I had an IUD put in a while ago, and while they did give me literature on it, they really didn't make it clear that it would turn me into a psychotic, emotional disaster. The newest side effect was intensely painful cramps which came on suddenly and made it impossible to stand or walk. As a mom of two incredibly active kids, this is not okay. It was really scary, but they did eventually pass. I'm starting to wonder if it is worth it and also what kind of things it is doing to my body. It all feels very unnatural.
It's starting to affect my daily life. Some days I cannot control my mood swings and I get bent out of shape by the smallest things. Not good for a mom or someone who works with middle schoolers. I didn't expect these kinds of side effects, and I'm hoping they will wear off after a while. I don't feel like myself. I feel like I'm pregnant only without the benefit of a baby. The whole point is to not get pregnant again, and I don't want to experience the pregnancy symptoms either.
This blog is supposed to be about my writing, but some things need to be purged from my soul. I can't write or do anything I normally would when I am curled up in a ball crying or freaking out because someone at work said I was stressed out. It makes me feel like I'm crazy, and I hate feeling that out of control. I really hope it is the IUD and not just my sanity diminishing.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Saying goodbye to fear
I find fear fascinating. Fear controls so much of who we are and what we do. I'm an extremely fearful person. I'm afraid of spiders, heights, interactions with people, people not liking me, etc. Writing and theatre are the two areas of my life where I refuse to be fearful. I think it's because I love doing both and want to do them for the rest of my life. Neither are things where you can be afraid of rejection. I'm learning to just say F-it and let people think what they will. You can't make everyone like you. This is something I have struggled with my entire life and am just barely starting to accept. I've spent a long time trying to make everyone like me and feeling like no does. I'm not doing that anymore. I am who I am. I do what I do. I write what I write.
Monday, October 26, 2009
the next phase
I've finished the second revision on my 2nd book. Today, I'm going to give it to a couple students I work with in theatre and have them read and critique it for me. I wrote it for a middle grade/young adult audience, so I am excited to hear their feedback. I think I'm going to have them fill out a questionaire after they finish reading it, but I'm not sure what to put on it.
While they're reading my book, I'm going to start on a draft of my query letter. I learned a lot from writing the last one, and I think I will end up with a better one this time around. The query letter is difficult because you only have one page to catch the agent's attention, summarize your book, and give all the other pertinent information. It seems simple, but it's hard to fit it all onto one page.
For anyone who doesn't know the process, a query letter is what you send to literary agents in the hope that they will be interested enough by it to request the full manuscript. If they like the manuscript and think it is something they can sell, they send you a contract. Most of them ask for the query letter and the first chapter. I think that the first chapter of THE LAST WITCH OF NORG HALLOW is pretty catchy, but I'd love another opinion about it. I'm going to include it in this post for anyone to read and comment on.
I'm looking forward to receiving feedback on this project. I'm putting my writing out a little more, and it is scary and exciting. I've also been working on a musical with my husband, and now our good friend is going to collaborate on it as well. It's a project I have wanted to do for a long time, and I think things are finally coming together. It's going to be a lot of fun, and hopefully, when we're done, we'll have something our theatre company can put on stage. It's going to be a whole new experience, and I'm excited to see what happens.
Thought of the Day:
I love this time of day. Early morning to me is the calm before the storm. The kids are asleep. The house is quiet except for the kitten playing with his toy mouse in the kitchen. I have a cup of tea and my laptop and a little silence. I don't need anything more.
THE LAST WITCH OF NORG HALLOW
Chapter 1
The house at 1558 Bellevale Road was a sprawling old Victorian, warped out of its once graceful shape by additions of indeterminate age and time period. It looked like a Gothic castle only somewhat successfully joined with something out of a science fiction novel. The house was enormous and sat upon fifteen acres of sprawling marsh and bog and a forest of gnarled, ancient trees. The final touch was the backyard, which boasted large, colorful gardens seemingly misplaced against the muted greens and grays of an enormous hedge maze.
The house itself was massive and ancient. The boards groaned underfoot, and there were hundreds of secret passageways and false walls. I always imagined the previous owner as a thin, little man with a large, round head that shone in the firelight. I saw him slipping away into dark, secret rooms and having hushed meetings with mysterious visitors in the night. Sometimes my daydreams wandered into the realm of ghosts and vampires, but it gave me nightmares, and I had to stop.
I had lived in the house with my great grandmother, Valencia Valdala, since I was five years old. Valencia was gloomy and strange, and she muttered to herself constantly. Her wiry body was strong, though she was ninety-four the summer of my sixteenth year. She liked to be alone and rarely spoke to me, though when she did she seem to like me well enough. She took me in when my mother and father died in a car accident. I was home with Valencia when it happened. I’ve tried to remember them, but the memories are fragmented and infrequent. I remember my mother’s face, but it is fuzzy and out of focus. My father is more a scent, a certain aftershave. I smelled in once in a store when I was ten, and it knocked me down. I came to in the employee lounge, with Valencia hovering above me, anxiously gripping my shoulder and yelling at the paramedics.
