Hollow Sight
Kristie Pierce
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to events, people, or locales are used fictitiously. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or persons or locales, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Kristie Pierce
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.
Photo Credit: Chelsey McNulty
Acknowledgements and Dedications
An ENORMOUS thank you to my dear friend, Bridget. You have given me the courage and belief that I often lack in myself throughout this entire imaginative process. From day one, you have been just as devoted to the story as I have. Your enthusiasm and eagerness to read each chapter fueled me to finish. Without you, this book may have never been printed.
Mom, there’s just simply too much to say. It’d be a book by itself. Without you, I’d be nowhere. Thank you. I love you.
Brian, my love, my life, thank you for tolerating my three-way with the computer. The late nights and the not-so-home-cooked meals were also a sacrifice for you. The boys, too. But they didn’t mind an extra Happy Meal here and there. Thank you, my little family, for supporting me throughout it all.
Chelsey, thank you for your photographic genius! I cannot tell you enough how much I appreciate you permitting me to share and use your photograph for my book cover. Much gratitude for the alterations made to fit the picture inside my head.
For Randee. Because I can.
Contents
Chapter One 1
Chapter Two 20
Chapter Three 35
Chapter Four 51
Chapter Five 64
Chapter Six 78
Chapter Seven 95
Chapter Eight 113
Chapter Nine 132
Chapter Ten 150
Chapter Eleven 163
Chapter Twelve 175
Chapter Thirteen 197
Chapter Fourteen 208
Chapter Fifteen 219
Chapter Sixteen 232
Chapter Seventeen 245
Chapter Eighteen 256
Chapter Nineteen 269
Chapter Twenty 283
Chapter Twenty-One 295
Chapter Twenty-Two 307
Chapter Twenty-Three 319
Chapter Twenty-Four 332
Chapter Twenty-Five 345
Chapter Twenty-Six 359
Chapter Twenty-Seven 375
Chapter Twenty-Eight 386
Chapter Twenty-Nine 397
Chapter Thirty 408
Chapter Thirty-One 420
Chapter Thirty-Two 436
Chapter Thirty-Three 449
Chapter Thirty-Four 459
Epilogue 471
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light...not our darkness...that frightens us.”
-- Marianne Williamson
Chapter One
The alarm woke me with a shock.
Summer vacation is over and I’m not used to being jolted out of sleep at an early hour. Even though I had planned to set my alarm every morning the week before my summer freedom was up, I could never bring myself to do it. I’ve never been much of a planner, so why start now?
I slam a heavy hand down on the little alarm clock located on the nightstand and lay in bed, eyes still closed, so wishing that I could just stay here. The more I think about how warm and snugly I am all wrapped up in my blankets, the less I want to move.
I’m more tired than normal. Last night wasn’t a quiet one for me. There was a constant buzzing thrumming in my head via voices that no one else can hear. Am I crazy? No. I think the more appropriate word would be gifted. Although, I’ve always thought the ability to see and hear dead people was more of a curse rather than a gift. It’s something that I’ve become quite good at shutting out, but when I’m relaxed or exhausted, my defenses are down. Way down. So much so, that everyone comes in tune more than I’d like. So, last night was spent with restless tosses and turns while I buried my head beneath my pillow attempting to ignore chit-chatty ghosts.
I hear my mother in the one bathroom that walls up next to my bedroom, running the sink water and closing the medicine cabinet. It’s still dark outside, making it all the while harder to convince myself to open my eyes. I curl my body up into a tight ball and hit the snooze button a second time. My body doesn’t want to respond to the command my brain is giving it – swing legs over, put feet to floor, stand up. It’s too early.
I listen to the cheerful birdsongs outside my east window that overlooks the backyard and wish that I could be that enthusiastic this early. I grudgingly open my unwilling eyes still thick with sleep to notice that there is a slight breeze coming in through the cracked window above my bed. The light wind is blowing the thin aqua curtain enough that I can see the sky turning dark lavender from the rising sun. The happy little bird chirps and whistles are interrupted then by the sound of my trusty German Shepherd, Abigail, whining with her nose more than likely pressed against my door. She’d heard my alarm and has decided that I’ve postponed getting up long enough. With a defeated sigh, I sit up stiffly and glare at the clock. Six-seventeen. Ugh.
After turning the alarm all the way off – no need to hear a mysterious beeping noise from the forgotten snooze button – I clumsily walk through my small square room, still groggy with sleep, managing to trip over a flip-flop in my path with the grace of an ox in a China shop, and open my sticky bedroom door. I drudge out of my room and reach down to lazily scratch my excited friend behind the ear as she leans her fuzzy head against my thigh. I stand, motionless in my doorway, staring at nothing in the tiny hallway in front of me and wonder idly if I should eat breakfast or take a shower first.
I’m not awake enough to eat, so therefore I don’t have an appetite. My body is still trying to register as to why I’m awake at this early hour. I inwardly sigh and veer toward the bathroom. Maybe the shower will help wake me up.
I meet my mother in the short hallway adjoining our rooms and the one bathroom as she’s leaving for work.
