9• You're Dangerous, Brunilda.
"Pilafi doesn't carry water anymore with you."
Anila's loud voice didn't even reach her cousin's ears, let alone wake her up.
"Pilafi doesn't carry water anymore with you, I tell you!"
Brunilda woke up, confused by the surrounding noises, and before she realised what was going on, Anila jumped on the bed, grabbed her by both arms, and started shaking her from side to side.
"How come there are no righteous people in this world to leave me alone? Oh, I'm sorry, myself." Brunilda weighed her head heavily on the pillow and closed her eyes.
Anila looked at her with a smile, allowing the feeling of being grateful that she had a friend who offered comfort with her presence, her wise way of speaking, and her understanding. She felt like she wasn't doing enough for Brunilda, and maybe Anila was the one who wasn't a good friend, because she couldn't convince her cousin that she didn't have to doubt her worth for a second because Anila saw nothing but a masterpiece in her, and if Brunilda saw herself like that and allowed others, they would also show that they saw her as such.
"Look at how you sleep, and meanwhile, I am full of bombs here. You didn't even wait for me yesterday," Anila remarked, surprised, and then she looked excited at what she was going to say. "Bottle in the air?"
"I fell asleep," said Brunilda about last night with her eyes closed. "Throw it."
"Blerimi and I are dating together!" Anila spoke in a blithe voice and watched her cousin open her eyes, not at all jovial about that news.
'No!' was the first word that unconsciously came to Brunilda's mind as she looked at her friend.
She didn't resist the feeling that Anila was wrong, but she couldn't say anything because she was afraid that Anila would be angry with her. She would argue that Brunilda was only creating negativity and judging someone, whom she didn't know enough to give a true opinion about, but only based on some feelings she claimed to have, but maybe that was because she guessed that others felt the same from her presence, and Brunilda was getting the energy that she was giving.
"Congratulations," she smiled lightly and turned to the right to sleep a little more.
"You will tell me 'Congratulations,' when we go out tonight."
Brunilda sighed deeply in annoyance.
"I don't want to go out," she said what she felt, probably for the first time since she remembered herself, and surprisingly for her, she wasn't scared that she would be judged but powerful enough to insist on self-defence and do as she wanted.
"Ida, in life, it is not said that we will always do what we want."
"Because there are people in life who think that the world has to live as if it belongs to them, and these people are very arrogant," Brunilda uttered bitterly.
"Listen, yesterday I read the fragment of a mafia book that a girl had posted on her story on Instagram, and it immediately reminded me of you."
"Mafia?" Brunilda saw her, mystified.
"Let's skip this part. Listen to what it was about. I'm sure it will help you," Anila insisted. "The character in that fragment had all those problems and was very anxious about how they were going to solve them. One time they listed them all one by one, and in the end they said, 'I don't care how much fear these challenges cause. I'll find a way to work them out, and that's it. It's nothing to be exaggerated.' You do the same, too. Ignore the fear of introversion that you have, as if it were an arrogant person, trying to get your attention, and you're not impressed at all by them."
"How come that girl wasn't afraid?!" Brunilda, from all that explanation, kept in mind only the girl who had posted the fragment.
"Afraid of what?" Anila looked at her, flummoxed.
"That others might think that the reason why she has posted the fragment of that book about the mafia is that the girl you talked about is exactly in such a situation in her life. This type of genre is usually about characters who have very, very heavy traumas and, because they haven't been able to heal from those traumas, they have ended up on the wrong path, have gone too far, and it seems like there is no turning back for them. That girl in real life has such severe traumas that she can't find a solution, how to heal, and therefore she reads about characters in the same level of pain from her point of view to know how they manage to heal, because that method may also be used by her to heal from her traumas."
"Ida, you're the first person I am hearing something like that from." Anila put her hand on her chest, astounded by her hypothesis.
"Maybe I'm wrong, and she just likes the book, but maybe that story on Instagram is a call for help, or the girl just wants to get attention by playing the role of a depressed person."
"OK, let's change the subject." Anila regretted the way she chose to motivate her. Instead of persuading Brunilda to give up overthinking, the latter was pulling her towards the vortex of the trap, to act in the same way, to overthink the most diverse theories about a certain topic.
