Eyes of Ice

I first saw her at the start of the semester. She was a new student, and had come from overseas. The professor acknowledged her presence with only a nod, the female students sent her envious looks, and the male students, like myself, couldn't help but fantasise. From what little I had heard about her I learned that she had gotten a full scholarship, and was educated in a wide range of subjects. She had lost her family in a car accident only recently; news of that kind travels fast. I felt sorry for her when I realised that she shared her loss with every student present, and not by her own choice. But when I looked at my fellow students I knew for certain that all of them would try to be more than kind- everyone wanted to be a friend of the angel.

I remember that I stared at her as she stood there, intently observing everything around her in silence, and the thought struck me that she might even be able to read our very thoughts with her perceptive gaze.

She was beautiful. She had long, curly golden hair and big, bright blue eyes. She was tall and had all the right curves, and even the simple clothes she was wearing couldn't make her look any less stunning than she did. I suspected anything looked good on her. She was, as I said, like an angel.

Her eyes trailed several rows of students until they met mine, and there they rested. A shiver went down my spine. I had never seen eyes so icy and empty, so careless, so indifferent. An immense sorrow seemed to be hidden in them. I wasn't really surprised, so I tried to send her a small smile, but her eyes had moved on.

Seconds- or maybe ages, I couldn't tell- after our eyes met, she quietly started walking to the nearest empty seat.

The seat next to mine. She said nothing as she sat down next to me, and as she took a pen and a notebook out of her bag she still did not speak a word. I observed her from the corner of my eye, afraid to look directly at her, afraid to stare, afraid to be rude, afraid that she could hear my heart pounding somewhere up in my throat. I wanted her. We all did, and by saying "we" I think it would be safe to say that it included the women.

The professor started his lecture, but I didn't take notes, nor could I actually get myself to pay attention. In the following hour and a half I heard nothing but the pounding of my own heart and the scribbling of her pen. I caught myself staring at her. She looked up from her notes and glared daggers at me. I shivered again. She turned back to paying attention to the professor rather than to me.

When my tutor told me that I was assigned to show her around the campus until she was capable of finding everything by herself, my heart skipped a beat.

She was waiting by the fountain in the courtyard before the library, sitting on the edge of the large marble basin, her right hand drawing circles in the water. I gathered my courage and walked up to her.

"Evadne?" I prayed that I was pronouncing her name right. She looked up at me, unreadable.

"Yes?" She had a soft, cold voice.

"I... I'm here to show you around."

"I see."

She did not shake the hand I held out to her, nor did she accept it as help. She got up by herself and looked right through me. Her eyes made me uncomfortable. They seemed out of place for an angel. Mentally kicking myself for stuttering, I introduced myself properly. She nodded, but didn't seem to really care. I proposed going to the cafeteria first, suspecting that she might be hungry. She agreed and followed behind me. We didn't exchange a single word; I could find none and she most likely desired none.

In the two weeks that followed I spent my hours off by helping her find her way on campus and around it. Her eyes didn't warm even once; they never smiled along with the rest of her face when she was amused. Maybe she never actually was amused, but she granted me a rare few smiles nonetheless. I don't think she ever considered me to be a friend, but I was closer to her than anyone else, if close was a good word to define it.

It wasn't as if no one tried. The male students all desperately tried to get her attention, and the female students wanted to be seen in her presence all the more for that reason. She never seemed to care. I do believe that every student on the campus envied me for my position, especially some of the more popular young men.

We seldom really talked, and if we did, I spoke more than she would. After six weeks I knew little more than what everyone else knew, and that only because we had heard it- whence the information originally came was, as is wont with hear-say, unsure. She, on the other hand, knew a lot about me from what I had told her, and doubtlessly guessed even more.

I always looked her in the eyes when speaking to her, even though they unsettled me. They didn't seem capable of showing even the slightest emotion, yet I was determined to change that. When I asked her about the accident they only got colder, and she told about it as though she were a robot; speaking monotonously and without apparent interest in the events she detailed.

Instead of ever understanding her better she became more of an enigma to me, never ceasing to surprise me. When I asked her out for dinner she agreed- beyond my wildest hopes.

She looked absolutely stunning in the silver dress she was wearing when I came to pick her up. I felt my knees go weak. She was an angel beyond doubt; a vision from a dream. I wasn't sure if it was my imagination or reality, and although I doubted it was true, even her eyes didn't seem as cold. I felt a fool in my black suit. I disgraced her with my presence, and defiled her hand with my lips when I gently kissed it.

She didn't open up over the expensive dinner, or when we were slow-dancing afterwards. It was much the same as always, but now I didn't say much either. Not a single word I thought of sounded fitting for an angel to hear, and I feared for the way my voice would sound. I had a hard time restraining myself. She was so close...

It was late when I finally brought her back home. She had a small apartment not far from the campus, on the third floor of a four-story apartment building. Standing in front of her door I almost felt like a boy on his first date again, not sure whether or not it was right to kiss her. I desperately sought for proper ways of wishing her a good night, while at the same time I wished nothing more than spending a good night with her. I did not have the courage to even hope for my wish to come true.

We were standing close; I was still holding her hand. I was only heartbeats away from a kiss, and mentally kicked myself for not having the guts to stir her lips. Instead, I pressed my lips to her knuckles. Looking up into her eyes, gathering courage to take my leave, I saw the same indifference.

I froze when her fingers suddenly caressed my cheek. Her eyes said nothing. Her hand slid down to my neck and drew my head closer to hers. I closed my eyes and allowed her to direct the course of actions that followed.

I expected her to explain some more things to me when I woke up next to her the morning that followed, but instead of the anticipated warmth in her eyes, they only seemed colder. She granted me a kiss, but no smile came to her lips. I told her that I was in love with her, but she gave no response. I let my hand run through her soft hair and drew her close to me, skin on skin. I kissed her again. Her response was without feeling.

