Sapphire (2 page)

The lunch bell sounded, making Shawna jump off the
bench like she’d just been electrocuted. She half-heartedly laughed
at herself and reached for her backpack, then remembered that she’d
left it in the hallway at home. She hoped to God her parents hadn’t
noticed her forgotten backpack.

Tara joked as they walked down some steps. “Now I
won’t be the only one in
I-have-a-troubled-home-life-so-let’s-share-and-eat-lollipops-and-pretend-I-care
counseling.”

“Wow,” said Shawna, “they really broke through to
you, didn’t they?”

Tara laughed and Shawna tried to say something else
witty, but her thoughts were held hostage by those disturbing
words.

“
They’ll come for her.”

Tara was looking at her with concern. For a moment
she dropped her playful, sarcastic, nature. “Are you really okay?
What’re you gonna do? Can you give them a”—she made a rude hand
gesture—“and thank them for all the fish-sticks?”

“I don’t know. I’m still a minor, so I doubt
it.”

“Oh, whatever. Just come live with me and my evil
cat. And don’t forget your towel.” The usual manic glint came back
to Tara’s eyes as if seriousness was too much effort. “You can
always run away with my circus. That’s
my
evil plan. I’ll
ultimately take over the world with an army of gunslinger ninja
gorillas in disco suits…”

Shawna smiled. She appreciated her friend’s effort
to keep things ‘normal.’ If she could just pretend she hadn’t heard
anything, wipe her memory, rewind everything.

Tara rambled on, “…Then you’ll have to kill Jarred’s
girlfriend and club him stupid, otherwise you’ll have to go to prom
with that freshman.”

Normal. Everything’s normal. It never happened.

“At least,” said Shawna, “I’m not an old spinster
that was held back in first grade. Hope you don’t trip over your
date’s walker.”

“At least I’m not a hitch-hiking bum cuz I can
drive
to school.”

“Yeah, well, If I had to stoop any lower for friends
I’d be licking the pavement.”

“You mean like how you lick the pavement wherever
Jarred
has stepped?” Tara swooned. “OOoooh JARRrred, where
fart
thou, JARred?”

Shawna playfully pushed her away. “Or maybe you’ll
find a date at the preschool. Cuz
why
do you still have
that?” She pointed at the sparkly unicorn-head keychain on Tara’s
button-laden backpack. It bounced next to a
thank you for not
being perky
button and an ill-sewn
come to the dark side we
have cookies
patch.

“That’s Rainbow-Barf!” She stuck her pierced nose in
the air. “Just cuz you’re too cool.”

“I’m not ‘too cool,’ I grew up. Maybe you should try
it.”

“
Should have left her.”

She felt her heart speed up at the voice of her
not-father repeating in her head.

“You really don’t wanna join my circus?” Tara asked
as she threw her empty cup towards the trash can. It sailed right
into someone’s open backpack instead, splattering its contents.

“Goooooaaaaaal,” Tara whisper-yelled, pumping her
arms in the air.

Shawna smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “Okay,
theater-geek, go back to your happy-padded-place now.”

“You gotta tell me more after school, okay,” Tara
called as they parted ways. “That’s totally
crazy
they never
said you were found like a stray cat, or something.”

She nodded as Tara waved, turned the corner, and was
gone.

“Yeah. Crazy.”

With her head filled with unsettling thoughts
throughout class, time painfully crawled by like a
slug-pulling-a-glacier. As Mr. Emery droned on about algebra
equations, her thoughts drifted back to the morning.

She was walking past what she called the “monastery
room,” then froze as her father’s words echoed from behind closed
doors.

“…
You only wanted Shawna because of that…thing,
that hallucination. You acted like she was some sort of sign.” He
barked a laugh. “We should’ve just left her where we found
her.”

“
John,” her mother gasped. “Don’t say that. It
wasn’t a hallucination. You saw it too.”

Tara laid on her car horn again, and Shawna hurried
outside to tell her she wasn’t coming. She didn’t wait for Tara’s
reply as she turned and quietly snuck back in to hear the strange
argument. Her heart was pounding as she heard her mother’s
voice.

“…
You wanted to have children.”

“My
children, not our children,” he snapped back.
“I only agreed to stay sixteen miserable years with you and keep
Shawna because I was desperate, we both were, and I thought
that…thing was real.” There was a chilling silence. “You tricked
me.” His voice was low, an angry growl, and she almost didn’t hear
his next words. “Somehow, you made me see things. You made me
hallucinate. What did you do to me, you witch?!”

“
No. No! It was real! It was an angel!”

She heard scuffling on the floor.

“
John, we’ll take her out to that place where we
first found her, like we promised, tonight, and…and those things,
they’ll come for her. You’ll see. We must do as we were asked. We
were promised, when she turns sixteen, that we would get everything
we ever—”

“
If they don’t…” His voice sounded dangerous,
threatening. “If they don’t, Mary, I swear, I’ll make you
both
regret it.”

The room spun, and Shawna covered her mouth in fear
of being sick. Her mother and father had always been kind of, well,
insane, but a somewhat manageable-insane. This was just total
madness. What was going on? Had they both finally lost it? What
they were saying made absolutely no sense, but they sounded
serious, and those last words made her heart stop. Regret it?

Her mother’s obnoxious parrot started squawking from
the living room, “Holy! Holy! Pretty bird! Shut-tha-hellup!” It had
learned that last one from John.

