Re: hannah and david: woods
She smiled at him. "He saw what he wanted me to be," she said. "It's like that a lot, I think," she said, "at least for me. I think maybe I'm a blank," she said, slipping her arm through his, if he allowed it, and walking slow and lazy, syrup in footsteps, thoughtful. Muse, muse, muse. "I think maybe I'm a blank, and people see me and think they can paint me whatever colors they like. Or maybe I'm a blank, and people can assume I'm anything and everything. But, either way, it's not me," she agreed with a small nod. "But I'm not waiting for anything to come. I have been. I waited and waited and waited, but I have what I want now. Don't ask, though. It's mine. My secret," she explained, and it was more than she would say to anyone else, really; she trusted David.
And a laugh, a bright one, and perhaps that, too, was oddity and incongruity beneath moonlight. "The man with the shoe wasn't really a man," she said, and he hadn't been. "But I killed Marcus. I shot him. I knew I was going to do it. I woke up that morning, and I knew that was going to be the morning, and I didn't shoot him in the back. I didn't do it when he was asleep. I waited until he woke up. I wanted to see his face," she said. "I wanted to see the lights go out. I don't think I would've believed it otherwise. And I did it outside, so he wouldn't taint the house. It wasn't a bad house," she continued, as if these whispers in the dark were nothing to hide.
She smiled. "Si said the same thing, about making the rules, about not being cowed. I'm not very good at not being cowed," she admitted, still walking with those same slow, slow steps and toward nothing at all, away from nothing at all. "Dad said Mars went to an exclusive boarding school. He said she was the luckiest of us all, since she got to go. But it wasn't that. It was a hospital, a bad one, where they took parts of her little by little. She was eight."