by Chris Howard
The witch sank into the gloom, eyes closed, her pale arms curled around her drawn up legs.
And silence returned to the lake.
Drifts of blood floated around me with bits of dead leaves and other organic shit, blood coiling through long tangles of my hair.
Holy crap, I’m tired.
I looked up, but didn’t have the energy to lift my hands, cup them and swim to the surface. It wasn’t even that far away. My head sagged back, lolling to one side, and I stared up through no more than thirty feet of water at the blinding sun, flickers of it coming through soft swells and crests, a shadow of something on the surface looming off on my right. I didn’t have enough strength to find out what it was.
Then I remembered my anger; it roared to life, flowed through me, pounding in my temples.
I didn’t want to get in the damn water in the first place! That bitch, Deirdre and her accomplices Autumn and Cornelia had taken me to the middle and thrown me in.
Then an uglier image stepped all over Deirdre and hung in the center of my mind: the director of the entire girl’s department of St. Clement’s Education Center.
Ms. Matrothy.
I don’t like being pushed around, but I’d never been able to stop Matrothy. She was like a force of Nature, a wall of brick coming at me, a monster with a brain so small it couldn’t be reasoned with.
Took me a few tries to open my eyes, and then I looked past my feet, into the gloom, no sign of the witch. Probably on the bottom, still in the fetal position I put her in. I had stopped her just by shouting.
I did that with my voice.
Tilting my neck back dizzily, I started to shake my head, but it hurt too much.
What the hell is happening to me? Sure, all the girls at St Clement’s got the your-body’s-going-to-change talk when they moved into the nine-to-sixteens department, but no one said anything about breathing underwater.
No, this is different. This is...something else.
I felt as if I should feel out of place, but I didn’t.
Floating there, breathing it in, living underwater seemed right, more natural than living in the middle of Nebraska ever had.
With the thought of my boarding school, the face of Ms. Matrothy pushed its way back into my head, shoving everything else aside. I bit down hard, grinding my teeth and focused on the surface.
Matrothy.
Like before, the rage started out small, but quickly turned twisted and jagged, roaring in my ears. I felt like I could punch a hole through this world. Fists tight, the anger exploded inside me, a burn like acid in my stomach, moving through my lungs, into my throat, a hot halo that hung around me in the water as if I had ripped my insides out.
I kicked into the light.
Chapter 2 - The Girl who was Afraid of Water
It was like hitting a brick wall. I broke through the surface of Red Bear Lake, and for a few seconds, didn’t know what to do.
I shut my eyes against another wave of dizziness and vomited up everything in my stomach. Then my lungs erupted, pasting my tongue to the floor of my mouth. I choked, sucking in water and air that burned in my throat, and then I sank into the lake up to my chin.
Forcing my eyes open, I reached desperately into the air.
In the last twenty minutes, I had slipped so easily into another world under the water, and now the thin world above seemed harsh and alien, cold and dry against my skin and painfully bright. Water splashed in my face, blinding me.
Someone called out, a girl’s voice. “Kass!”
I spun toward it, clutching madly at the lake’s surface. Jill? And where Jillian Crosse was, Nicole Garcia was never far. The two of them were inseparable.
Something hard hit me in the forearm, scraped along to my elbow before I realized what it was. I clutched the oar, and managed to get my eyes open. Jill yanked me toward the rowboat she and Nicole had taken out on the water.
“Come on, pull yourself up, girl.” Jill’s voice had a rough panicky edge. “Keep your eyes open.”
Easy for you to say. I lunged forward, shaking heavy tangles of my hair out of my face. I saw both of them now, Jill and Nicole, closest things I had to friends at Clement’s. Kneeling over the boat’s side, Jill grabbed my shirt and one belt loop, pulled me backward against the hull, while Nicole—much stronger than Jill or I—dug her hands under my arms.
Together they heaved me into their boat, with me kicking and gripping the wood rail like a madwoman.
