The Girl Who Couldn't Fly

by Richelle Renae

something that I never had considered doing before, an action of pure reaction without a moment of thought towards the consequences.

  I punched him. Then, I punched him again. His nose was bleeding. My hand hurt like hell. I had forgotten that I had punched a mirror earlier. Why the hell had I done that? I should have known to save my fists for someone who truly deserved them. Seriously though, that hurt. I didn’t get how people punched people more than twice in any fight. It hurt so much.

  But I couldn’t let Peter see my discomfort. I couldn’t give him that pleasure. While he was still recovering from the shock of my sudden violence, I turned and walked away as smoothly as I could manage.

  That was my first time actively betraying the Wiccan Rede. That was my first time physically hurting something. It felt terrible. It felt good. It was degrading. It was empowering. What the hell was wrong with me? There was no good justification to punch somebody like that. Then again, there was also no possible justification to act like Peter had. Screw it. I was pissed. I threw logic out the window. The situation wasn’t logical anyway. Why the hell would logic help it?

  Looking back, I can comfortably say that I was wrong to punch Peter. I can also comfortably say that if you put me in the same situation, I would punch him again. I don’t condone violence, and Peter certainly didn’t deserve it--he had probably been emotionally abused worse than I--but that’s just reality. Sometimes, people feel emotions so strong that you need to do something. It doesn’t matter if those emotions are misguided, you feel them. I do wish I had apologized to Peter though. He deserved that much, at least.

  After that, it was another month before anything significant happened in my life. It was a long month of avoiding Peter at all costs, as he thankfully did the same to me, and cementing my position as the bottom of the totem pole at my school. Peter hadn’t told anybody about me punching him, but word had gotten out about me punching the mirror. Even those who normally put up with me were made uncomfortable by that news. Everybody began to distance themselves from me. Not that I minded, I was more than happy being alone. Then, one day after I got home, my mom spoke to me.

  “Honey, we need to talk.” I never talked to my mom and she certainly never called me honey. I froze in place and tensed up, preparing to run away. After a moment’s thought, I sighed and walked over to see what she had to say.

  “What, mom?” I didn’t like talking to her and tried to make that sentiment clear in my tone. Her and my dad were always trying to get me to give up my wiccan ways. It wasn’t their fault; they just didn’t understand. Still, it was frustrating. Usually my mom was better than my dad. She would just ignore me, while he would insist on trying to change me. He was always trying to talk me in doing stuff with him, ‘normal girl stuff.’

  “Why don’t you sit down, sweetie?” Now I was starting to freak out. My mom wouldn’t talk to me like this unless something was seriously wrong. My dad did all the time, trying to get me to ‘try new things,’ but never my mom.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I could barely whisper the words as I sat down on the couch next to my mom. Whatever the answer, I knew I wouldn’t like it.

  “It’s… Sometimes.. I’ll just say it.” She sounded totally defeated as she spoke. “Your dad is dead. A drunk driver ran him over last night.”

  The world froze. The world shook. The world froze again. Everything was wrong. WHAT THE HELL? I’m not sure how I should have reacted. I’m not really sure how I reacted. I had hated my father--or at least I thought I had. So why did hearing he was dead hurt so much? What was wrong with me? A lot, but still. My dad was dead. I felt my mind wandering, searching through memories of him.

  “Do you want to get your hair done?” He would ask, smiling at me.

  “No.” I would growl the single syllable, like a wild animal trying to scare another away.

  “How about going to an amusement park?” He would continue, still smiling.

  “Why would I do that?” I would snap.

  “It’s fun.” He would answer. “So, I guess you’re doing another spell thing tonight?” He would still be smiling at me, but I could see the judgement in his eyes. I would run away without answering him.

  Looking back, I still find myself wondering if I misinterpreted the judgement in those eyes. Maybe it was only concern for a loved one and I only assumed it was the look I was more familiar with. Either way, in that moment, I couldn’t handle the news of his death. I ran to my room, slamming my door behind me. I dived onto my bed, lying on my stomach. I buried my face in my pillow and did the only thing I knew how to at that point, the only thing that could offer me any level of condolence.

