A Memory from the Past

Arya returned to her bedroom and locked the door. She quickly threw her pumps to a side and undressed. It disgusted her to pass a second more looking like her mother's little minion. She wanted nothing to do with her at all.

Arya saw her reflection in the mirror. She was disgusted even with her face. She looked so much like her mother with her long black silky hair. Her left cheek was starting to swell, but she did not care, she grabbed a pair of scissors in her bathroom cabinet and started cutting down her locks of hair. She cut it down till her hair length was just a bit after her shoulders.

Arya would have liked to dye it immediately, but there was no hair dye in her bathroom, so she decided to do it tomorrow. Satisfied that she now looked a bit different from her mother, she looked in her mini-fridge for an ice pack. To her demise she had none. Asking Kanon meant needing to deal with her again, and she was scared to not be able to hold back the secret and spill it all to her sister. So, Arya resigned herself by using a bottle of juice as an ice pack to make the swelling go down a bit.

Dressed in just a pink silk gown with white laces and with the juice bottle in her cheek, she went to her bed and started texting Violet.

"Vi, my mother is the worst!"

"Why? What happened, Ari? Wait a sec. I'm going to video call you on WeChat."

"No… don't worry. It's just that we had a silly fight. I think I'm not going to school tomorrow. Let me know if the teachers leave a test or homework. XOXO, talk to you soon."

"Ari, what's happening?"

Arya did not answer Violet's last message. If she almost spilled her secret to Kanon, there was no guarantee that she would not spill her secret to Violet who was her confidante, and also, she did not want Violet to see her bruised face.

"Sorry, Vi, but this is a mess I must solve on my own," Arya whispered, as she kept her eyes on her phone.

Just as Arya was about to call it a day and go to sleep, she decided to call Asher. She did not know why she wanted to hear his voice, after all, he was currently ranked second most hated person on her list. The first one currently being her mother.

Asher answered immediately.

"Arya why are you calling? Did something happen?"

Arya knew Asher was not someone she would get a petal with even if she said sorry to him, but it seemed like the right thing to do. The grim reaper had not done a thing to deserve the treatment she had given him today.

"Sorry."

"Sorry for what? Arya, are you okay?" Arya could not help but notice that Asher sounded worried.

"Everything is okay or so you can say. I just wanted to tell you I'm sorry for being such an arse since we've met. I do hope we get along in the future since well… you are the only person who I can talk with about my mission."

Arya heard Asher sigh in relief. Did he thought she was about to commit suicide? "Don't worry about it, Arya. See you tomorrow."

"Um… I know my apology will sound insincere right now, but can you come and pick me up tomorrow after 9:00 am. There's somewhere I want to go tomorrow, and I can't let my parents know, so I can't ask Evan to drive me there."

"See you tomorrow at 9:30 am then," Asher said as he hung the call.

It was a sleepless night for the Ling family. Kanon and Arya's bedrooms were on the second floor in the east wing, while their parents' bedroom was in the north wing. It was supposed that since there was so much distance between the rooms they should not hear the noises, but Eason and Ava's fight was especially loud that evening.

Before going to bed, Kanon tried several times to knock on Arya's door without avail. The only thing Arya answered through the door was that she was not feeling well and that she was going to skip school tomorrow morning.

Kanon went back to her room defeated. She wished that her family could be the same as it was when she was a child. She could not sleep because it seemed their parents decided to smash glass in their fight. Kanon could just hear glass breaking and the muffled shouts coming through the hallway.

"Please, just make it stop," she cried as she covered herself under the comforter and tried to sleep.

The truth was that Kanon was scared, Ava had never laid a finger on any of them before today. Arya had always irritated her, but Ava never dared to hit any of her daughters. The violence was just escalating, and Kanon could see that Arya was holding up very hard to not hit their mother back.

Kanon finally fell asleep between her sobs. She dreamed of a memory of when everyone in her family was happy.

"Sis… sis…" A six-year-old Arya was calling Kanon in her dreams.

"Baby sis, I'm here!" Kanon giggled as she appeared on top of a tree that was in their backyard.

"Wuah! I also want to go up with sis!" Arya shouted, her eyes were round from curiosity, and her cheeks were pink flushed from running around the backyard for so long.

"It's dangerous up here! You cannot come up!"

Arya then cried. Somehow, Arya was very attached to Kanon when she was little. Every little thing, Arya told her sister.

"When did she started hiding things from me?" Kanon thought as she continued watching her dream.

Eason and Ava came out holding hands and laughing at something Eason had said. There was clearly a time when Eason and Ava were madly in love with each other, but now, they were just mad.

"Girls, what's the matter?" Eason asked seeing that her second daughter was crying.

"Sis won't let me cli… climb up the tree!" Arya sobbed.

Ava then carried Arya in her arms and tried to hush her sobs.

"Kanon, come down right now."

"Don't worry, it is perfect…" Before Kanon could finish her sentence, she slipped one of her feet and was falling to the ground. Eason reacted quickly, but also slipped and fell to the ground just below where Kanon was falling. In the end, Eason saved Kanon from the fall, since he acted as an air cushion.

"Kanon, are you okay?" Eason asked, feeling that maybe one of his bones was fractured.

"Yes!"

Arya was clapping. "Papa is a superhero! Mama, did you see how Papa flew to rescue sis?"

This comment made the other three laugh. Ava then put down Arya and went to help her husband.

"Darling, are you okay?" Ava asked as she put Kanon on her feet just beside Eason.

Eason then tried stretching to see if nothing had been fractured, "Well, apparently this old set of bones is still tough." This made Ava laugh, and she gave him a kiss on the cheek.

"Oh… my hero. What will I and our two daughters do without you."

Kanon could not help but smile as she saw her parents being all lovey-dovey. Arya then went running with her small feet to her sister's side, "Sis! You are incredible! You should come next time with me to Shur's house."

Kanon was about to say something in her dreams, but the sound of her alarm woke her up. She rubbed her puffy eyes and started thinking about the end of her dream. She does not remember Arya having any friend called Shur, but that dream was clearly a memory from the past. She went out of bed and started preparing herself for school. As she did that, she kept thinking if she remembered wrong, or did the last part really happened? If that's the case, who was this Shur, and when did he stopped appearing in Arya's life?