happy birthday, Christian Bale. In honor of your awesomeness as Batman, I have installed upon my black pencil case an orange badge with a grinning cartoon bat and the words, Back off! I will bite...
in which Artemis meets Wally's SAT vocabulary list
The words swim dizzyingly in her gaze. Likely refracted by the hot tears that got past the dams she's erected behind both eyes.
Cicatrix — new tissue that forms over a wound and later contracts into a scar
Rive — to rend, harrow or distress (the heart)
Forget this, Artemis tells herself, picking a pencil off the table. She doesn't do crying. The archer begins scribbling wildly, all over the paper, now noting, with angry joy, 'Wally West' on the first page.
Until she perceives a faint outline, a past imprint that remains unshaded.
It's... her, doodled beside the word 'pulchritudinous'.
Beautiful.
All definitions from dictionary(dot)reference(dot)com
Follows up from Chapter 1 "Pulchritudinous" and Chapter 13 "Take Two...".
Coincidentally, today, January 30, is Brazil's official day of saudade (Galicia-Portuguese), the closest English translation of which is 'the love that remains'. It can also mean missing someone or something you care a lot about, according to (the actual Brazilian) Juliana Santos!
m.e.