Crystal Green - His Arch Enemy's Daughter

As she’d drawn pictures in the dirt with a discarded straw, she spied a tall, wiry silhouette—broad through the shoulders and lean in the hips—blocking the light of the locker room. The boy ambled nearer, to a cheerleader whom Ashlyn hadn’t noticed leaning against a nearby water fountain.

Jo Ann Walters. Ashlyn had caught her breath, hoping that she’d grow up to look just like the head cheerleader, a girl even her stuck-up brother went silly over. She reminded Ashlyn of a princess in one of her Disney storybooks, all pink and slender, with a smile that glimmered with fairy dust.

Enthralled, Ashlyn had set down the straw, sniffed her runny nose and found a comfortable place to spy on her role model.

Even now, with the passage of years, Ashlyn could still see the light from the locker room as Jo Ann had fallen into the boy’s arms.

They’d kissed hello and, afterward, the boy thrust a bunch of what looked like flowers at Jo Ann, who accepted them with a giggle.

It was the most romantic thing Ashlyn had ever seen. Her father never brought her mother anything, not even chocolates. They’d always ignored each other.

Ashlyn sighed, remembering how she’d wished that someday someone would look at her the way the boy had looked at Jo Ann.

She remembered cringing back into the shadows as the couple began walking to the parking lot, passing her hiding place.

As if in slow motion, a ribbon had fluttered to the ground from the flower stems, a perfect circle, a shadow in the light.

She’d scuttled from her hiding place to retrieve it, running it between her fingers with something akin to awe. It was soft and silky, as red as a Valentine.

The boy must’ve heard her, because he turned around, light suffusing his face.

Sam Reno, one of her brother’s football team-mates.

She’d wanted to run back to her hiding place, to cower in shame. A silly ribbon. What would Sam think of her?

But he’d smiled. A crooked slant of a smile that had led to years of teenage dreaming for Ashlyn. No boy had ever lived up to it since.

Now Sam was back, and he probably couldn’t stand the sight of her.

Ashlyn wandered to the window, and stared at the dim lights of Kane’s Crossing in the near distance. The wooden window frames cast barlike shadows over her hands as she held up the ribbon to the moon, watching its circle imprint on the silvery light.

Somehow she felt like the world’s most privileged prisoner.

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