The locals think the house is haunted. It was owned briefly by a man who went crazy one night and cut up his wife. He kept her in a giant walk-in freezer, one of the uglier additions that jutted off the western corner of the house like a big, metal boil. Her ghost is said to haunt the addition and walks the halls every night at midnight. I’ve never seen her, but I avoid the freezer. There are many rooms in the house that Valencia has deemed off limits, usually to keep her many knick-knacks and antiques safe, but the freezer wasn’t one of them. She didn’t use it. It was only slightly cooler than the rest of the house. Valencia had filled it floor to ceiling with her stuffed animal collection. She had dogs, cats, monkeys, and jaguars. The largest was a massive grizzly bear with teeth that looked like long, glistening knives. Its claws were longer than my hand and looked razor sharp. It was terrifying.
I had seen it only once, the one time I visited the freezer. I had heard the kids at school talking about it and wanted to see if anything weird happened. Nothing happened. The room just seemed sad to me, filled with death and left to sit forgotten and gathering dust. The grizzly was the only thing that frightened me. I had dreams about it for months. It was alive again and hunting me. Wherever I went it was always just behind, and I would feel its hot breath on my neck before waking in a cold sweat with my heart pounding.
The kids at school kept away from me, as if the house had tainted me with its grisly past. In addition to the rumored haunting, Valencia was deemed a witch because she went about talking to herself and glaring at anyone who met her eye. She dressed in dark dresses and long, flowing skirts, and her hair was a halo of gray frizz. I tried asking her to tone down her erratic behaviors, but she only looked down at me and gave me a rare, beaming smile.
“Let ‘em talk, dear. It’s good for the imagination.”
I had started doing most of the errands in town myself to avoid more speculation, and I walked into town at least once a day. The house was located at the end of a mile long drive that twisted through the tall pine trees surrounding the house. The drive joined a dirt road that led into the town. At the corner sits the only house within four miles of ours, a large brick monstrosity, dotted with windows like sleepless eyes, staring back at you without blinking.
It stood empty until that summer. I had just turned sixteen, celebrating this milestone birthday with a small, store bought cake that I purchased myself. Valencia serenaded me with her crackly voice, and when I blew out the candles I made a wish. I had never done it before. The only wish I ever really had was for my parents to still be alive, and that wasn’t possible.
My sixteenth birthday was different. The end of tenth grade was approaching, and summer loomed before me. The other kids still avoided me. My name was something that could only be spoken in hushed tones amidst a tight group of bodies huddled against the lonely outsiders. During the entire last year, only four students had even said hello to me. One was Tiffany Brenwick, the bubbly blonde whose smile was like a flame, attracting others to her. There was a choreography to it. The jostling of bodies as they each tried to position themselves closest to her. She was nice to everyone, and she made a point of saying hello to those of us who could not be accepted into her sphere.
I was thinking about Tiffany, who had already been assured her place on the varsity cheerleading squad next year, as I trudged home, carrying two bags of groceries and my backpack. As I neared the drive, I noticed a large moving van parked outside the house on the corner. Two burly men in Rick’s Moving Company t-shirts and dirty jeans were hefting a sofa, while a tiny, beetle-like woman scuttled back and forth, nervously giving them directions.
There was a squeal from inside the house, and a teenage boy raced out of the house carrying his little sister on his shoulders. She had her arms flung up in the air and screamed with wild joy as he ran across the lawn toward the edge of the forest. The mother paused and shot a frightened look at her children before smiling and turning back to the two goliaths still grunting under the weight of her floral printed couch.
The boy swung his sister down to the grass, and she ran to embrace her mother. He looked at me, and I blushed and looked away. I’d grown used to being ignored, and I reacted with terror when someone actually looked me in the eye. His eyes were a startling light blue, ice blue is what it should be called.
I walked a little faster and kept my eyes on the road. My bags were heavy. I had planned to stop and rest at the house before continuing up the drive, and my shoulders were burning. The handles of the bags were cutting into my palms, and my fingers felt numb. There were footsteps behind me, going faster than mine, catching up to me. I looked up, and he was standing beside me. He smiled, a sliver of white in his tanned, handsome face. He brushed a strand of golden hair from his eyes and reached out to take my bags.
“Here, let me take those. They look heavy. My name’s Blade.”
“Blade?” I couldn’t suppress my surprise.
“My old man’s idea.” He sighed. “Long story.”
