Chapter 9
While sitting in the quad at Montebello High School, Ashley bit into a warm slice of pizza. A string of melted cheese clung from her mouth to the crust as she lowered her hand. She tried to rip it with her fingers but it just stretched longer, sticking to and tangling her fingers.
Two cute varsity football players—Jesus and Enrique, sitting at a nearby table—pointed and laughed. She felt so embarrassed. She used to like Enrique, before her ex-friend, Marisol, spread rumors of Ashley being a slut. After he heard those lies, he looked at her differently, like she was less than other people. Other girls stopped talking to her as well. A week later, Marisol asked him out. Ashley never even had known Marisol liked him. If she had, she would have stepped aside, offering no competition against her friend.
Since then, she had been leery of making new friends, preferring isolation.
She looked down at the small brick wall where she sat. Beneath her long-sleeved, blue blouse, her white shorts dazzled in the sunlight. The skin of her legs and feet warmed. She wore only sandals. The rays felt protecting, sustaining. She focused on this.
It made her feel safe and centered.
The sky was turquoise blue, extending into forever. The blinding white-yellow patch overhead amazed her. She learned from her astronomy teacher that the sun is a whole bunch of nuclear explosions and hot gasses. This light travels ninety-three million miles in about eight minutes to warm this cold, crusty planet.
When you see the sun in the sky, you are actually looking eight minutes into the past.
People managed to forget this miracle above them every day.
As she was thinking these good thoughts, fear knitted itself into a corner of her heart, stitching its way to the core. She couldn’t stop it. She didn’t want to stop it this time.
It was a message something bad was going to happen. She was sure. Although, she couldn’t explain just how she knew this.
The creature wouldn’t wait till night. She had previously thought daytime was safe. But that security was melting away, and the sun now felt hot and cancerous.
She picked up her books, abandoning the messy pizza on the brick wall. As she walked towards an elm tree to sit in the cooler shade, she tripped on an uneven crack in the pavement and fell.
With her right cheek burning against the heated cement, she saw Marisol staring at her, seated at a lunch table with two follower-friends, Susana and Jackie. Their perfect legs were all crossed in the same direction in their red and white cheerleader uniforms. Each smirk and giggle from them stung.
Pushing herself up and gathering her books, she wanted to hide away in an empty classroom. She continued to the shade, breathing faster with each quickening step, trying to dodge the whispers passed amongst the cheerleaders.
She wouldn’t feel this bad if the shadow creature wasn’t tormenting her as well.
Was she the only person pursued by it? How could it find her in broad daylight? Wasn’t there a balance of justice in the universe? Places should exist that were protected.
***
“Remember you have control, Tina. Just one word and I’ll turn on the light.”
She swallowed hard. “Alright. I’ll try.”
“Good girl. Shooting for four minutes now.” He flicked the light-switch off.
Pitch dark …
This time was different. She felt it as surely as if a black-widow crawled her belly, up her flat, unprotected chest, each of her thunderous heartbeats provoking the spider.
She wanted to scream but found her voice gone. She stood and began to walk toward Jeff. She would turn the light on herself. But as she walked, she felt lost, like she might crash into things. She stopped.
Tears sprang out of her eyes. She hitched in great drafts of air.
“Tina?” her father called.
She couldn’t talk.
Light rained down abruptly from the clear-plastic ceiling panels, displaying Jeff standing by the door. His hand rested on the switch, concern twisting his face.
They hadn’t left her. Everything was fine. Why was she freaking out? She felt like a weak, pathetic girl, crying for no reason that anyone could comprehend. Dad probably felt deeply ashamed.
She had always believed he wanted a son instead of a daughter, but because of bad luck, he got her. All her life, she tried to please him, only wearing jeans, t-shirts, tennis shoes, high-tops, and Vans, avoiding girly colors like pink, yellow, orange, and red, doing boy-stuff like playing catch, batting baseballs, roughhousing with neighborhood boys, grunting through action movies, skinning knees from skateboarding, avoiding talking about her feelings, trying to be tough. But with each of her attempts, Dad seemed disappointed anyways.
She was a girl. She couldn’t help that. She couldn’t change that.
After her mother died, she didn’t want to change that. She wanted to be more girly, more connected to her mother. But she couldn’t bear disappointing her father.
Through tears, the blurry image of her father came towards her. Now, she really blew it. He would remember this for months. It would stick in his memory like glue. But she secretly relished his safe arms embracing her. She smelled his comforting scent and hugged him back tightly.
Jeff encouraged, “You did excellent, almost four minutes. Don’t worry, it’s natural to feel scared.”
She winced at his last word. As her father guided her back to the chair, her head drooped. She couldn’t look into his eyes. She would not look into them and see his disappointment and shame.
Jeff sat beside her and patted her shoulder. “You’re brave confronting your fears. This is a good thing. We can wait a few minutes and try again after you’re comfortable.” He took her wrist and began counting the beats.
Still looking at the floor, she said meekly, “I don’t want to.”
“I know.”
Dad asked, “Should we try another day?” displeasure scratching his voice.
Tina lifted her eyes to her father’s chest, but couldn’t go any further.
Jeff responded, “We can. But it’ll be dark tonight, without us to help. If she gives in to her fear now, she empowers it. We want Tina to control it, not the other way around.”
“That is what we want,” Dad agreed with enthusiasm. “How about it, Tina? One more time?”
Of course it was safe with the light glaring throughout the entire room. The shadow creature would never come out in this. But sickening fear clung to her, making breathing difficult.
***
The shade of the Elm didn’t make Ashley feel any better.
She pulled out a pencil and blank paper from her notebook and began to draw with her dominant hand, her left. It usually felt comforting to put her feelings down on paper. It made them come out of her, rather than sit inside and distress her. She didn’t know what she would draw, but just allowed her instincts to roam.
The picture started as a box, then came chairs and three people inside the box. No, she thought, as she looked at it more carefully. It wasn’t a box at all, but a room. One of the people was smaller than the other two, and Ashley decided to draw this one with long hair, turning it into a girl. Big tears fell off the girl’s face. Ashley wrote Tina on the girl’s shirt—the same name that had mysteriously came to her the night before.
Starting in the corner of the room, she began to shade darker, until Tina was partly obscured in darkness. Ashley’s hand went back to the corner of the room and began scribbling something unidentifiable, dangerous, waiting.
Ashley’s heart was beating fiercely. She stopped and looked up.
Four Emo girls stood around her. She hadn’t even heard their approach. Their mostly black clothing, tight jeans, and hair in strange waves jutting outwards and over their faces made them quite different from other high school cliques. Emo was short for Emotional. She identified with that aspect of the clique. She had harmed herself by cutting her wrist in the past, as some Emos do.
One of the girls, Dolores, she recognized from her freshman biology class. Dolores leaned forward, studying the drawing, pulling her hair from her pale face. “That’s cool.”
Ashley smiled. This was difficult because she felt nervous.
“You should be an artist,” Dolores said admiringly. And the Emo group began strolling away as though a school of fish, in synch with each other’s steps and turns and head motions.
Somewhat stunned by the compliment, she replied after the group, “Thanks.”
This drawing wasn’t just a drawing though. Somehow, she knew it was real. It felt like it was happening right now. The shade in the corner was the same creature she had seen at night. Except this time, it was going to kill. She was certain. A feeling, deeper and stronger than intuition, told her so. The shadow was after Tina.
Despite not knowing this girl, Ashley began to scribble out the whole picture, trying to stop the shadow creature. She pressed so hard that the pencil lead broke and the paper tore.