When 13 year old Leila Damaris took
a dive off the stage and suffered a concussion during the winter formal at Belmonte
Junior College, the school administrators finally had to admit they should have
done something about their abysmal disregard for safety infrastructure when
they had the chance. A simple, but perhaps unsightly banister could have meant
the difference between keeping up an appearance of impeccable taste, and now
having to deal with the possibility of a local scandal.
In Leila’s home, a dim morning drew
the injured teen out of a dreamless slumber. As she opened her eyes her stark
white ceiling offered the only welcoming sight. It seemed to dance in and out
of focus and she could at one point swear she saw a flurry of colored lights
cavorting on its blank canvas. A sharp, sinister pain arrested her head to the
core, and the illusion of color disappeared in an instant. She blinked out a
few tears that slid, unassuming, down the sides of her temples and were sopped
up by the bandages that felt at present to be holding her skull together.
The
pain is different she thought. It
had been a living, fighting pain the night before; a freshly hatched, yet
deadly cobra coiled inside her head lunging for the kill and she had been
baring her teeth and lashing back against it. It didn’t feel like something
living anymore. It felt like decay. Her thoughts meandered back to science
class. You can fight a predator, but there’s no fighting a decomposer.
Scraps of recollection were
gathering in her mind. She closed her eyes again and sifted through them in her
half-conscious state, too weakened by the pain to make an effort to put them
together just yet: winter formal, her blue dress… shaking onstage like a baby
chick… a fight in spite of instinctual dread of confrontation… outrage and
humiliation. The overall feeling was a distilled version of the dread and
aversion she’d experienced at her school since she’d started attending roughly
four months before.
Her alarm clock beeped. She sat up
in a series of calculated moves and
remembered she had to take her medication. Her mother walked in just as she was
about to swallow the first pill.
“I was just coming to wake you up
for that.”
“I’m good. I think the pain did a
better job of waking me than my alarm.”
Lola sat gingerly at the foot of
the bed and regarded her daughter with a soft, groaning sigh. She did that
often, even when she was under no visible physical strain. Leila thought that
her mother sighed to release some of the constant aggravation she felt. She’d even
caught herself doing the same thing a couple of times in recent memory, or what
was left of her recent memory.
“How’s your head feeling? Do you
still remember everything that happened last night?”
Leila shrank inwards as she recalled
highlights of the conversation with the doctor. Short term memory loss was an
expected result of a concussion even as mild as the one she’d had. It also
depended on the patient’s constitution and ability to handle stress. That last
thought made Leila roll her third eye… handling stress… that’s a joke for the
ages.
“I can remember most of it”, she
answered automatically, “I’m just trying to work through the pain and get my
thoughts in order. I don’t think you should worry.”
“Okay then, when you feel well
enough we can talk about that boy’s reasons for doing what he did. Right now
the important thing is for you to rest.”
It was fortunate then for Leila
that her mother chose to leave her words hanging in the air as she turned to
exit the room. It didn’t give Lola a chance to witness the slate of blank shock
painted on her daughter’s face.
Leila had no idea what her mother
was talking about.
Someone
did this to me. A boy did this to me. Who would do such a thing? And… why do
this to me, of all people?
Upon learning she had been accepted
in the prestigious school, Leila had devised what she believed to be a
foolproof plan to navigate the dark waters of Belmonte. The plan consisted
quite simply, of not getting in anyone’s way. Rather than attempting the
foolhardy notion of being assimilated into school society, she’d made an art
form of blending into the background like a perennially taupe gecko hanging on
for dear life on the pristinely painted walls of the huge school building.
Now that she started giving things
some real thought, she wondered how in the world she came to be onstage at the
winter formal in the first place, or why she’d gotten into a fight. So many
events from the previous night seemed completely out of character for her, just
about as plausible as finding a goldfish in a can of caviar. She was at once
intrigued and determined to track down the source of all the insanity.
