Exanthem

Jordan was sitting at another of his classes, coincidentally this one he was supposed to be sharing with Mauve, but she had taken a sick leave. After her disappearance, she had talked with Karen, assured Jordan that she was not going to die, and then proceeded to catch the flu and bathing Jordan with a nasty jet of projectile vomit in one of his visits. After that of course Jordan was more reserved with his visitations, but in one of them, he could not help but discover the secret that Mauve had tried so hard to hide from him.

As Jordan was walking up to Mauve's house he raised his eyes away from the screen of his new cellphone, which he had finally gotten from Peter after many apologies about it being second hand and questions of "is it really okay that it's second hand?", and was surprised with a scene he truly did not expect to see. Jonathan Wales was at Mauve's doorstep, holding a pot and pressing the doorbell. Jordan quickly retraced his steps and hid behind a wall, he watched as Mauve's mother smiled and welcomed Jonathan as if she knew him for a long time and his curiosity was piqued. He quickly pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and texted Karen, telling her what he had just witnessed.

The only answer he got was:

"Wait 4 me."

After a few minutes, Karen's car was seen turning around the corner and stopping right in front of Jordan, he got inside and she drove silently to the same cafe that she had taken him before so they could talk; that was how Jordan knew that the conversation would be a serious one. They sat down, each asked for a coffee and nothing else, and then Karen sighed deeply. She was debating whether to tell him literally everything or not but because Jordan had actually witnessed the whole interaction, Karen concluded that hiding anything at this point would be counterproductive and useless. In the end, they were indeed trying to put Jonathan behind bars together. So she buried her eyes in his and pursed her lips tightly.

"What I'm about to tell you should not reach Skye's ears, for now, okay?"

Jordan nodded and she sipped her coffee before proceeding.

"Jonathan is Mauve's next-door neighbor and their friends, as you could see."

"What..."

Karen sighed looking defeated and sad, she had kept Mauve's secret indeed and it hadn't been easy when she had learned that Mauve liked that guy she had to use all of her self-control not to flip out and panic. The fear that crept inside of her at that moment almost stripped her of her reason, and it was not without a huge amount of effort that her brain managed to squeeze out the question of why was Mauve still okay? That allowed her to stop feeling so overwhelmed and take a step back to analyze the situation the way it properly demanded.

"There's more, but before that, I'd like to remind you that Mauve was as much blind to his nature as we were."

She waited for Jordan's confirmation that he understood, then cupping her warm cup of coffee between her hands, she steeled herself as if she was getting ready for a war, alarming Jordan internally to expect the worst.

"Mauve is in love with Jonathan."

Jordan's brain stopped working for a second and just when he was about to lose his marbles, he remembered that Mauve was not aware of Jonathan's true nature until that day at the cafeteria. Thinking about her own character Jordan began to notice how natural it would have been for Mauve o fall in love with a guy that had so many qualities as Jonathan pretended to have. She was innocent to a fault and Jordan knew she had a deep root of romanticism inside of that guarded exterior, of course, if you did not dig deep you would be fooled by Jonathan's whole facade, and to Mauve's eyes he would most definitely look like the prince charming she had hunted and waited for all her life.

He was popular, nice, and had all the masks to pretend to be a golden boy. He was perfect to fool her. Jordan sighed, then the awful thought that she could have been another victim of his deviances crossed his mind and he directed one very fear-filled look at Karen, to which she smiled knowingly and sadly.

"Been there, Mauve was not a victim and I don't believe she will ever be. Jonathan doesn't seem to have that kind of interest in her, it's weird if you hear the whole ordeal. He behaves just so... normally with her, that you'd have one very hard time believing he is the monster that he is if you were Mauve."

"So you're saying that she doesn't believe it?

Karen shook her head.

"I'm saying she had a hard time believing and when she did it was too much. Can you put yourself in her shoes? She was hitting on him, leaving hints here and there to a rapist."

Jordan swallowed dry, and ran his fingers through his hair, he suddenly understood why she ran away that day. Even thinking about it made him sick to his core, and he could not truly grasp how his friend would have felt, because he was not a girl and he was not the one courting danger and damnation.

**** was one of the most, if not the most horrible thing that could happen to a person, it defiled everything a person was, destroyed that person's soul, and brought to light that the whole evilness and darkness that they believed was not around them, was actually breathing down their neck. It was vile and cruel and Mauve could not make peace with the fact that she had courted it, she had danced with the devil willingly and could only thank the Lord that she had not been sullied by all of that. As she laid down on her bed after puking for whatever many times already, she contemplated if she would've been able to survive such a thing, such destruction.

Mauve had indeed survived many things in her life, but being honest with herself, she admitted that she had no idea if she could or would survive being violated to that extent. She thought about Skye and Deborah and, for once, Mauve managed to win over her own cowardice. She would not lay on the floor and not do anything, she would not let more girls get hurt like that. Mauve would fight. She then realized that Jonathan was like a virus, a sickness, it invaded the body pretending to be something harmless and then, it began to spread and when the body realized what was happening, things were already starting to escalate. That small realization brought another thought to her mind. How many other girls had he raped before Skye?

She had no idea. But she vowed to find that out.