Deception (2 page)

We’ll come seek you on one hallowed eve

When grace upon you is in full bloom

A queen emerges among us all

To take us into a peaceful rule

A prince will name her to his own

Guard her well from friend or foe

Come seek us at the pass

Otherwise, you shall not last.



Dreams are like clouds.  They wisp away like seconds on a clock and leave a person unsatisfied with whether it was real or imagined.

I woke from my second dream, one that will never come true no matter how much it seems real in my head, about two in the morning.  It was too early to do anything but grow too tired to think in class, so I slammed my body back down on the bed and hit the alarm clock by accident. I hid under the pillow hoping for just a few extra measly minutes but a sudden banging sound came from outside my balcony though it was my bedroom door that creaked open.

“You okay?” came Miss Dan’s voice, the too short, plump don’t-mess-with-me live in housekeeper. Persistence was her middle name. She could probably convince a cat to take a water bath.  “I heard your alarm.”

“Yes!  Just dreaming the impossible dream,
again
!” I sighed heavily looking up to find her staring at the balcony door. No doubt, she owned the ears of a cat if she heard not just the alarm, but whatever animal landed on my balcony. She peeked out the thick curtain, them peeled it back. The sound of her clicking her tongue aimed with the shake of her head said she was not happy but when she turned, she was smiling. “Do you need something to help you back to sleep?”

Sometimes Miss Dan would make warm milk and heat up a muffin to help me get back to sleep. Mostly when I was younger, but sometimes I still pouted out my lip and followed her downstairs. 

Miss Dan closed the door slowly enough I sighed again and closed my eyes ignoring her kindness. I really was extremely tired from studying for the trig test that would now be here in just a few hours.  Ugh!  I stomped my feet against the topside of the bed in exhaustion then rolled over mummifying the sheets and warm quilt around me. The book under my pillow I'd ignored for weeks now fell to the floor. Too much
crazy
in my life at the moment. Lying still, I thought of things forbidden. Events that will never happen. A place that doesn’t exist. Though it seems so real in my mind, it isn't.

Oddly, I fell right back to sleep and…dreamed again.

The garden of strange creatures surrounded filling me with awe and fear in the same moment. I measured my walk through the lush green carpet of grass with a shimmering silver light glowing around me that was keeping beat with my stride. The lights reflected the dress I wore. The scent of roses all around. I felt like a princess. From the darkness a shadow seemed to almost float closer to my dream self. I watched the beautiful boy move towards me in slow motion though his face unclear. It was his clothes, so foreign, so regal that made me think him handsome. When he was almost upon me he pulled a dagger from his side and started to plunge it into my chest. Before he could—
Ian, my best friend, invaded the dream, pulled me to safety while falling into his arms and we both stayed there looking into each other’s eyes while he held me suspended in air. The dark prince-like boy always disappeared when Ian broke in.

  Or at least, that’s how my mind rearranged the events. Over the years, I’d been able to alter the dream a little, but it always began the same way. The ending, I always kept to myself, but told the beginning to Ian when I had the dream the first time at twelve. I so often babbled about my princes and princesses and the tall towers and dragons and he’d usually laugh and say “There’s no such thing as dragons.”  After that, he’d ask daily if I’d dreamed my little dream making me nervous all over again. It never failed. I told him the same thing every time letting it become our morning ritual before school.   “I was walking through a luscious green garden area dressed in a long emerald green ballroom gown and an elf prince dude walked in smiling but pulled out a knife and…”

I
told
Ian that’s the part woken up to every time. Always with a blush, I waited for his usual response--to ask if that was it or did a new ending come about, for I was able to expand the ending every time in my dreams if wanted. I vowed never to tell him I’d been dreaming about
him
for years. 

That was yesterday. If I'd known that a few days from now there were evils of the world more than just bullies and jocks and worlds existed with magic and dead kings who left behind handsome princes and queens who are prophesied to save the world, then I'd have jumped ship long ago.

The time on the dash of my old beat up Mazda as I yanked the steering wheel into the rain slick blacktop of the West Fort High School parking lot showed six past the hour. Late again. A look around for a parking spot as well as a certain individual warranted no motorcycle in sight, not a spot for my car. Most of the vehicles in the parking lot were not amazing, but mine stood out in a scary way with all its rust. At least I had a car, I cheerfully reminded myself. Most people were bused into school.

The ten-mile drive on the Ozark mountain road was dangerously curvy year round, but today water was on the road from yesterday’s rain and it was like soap lined the way.  I’d been on it many times. The interstate ran between home and school, but my mom wouldn’t let me drive on it.  Yep!  I took the back roads. Living in the little town of Winslow with the population of less than four hundred wasn’t terrible since I had my other best friends here, but they rode in with their mom or on the bus. My mom wouldn’t let me do that either. 

And above all that, just twelve miles the other direction and I could be hiking in Devil’s Den which sounded very tempting at the moment. The trail was amazingly calming and thrill seeking simultaneously the higher I climbed.  Sighing, I walked through the parking lot surveying the beautiful autumn trees to the left that led to the national forest. It was as if summer had never happened. 