“Good morning, Miss Breckin,” she greets carefully, knowing I despise being up so early.
Eleanor – or Elly, as she prefers – is moving at a frantic pace, buzzing around gathering her keys and purse after throwing her shoes on without bothering to untie the already knotted laces. She must be running a bit late.
“Yeah,” I reply through a yawn.
“According to the weatherman, it’s supposed to be sunny and warm. So in translation: it’ll be hot and muggy,” my mother explains making a face. It’s a lot like looking in a mirror somehow when she does that. I have many of her facial expressions.
“Yippy. Okay, I’ll be sure to dress accordingly.” I answer, rolling my half-open eyes.
“Well, have a wonderful day at school,” she sings with a warm smile after kissing my cheek and then waving good-bye as she scurries to the back door. I should have probably returned her kiss or maybe even attempted a halfhearted hug. But all I could manage was stifling a dirty look.
She knows I’m not much of a morning person and never really attempts conversing with me until I’ve been awake for at least an hour. She has already been awake for a good two hours herself – or maybe not since she was in such a hurry – so that she could be ready and leave in time to arrive to work at six-thirty. I make a mental note to try and s
teer clear of professions that call for an extremely early work hour. Nine to five - yeah, that’s more to my liking.
It’s been just her and I since I can remember as she left my less that faithful father when I was just shy of a year old. Paul, an almost stranger to me, has never really been in my life. A kid apparently wasn’t too cool when you were busy running around living the single life – not that he stopped living that way when he was married. But thanks to him, my mom is now slightly jaded when it comes to relationships. She’s been on a few dates, but nothing that ever amounted to anything serious. Men are not her priority. Elly indulges herself in her work at the hospital, committing her time to patients, and what little spare time she has she spends with me or quietly at home.
Elly is admittedly a workaholic. She’s worked at the local hospital as an emergency room nurse from the time she’d graduated from nursing school at the ripe old age of twenty-two. She works ten hour days, five days a week, welcoming the overtime and takes call every other weekend. Something most people find absurd, but she wants to make sure as a single mother she can provide for the both of us. There are times that overtime payout is stopped due to budget cut backs at the hospital, so on those days Elly and I make it a point to spend some time together. Even if it’s a school day, she’ll pull me away from classes early so that we can maybe go out to lunch or to a movie. Perhaps even make the hour drive to the nearest mall just to poke around in the store - not that I’m much of a shopper. I can tell her anything, and usually do. We have no secrets. She and I get along great as I’ve always felt like I’m more of an adult than a child or adolescent, and I consider her to be my best friend.
We live in a little one-story ranch style house just outside of town that we had moved into when I was a toddler. It was a nice change from the small two bedroom apartment we had resided in previously. It’s perfect for just her and me. It’s quiet here, which I like, but not located too terribly far away from civilization. The house is, like my room, square but cozy. A small living room in the front that connects to a rarely used dining area that then attaches to an outdated L-shaped kitchen with its dated wooden cupboards and lumpy linoleum floors. When you walk to the back of the house, there is immediately the one bathroom with my room to one side and Elly’s to the other. Most of the house is painted in warm earthy tones and we still have the original furnishings Elly had scrounged to buy when I was a baby. But it’s all hers alone and she loves it.
I stand in the shower motionless for a long time, letting the hot water run over my stiff body until it runs cool and I’m forced to get out. I decide I’d better start getting ready. Heaven forbid I be late on the first day of school. I wrap myself in an oversized towel and wind my hair in another on top of my head. I shuffle to my room and then open my closet with a little feeling of loathing. I’m unsure what I am going to wear, and if I wasn’t such a procrastinator I would have laid out my clothes the night before – or at least had an idea as to what I’d wear. I’m a jeans-and-T-shirt kind of girl, but today promises to be too hot for that. I decide on khaki shorts and a light-green, semi-fitted polo. After dressing and heading back to the bathroom, I dry my hair until it’s straight-ish and then go over it with a flatiron, straightening from the crown and then curling it at the ends (yes, curling with a flatiron). An always time consuming task since my hair is all the way down my back, but if I don’t want to look as though I’ve stuck my finger in an electric socket, all the fuss over my hair has to be done. It’s always the longest part in my morning routine.
Brushing my teeth, I stare back at the girl in the mirror mimicking my every move. My skin is still golden, glowing with a delicious tan showing proof of the summer vacation I’m leaving behind. The tan brings out the freckles I have peppered across my cheeks and nose though and I think they make me look like I’m twelve years old. My brown eyes match my brown hair, although my hair has soft honey highlights from the many hours I’d spent in the sun over the last three months. My lips are full (something I hate because I’d been made fun of for it in my earlier adolescent years – I’d been told they didn’t match my face) and I have fairly straight teeth thanks to braces in the ninth and tenth grade. However wearing my retainer was something I often forgot to do, and my teeth aren’t celebrity-straight anymore. Oh well. I kind of like my smile not being picture perfect. I am what I think to be short, but thin and tone thanks to many years of swim training and running, although I’ve never had any desire to join the track team. I snort. Run for fun, my mom always says.