"There will be a conference by a psychologist about self-confidence at the Plazza Hotel after two days. We will go. I don't want objections."
"Why are you going? You already have self-confidence."
"I'll get advice for any other person that I may know in the future who is going to need motivation. Perhaps my words won't convince them, and I'll need someone else's point of view, in other words," Anila justified. "We shouldn't know things in life only to use them for ourselves. We should be aware of every possible topic."
The new message on her phone interrupted the conversation between them.
"Blerimi texted me," Anila said, which Brunilda guessed when she saw her face light up after reading the message. "OK then. Since you don't want to go out, I'm not bothering you anymore." Anila turned off her phone and stood up. "I'm going out with my boyfriend. I'm getting the clothes ready right now," she went towards the beige wardrobe interspersed with brown.
Brunilda got up in no mood and moseyed lazily to the kitchen to drink water. She was pensive that now her best friend had Blerimi to go out with, and she no longer insisted on going out with her.
The main reason why she began to agree the first time she was asked the following days, when Anila beseeched her to hang out, was that she didn't want to lose the close friendship between them, although she was afraid that she had realised it too late, and now Anila had given up on trying to change her into an extrovert.
Anila had noticed the change in Brunilda that September, before she returned to her parents' house, and was surprised that she was often the one who asked to go out.
The suspicion that maybe Brunilda wanted to separate her from Blerimi by trying to create distance between them often overshadowed all the other thoughts and convinced Anila that such doubt was a fact, but there wasn't enough evidence yet, except for the dislike that Brunilda had shown towards him, of which Anila was now thinking that perhaps it was a pretence by Brunilda in order to persuade her to break up with Blerimi so she could date him afterward.
With her boyfriend, she would say that she had had a great time that early autumn month with the weather still in summer if she excluded the moments when she had intermittently noticed Blerimi being annoyed by the monotony as if he didn't like the environment he was in at all and who he was with.
She justified it with the guess that he was probably tired from work. She understood that and strongly supported the assumption, so as not to give more room to the doubt of the repeatedly strong premonition that Brunilda was right in her warnings, and he was playing with her.
Jealousy of Blerimi prompted her to think that her cousin had managed to get into her boyfriend's thoughts, and that was why he sometimes acted aloof with her.
Her best friend, who was maybe truly the enemy she didn't know she had, wanted to manipulate Anila into breaking up with Blerimi.
••••
Brunilda had gone to Toptani Shopping Centre to buy something for her family since she was going back to her parents' house that day.
She came out of the supermarket, put the bill in her bag, stopped immediately when she saw Blerimi at a table in the bar on the opposite side with his friends, looking at her, and headed straight to the elevator.
Torn between guessing whether he would get up and meet her or not, she chose denial. Why would he do such a thing? They only knew each other because of Anila. She wasn't there at the time, so they had no reason to talk.
"Brunilda."
His voice made her turn her head to the right, where the politely smiling man was getting closer, and shift her gaze to the lift, so tensioned that she couldn't avoid meeting him.
"How are you?" Blerimi asked without extending his hand.
"Good," she replied with a smile. "How are you?"
"I'm great."
Brunilda held back her smile for a moment, trying to hide her suspicious look at him, and turned towards the elevator.
"Why did you look at me like that?" confused Blerimi wanted to know.
"Like how?" She gave the same reaction to his question.
"As if I want to hurt you, and you're trying to find out how."
"You're wrong." Brunilda objected seriously. "I have no such intention. I have no intention at all," she added, so that he wouldn't guess another untrue thing, and she was glad that the elevator came just at that moment.
She wasn't feeling comfortable at all around Blerimi after the conversation they just had.
"Goodbye," she looked him in the eye before entering the elevator and turned her back on him until the doors closed so she could breathe freely even in discomfort afterward.
Blerimi felt at risk and in big trouble.
That there were going to be obstacles because of a man dating Anila, he had thought about it, but that her best friend would become such a problem, he had never thought of it.
He couldn't lie low anymore. He had to get rid of that girl as soon as he could.
And to obtain that, he was going to use Anila.
Bạn đang đọc truyện trên: AzTruyen.Top