The Compelled (The Vampire Diaries 19)

Honestly, I couldn’t stick any closer to home unless I never moved out of this house at all. I’m being such a wimp. But it seems like I just got my home back—my family, my life—after being exiled for so long, and now I suddenly have to leave again.

I suppose I’m scared partly because these last few weeks of summer have been wonderful. We packed all the enjoyment we would have been having these past few months—if it hadn’t been for fighting the kitsune, traveling to the Dark Dimension, battling the jealousy phantom, and all the other Extremely Not Fun things we’ve done—into three glorious weeks. We had picnics and sleepovers and went swimming and shopping. We took a trip to the county fair, where Matt won Bonnie a stuffed tiger and turned bright red when she squealed and leapt into his arms. Stefan even kissed me on the top of the Ferris wheel, just like any normal guy might kiss his girlfriend on a beautiful summer night.

We were so happy. So normal in a way I thought we could never be again.

That’s what’s frightening me, I guess. I’m scared that these few weeks have been a bright, golden interlude, and that now that things are changing, we’ll be heading back into darkness and horror. It’s like that poem we read in English class last fall says: Nothing gold can stay. Not for me.

Even Damon…

The clatter of feet in the hallway downstairs distracted her, and Elena Gilbert’s pen slowed. She glanced up at the last couple of boxes scattered around her room. Stefan and Damon must be here to pick her up.

But she wanted to finish her thought, to express the last worry that had been nagging at her during these perfect weeks. She turned back to her diary, writing faster so that she could get her thoughts down before she had to leave.

Damon has changed. Ever since we defeated the jealousy phantom, he’s been…kinder. Not just to me, not just to Bonnie, who he’s always had a soft spot for, but even to Matt and Meredith. He can still be intensely irritating and unpredictable—he wouldn’t be Damon without that—but he hasn’t had that cruel edge to him. Not like he used to.

He and Stefan seem to have come to an understanding. They know I love them both, and yet they haven’t let jealousy come between them. They’re close, acting like true brothers in a way I haven’t seen before. There’s this delicate balance between the three of us that’s lasted through the end of the summer. And I worry that any misstep on my part will bring it crashing down and that like their first love, Katherine, I’ll tear the brothers apart. And then we’ll lose Damon forever.

Aunt Judith called up, sounding impatient, “Elena!”

“Coming!” Elena replied. She quickly scribbled a few more sentences in her diary.

Still, it’s possible that this new life will be wonderful. Maybe I’ll find everything I’ve been looking for. I can’t hold on to high school, or to my life here at home, forever. And who knows? Maybe this time the gold will stay.

“Elena! Your ride is waiting!”

Aunt Judith was definitely getting stressed out now. She’d wanted to drive Elena up to school herself. But Elena knew she wouldn’t be able to say good-bye to her family without crying, so she’d asked Stefan and Damon to drive her up instead. It would be less embarrassing to get emotional here at home than to weep all over Dalcrest’s campus. Since Elena had decided to go up with the Salvatore brothers, Aunt Judith had been working herself up about every little detail, anxious that Elena’s college career wouldn’t start off perfectly without her there to supervise. It was all because Aunt Judith loved her, Elena knew.

Elena slammed the blue-velvet-covered journal shut and dropped it into an open box. She climbed to her feet and headed for the door, but before she opened it, she turned to look at her room one last time.

It was so empty, with her favorite posters missing from the walls and half the books gone from her bookcase. Only a few clothes remained in her dresser and closet. The furniture was all still in place. But now that the room was stripped of most of her possessions, it felt more like an impersonal hotel room than the cozy haven of her childhood.

So much had happened here. Elena could remember cuddling up with her father on the window seat to read together when she was a little girl. She and Bonnie and Meredith—and Caroline, who had been her good friend, too, once—had spent at least a hundred nights here telling secrets, studying, dressing for dances, and just hanging out. Stefan had kissed her here, early in the morning, and disappeared quickly when Aunt Judith came to wake her. Elena remembered Damon’s cruel, triumphant smile as she invited him in that first time, what felt like a million years ago. And, not so long ago, her joy when he had appeared here one dark night, after they all thought he was dead.

There was a quiet knock at the door, and it swung open. Stefan stood in the doorway, watching her.

“About ready?” he said. “Your aunt is a little worried. She thinks you’re not going to have time to unpack before orientation if we don’t get going.”

Elena stood and went over to wrap her arms around him. He smelled clean and woodsy, and she nestled her head against his shoulder. “I’m coming,” she said. “It’s just hard to say good-bye, you know? Everything’s changing.”

Stefan turned toward her and caught her mouth softly in a kiss. “I know,” he said when the kiss ended, and ran his finger gently along the curve of her bottom lip. “I’ll take these boxes down and give you one more minute. Aunt Judith will feel better if she sees the truck getting packed up.”

“Okay. I’ll be right down.”

Stefan left the room with the boxes, and Elena sighed, looking around again. The blue flowered curtains her mother had made for her when Elena was nine still hung over the windows. Elena remembered her mother hugging her, her eyes a little teary, when her baby girl told her she was too big for Winnie the Pooh curtains.

Elena’s own eyes filled with tears, and she tucked her hair behind her ears, mirroring the gesture her mother had used when she was thinking hard. Elena was so young when her parents died. Maybe if they’d lived, she and her mother would be friends now, would know each other as equals, not just as mother and daughter.

Her parents had gone to Dalcrest College, too. That’s where they’d met, in fact. Downstairs on top of the piano sat a picture of them in their graduation robes on the sun-filled lawn in front of the Dalcrest library, laughing, impossibly young.

Maybe going to Dalcrest would bring Elena closer to them. Maybe she’d learn more about the people they’d been, not just the mom and dad she’d known when she was little, and find her lost family among the neoclassical buildings and the sweeping green lawns of the college.

She wasn’t leaving, not really. She was moving forward.

Elena set her jaw firmly and headed out of her room, clicking off the light as she went.

Downstairs, Aunt Judith, her husband, Robert, and Elena’s five-year-old sister, Margaret, were gathered in the hall, waiting, wat

ching Elena as she came down the stairs.