Evangeline, who had witnessed everything unfold, stopped her sister Autumn. "What are you doing, Evangeline? It's raining outside. Let's go inside."
But Evangeline pulled her hand away, signaling in sign language, "Don't call me by my name."
Autumn was taken aback. "What do you mean, Eva?"
Even without her voice, Evangeline's movements were sharp and strong, cutting through the rain, louder than the downpour around them. She signed again, her eyes burning with emotion. "Don't call me by my name because you don't deserve it!"
Autumn felt the sting of her words. Shocked, she tried to understand, but Evangeline wasn't finished. With a bitter twist in her hands, she continued, "You were always the best, the strongest. But ever since August came into the picture, you've started to show your flaws. You're not as strong anymore. You've become weak. You're losing your color."
The rain blurred their tears, but Autumn's heart ached. She spoke with a shaky hand, her voice in sign language, though it trembled. "I'm really disappointed in you, Eva. Everyone has these expectations of me, and I don't care. I don't need to fulfill their desires. But you... you should have been different. You should've been better than them."
She paused, her eyes filled with vulnerability, "It's not because of August or anyone else. The person you imagine me to be… is not who I am. The person in front of you is real, and I'm sorry to say it... but I'm nothing. Just a beautiful lie."
Evangeline, unable to find a response, turned away swiftly, her movements filled with frustration and unresolved emotion. Autumn's heart sank as she watched her walk away, her sister slipping through her fingers.
Autumn raised her face to the sky, the rain cold against her skin. "That's right, leave... so you don't catch a cold." Her voice barely cut through the storm, lost in the chaos of the rain and her own inner turmoil.
---
Flashback Addition:
In the silence that followed, Autumn looked up at the sky, and memories long buried began to resurface. She remembered herself as a child, always protecting Evangeline. She had stayed up nights when Evangeline was sick, carrying medicine, making sure she was warm. She had shielded her from everything—everything but herself.
But time had passed, and the roles had shifted. In this moment, Autumn felt powerless to protect the one person she had always sworn to guard.
"I was always stronger than you," Autumn whispered to herself, her voice barely audible in the storm. "But you were always my light, and losing you doesn't just mean losing you... it means losing myself."
____
A few days later, in the same dining hall, August sat in the same place, with a new group, trying to enter the conversation, laugh, and smile. She confessed her love for a singer whose name she didn't even know, and she was talking in a way that didn't resemble her, to the point that the people sitting felt more and more distant and their rejection of her was evident on their faces and words. One of them said without any interest, "You've always been like this?" Everyone laughed, only August didn't understand.
This was the beginning of August's destruction, who never knew what it meant to destroy her life, so she began to take every scene seriously and affectedly, crying over anything and expressing her pain even if it was a result of losing her favorite pen, she did not listen to anyone, and acted shyly and denied admiration when someone expressed their admiration for her beauty, even though she knew very well that she was beautiful, but if she said that she was beautiful, others would not need to tell her.
The next day, when Augustus realized that she could not be too close to a circle, she dressed herself tightly, the skirt below the knee, her whole outfit from the school uniform, the bag, the school shoes, and even her hair, the looks of the others were hovering around her, and she was sure that she had succeeded, until she heard a girl from afar, "She looks like she came from the country." Her friend laughed and said, "But Autumn is dressed like this, but she looks fabulously beautiful."
"Don't compare a Vile doll to a girl we don't even know where she came from."
"You're right"
A feeling of nausea and disgust took over August as she ran to the nearest toilet. She turned on the tap and splashed water on her face, struggling to breathe, and when she raised her head to look in the mirror, she saw a featureless monster, so she broke the mirror in anger, she was like a bull that saw a red color, anger overflowed her to an indescribable degree, and she did not know where to direct her anger, so she grabbed the broken pieces, to forget.
It was true that she tried to imitate Autumn, but she thought that they would say about her, for example, "The girl who wears the school uniform perfectly, is an ideal student and beautiful." She thought that all the girls would follow her moral path, and the principal would come to thank her. She went too far with her imagination, she had never seen the others around her, so she did not realize that every girl in the city had given up on that idea because they looked like junk in uniforms that did not show off their charms, besides Autumn who even if she covered her face, would be like the stars in her beauty.
This is what dreams do to naive girls, it makes them blind, they think that the universe was created for them, and that they are the origin and end of everything, and that every young man is infatuated with them, and every passerby wants to get to know them, they live in an illusion and do not accept anything but their own points of view.
For August, every sound of laughter now seemed to be directed at her, as if she had become a joke. And She didn't understand why everything was ruined.