Impulse by Vanessa Garden

in her hands, but her face carried a mysterious expression: part excitement, part fear and part something else I couldn’t quite distinguish.
    â€˜So, have you been enjoying our beautiful city, Randy?’
    I clutched my clothes to my chest and closed the wardrobe door.
    Randy. Jilly had just used Lauren’s nickname for me.
    â€˜Are you okay? Has my familiarity offended you?’ She frowned. ‘Sorry. I do it all the time—name shortening. Anne is always saying how surprised she is that I don’t call her the letter A.’
    I smiled and waved a hand in front of my face, like swatting a fly. ‘Randy is fine.’
    Jilly nodded and smiled, but her eyes darted to the doorway and back to me nervously.
    â€˜Remember you asked after Anne?’ she said, leaning forward and whispering.
    â€˜Wait. Has something happened?’ I asked, my heartbeat going from tick-tick to BOOM-BOOM in a millisecond.
    Jilly glanced over her shoulder at the door again and then it hit me.
    â€˜Is she here?’ Without waiting for an answer, I rushed to the doorway and opened it to find a much skinnier and paler version of the Anne I once knew.
    â€˜Miranda,’ she said, with a genuine but weary smile.
    Though it was warm in the castle Anne wore a thick, woollen, itchy-looking shirt and long pants of the same material. It made me want to scratch my skin just to see her in it. She no longer looked like a maid but a prison inmate. And her once fresh and youthful face had a haggard, middle-aged woman’s look to it, as if she’d spent a decade baking in the sun or looking after a dozen or so children.
    â€˜Anne. It’s great to see a familiar face again.’ I wanted to throw my arms around her and crush her to me in a warm hug but she looked so fragile, like I would grind her bones to dust if I did; so I restrained myself and beamed what I hoped to be my warmest smile to compensate. She smiled back, but on a scale of one to ten for happiness, it didn’t even score a one.
    â€˜Come in and have breakfast with me.’
    Anne shook her head. A soft-pink glow started to spread across her gaunt cheeks. ‘I’m on a special diet at the moment.’ Strangely enough, a small smile twitched at her lips, as though the special diet was something she was truly happy about. But she was so thin that I could see theblue veins through her snow-white skin, and the shape of her bones.
    â€˜What sort of diet? Maybe we should do it together?’ I said, hoping to get more info out of her. In truth, my ridiculous stomach was already dying to tuck into the breakfast Jilly had just brought in.
    Anne avoided my eyes. ‘Just something I’m trying. It’s a special diet just for me and nobody else.’ She blushed deeper. Anne blushing could only mean one thing.
    And then it hit me. Dieting and blushing. She was trying to impress a guy.
    But what sort of a guy would let a girl wither before his eyes? What kind of a ‘special’ diet was this? And then I remembered how Anne used to blush like this in front of Marko all the time.
    â€˜I’ve got to get back to work.’ An expression of relief smoothed Anne’s face as she backed away from me and towards the door. ‘Take care, Miranda.’
    â€˜I will.’ Then I held her gaze to show her how much I meant my next words. ‘You too, Anne; please look after yourself.’
    Before she got too far across the room, I stepped forward and caught her thin wrist between my fingers. It felt cold and limp. ‘If anything’s bothering you, you know you can come here anytime to talk.’ I smiled. ‘I’d love the company.’
    A frightened-rabbit look crossed Anne’s face before she turned and walked briskly down the hallway. I stood and watched her until she was out of sight.
    â€˜What do you think’s wrong with Anne?’ I asked Jilly as I sat down to eat my breakfast of fresh bread and a