Shade

by Marilyn Peake

  I looked at the thought bubble. A direct quote from my mother. And yet, all too often, it was my mother who had the disheveled appearance after her long bouts with drugs and alcohol.

  I finished Chapter 1 and moved on to creating the first scene in Chapter 2. The setting was Mars. My U.S. History class had watched a video of the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars as part of Modern Scientific Achievements. The landing had been spectacular. To think that human engineers are capable of such a feat, that they have the education and intelligence to pull that off, fascinates me. Why is it that some people spend their days landing rovers on Mars while others wreck their lives and all the lives they touch?

  I colored the Mars soil red. I turned on my laptop, looked up pictures of Curiosity and drew that little rover zipping across the surface of Mars, splitting apart Martian rocks with laser beams. From inside some of those broken rocks would eventually escape the otherworldly ingredients for the robots to construct ... ta-da! ... superhero leotards!

  As I added shadows to the Martian landscape, I heard the front door open and close. I waited for my mother to yell up to me. Nothing. Then I heard the tinkling and clanking of bottles.

  So, it would be that kind of night. One whole day on the job and it was back to drinking. I bet Mom quit her job already or would at least call in sick tomorrow.

  I debated whether to cook dinner or order pizza. At any rate, I wasn’t going to do either until after the drinking was well underway. I had learned to avoid whatever rage or disappointment had led my mother back to the bottle. Better to wait until the liquor had calmed her down. She was happier when she was drunk and more peaceful when she smoked pot.

  I started praying that my mother would smoke pot that night. Then I felt guilty and turned my thoughts to Curiosity blasting rocks with its laser beam. I wished I had a laser beam on my head.

  Oh my God, Leotard Girl would have a laser beam on her head!

  CHAPTER 4

  Next morning, I found my mom passed out on the couch, half-empty wine bottle on the coffee table, empty beer bottles strewn on the floor and ... yup ... joint stubs in the ash tray. I shook her by the shoulder. “Mom ... Mom ... it’s time to get up.”

  She pushed my hand away and mumbled, “Not goin’ in today. Call in sick f’ me. ’K?”

  This was the next best thing to her quitting her job at my school, so I immediately agreed. I called the high school, reported her out sick for the day and ran upstairs to get dressed.

  Looking in the mirror, I approved my outfit before leaving the house: jeans embroidered with flowers across my butt, a lavender long-sleeved shirt and flat leather shoes.

  In Creative Writing class, I managed to think my way out of a jam. We were given an assignment to write a couple of pages about our summer vacation. So lame. What was this, third grade? Shouldn’t we be writing about something slightly more meaningful or creative?

  Well, let’s see ... My Goddamned Summer Vacation. My mom broke up with her third boyfriend, a guy who almost kind of acted like a father to me and included me in activities. I watched my mother drink more days and nights than I care to remember. We moved out of our old home to this godforsaken town, into a house resembling the haunted house I used to visit with my best friend for spine-tingling fright on Halloween.

  No, I didn’t write that. Rather, I realized how much shame my real life brings to me and how I just couldn’t share that at a new school. I’d rather die. So I decided to be creative in Creative Writing class and conjure up a new life, the kind I’d be proud to be living. I imagined I had a grandmother who took me to exotic places every summer. I wrote that down. “Every summer, my grandmother takes me with her on a grand adventure. This year, we went to Ireland.”

  About the middle of the piece, I wrote: “Two days into my vacation, I decided to look for leprechauns, in case they really existed in Ireland. I never did find leprechauns, but I discovered tiny faeries in a couple of castles where we stayed.”

  At the end of class, I handed in the paper and decided I would join the Creative Writing Club. It was meeting that day and I was totally in the mood for it.

  At Club, I looked around the room. This could work. It was an organized group made up of exactly the types of kids I had learned to search out in the lunchroom, a motley group of individuals. One girl looked like a cheerleader; another looked like a dark and moody goth. I was home. I’d found my people. Hopefully.

  Our first assignment was to introduce ourselves in writing and then read it out loud. Crap.

  I decided, once again, to write about the imagined faerie experience. And I would challenge myself to read it like an actor, to read that story without my hands or voice trembling, to read it like it was the truest, most honest thing I would ever share with that group.

  When I finished reading my introduction, there was a long moment of silence. Someone cleared their throat. The goth girl glared at me. Good Lord, those eyes. She had smudged gray and purple eye shadow all around them. Then I inappropriately lost myself in her eyes, actually staring into them because I thought I saw one red star in each of her eyes. I suddenly looked away, realizing she was probably wearing contacts and I was probably coming off like a loon.

  Then Mr. Hoffman, the Creative Writing teacher who ran the Creative Writing Club, stood up from the desk he had been sitting on and paced around the room a bit. “Interesting. Interesting. Good use of imagery there. Some great use of language. I particularly like the onomatopoeia you used in describing the sound of the ocean waves outside the castle. You have a very good imagination.”

