by T. Rudacille
***
We sat up with the blinds closed, dreading the moment when night fell, though we never said that out loud. I tried to remain as optimistic as I could when I knew down to my core that we would be seeing our freakish visitor again. Alice shook her head every time I tried to say that we wouldn’t until finally I stopped speaking all together, realizing that she didn’t need me or anyone else to lie for her sake.
As we sat in silence on her bed, my mind traveled back to when we first decided to go from being friends to boyfriend and girlfriend. Immediately, her mother and father objected, saying that it didn’t matter how far we had come as a society, we would still face the same barriers and prejudice interracial couples had always faced. Alice was young and naïve, they said, if she believed otherwise. But she was stubborn and so sure of the fact that we were meant to be. She didn’t hesitate to tell her parents that she saw herself ending up with me.
Young and naïve, they said again. Even if it weren’t an issue of me being black and her being white, the chances of us staying together for the rest of our lives or even through college were slim to none.
My parents were a little gentler about the whole thing, retelling all the stories they had been told by their friends who had married outside of their own race.
“Do you all have any idea what year it is?!” I had exclaimed furiously. “We’re past this! You claim society is going to object, but it’s just you! It’s just you and her parents! I’m surprised the four of you don’t get along better given the fact that your beliefs are exactly the same. Besides, we don’t even live in the south!”
They had tried to say that down in the southern states, we would face the worst of it.
“Good thing we’re not planning on moving to Texas, then, right?” I had laughed at the sheer ludicrousness of it all. They were out of touc,h and they just didn’t like her, for no reason I could pin down in certainty.
“Besides, Quinn, you shouldn’t be asking us if we know what year it is. You should be asking the people who will give you a problem over this.” My dad had reasoned, “It’s not right and it’s not fair, but it is reality. You understand that, don’t you?”
“It’s not reality! You two and her parents have no idea what you’re talking about! And it doesn’t matter what you say, okay? We’re going to be together.”
A teenage boy proclaiming his undying love for his girlfriend with all the naivety and idealism in the world is hardly front page news. Our parents projecting a completely ridiculous notion of racial prejudice to keep us apart was hardly a new tactic of division. But the situation we found ourselves in that night was so out of the ordinary that to tell anyone about it would surely have guaranteed our swift departure to separate mental hospitals.
“I just don’t want to see it again, okay?” Alice whispered to me, and I looked up at her, seeing the darkness reflected on her face now instead of the fading streak of light I had seen before. We both turned our heads to the window.
“I don’t think it’s out there.”
I stood up to go look, but she grabbed my arm.
“Quinn!” She exclaimed, “Just keep the blinds closed. Please?”
I nodded, and we sat back down, waiting for any sign of its presence, be it a scratch, a heavy breath, or its blood-chilling voice.
“We’re being so stupid.” I told her as I laid on her bed staring up at the ceiling. The sun had gone down two hours earlier.
“Do you think so? Do you think it really was just a stupid kid in the neighborhood?” She asked, her eyes moving between me and the window.
“Or it was a group hallucination.” I replied, grinning.
“Shut up! It was not a group hallucination!” She laughed and smacked me with a pillow.
“It was. You’re just in denial.”
“I am not in denial. Let’s just go to sleep.” She told me, still smiling. “It’s freaking hot in here. I’m opening the window.”
“Yeah, it’s hot because some people don’t know how to use thermostats.”
“Shut up!”
She grabbed the blinds and pulled them down slightly so that they flung up.
We both gasped, her covering her mouth to prevent the scream that rose quickly in her throat.
The thing was outside again, staring in at us with the faintest trace of a smile on its contorted mouth.
It was playing with us.