I spent the rest of the day cursing myself for my stupidity. I didn't understand why I had ever thought to be capable of warming the heart of the ice queen. Everyone else had given up; she was rendered untouchable. I had touched her, sure enough, but I hadn't managed to stir up any emotion. I realised that somehow she got further away from me which each step I took to approach her.

I began to believe that nobody could rouse any emotion in her. We didn't exchange a word all day. The worst of it was that she acted as though nothing had happened between us.

Thinking of that day, I recall nothing else than utter bliss suddenly turning into absolute despondency.

The rest of the week was equally frustrating. I tried to talk to her about it, about us, but every time I tried to she simply changed the subject. We had longer conversations than before, but their meaning had become insignificant. Every word was emptier than ever.

I didn't pay attention to the lectures anymore and started falling behind the other students. It didn't help that she was sitting next to me. Two more weeks had gone by in the meantime, but I still hadn't found a way of getting her to care even the least bit.

I felt as though I was standing in a dark, desolate wasteland. When I looked into her eyes it only felt as though a chill wind blew over the barren plain that was my mind. I knew her smile would warm me, but she rarely did so, and never from the bottom of her heart.

I can still see her crossing the street and glaring at a small group of guys who had thought it to be a good idea to shout shameless obscenities at her. They all shut up merely from seeing her eyes. When she turned her head and saw me, I took a step back and turned around, not wanting to feel as though I was looking into the eyes of death itself. If she really was an angel, it could only be the angel of death.

Her eyes had become an obsession to me. I drew them everywhere, on any flimsy bit of paper I could get my hands on. I always tried to capture their emptiness, their cold, impersonal stare, but somehow everything I drew still seemed too vivid to be hers. Every assignment I did, each picture I drew, be it tiger, tree, owl, human or anything else, they all contained her eyes in some manner, or my attempt at her eyes anyway.

If she was looking at me as I drew, my drawings became messy. My notes were disorderly and consisted more of collections of eyes than actual text. The essay I was supposed to write was an out-and-out disaster. I decided that something had to change, and gathered the courage to confront her.

"You used me," I said.

She gave me that trademark cold glance that sent shivers down my spine. "Did I now?"

"Yes. I feel you did."

"You feel I did?"

"You did."

"I did?"

"Yes!"

"And this conversation is to be going somewhere?"
I swallowed at her indifference. I hadn't expected any cooperation, but somehow it hadn't seemed to be as hard a thing to do in my mind as it turned out to be. I took a deep breath and kept my mind clear, not allowing her stabbing, unresponsive words to scatter my rational thoughts.

"I want to know why."

"So you assume things have a reason?" she arched an eyebrow.

"Of course they do!"

"And you just assume that I used you? How can you be sure?" She was intently studying some non-existent filth under her nails.

"Because you just don't care about anything that happened!"

"How do you know that?" Her indifference was starting to get to me.

I took a deep breath to stay calm. "I can see it in the way you act, in the things you do."

"What am I doing, then?"

"Nothing! The whole point is that you're doing nothing!"

"Then how can you come to a conclusion from the things I do?"

I opened and shut my mouth several times before I came to a sensible answer. "Sometimes not doing anything says more than any action could show or words would say. I came to my conclusion by your lack of action."

"So you didn't see it in the way I acted at all. You lied."

"What?"

She icily looked back into my eyes. "You lied to me."

I blinked. This wasn't true. It just wasn't. She was twisting everything I said, turning my grounds into quicksand. She was knocking me off of my feet and making herself the victim. "I wasn't lying to you!"

"You were. You just said it yourself."

"I did not!"

"You said that you did one thing, and then you said that you actually did something else later on. Only one or the other can be true, so that generally is considered to be lying."

There was no passion in her words whatsoever. Each one of them was said with the same lack of interest, yet she had no problem with winning the argument. It was the fact that she didn't even put any real effort into it that bothered me most. "I'm not a liar!"

"Then what are you?"

"A person, with a rational mind, and with feelings!"

"And?"

"What do you mean, 'and'?"

"What is 'a person with a rational mind and with feelings' supposed to tell me? What should it mean to me?"

I gritted my teeth as I took another deep breath and suppressed my anger. I glared at her, forcing myself to say the words. "And those feelings are hurt."

"I see. Anything else? Or was that all?"

Something snapped right then and my hand shot up to her face, hitting her flat against the cheek. I didn't wait for a response; I knew there wouldn't be one. Not one that would mean the slightest thing in any case. I turned and walked away, blind in rage. I just wanted to get away before I really hurt someone.

I didn't hear the honking in time when I stepped onto the tarmac. Someone pushed me aside roughly. There was the sound of rapid braking, and then a loud thump. Somewhere in the back of my mind my psyche registered seeing her flying through the air and hitting the road, rolling over several times and then finally stopping.

I ran to her and turned her onto her back. Someone came running out of the car, slamming the door.

I looked at her, drew her close to me. She was cold. The back of her head was pulp. I knew she was dead, and that nothing could be done. She was gone forever. Her body lay limp in my arms.

I moved my fingers to her eyes to close them, and even as I did so they looked more alive than they had ever done before.

~*~

I wrote this some time during the summer of 2003, and first posted it online in October of the same year. It started with little more than an image in my head, and while I got it onto paper decently enough, the wording still doesn't entirely please me. I have edited this piece more times than I care to remember. I'm not even happy with the title, and have changed it a number of times as well. There are probably two or three earlier versions of this story scattered online. This is my latest attempt at making this worth reading, so if you have thoughts on how I can improve it, you're very welcome to share them.