The three of us dropped to the benches, arms draped over the sides, gasping for air, and Jill, who never shut up, said between breaths, “Shit, you... scared... us... to... death.”
Nicole recovered first and sat up, throwing the working end of the oars back in the water, and shoving the handles into the locks. “What happened to you?”
“Oh, uh...” I managed to whisper. “I fell in.”
“Yeah. Obviously.” Nicole pushed the oars deeper into the water and got us pointed toward the shore. “We thought you were...” There was a pause, and then her voice came back scared. “gone.”
“Did you come up for air?” Jill put in hopefully.
Nicole drove the oars, glancing over her shoulder at the crowd of St. Clement’s girls at the lake’s edge, her black braids swinging around her head. “So glad you’re alive.”
The warm wood against my neck, the sunlight on my face, I closed my eyes, whispering, “Me too.”
Jill pulled at the torn sleeve of my shirt. “Tell us what hap—you’re bleeding all over the place!”
I twisted sideways, lifting my eyelids for a second, long enough to investigate the damage. Then wiped away some of the blood seeping through my shirt, dribbles of it running down my arms. I closed my eyes. “Not enough to kill me.”
Jill got all motherly, pressing her shirt against the cuts on my shoulder to stop the bleeding. “What happened after Deirdre tossed you in?”
I let a few seconds pass, opened one eye to see if they expected me to answer. Then shrugged and felt the cuts in my shoulders pull tight, opening the wounds.
Jill and Nicole exchanged worried looks.
“Did you stop breathing?”
My eyes went wide, startled by the question, but I decided I didn’t really need to lie. Just be vague.
“I don’t think so.”
“Then you must have come up for air and we didn’t see you.”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “Yeah. I guess.”
Jill pointed to the road that led through the trees to the picnic area next to the lake. A small fire truck came around the last bend in the road, sirens blaring.
“Sirens,” I whispered. “I hear the sirens calling me.”
Jill gave Nicole another worried look, and Nicole jutted her chin back. “You bail. I’ll keep rowing.”
I levered my body up and turned to look into the lapping water. My body was one loose pile of weariness, arms and legs draped over the bench and rail, but there was a race of questions in my head.
What the hell just happened? My life had changed in the last twenty minutes. The world wasn’t the same as it had been when I woke that morning. There were pale witches lurking in the muddy bottoms of lakes in Nebraska, and my mother was not a murderer.
Nicole pulled in the oars when the boat hit the first boulders. Two medical technicians shouldered their way through the crowd, throwing a blanket around me, leading me by the elbows to level ground next to their truck.
I let my thoughts run their race of questions and speculations while they checked my breathing, flashed bright lights in my eyes, and squeezed my fingernails to see how long it took for the color to return. They made sharp little remarks like, “eyes open to speech” and “withdraws from pain.”
One of them cleaned and wrapped the torn skin on my shoulders and upper arms. It looked ugly, starting to get pale and shriveled at the edges.
Looked like some carnivore had attacked me.
And that’s sort of the way it went, right?
The
EMT glanced past me, out at the lake. “How did you cut up your shoulders?”
I barely heard him, drifting in my thoughts. But I sat up straight when the other EMT rubbed antiseptic along the inside of my arm, preparing for something intravenous.
I’d had enough needles stuck in me today. I shook my head and pulled my arm away.
“It’ll just sting for a moment.”
What you all say. I threw him a then-I’ll-only-sting-you-for-a-moment look.
“Come on. It’s just—”
I tried to stand up. Took me a couple tries. “Get away from me. I’m fine.”
Then I threw off the blanket and rubbed away the cold antiseptic.
One of the technicians held out his hands, blue-gloved fingers spread. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
I just glared back, fists going tight. “I am going to hurt you.”
The one with the needle shifted around so that I stood between them. The crowd of St. Clement’s girls hemmed us in beyond that.
“Please.” The EMT tried a calm voice. “Sit down.”
Looking for a way out. “Leave me alone.”
