Her

Clare didn't like me very much on the first time we met. We were all jetlagged, having spent hours on the journey from our different hometowns. The airport was supposed to be our last stop before the trip straight to the academy. Both dread and anticipation came over me when I thought about what they might have for us there, and I saw the same thing mirrored in everyone's faces. We were all strangers but we were all told that there we were the same. A part of a greater cause.

When I took a seat behind a redheaded girl, she looked at me warily as if daring me to do anything to her—do what, I wasn't sure then, but I would learn later that she was looking out for her belongings, having spent all life in a home where kids stole her things all the time. At that moment, however, my guess wasn't that far from the truth. She didn't seem to trust strangers. No one seemed to trust anyone here.

I looked the person sitting next to me. "What?" he asked.

"Just thinking," I whispered. I didn't want to tell him how relieved I was that at least among all these people I knew him. He would say I was being sappy. We had known each other all our lives, sticking together when we didn't feel like we belonged with the world. When the recruiters found the two of us fighting off a creature that fed off dreams—a Night Terror. We hadn't known its name—it had never even occurred to us to name those things. His parents thought we were on drugs.

It had seemed like we were the only ones aware of the existence of monsters until a woman called Alyssandra Bedivere told us that she wanted to recruit us on behalf of a training institution specializing in people like us, people who could see those creatures.

Two weeks later, she had tricked his parents into believing that we were going to a boarding school for delinquents and that she could help us with our 'coming of age problems'.

And now we were in a plane on the way to a school we had known from nothing but a woman's words. I told him that we could be heading to the center of a human trafficking organization, about to be disemboweled or sold as slaves.

"We're not," he replied simply, surprising me with his lack of witty comeback. "I have a feeling."

At that moment, the redheaded girl in front of us turned to glare at us. "Will you two please shut—" And then, for some reason she stopped. I knew why. No one really got angry around him. I never understood what they saw in him. When we were kids, I thought it was because of his angelic looks. But lately with recent rebellious streak he developed against his parents he didn't look so innocent anymore. Now that I knew there were impossible things beyond our world, I wondered if his tendency to make people comfortable around him had something to do with those things.

"I'm nervous," the redhead admitted. "I didn't mean to snap."

"We're all nervous," I said.

"I'm not," he said.

That was how our friendship began. We worked together all through the initiation, and then the orientation. Upon arriving in the academy, we became roommates. I was over the clouds with the prospect of finally having a friend who was a girl. I could talk about things I could never talk with him and she wouldn't think I was sappy or emotional. He hadn't said that since we were thirteen, of course, but it still felt weird when I wanted to talk to him—like the time I had a crush on a boy in our old school and he refused to do the girly talk.

She was everything I imagined having a girl best friend was like. We didn't exactly braid each other's hairs while talking about boys, but we did talk about hot seniors and how many medals they had pinned to their uniform. We hadn't earned any yet because we were only first-years, but she said because we had fought for real before we came here, it shouldn't be so hard to best those who hadn't.

"We're better than them," she had said one night when we stayed up late to talk about our ambitions.

"I don't know," I had replied doubtfully. "The purebloods like Annie Ivon—"

"Blood has to do with nothing." I jerked a little, because she said it with such vehemence—she used that kind of voice with people sometimes, but never with me. She softened a little when she saw my reaction, and I cursed myself for still acting like a kicked puppy after all the time I spent here. "Corrie, girls like Annie learn from textbooks and boring lectures. Maybe she could kick a dummy in class, but it's not like the real thing out there. Has she ever even lived in fear for one moment in her life? She can't run to Sir Famous Daddy when an actual eight-foot Volvere drip its monster goo all over her blond hair—"

"Gross."

"You'll see, Corrie. In a few years, we're going to be way better hunters than them."

"Knights, you mean."

But she didn't say anything again and I assumed she had fallen asleep.

The first year was one of the best years of my life.

We had many times spent together, the three of us. Even though Clare and I often told him jokingly that he shouldn't spend all his time with us at the risk of becoming too 'girly', he was actually fitting in very well at the academy.

However, a distance was set between us when he started hanging around with the older kids. The seniors had taken a likening to him, unconsciously fascinated by his 'calming effect'. The moment the Houses discovered what he could do, they made him a sort of human placebo to the seniors with poor control, using the unique power of his presence to prevent them from attacking people at random.

For some reason, that made him the cool kid, and people started flocking around him. He got many admirers, mainly from our female peers.

That included Clare.

It wasn't until the second year that Clare admitted to me that she befriended me only because I was his friend. She liked him. She had always liked him. In fact, just the night before she told me this, they'd kissed.

She convinced me that her friendship to me had grown genuine over time, though, and I believed her.

It was only one of the early issues that led to our falling out.