We walked along in silence. I knew I needed to speak, but I hadn’t spoken with anyone other than Valencia in years. I struggled for words, any words to end the silence. I started listening to the sound of our footsteps. We were walking in sync, our steps a simple choreography. He laughed out loud, and I jumped. The sound seemed so foreign surrounded by the heaviness of the trees.
“You’re a quiet one, huh? No problem. I can talk forever. I just hope you don’t mind me rattling on.” He flashed me another pearly white smile.
“I don’t mind,” I squeaked. “I’m Casey.”
That was my first encounter with Blade. He was handsome and mysterious. My heart raced, and I felt sick with anxiety. He walked me all the way to the house. At the door, he handed my bags back to me and bowed like someone out of a Jane Austen novel.
“Nice meeting you, Casey. I hope we’ll see each other soon.”
Another flash of smile, and he was off. His shoulders were broad under his gray t-shirt, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I watched until he rounded the curve in the drive and disappeared from view. I saw Valencia watching from the window above. The curtain fell back as I looked up, and I was certain at that moment that I would never see Blade again. He must have seen Valencia’s witch-like face hovering over us like impending doom. He would soon meet other kids in town and hear the stories of the house, and he would be relieved that he had survived the encounter.
I went back to my usual summer pursuits. I made a daily pilgrimage to town to buy things for Valencia. I don’t think she always needed these things, but she hoped that I would make friends if I kept going into town, as if I could be absorbed into their group just by walking past them enough times. She didn’t know the anguish it caused me, passing them day after day as they sprawled outside the doors of the grocery store, the boys flicking bottle caps and small stones toward the girls, and the girls screaming daintily.
As I approached their eyes would skid over me, stop for a brief moment, then return to where they had rested lazily before I disrupted their space. I was forgotten as soon as I passed and caused no reaction at all as I trudged out of the store minutes later, laden down with bags, my eyes on the ground. My feet could never move fast enough when I was leaving, though approaching always felt like I was walking under water.
I hadn’t seen any of the inhabitants of the brick house since that first day, but there were signs of those who dwelt inside, a bike left in a heap on the lawn, its pink and silver tassels raised into the air like a flag, a skateboard abandoned on the front steps, and bright pansies and marigolds lining the walk. Once I thought I saw a curtain on an upstairs window fall back into place as I passed, and I imagined Blade watching me through a small gap in the fabric.
After a week, I was sure that he was watching me. He had been a moment too slow, and I saw him standing in the second floor window, the one on the eastern end of the house, closest to the forest. His face, in the brief moment before the curtain obscured my view, was troubled. There was a look of sorrow that made me wonder if someone close to him had just died.
It was a quick glimpse, and I could not be sure what I had actually seen. I had to accept that it was probably my imagination. It was certainly a romantic notion, and I was in the habit of concocting wild tales about people based on the slightest interaction. Being ignored had turned me into a storyteller, and I enjoyed the romantic tales I wove in my head, spinning out love stories like webs to trap my loneliness.
I was very lonely and had hoped many times for companionship. There had been girls, new students who were nice to me at first, but dropped me without hesitation when they heard the stories or caught a glimpse of Valencia. There was one in particular, a girl named Kristy. A perky name for a perky girl. It seems like all popular girls have names that end in a perky exclamation, making it easy for their friends to squeal their name across a crowded room without sounding dumb. I had one of those names, but no one had ever squealed it before I met her. Kristy squealed everything she said. She was confident and did not fall prey to the common new student insecurities. She was certain that she would be accepted, and I was merely a bump in the road, a required irritation that would soon pass and be forgotten. She screamed in terror when she first saw Valencia.
Valencia came to meet me after school one day. I had made the mistake of mentioning Kristy the night before, so convinced I was then that she and I would become best friends, giggling over magazines and walking arm and arm down the hallway, a united front against the hostilities of high school.
I think Valencia was excited for me. In her youth, she had been surrounded by friends, adored by all who met her. The house was covered with framed photographs, snapshots of brief moments in her life, capturing her happiness, her laughter, her thorough enjoyment of everyone and everything around her. Valencia lead a peppy life, always the center of the group. My lack of popularity devastated her, though she had already outlived her multitude of friends. She had once had hundreds of them, collected over the years like porcelain figurines. The last one passed when I was ten. Valencia was eighty-eight but acted more like a sixty year old. Something happened when that last friend passed. Valencia seemed to shrink into a shell of her once boisterous self. She stayed inside the house, wobbled from room to room muttering to herself. It was monotonous, turning into a chant, a low guttural sound located deep in her throat. I couldn’t understand many of the words, but the few that did reach me were disturbing and disjointed.
