ZAIJIAN HEWSON
It had been three days since I last saw Acir.
Which meant that the last time I saw her was when I saw her at the parking lot. Thinking back of the night at the hotel, I still remembered how happy she had been before everything changed. She had been smiling—not the polite smile she gave her classmates. Not the small one she sometimes gave me whenever our eyes happened to meet across the lecture hall. It had been genuine, effortless, the kind that reached her eyes and made her look younger than she actually was. I hadn’t seen that expression on her face in a long time.
And perhaps that was what made the silence afterward hurt even more.
I had watched her before, more than I probably should have. Whenever we had classes together, whenever I happened to pass her in the hallw