Her parents thought she had left for school with
Tara almost twenty minutes ago, so she snuck out the back and raced
into the woods behind their house. At first, she wasn’t going to go
to school but then decided it’d be better if her parents didn’t get
an automated tardy phone call. What if they sent whomever it was
after her? She figured ‘things’ meant people in either white or
black suits. But why? Was Mary trying to send her away somewhere?
And what had John meant when he said ‘regret it’?

She kept running along the road even though her side
hurt, and wished she hadn’t told Tara to drive on without her. She
finally flagged down a passing truck and made it to school after
the last bell. Rushing down the hall to her first class, she nearly
smacked into the man of her dreams.

“
Oh, sorry,” she mumbled, looking down and trying
to edge past him.

Jarred, the most popular senior at Bozeman High,
just looked at her like she was a cheaply made knock-off of a human
being. He smirked and stepped past her. She watched the back of his
perfect dark-hair, and even more perfect physique walk away.
Without knowing why, she called out to him.

“
Jarred.”

He stopped, looked around, and raised his eyebrows
like it was an inconvenience to answer her. “What?”

She just whirled around and speed-walked in the
other direction. After a few steps, she glanced over her shoulder.
He was gone. The knots in her stomach tightened.

She was wondering what it would feel like if he
wrapped his muscular arms around her, comforting her, keeping her
safe, the softness of his hair as she ran her fingers through it.
What if he loved her instead of Krystal and they ran away together?
Ridiculous daydreams of herself and Jarred, escaping together and
battling men in black suits, distracted her from the panic trying
to envelop her all day.

“Hey.”

She jumped and turned around. Krystal, Jarred’s
‘perfect’ bleach blonde girlfriend, raised a penciled eyebrow at
her.

“Yeah, hello, like, pass-the-
papers.
” She
rolled blue eyes under fake eyelashes.

Shawna had been lost in her own head for the first
half of algebra class. Krystal snatched the papers, then passed
them back.

I’m gonna lose it.
Shawna stared blankly at
the assignment.
Found her…desperate…sign…those things…regret
it.
She closed and opened her eyes.

Krystal made an annoying high-pitched, “no,
way,
” to another girl.

Don’t…smack her.
Shawna exhaled, gripped her
paper, and crumpled it. Krystal was prattling on and laughing like
a yapping Chihuahua with one of her friends. Shawna inhaled deeply,
then forcefully exhaled again. Their teacher, Mr. Emery, continued
to mumble equations into the chalkboard as if twenty-eight students
were just figments of his imagination.

“You, like, got a
problem,
or something?”
Krystal said to the back of Shawna’s head. “I heard you like my
boyfriend.” She smacked and chewed on her gum like a cow with cud.
“You and your weird
dog
that follows you around, Tarda or
whatever, better go back to the kennel before we call
animal-control.”

Her cattle-minded friends giggled obediently. She
continued to smack her gum loudly, flaunting her authority, and Mr.
Emery ignored it.

“You listenin’ to me…”—she seemed to struggle for a
moment for a creatively demeaning word—“
ogre
-face?”

Shawna grit her teeth. Krystal had chosen the wrong
day to heckle her. She turned around with a glare, put her hands on
Krystal’s desk, and—

Krystal, the chair, and the desk slammed into the
wall. Everyone around them leapt away like a herd of frantic deer.
Shelby caught her foot on her own desk leg and face-planted it into
the rug as the class scrambled towards the walls. Krystal was
slumped and shaking her head as papers fluttered to the floor. The
entire class, including Mr. Emery, was dead silent. Shawna just
stared at what she’d done.
Had
she done that? How could she
have thrown Krystal into the wall like that?

You didn’t do that,
her mind tried to reason.
Krystal…Krystal what? Threw herself like a pro-wrestler into the
wall?
She looked at her hands. It was suddenly hard to breathe,
and even harder to think. It was gone now, but on her arms she
could have sworn she’d seen…something very strange. Someone was
repeating a word, her name.

“Shawna?” Mr. Emery said.

She continued to stare at her arms and hands.
Krystal, who was gingerly touching the back of her head, looked
like she was trying to adhere to the wallpaper. Shawna felt
everyone’s eyes on her. The whole class, every face, was terrified,
except for Josh. His usual, bleary, squinty-eyed grin hung on his
face.

“Awesoooome,” he said, like he was watching an
action film.

Mr. Emery cleared his throat. “Shawna, I think we
need to step outside.”

She nodded blankly and stood up. Krystal flinched,
and despite everything, Shawna gave herself a little satisfied pat
on the back for scaring the plastic out of the bleach blonde
California-Barbie. She slowly walked towards the door Mr. Emery was
holding open. His eyes were glued to her, watching her every
move.

Expecting me to run, or maybe turn into a green,
muscular, ogre-face
.

“Psycho,” someone muttered as she walked past.

Running suddenly seemed like a very good idea. Her
mind began racing while every step forward felt painfully slow.

“
We’ll take her out to that place.”

Her breaths were quick and shallow.

“
They’ll come for her.”

She was stepping past Mr. Emery.

“
Tonight.”

He was extending his hand to clamp around her arm.
She ran. He yelled and she heard pounding footsteps in pursuit, but
they faded quickly. She bolted out the main doors, down the road,
and didn’t stop running until a stitch in her side forced her to.
Clutching her side and gasping, she slowed and caught her breath as
dappled sunlight danced across her face. She quickly walked through
the woods, just allowing her feet to carry her. Eventually, their
paint-chipped, rusty, old house came into view and she stopped. No
one was home. She was standing so still that a little lizard
crawled onto her shoe. It scurried away when she looked down, then
disappeared under a rock.