I rinse out my mouth and quickly apply some black mascara. I own tons of makeup but never wear anything too bold. My lipstick of choice is usually one of the many flavored chapsticks I own – nothing to grab attention to my clown mouth. I snatch a tube from my dresser and shove it into my shorts pocket as I slip on a pair of flip-flops and am now thankful that I was feeling girly the night before and painted my toes a summery coral color. I double check my bag, making sure I have all the normal back-to-school criteria, wallet, and then sling it over my shoulder. Glancing at the clock I realize I’m late. Great. I guess it’s a granola bar for breakfast – not much time to eat now, I hadn’t realized how slow I’d really moved this morning. Snatching my truck keys, I pat Abigail on the head as she escorts me to the door and head out to face the day ahead.
“Have a wonderful day at school! You big senior, you!” Sera shouts as I gallop down the three stairs leading to the garage. I jump in my skin. I’ll never get used to her showing up out of nowhere the way she always does.
As I’m driving to the first day of my last year of high school, I can’t help but to be hyperaware of the overwhelming feeling of relief and excitement I’m consumed with. Relief because it’s my senior year and there is light at the end of the tunnel. The long, dark, torturous tunnel known as high school. I feel like I have made it through my sentence. And excitement, well, because like any seventeen year old school girl, I am in fact, a senior! This year promises to be better than all the others, or so I hope. But as I think between the two emotions, relief is definitely the stronger of the two. I’ve never enjoyed school all that much and it isn’t due to the brain-blowing educational curriculum I’ve suffered through. Certain peers in my class – the girls in particular – have made school seem like a personal existing hell for me. The phrase “mean girls” is putting it lightly. I have always been the type to want to get along with everyone, trying to make someone’s bad day brighter and listening when anyone needs a shoulder to cry on. I never want to be on anyone’s bad list and don’t like turmoil surrounding me. For some-odd reason, I’ve always felt the need to put things right and I have always believed life is too short for enemies. But unfortunately with raging hormones and catty girls out for blood and a top rank it high school society, that’s not usually the case for me.
I do have a few friends. I never thought myself to be popular but it’s not like I’m an outcast either. I hang out with them from time to time, but never feel the urge to have set plans every spare chance I have. I’m quite content with being by myself most days and I usually spend my time writing, drawing, or listening to music. Quiet is something I enjoy and even look forward to. With unwanted visitors constantly breaking their way through to unknowingly scare me or just pop in, I find that silence really is golden.
The drive isn’t long to the small high school – only about ten minutes as is everything else in the area. I have always enjoyed the drive because it’s a pretty one. The roads are surrounded by green leafed trees and quaint little Amish homes scattered every quarter mile or so with the occasional ranch style house like my own. The spaces in between hold wide open fields with flat tree lines and small foot hills. It’s a beautiful sight; however I could go without the occasional smell from the local farms.
The weather man was right; it is warm this morning – a typical August morning in southern Michigan. Warm, but not terribly humid yet and there are only a few light puffy clouds dotted here and there in the blue sky. I never did un
derstand why school started the week before Labor Day. Couldn’t we just start the Tuesday after the holiday? Administration staff probably figured one more week of purgatory wouldn’t kill us.
Coming into the small town of Quinton, the speed limit slows as I approach the city limits. I come to the one stop light at the main four corners and wait for it to turn green. I glance around at the small shops lining the main road and notice some of the other high school kids at the gas station across the street. The light turns green and I slowly drive through as the lolly-gaggers are still in the middle of the street, laughing and glaring as I impatiently wait for them to pass. The school is only a couple more side streets away and the little roads are quite crowded with other pedestrians, school buses, and cars. The one town officer sits parked on the curb connecting the student parking lot to the street, eyeballing all of the hoodlums driving past. I smile attentively when he sneers at me – I always get eyeballed because my Bronco’s exhaust is overly loud. Loud, but I am proud to admit not illegal, thank you very much.
After making my way past the cruiser and pulling into the petite, overcrowded parking lot, I see all the familiar faces of my one hundred-and-something class hurriedly walking to the gymnasium. That is where the entire high school population meets for the first day of school to do a sort of kick-off to the new school year. Once inside, we’ll be sectioned off by last name groupings to assign lockers and hand out class schedules. I slow into a spot way in the back of the lot and cut the engine to my black, (okay, black had once been the dominate color but now she’s rusty-blackish-gray) senile Bronco and grab my bag from the passenger seat. I sit for a minute, staring at the big monotonous brick building in front of me, then take a deep breath and jump down from the driver’s seat. Elly wasn’t sure on my decision to drive an old Bronco, but she agreed once I’d convinced her it would be better in the snow. Big tires, more traction. Plus she’s a four-by-four. But that wasn’t why I’d wanted her. I really liked all her unique qualities with her soft-top roof and the idea of being able to take the top down in the summer like a small car convertible, letting my hair whip around in the wind, the warmth of the sun on my cheeks. I’d never really liked little cars anyway; the big clunkers were what grabbed my eye. Plus she was cheaper because she’s old – less for insurance, too – although she’s a thirsty wench and does drink a lot of petro.
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