  I cried. I cried and cried. I cried and cried and cried. When the full moon rose high in the clear sky, an ideal situation for countless rituals, I continued to cry. As the full moon was replaced by the sun, my face remained wet with tears. There was nothing else to do but cry.

  In the year after that, I let my natural brown hair grow out. I went out in the sun as much as I could, and even managed to develop a tan. I began wearing brighter colors; I found green matched my new complexion particularly well. I didn’t do any rituals. I didn’t do any spells. I had given up on the wiccan life. It just seemed… meaningless, I guess.

  Perhaps the biggest problem with my decision to change was that I had already pushed all the people in my school away. I tried to make friends. I really did. But everybody already had their in-jokes, they already had the crowd that they liked to hang with, and they already had their perception of me as an outcast who didn’t fit in with them. Those hurdles looked to be damn hard to overcome. In reality, I think they were impossible.

  In some strange twist of fate, Peter was going through the exact opposite changes I was. It turned out that his dad was the drunken driver that had hit my father. His dad had supposedly always been a drunk and was taken away by the court, locked up for what would likely be the rest of the man’s life. I felt bad for Peter, but I couldn’t talk to him. Just seeing him made my blood boil, so I ignored him. That is, until I was offered an opportunity.

  “Hey, outcast-girl.” The speaker was Alyssa, one of the most popular girls in our school. “You still want to hang out with us, right?”

  “Yeah.” I answered cautiously, not trusting her unusually friendly tone.

  “And you’ll do whatever it takes?” Alyssa asked me. Her friends were laughing behind her.

  “Yeah.” I answered again, this time with more confidence. My dad had always wanted me to be a normal girl, after all.

  “Then I have a proposition for you.” She continued. “Make weird ol’ Peter over there kiss you, and we’ll consider letting you hang with us.”

  “What? Why would you want to make me kiss a loser like that?” I found myself suddenly unsure of what was going on.

  “You need to prove you’re cool enough to make a boy kiss you.” Alyssa answered promptly, clearly holding back a giggle. “Plus, it’ll be funny.”

  “Alright. I’ll do it!” I didn’t really get why I was doing it, but I agreed. Whatever it took to be a normal girl, I was willing to do. The other girls all snickered as I walked up to Peter.

  “Hey Pete, old pal.” I said in my sweetest, most caring voice.

  “What do you want?” He snarled back. “You making fun of me to now?”

  “Actually, I was thinking about us.” I said, hopefully smoothly.

  “Us?” He snorted. “What the hell’s us?”

  “A long time ago, we shared a ritual. I hoped for so long that we’d share another.” I saw the expression of hope in Peter’s in eyes. It was one I knew all too well. The guilt began to well up inside me, but I was already committed. I leaned in against his chest. “We also shared a kiss that night. I was hoping we could share another of those now.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Peter pushed me away as he spoke. He looked at me with a face of disgust. “We haven’t spoken for so long, and now you want to kiss?”

  I wasn’t listening
to him. I had leaned in again, and this time I had moved close enough  that my lips brushed his. He froze in place before pulling me into him, sharing with me the warmth and comfort of his body. Our licks were interlocked, and it was the same passionate, wonderful feeling that I had felt so long ago. Then, there was a bright flash. I stopped kissing Peter and looked over. I saw Alyssa holding a camera. I saw one of her friends handing her some money.

  “Told you I could make her do it.” Alyssa laughed. “What a loser.”

  I wanted to die. I looked back at Peter. I opened my mouth to say sorry, but nothing came out.

  “I hate you.” He said.

  ‘I hate you.’ Those were three words I had heard countless times before. In fact, they had lost all their meaning to me because I never understood why people would say them. But this time, as I looked straight into the pure pain reflected in Peter’s eyes, I understood why he said the words. He meant them. That was terrifying to me. In the past, all those words that had hurt so bad, nobody had ever meant them. They had simply been the easy answer, the thing to say. When I saw that Peter meant his words and, worse, that I deserved them. I gave up. I ran away from Peter, then from school, and went home. I didn’t go to school the next day. The next night, I had made another decision. I sat down at my desk and began to write my suicide note.

  To whoever cares,

  I