Hair Like Autumn Leaves (Ch.1)

The girl sat with her legs crossed under her desk, one shapely calf draped over the other, her toes, encased in black flats, brushing the floor. Margaery had noticed her immediately, noticed the waves of ginger hair that grazed her sharp jawline and came to rest softly on the pale flesh revealed by her wide boatneck collar. She had noticed how the girl sat—with back straight and neck bent, and the half-closed eyelids over eyes which seemed to view the world with a sort of thoughtful aloofness, both shy and haughty.

            Margaery was never one to be bashful or coy, so she had sat right behind the girl and stared at her autumn-leaf hair and the outline of her shoulder blades through the thin white cotton of her t-shirt as the professor explained the syllabus for their Introduction to Medieval Europe class.

            When the class ended, the girl swept her notebook and pencils into her messenger bag. She moved with a kind of hurried grace, and her hands were deft, but not so deft that one of the pencils didn’t roll down the gentle slope of the desk to land soundlessly on the rough institutional carpet in front of Margaery’s feet. Margaery picked up the pencil, and looked straight into the girl’s eyes as she deposited it in her open palm. She prided herself on being unabashed and unapologetic in all her interactions, and she let her eyes linger on the girl’s as she withdrew her hand. The girl stared back into Margaery’s eyes for a moment, then shifted her gaze to the carpet.

            “Thanks,” she said, and her voice was just like her smile, just like her half-lidded eyes and her graceful posture: understated but unfaltering.

            “What’s your name?” asked Margaery.

            “Sansa. What’s yours?”

            “I’m Margaery.”

            “It’s nice to meet you,” said Sansa, with a somewhat concerned glance toward the door. “I’ve… um, I’ve got to go now actually, but thanks. Thank you.”

            Margaery gave Sansa her best smile, the one she knew creased her face and curled her lips in just the right way. “See you on Thursday.”

    Sansa nodded and smiled softly, and Margaery wondered if she had imagined the soft flush in her cheeks or the anticipation in her smile.

    Margaery was not sentimental. She did not fall prey to infatuation. She maintained an ever-present exoskeleton of strategic niceties and kept her distance. But as Margaery walked to her next class, her mind was full of Sansa’s waves of red hair, her smile, her voice, her soft aloofness. Normally, as Margaery walked from class to class, she would examine the faces she passed. She liked to make eye contact with people, liked to see how much she could find out about them by looking at their faces, the way they walked, whether they noticed Margaery’s eyes lingering on their face, and how they reacted if they did.

    But now, as Margaery walked, squinting in the brightness of the late-summer sun, her head spun with Sansa.

    Margaery had thought that maybe the two days that would pass before she would see Sansa again would help, that the hours would wash her from Margaery’s mind, but as Margaery ate dinner that evening, nothing had changed. Her friends’ voices swam unheard in the space around her ears as Sansa’s face danced in front of her eyes.

    That night, Margaery sat in her living room, flipping through a magazine. She didn’t notice Catherine, one of her roommates, enter the room until she plopped down on the couch next to Margaery.

    “Hey,” said Catherine, in a tone Margaery recognized as mock-flippancy. “What’s going on?”

    “What does it look like?” Margaery asked, not unkindly. “I’m reading a magazine.”

    “You know what I mean.” Catherine looked pointedly at her.

    Margaery looked down at the glossiness of the magazine pages, then, after a few long seconds, fixed her gaze back on Catherine. She felt the corner of her mouth curling into an involuntary smile as she said, “There’s a girl.”

    Thursday came much too slowly, and Margaery’s discomfort only grew. She had been with plenty of girls, and they had all been beautiful, but none of them had taken residence in the empty spaces in Margaery’s mind like Sansa had. None of them had made Margaery smile involuntarily to herself like Sansa had.

    There was a crack in Margaery’s exoskeleton, and Sansa had put it there.

    When Thursday finally did come, Margaery walked into Introduction to Medieval Europe five minutes early only to glimpse Sansa’s vibrant hair across the half-filled classroom. Her heart fluttered earthshatteringly, but she didn’t let her slight smile or her purposeful stride falter, and she sat down in the desk behind Sansa.

    Sansa twisted in her seat and caught Margaery’s eye as she sat down.

    “Hey there. It was Sansa, right?” asked Margaery, even though the past two days had etched the name so deeply into her brain that it may as well have been her own.

    “Right. And you’re Margaery?”

    “Right.” Margaery leaned down and rifled through her backpack for her notebook so she would have a moment to compose herself, then said, “Hey, so, Sansa? Maybe this is just me, but I usually like to have at least one friend in each class, and I haven’t exactly talked to anyone else in here. Would you want to get lunch sometime? Exchange our contact information? I find it’s pretty useful if you miss class or don’t understand the assignment or just want a study partner.” It was only a half-truth, but Margaery only ever told whole truths if she had a good reason.

    Sansa looked back at her, and for a moment Margaery was afraid she would decline, but then a slow smile crept onto her pink lips. “That sounds great, actually. I’d love to.”

    They planned for Saturday afternoon, and as their professor started class in a voice that resonated off of the classroom’s back wall, Margaery felt a thrill of happiness that threatened to push and surge and spill up her throat from the warm place in her chest.