  Onomato ... what? Onomato-tomato? And I have a very good imagination? What did he mean by that? Was that in reference to my having made up the entire thing, fabricating a reality that wasn’t my own?

  Shit.

  After Club, I picked my book bag up off the floor, slung it over my shoulder and headed for the door. Out in the hallway, stars-in-the-eyes caught up with me and asked if I wanted to go over to her house to talk about my story. Oh, great. She believed in faeries? She had a dungeon with torture paraphernalia that would make me confess the truth, that I was a total loser who could no more afford to go to Ireland than I could afford to buy a car and drive far away from this town?

  I thought it over. “Sure. I could do that. My mom’s usually busy this time of day.” Getting wasted, that is; and it sure would be nice to avoid that situation for a bit.

  “Say, isn’t your mom the new substitute Art teacher?”

  How did she know that? Stalker type?

  “Yeah, she’s substituted one day so far.”

  “Really, only one day? Well, I had her that day. She was pretty good.”

  I turned around and stared into her eyes. “Do you have stars in your eyes?”

  “Yup. It’s contacts. I’m wearing clear contacts with red stars on them.”

  “Do you see the stars? Do they bother you?”

  “Nope. I don’t see them. But other people do. It’s a concept: goth girl with stars in her eyes. Kind of ironic, don’t you think?”

  “I guess. Do you feel starry-eyed?”

  “Sometimes. Mostly when I think about the future.” She paused, kind of puffed out her chest. “I might look like a rebel, but I’m pretty smart and my grades are good. I have a strong survival instinct. I’m not getting stuck in this town. When I graduate high school, I’m goin’ off to some faraway college. Once I’m outta this stupid town, I’m reinventing myself. This place will kill your soul, if you let it, totally petrify it into a piece of dead wood. It’s a daily struggle not to die of boredom here. So, yeah I’m starry-eyed, I guess. I have dreams.”

  “Hmmm ... OK ... Good to know. So what’s your name?”

  “Anne Marie Green. My friends just call me Annie.”

  So totally unfair. The goth girl has a normal name.

  Annie pointed. “Over there. That’s our ride.”

  I looked in the direction she was pointing. There wasn’t any car. Just a black limousine parke
d at the curb across the street.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “You don’t see the limo?”

  “Oh, yeah, I see that. I was looking for something more...”

  “Ordinary? Nope. My parents don’t do ordinary. My mom’s baking cookies today, so she sent the limo to get me.”

  Baking cookies? I thought only TV moms did that.

  The limo was an odd experience for me. We sat in the back. The driver was courteous, but didn’t say much. Every passenger seat had a TV screen in front of it. And there were two bottles of soda set into the armrest between Annie and me.

  I liked it. I could get used to this.

  When we drove up to Annie’s house, my jaw dropped a bit. She lived in a mansion with turrets, multiple stone chimneys and a circular driveway in which a man impeccably dressed in a black suit waited to greet us. Ushered inside, we were met by a young woman wearing a maid’s outfit who directed us into the kitchen.

  The aroma in the kitchen was incredible: a mixture of chocolate, vanilla and butterscotch. The room was as large as the entire downstairs of my house and there were trays of assorted cookies on counters and tables.

  A petite woman with a smiling face and wisps of hair escaping from the tightly wound bun on top of her head pulled a tray of chocolate chip cookies from the oven. Then she walked over to Annie and did a kind of Hollywood thing, kissing her on each cheek without actually kissing her. It was a demonstration of air kisses. She actually kissed the air with “mwah, mwah” sounds. Ugh. No wonder Annie was goth. The air was thick with emotional emptiness.

  Annie snatched a chocolate chip cookie from the tray. “Can I fill out an order form to have cookies and milk delivered up to my room?”

  “Yes, you may; and thank you for asking so politely.”

  As her mom returned to baking, Annie walked over to a glass table. She picked up two forms and handed one to me. “Here, fill this out. Just pick out the kinds of cookies you’d like and pick a beverage. I like milk with my cookies. Then the butler will bring everything up to us.”

  Sweet. How do I get to move in here?

  Annie’s room put mine to shame. She had a window seat in a turret of the house, but nothing else about her personal space resembled mine. It was huge and decorated to perfection. Weird. I suddenly noticed that the room wasn’t the least bit goth. It was all pink and sunshiny gold.

  “Your room doesn’t look anything like you.”

  “No kidding. My mom lets me dress however I want, but ... and I quote, ‘You will not mar my house with your depressing goth style, young lady. Far after you outgrow your passing teenage phases, this house will be mine, and I believe in happiness. Perhaps a brightly decorated room will prevent you from sinking too deeply into a self-destructive level of depression that affects so many youth today.’”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.” There was a knock on the door. Annie smiled. “Although my life does come with cookies.”

