Oleander: A Great Expectations Reimagining

by Scarlett Drake

It was hard to imagine there even was a time before. Before the Deveraux mansion and the two wraiths that haunted it. Before that summer, when everything was on fire, and I knew what it was to be consumed by flames.

The year I first met him, I was fifteen.

Remember this and he was 8 when his parents died.

It was a Tuesday. Life-changing things rarely happened on Tuesdays

My parents – mine and Beth’s parents, I should say – had been hit from behind by a truck driver on their way home from a friend’s wedding, making us both orphans in the blink of an eye.

I think about that frequently. About what I’d want my last night on this earth to look like.

I’d always been a little difficult as a child, moody and insular, and prone to bouts of deep self-pity. And now I wonder if Gideon and Caspien had smelled that on me. Like sharks in the water. My heart, a soft and fleshy thing that was vulnerable to their poison.

It was the first time I met Caspien Deveraux, and I loathed him with a passion I didn’t know I was capable of. And though I didn’t know it then, I’d soon come to love him with the very same ferocity.

“It feels like nothing else on earth, you know. Completely overwhelming, like you might die. But then you don’t, and it’s...well...it’s very good.”

He was a kaleidoscope, one that I couldn’t look away from. I was entranced.

My entire destruction felt possible from that kiss, and I had no desire to fight it. It was what books and song lyrics told you kisses ought to be. It was the end of childhood and the beginning of something else, and I knew I would not be the same when it was over.

There are things I’ve tasted since – the burrata from that café by the Tiber in Rome, the croissant from that café in St Mark’s Square, the hot chocolate from Angelina’s on the Rue de Rivoli – that I’d describe as little pieces of heaven on earth. But his mouth, laced as it was with grape and watermelon, altered my brain chemistry in a way that I’ve never been able to undo.

But one day, I woke up and realised I didn’t feel that same anger anymore. I could still find it inside if I looked, packed away under other memories and feelings I’d grown out of. Sometimes, I’d pull it out and shake it off, holding it against me to see if it still fit.

I love you. I don’t want to remember a time when I didn’t. I love you. And as long as I am able to draw breath, then I will love you with every single one. I love you.

“He’s going to break your heart, you know. And still, you’ll love him. He’ll break it over and over again and you’ll continue to love him.”

I wore my heart on the outside of my body, bright as a beacon. It was no wonder it was pierced right through.

He’d always been the one hunting me. I’d only ever tried to survive him.

I loved him, desperately, and he’d taken that love and turned it into this, turned me into this.

those big green eyes that look at everything the world has to offer you with an edge of terror’),

If I could have chosen a love, one that would have made me a better version of myself instead of worse, then I’d have chosen Nathan. But we don’t get to choose these things.

What on earth was wrong with me that I wasn’t satisfied with this? Here was a man holding me to his chest and telling me my comfort was important to him, my feelings were important to him and yet my fucking soul ached for someone who’d thought nothing of either.

“You imagine me with girls?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “I think you’re doing gay wrong.”

If Caspien is the reason this story exists, then Nathan is the reason I am writing it.

What was one more battle scar on my heart when the war was this glorious?

“You were everything warm and bright and alive in this place and I would have poisoned that.”

I’d been telling the truth when I told him he’d saved me over and over again; because if Jude could love me, Jude who was perfect, Jude who was the sun, then it meant I was worth loving.