I loved school, loved facts, reading, new information, but sometimes I felt imprisoned. Geeky on the inside, I called it. All of the credits I needed to graduate were completed last year but my parents wouldn’t let me finish till I was eighteen. Something about “it’s a magic all it’s own” and “there’s a certain age where certain events start to happen”. My parents were determined to make it difficult.  I’d even been given college credit that left me asking why I even needed to go to school for the last year, but my mother insisted. But none of that mattered and before long, I was leaving to go somewhere—I just didn’t know where yet. No more being locked inside this fortified prison. Free. I wanted to be freed.

“Because no one should miss their senior year in high school. This is a time in your life to make goals, a normal process in life,”
my dad argued like he was in the courtroom even at home. I rarely heard my dad speak, so I held on to the words dearly. And he knew very well nothing was normal about me.

“Honey, you’ll have plenty of time to find out what your destiny in life is.”  My mom patted my arm as my dad shook his head. He didn’t believe in destiny. He didn't believe in anything but paperwork and laws and human rights. He believed in justice for the wronged. Or at least, this was his repeated mantra of testimony.

“Why can’t I just get my GED and be done.  I’m just going to open my own greenhouse and nursery anyway. I don’t need anything but a green thumb for that. And besides define normal process. Completely overrated.”  

I could share most of my anxieties with my best friend, but Ian kept an emotional blockade up when I brought up such things. He called it delusional in a fun way to make it seem less "freakish".  But I wasn't the only one. He had moments people labeled him the same. Like the time he just disappeared from the parking lot or from class. He always had an answer for it.

I’d prefer to just study the dreams of my own liking, realities that can actually exist and not reoccur in silly dreams. Travel to odd places and discover their real truths of the world no one knows. My father called me a
dreamer!
My mother
called me
indecisive!  My
own accord
, free thinker!

A horn honked waking me out of my stupor. The soles of my shoes lifted as I sprang upward at a laughing disembodied voice coming from the car parked in the no parking zone. I looked everywhere for the voice but nothing. It happened often enough I kept a straight face. Sure the voice sounded like the mindless jock idiot Kin who wouldn’t leave me alone so I cursed his name to the wind, but that still made me labeled crazy for hearing it in the first place. If it was him, he’d at least done me a favor and disappeared. My hands were burning hot coals like every other time Kin was near alerting me to turn the other direction. I wondered what he lived in to smell as such. A run down shack with firewood to chop to stay warm. In the summer months? And the smell of burning rubber stuck with him to. I assumed it was the motorcycle. Like my own evil jock too close alert system.

Walking slow, because I was already late anyway, I reminded myself how real the latest dream was. Really a nightmare, it surfaced and played out in my sleep twice last night, the first not as great an ending by the way I awoke. Kin was there, in my bedroom, standing over me at my balcony. I awoke screaming and Miss Dan was there. I heard a lot of shuffling like there was a fight going on outside my bedroom door, but chalked it up to imagination and fear. Miss Dan had a way of doing just that, making the bogeyman run away. She was more affectionate with me than my own mother sometimes. Miss Dan was just that way.

Another person present in my life, Caylie. She's been my best friend since junior high. I needed Caylie. Without her, no one would listen to my sob stories in life, except my one other best friend and he was often difficult to talk to since he was mostly the topic of conversation.  Yet, only Caylie
could
, and
would
, listen to my pitiful droning on and on about Ian.   She’d been there when I’d developed a terrible crush on my other best friend years ago. She’d listen when I vented about how he seemed to never notice me in
that way.
  I was just plain, ordinary me.  Caylie thought I should have given up long ago, but she just didn’t understand how drawn to him I felt.  Caylie secretly always rationalized that he never went away either way.  He seemed to always be around. Caylie, who never judged, never let it go much further than that. 

And my obsession with saving the trees was beyond Caylie’s understanding also.  Not much in common but friends through and through. 

Ian, my other best friend, he's
different
. Different
good
, not different
bad
!  He accepts the crazy ideas and sometimes helps research my favorite freaky stuff even if he calls it just so. He was very supportive of my vision of wanting to visit other worlds and dreaming about exploring places that probably don’t exist. He listened when I needed to just explore the possibilities and even claimed he'd drive me wherever whenever. But he stayed in that frame of mind sometimes staring at me for lengths of time like he wanted to say something more of the idea, but never spoke. At the very mention of fairy tales being originally true at one time makes him uncomfortable. It was mostly a joke the first time mentioned, but with his uncomfortable state, I forced the conversation often just to see him squirm. I didn't believe in them myself. 

My life will forever be boring, uneventful, and sad because one day I will be alone and Ian will leave. Fairy tales do not come true.

He said he never dreamed. Everyone dreams. But he always said if he could dream he’d dream of being in the woods. When I asked for him to clarify more specifically, it amounted to living in the woods, survive off it, things like that. Nemophilist!  One who loves the woods!  He always had a woodsy smell I loved. His dreams seemed to mimic his scent. 