I backed away from the one with the needle. It was clear those words did a lot more under the water than above it. They had no effect on these people.
Then Ms. Matrothy pushed her way through the girls, came up behind me, and grabbed my wrist, twisting it into the air.
“That’s mine!” Deirdre’s indignant shout broke through the murmuring in the crowd. “She stole my bracelet.”
The director pulled my arm higher, a twist in my joints, and pain shot through my shoulder, along with a warm wash of blood into the bandages.
“You took Deirdre’s bracelet.” Not even a hint of a question.
I shook my head. “It was sinking to the bottom of the lake.”
“And I suppose you swam down to retrieve it?”
I swallowed hard. “Yeah.”
“You can’t even dog-paddle. Don’t play stupid with me, girl.”
“But—”
“I was here when they brought you in a dirty blanket.” Matrothy’s face was turning red. “I’ve been here every day since. You’ve been afraid of water since you were four years old.”
That hit me, stopped the questions running in my head. “What…” I was going to ask what happened when I was four but I had vague violent memories of what that was about. Matrothy shoving my head against the bottom of the bathtub, soap and water filling my mouth, my lungs—and then getting an ass-kicking afterward for throwing it up all over her.
But a more pressing question burst out of me. “Who brought me?”
“Ms. Matrothy, make her give it back,” Deirdre’s voice interrupted, and the director released me.
“Take the bracelet off and give it back to its rightful owner.”
My face went hot. I hadn’t really noticed all the girls from the department gathering so close. They stared at me, and there were disappointed whispers as I slipped the ring of gold links over my hand. Deirdre snapped it away from me with a sniff.
“Pathetic criminal,” said Matrothy in a low growl. “Just like your mother.”
“I’ll cut out your tongue!” I screamed the words without thinking, pulling them from somewhere deep and unstable inside. I spun to the director, hands out defensively, my wet hair swinging and curling in the air.
The crowd of nine-to-sixteens girls backed away. Even the EMTs tensed up.
“Get on the bus.” Matrothy stepped in, looming over me, flexing the fingers of one hand and making a fist, pulling at the collar of her old fishing vest with the other. Right on the edge of something violent. Then the director reeled it in. She couldn’t break any bones in front of the EMTs. Matrothy took them aside, not really lowering her voice, and lied to them about sending me along to the doctor when we got back to school. Like that’s going to happen. They packed up their equipment and the director returned, crunching across the loose gravel.
She pointed at me and then at the bus. “You can wait in your seat until the rest of us are done having fun. You’re dismissed.”
I held my psycho mouth tight, turned and walked across the parking lot, climbed the stairs, and took a seat in the back. Sliding across to the window, I leaned my forehead against the warm glass and stared at the lake through the trees. So tired. So many questions. If I closed my eyes, it felt like I wouldn’t wake for days.
“Who are you?” I whispered the question to myself and to the woman whose singing I’d heard in the water. Not the greenish looking one with sharpened teeth—well, okay, even her.
There were no answers, and I closed my eyes, trying to remember the song.
My mother’s song.
Nothing came to me.
Apparently, I was asleep when the fun ended and the rest of the St. Clement’s nine-to-sixteens boarded. I was completely out through most of the ride back.
Pulling up in front of the St. Clement’s main entrance, we jumped down from the bus, weary after the day’s activities. When we got up to the second floor—to our dorm hall, it was mostly end of the day activities, flopping, exhausted onto beds, some chatting, reading, playing cards or videos.
Deirdre and her friends threw me contemptuous looks from the hall’s end. Jill, Nicole, and a couple others were sympathetic but didn’t dare show it clearly. Down the row from me, four beds down, a girl was crying about something inconsequential, and I felt her tears in the air. She was one of those perpetual criers, two or three times a week, sobbing like a baby. But this was the first time I could smell and taste her tears in the air.
Made me sick to my stomach.
So I shoved my head in my pillow, closed my eyes, tried to shut out the world, and the more it intruded, the less it felt like mine—the less it felt like it had ever been my world.
