I recall kneeing him very hard in the groin.
I'd been stuck with the limo bill. And he'd gone to the hospital.
Ah, the memories.
I frowned as I looked at the cute boys in their football uniforms. There was another figure behind them. I squinted at the fuzzy black-and-white photo. I wasn't positive but it might have been Stacy lurking in the shadows.
Creepy.
I flipped forward to my grade and trailed my finger down the page. There I was. Sarah
Dearly. Forever immortalized in the yearbook as the girl most likely to close her eyes during a photo.
I flipped forward a few pages to get to the Ms. There was Stacy staring out at me with the same icy glare she'd given me in the washroom at the reunion.
Her eyes were the only thing I recognized. The rest of her was completely different. The vengeful woman I'd met in the bathroom had been a petite, yet busty blond with killer legs.
Well dressed in expensive clothes and designer heels. Perfectly applied, though too-heavy makeup. Expensive perfume.
The girl who looked up at me from the small black-and-white photo wasn't the same person at all. She had dark, greasy hair pinned back with barrettes, a sullen face full of pimples, and a couple of extra chins. And she wasn't smiling.
The absolute worst thing about her photo? The fact that as I looked at the teenaged Stacy
McGraw, the memories started coining back to me. Things I'd forgotten for ten long years.
I chewed on my bottom lip. Yeah, I'd known her. Not well, of course, but I remembered her. She'd been in a couple of my classes. She'd been a loner, and I couldn't even recall that she had any friends.
I let out a shaky breath. Oh, no.
The day that I'd broken up with my boyfriend had actually been a lot more traumatic than
I'd prefer to remember. He hadn't taken my rejection very well, and it had been a big agonizing hallway scene that had put me into a very foul mood.
That day had also been cheerleader tryouts. We were going to put together a squad for the summer. Just because it was summer vacation didn't mean that there wouldn't be some more games. Abottsville was fairly boring, after all. No multiplex cinemas. No mall. But we had a lot of sports fields: soccer, baseball, football.
Stacy had been one of the girls who'd tried out. I'd been tired, angry, annoyed by life in general. And I'd told her in no uncertain terms not to waste our time. I didn't remember exactly what I'd said, but it hadn't been kind and it had revolved around her appearance.
Her weight. Her face. I'd spewed some nastiness at her because I'd been feeling nasty.
I felt it with a clarity I'd rarely felt before—
I'd shown her the dark side of Sarah Dearly.
After that, I must have snapped out of my foul mood and moved on with my day and forgotten all about it.
Obviously Stacy McGraw hadn't forgotten about it. Ever. And if she'd been festering about the hurtful things I had said, add on the fact that I'd been asked to the prom by her secret crush, and it's no wonder that she hated my guts.
And now she was a witch with a very big grudge.
I closed the yearbook and leaned back in the high-backed leather chair, feeling sick to my stomach.
There was a knock at the door and it slowly opened. Thierry entered the room, his gaze steady on me.
"I wondered where you'd gone to," he said.
I held up my yearbook. "Just in here walking down memory lane."
"And how did that go?"
"It's a rocky road."
I told him about my discoveries. My throat was tight as I admitted to being a bitch to
Stacy in high school. I expected him to look at me with disgust or shame, but his expression didn't change.
"So obviously I deserve to be cursed," I said.
"That's nonsense, Sarah. You may have spoken poorly during this one moment in your life, but that doesn't mean you're a bad person."
"Sure it does."
He sat on the edge of the desk near me. "No, it doesn't. What happened in the past is just that, the past. You are a different person now. You're older and wiser and see the error of your ways."
I raised an eyebrow at that. "Isn't it funny how you can give me that advice, and yet when it comes to your own past you can't take it?"
"That is different."
I shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. I know I'm not the same person I used to be. But I've always thought that in high school I was the nice girl. That people liked me. That I had a lot of friends. Sure, I didn't like school very much and I wanted to get the hell out of my hometown at my earliest convenience, but I'd always thought of myself as one of the good guys. But maybe I wasn't so nice after all. If I was a mean girl to Stacy, who else wasn't I nice to? What else might I be conveniently forgetting?"
"You are one of the good guys. There is no doubt in my mind that you are good, Sarah."
"If you say so."
He gave me a very rare smile. "I do. I've met many people over my existence, be they human or vampire. Out of everyone I've ever met, I would have to say that you are one of the most genuine and special of them all."
"You really mean that?"
He nodded and reached down to take my hand in his. "Most assuredly."
His hand felt warm against mine. "Should you really be touching me?"
He didn't let go. "I am not feeling the darkness at the moment, only the light." He paused.
"Besides, Butch is waiting just outside the door. I've asked him to intervene if anything… unusual occurs."
I grinned at him. "That sounds vaguely voyeuristic, but I'm okay with it."