  She opened her bedroom door. There stood a man wearing a butler’s tuxedo, holding a silver tray with plates of cookies, a pitcher and two glasses of milk. I felt as though I had walked into my TV set back at my old dilapidated house because, as far as I was concerned, old TV shows are the only place in which stuff like this actually happens.

  But, no, the cookies were real. And they were delicious—chocolate chips and buttery dough just kind of melting in my mouth.

  We didn’t do much, just talked for awhile. Annie filled me in on the kids and teachers at my new school, at least from her point of view. By the time she stood up and drew apart pink-and-gold striped velour drapes to reveal floor-to-ceiling windows, it was dusk. “Hey, Shade, this is my favorite time of day. Wanna go get pizza, then head on over to your house?”

  My heart leapt, as though trying to escape. “Why? My house isn’t much to look at.”

  She insisted. So we went outside. I thought we’d get a ride in the limo, but she decided we’d walk.

  “I want to talk to you about your Irish faerie story.”

  I thought that Annie’s house must be far away from mine because her neighborhood involved several levels of upgrade from mine. Certainly the limo ride filled with TV viewing and soda drinking seemed to fill up a long period of time. Maybe the limo driver took a longer route than necessary or maybe experiencing so many new things stretched out time for me, but Annie insisted she didn’t live that far away from me.

  She was right.

  We walked for forty-five minutes past increasingly depressed blocks of homes until we came to the pizza place Annie had in mind. A homeless guy had set up camp on the corner, sitting on top of some old newspapers, tattered edges rippling in the breeze. All around him, cigarette butts glowed faintly, threatening to ignite him. He took one look at us and asked for change. I thought Annie might oblige, but she turned away.

  Inside, the smell of oily pizza hung in the air. We ordered a large with everything on it. As we ripped slices from the pie, Annie asked me about the faeries.

  By then, I had concocted a story in my mind. I talked mostly about Irish castles I had seen in books and only briefly about faeries. The more Annie asked me about the faeries, the more details I created about them, just little by little.

  In the end, I had invented faeries that were about three inches in height with glittery transparent wings. In answer to Annie’s long list of questions, I said: yes, they had hair, in all sorts of colors; eyes, mostly blue and green, or the gorgeous combination of blue-green, and some had lavender eyes. They were impulsive and mischievous and sometimes they moved so quickly, you only caught a flash of movement or flutter of wings out of the corner of your eye.

  After we finished our pizza, it was time for us to walk the rest of the way to my house. I silently prayed that my mother had sobered up, cleaned up the wine and beer bottles and emptied her joint stubs from the ash tray. About mid-prayer, I realized the improbability of this. I decided, instead, to develop my recently discovered talent for lying. “Ummm, Annie ... When you meet my mom, if she’s home, you’ll have to excuse her. From what my grandmother told me, she most likely saw faeries when she was little. Apparently, they were bad faeries who pulled pranks on her and wouldn’t stop no matter how upset she got, and she’s never been the same after that. For as long as I can remember, my mom’s been kinda messed up.”

  Realizing that Annie might not believe in the existence of faeries, I fabricated a few more details, “Of course, my mother may have been experiencing hallucinations. She was hospitalized several times for psychotic episodes.” That last bit was partially true. More than once, a bad LSD trip had landed my mother in a hospital emergency room where she had been evaluated by a shrink.

  Annie looked down at the ground while I explained. Then she stopped walking and gave me a hug. “Don’t worry about it. I completely understand. I want to tell you something.”

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  Annie replied, “Let’s keep walking. I’ll tell you while we walk.”

  In the next fifteen minutes or so, the breeze picked up, shuffling bits of paper across the sidewalk, the moon peeked out from behind darkened clouds and Annie told me that she saw faeries all around her almost every day. “They’re more like specks than the humanlike faeries you described, but they talk to me. I can’t understand what they’re saying and that bothers me. I feel it’s important that I understand them. Sometimes, these faeries are bright spots of light. Other times, they’re all shadow, just dots of darkness hovering all about me.”

  Hoo-boy. I was in deep now. I wasn’t sure what to say. “We’ll work on it, Annie. I’m sure, over time, we’ll figure it out.”

  Annie smiled. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.”

  When we got to my house, my mom was passed out on the couch—still or again, I wasn’t sure which.

  There were more beer bottles than when I had left her that morning, also a half-finished bottle of vodka and a new joint barely touched. Yeah, I realized then that she had gotten
up before passing out again.

  Annie looked at her with an expression of pity.

  I grabbed a gray woolen blanket from the back of a chair, covered up my mom and checked her for breathing. She was alive. I suggested we go upstairs to my room.

  In my attic bedroom, Annie shivered. “There’s a presence here, I think.”

  “Or a draft. This house is old and drafty.”

  “Naw, I think it’s more than that.” She looked around nervously, then sat in the window seat and looked out at the night sky for a bit. “I think we should try to summon your faeries.”