I tried to listen to him when he needed it, but he never seemed to worry about anything except his mother’s overbearing nature who was never at home. In kindergarten he announced in class he’d lost his dad at an early age. That is an
early
age. I was young then and didn’t appreciate my parents like most five year olds. That had to be hard to grow up with, but he always seemed reserved and at peace with it. Yet with all that, he never really seemed to have normal, everyday childhood or teenage worries. 

Trigonometry class was already in full swing. Everyone else was already seated, so of course, I made the trek with an audience. Keeping my eyes on the floor, my seat was near the back and an eternity walk of indirect unwanted attention. A boy at the front of the class whistled as I passed him making me blush.   Another student waited patiently when I turned away with my slip.  I did a double take realizing I recognized Christian watching, a boy who was in most of my same senior classes and bused tables at the local fast food place.  His angular face was covered in stubble like he was older than the rest and smiling my way.  I returned a polite smile and pushed on smelling the sooty fireplace he always seemed to have on him.  I wondered if it came from his home and his parents kept a fire going year round. I wondered other things about him too. 

He makes the bad boy look so…so…say yes to him no matter what he’s really like. Just to have him. He was mysterious to all I assumed with the looks he gets from girls who never get the courage to speak to him. Even when he’s fresh from the shower, he smells of a burning fire.
I only know this because sometimes his hair was wet when he took off his bike helmet in the mornings before school.

Josie, the dark haired beauty in the second seat behind him, coughed as I passed never glancing up. She was always asking for Ian’s attention in numerous ways, but he only gave minimal reactions to her flirting and attempts to steal his smile lately.  She’d suddenly found him attractive and interesting this year and the one girl who found the guts to act on it. For most he was labeled like me, but that was appealing to some girls it seemed. 

  Ian was in the next seat, so a careful look up to see his lazy grin shining at
me
, not her made it worth the misery.  He raised an eyebrow to indicate, “You’re late!”  I wanted to stick my tongue out but knew it was childish and new my reactions were only do to the nervous tension between of late. I was much too inexperienced to interpret guys and their hidden meanings and this one I felt like I knew well.  It was just the enjoyment guys in general found in tormenting the female mind.  And he was at it a lot lately.  A lot!

Another glance at Josie beside Ian proved a glare making a satisfactory smile trace my lips. I silently shouted out with everything I had that he was awesomeness way before she noticed him. I certainly did. One peek at Ian out from behind a trail of blonde haze made it obvious the book in front of me was a guise.  He was looking at his but smiling still. No way was he reading. His own look held much of the same, but in a more princely way. It really sucks to be in love with your best friend.

A boy named Ben sat in front of me who took a turn at the rehearsed coughing he sometimes graced the class with.  His leg swung out sideways to be sure I saw him.  He was nice, but I wasn’t interested.

  I glanced over at Kin adjacent to me.  He was bothering the girl in front of him with a pencil top on the back of her neck.  Rachel was a shy, insecure girl.  She’d been impressed with my photography of various senior class pictures they’d displayed in the weekly school newspaper this semester.  She had talent.  I, Grace Starmen, on the other hand, was talented at just about nothing.  I wasn’t on any committee, club, or team unless you count the “tree huggers” group.

Rachel's black hair was pulled up into a tight ponytail that made her eyebrows arch higher than ought too.  She was trying hard to ignore Kin by clearing her throat to attract the teacher’s attention who didn't seem to notice anything even though Kin’s body was obviously leaning too far over the row line with his extremely long legs to not be noticed. Six and a half feet tall, he was.  He must bribe the teachers with money to avoid punishment as often as he did.

I felt sorry for Rachel so I reached down to my backpack, pulled up a gummy bear from my front pocket stash, and pegged Kin in the back of the head.  He whirled around throwing his potent stench at me with his livid anger.  I chose to look down at that point seriously contemplating why I was so in tune with my sense of smell in the last year or two.  It was like some people had their own scent and the rest not at all.  At least the guys around me did.  The girls didn’t seem to have any other than rotating perfumes. 

Kin.  Burnt rubber.

The Christian guy.  Fire.

And Ian.  The woods, trees, the earth.  All of it. 

No other.  These three seemed to leave trails.  Bread crumbs of their determined  existence to track and follow my every move it seemed.

And didn't make sense years ago and it doesn't now.

Another peek showed Kin still pointing his dagger eyes.  As if realizing his display of being volatile piece of nastiness, he straightened himself, rearranged his face with a pretend smile, and mouthed the words, “Drop dead, princess!”

Across the marquee of my mind scrolled, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”  Or do they?  Keeping my gaze above the classroom door to read the quote that I had read every day as I left the classroom and I thought of Kin everyday when I did, but it wasn't there. The quote was missing because I wasn’t in English class yet where it was located, but I could see it perfectly. “Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care, for people will hear them and be influenced by them for
good
or
evil
.”  This would was full of both.  Buddha had that part right!  Was he referring to Kin in particular? I chuckled.  Kin was back to the evil stare when I looked up.  Definitely good and evil!  Mostly evil!  Yes, he was the kind of guy who made you feel fond of the big bad wolf.  Befriend him even just to protect you from ones worse than Kin and other baddies out there.  The lesser of two evils.