Chapter 3 - The Guardian
I wasn’t dreaming about tears when I woke with the taste of saltwater in my mouth. I was dreaming of seeds buried for years, of witches pulling me into the depths of muddy inland lakes, and I was dreaming about my mother—the shreds of a memory about my mother singing to me. She was faceless. I had no idea what she looked like.
There was just that song my heart told me had once been hers.
So, the day didn’t begin with tears, but with a dream of something waking inside my head, a seed opening, its shell splitting violently, and there was a cold dark underworld ready to grow inside me.
An ocean world.
The sounds of the others in the hall waking and talking broke through now and then. It was an otherwise normal Sunday morning, but I woke to find out I wasn’t me anymore. I was something dangerous. I was something more. I was something no one asked me to be.
The world still looked the same—same nine-to-sixteens hall, same bunch of girls sharing it with me, same school in the middle of Nebraska, but I knew I was different when I opened my eyes.
Ms. Matrothy usually let all the girls sleep late every Sunday morning. Some were early risers and had already gone down to the cafeteria for breakfast.
I rolled over, dropped my legs off the bed and bent forward, groaning at the morning light coming through the closed curtains. As usual, my hair fell in tangles around my face, and when I pulled it out of my eyes, I saw the strangest thing:
Our great and terrible Director Matrothy stood in the doorway grinning, a push-broom in one hand and a tray with a bowl of cereal in the other. She looked right at me, and then showed me more of her teeth when she caught me staring back..
“Happy birthday.” Matrothy made a creepy snickering noise and thrust the broom at me. “You’re on cleaning duty for the entire hall over the next week, today through next Saturday.”
Yippee-damn-do.
The girls department director set down the tray with the cereal, spoon and cup of water. “Bathrooms, floors and windows. I want the baseboards cleaned of scuff-marks. Dust underneath the beds. Windowsills wiped.” She paused with a thoughtful look. “Actually...I think your birthday was y
esterday.” She threw open the curtains, letting in a blaze of sunlight. Nearly blinded me.
What is this, like punishment for getting through my birthday alive?
Yesterday had been rough. Drowning at the St. Clement’s Nine-to-sixteens Girls picnic at Red Bear Lake, Jill and Nicole rowing out to save me and get me back to shore, with me coughing up all the water in my lungs on the way. And what had started it all? On Matrothy’s orders, Deirdre and her accomplices had shoved me in their boat, taken me out to the middle and tossed me in.
And today, Matrothy decided I needed to pay for what had happened? Under what twisted view of things did that follow from drowning? How did it follow from you can save your own damn skin, Kassandra?
Welcome to every bit of sense my world makes.
All thanks to Ms. Matrothy, the Director of the Girls’ Department for St. Clement’s Education Center.
I just stared at her, too tired to say anything.
“You’re not to speak with anyone about anything but school work.” To make it clear, she shot a glare at Jill and Nicole, both of them sitting across the aisle on Jill’s bed.
Matrothy’s monstrous face swung back to me, metal things jingling in the pockets of that hideous fishing vest she always wore. “You will not set foot outside the hall today.” She pointed to the rest of the girls in the department. “They will be playing outside and you will not. They will be going to the cafeteria to have lunch, dinner, and dessert. You will remain here.” As if some school rule suddenly got in the way, she added, “I’ll send up Mrs. Hipkin later with some lunch.”
Must feed the inmates.
Matrothy looked at my messy hair, sniffed as if offended by disarray, and stumped off.
Both Jill and Nicole threw me hints of smiles, a strained friendliness as they left for the day. Most of the others were afraid to look at me.
Maybe I was scary? Drowned girl back from the dead?
Deirdre made a crazy loud show of my...predicament, mimicking Ms. Matrothy enraged, swinging her fists, then—shifting character—cowering, rubbing her eyes, sobbing, in what I guessed was an imitation of me—although I had never cried tears in my life.