But she had to get something out of
the way before jumping into matters of the mind. In the great tradition of
squeezing one’s finger after a paper cut just to watch the blood flow, Leila
first endeavored to gauge the extent of her injuries. Lying in her bed she
flexed with the caution of one carrying a bowl of hot soup filled to the brim
up a wobbly ladder. Flexing her facial muscles sent spasms up her scalp, so she
only minimally attempted it before moving down to her shoulders, which hurt on
the right side where the shoulder met the neck. All of this discomfort was
explained by the nature of the fall. As she moved further down her body, other
aches were not as easy to explain. Her abdominal muscles were sore, as were her
legs. It was as if she’d been pushing rocks up a mountain like Sysiphus. It
made no sense.
Her entire body shook as she took
in the possibilities given her compromised memory. Could she have been
physically abused? No. If her mother’s reaction was any indication, that was
not a real possibility. She took a dive off the stage and hit her head; that
much was clear. The reasons and the way it happened were there, somewhere in
her mind, walking with outstretched arms through a thick haze. But she knew she
had the compass and blow horn to draw them out of the mist.
My
journal.
Leila wrote everything down. It
started out when she was 7 and needed an outlet for the bad things going on at
school. Writing things down seemed to put them in perspective, or at the very
least it seemed to unload them unto something other than her. She filled three
notebooks by the time she was 9, and by the time she turned 11, she was filling
a notebook every six months. Eventually, from her own experiences, Leila
started drawing inspiration to write stories. Mostly she wrote stories about
tragic young heroines in magical lands, solving everyone’s problems except
their own. Her surreal story about a girl who spoke to the sylphs and showered
diamonds into the sunset had earned her enough attention to get into Belmonte.
She slid off her bed, holding on to
the night table and the mattress for leverage. It made everything hurt, but it
was necessary for gaining access to her journals. Leila and her mother had
played a game of hide-and-seek with her journals ever since she started writing
them. Lola had been ahead of the game until notebook 5, when Leila had finally
managed to outsmart her by cutting a slit under her box spring and sticking all
of her journals in there. Getting to them was a sometimes painful hassle that
had cost her many a cramped shoulder, but Leila was certain it was worth it. If
Lola wanted access to her innermost thoughts, she would have to get as creative
at prying as Leila was at hiding. She was certain her ideas were worth the
trouble.
Twisting to reach the slit under
the bed proved to be even more of a chore than usual in her current state, but
she managed to grasp the metallic spiral of the notebook set off to the side,
next to two piles of four other notebooks.
Notebook nine was almost two thirds
of the way full. Sitting back on her bed, she let it fall open in front of her
with a satisfying crinkle of paper abused by her heavy handwriting. She
fingered a group of pages back and started thumbing forward, looking for any
event that she couldn’t recollect. About ten pages in, the journal was still
filled with memories fresh and vivid in her mind. It was mostly recounts of her
first days in Belmonte, her uncomfortable and unnerving welcome as a child
prodigy, her brushes with the strange students who seemed to operate on a
different reality. Being called “nerd” and “worm”; not directly to her face,
but loudly and with enough intention that she had to notice it was meant for
her.
Then something caught her
attention. One of the pages had garbled, unintelligible writing on top. It
seemed like the writer of the message had been struggling to keep a steady hold
of the black pen that they had used. Her first thought was that someone had
found her journal and defiled it, and she felt for a second like she sank a
couple of extra inches into her bed. No,
it must have been me. I did this. The affirmation was solid, although she
had no clear recollection of ever doing such a thing. The following pages,
about thirty of them, all the way to the end of the written pages of the
notebook had angry pen scratches from corner to corner, as if to signal that
the writing was such a hideous mistake, it had to be stricken completely from
record.
She flipped forward to the last
page with writing on it. What she saw made her blood curdle. The page was puffed
and still cooled with moisture. There were three lines of writing, jagged and
desperate, each one more slanted and crooked, going all the way down the page:
“Don’t trust them.”
“Don’t trust your dreams.”
“Everything was a lie.”
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