That was when Valencia turned from eccentric to the kind of strange that people only spoke of in whispers, the kind that made the speaker pause with a theatrical raising of the eyebrows, which was met with a commiserating look and a tactful change of subject. She became obsessed with finding me friends, including setting up a few embarrassing and futile play dates. She eventually gave up, too exhausted by her efforts to continue. The woman who had always seemed at least twenty years younger than she was had grown old before my eyes. Loneliness ruined her. She didn’t have my ability to withstand it.
But, back to Kristy. Valencia was waiting outside the main entrance of the school. It was Kristy’s second day, and the depth of my unpopularity was becoming clear to her. She was starting to distance herself from me in her polite way, a slow process that I would willingly stretch as long as possible. Her look of horror when she saw Valencia, looking more witch-like than usual with a smear of red across her lips, is seared into my mind. The humiliation I felt as she turned from me to the haggard crone on the sidewalk and back again was painful. I have never hated Valencia as much as I did at that moment. I wanted to strike her wrinkled, grinning skull, barely covered in a thin layer of frizzled hair. Instead, I ran. I ran all the way to the house, threw myself onto the bed, and cried until Valencia returned home hours later.
Kristy was absorbed into the popular crowd immediately after. They helped her through the horrible trial she had endured in seeing Valencia, and by the next morning she was all smiles and new friendships. She was the last new student I tried to befriend. There had been others, it seemed as if there were always people moving into Crystal River, but I ignored their hesitant advances, let them flounder for a moment before they moved on to the next kid in line, a huge girl with round glasses too small for her large face and man sized hands. She had permanent sweat stains under her arms and a best friend named Marjorie, which ranked her slightly above me on the popularity ladder.
I was thinking about Kristy the second time I saw Blade. He was hunched over the flower beds, pulling weeds for his mom. I’d seen her a few times as I walked home. She was a small, fragile boned woman who wore a large man’s shirt and faded black capris when she gardened. She topped them off with gardening gloves and a large, floppy brimmed straw hat, which hid her expression in shadow whenever she raised a timid, glove covered hand in greeting as I slouched by with my bags. I would briefly raise my eyes to glance at the eastern, second floor window and glance over her small greeting before turning back to my flip flops.
Blade turned at the sound of my steps scuffing the dirt. He smiled and wiped his brow, leaving a brown smudge above his eyes that seemed to enhance his good looks rather than mar them. He dropped his pruning shears on the grass and walked toward me. I’ve replayed that walk a thousand times, slowing it down and savoring every second. Blade Connor was my first crush, and it started at that moment.
I stopped and waited for him to approach. He was an athletic six feet tall and seemed to be a year or two older than me. He hopped the fence, took my bags from me, and we continued up the drive. He flashed me another blinding smile.
“Miss me?”
I was too shocked by this whole encounter to form sentences and could barely manage a slight nod. I could feel my face getting hot. He was staring at me, oddly detached as if I was an exhibit in an art museum, and he was trying to understand the depths and complexities hidden beneath the surface.
“Man, you are a quiet one. That’s cool, though. I like a girl who’s serious.”
We walked on in silence. I didn’t know what to say, and he seemed content to just walk. I wondered if he had somehow managed to miss seeing Valencia the first time he came to the house. Only that could explain why he was still speaking to me. I didn’t have to wonder for long, for as we rounded a bend in the drive, Valencia came into view. She liked to walk the length of the drive three times a day, and one of them usually coincided with my return from town.
My spine stiffened, and I had an immediate urge to retreat. I felt Blade place his hand on my arm. I couldn’t tell from his face if he was afraid or disgusted. His brilliant smile never wavered as we approach the old crone.
Valencia’s reaction to us was even more surprising than Blade’s calm countenance. Her face started to stretch into her usual, hideous smile, but it faltered when her eyes landed on Blade. She hesitated, which was something I had never seen Valencia do. There was not a moment I could remember when she had not spoken her mind in her careless, brash manner, but she seemed to shrivel before Blade, showing all of her ninety-four years.
We stopped to greet her, and she extended a withered hand cautiously, as if touching Blade’s hand would cause her pain. Her voice was weak and husky, the words smoky and fleeting, barely understood before being whisked away by a soft breeze. I was horrified to have Blade meet her, and even more horrified when he bowed and kissed her hand. His smile never faltered as his lips touched the parched skin. Valencia gave a yelp and pulled her hand away.
My embarrassment and rage were about to boil over, so I quickly ended the awkward conversation and started back to the house. Blade followed. He turned and looked over his shoulder, and his smile grew larger. I turned. Valencia was where we had left her and stood staring at the ground muttering. I wanted to run into the house, lock myself in my room, and never leave again.
Then Blade laughed, and my anxiety disappeared. We laughed all the way to the house, where he stopped and handed me my bags. He smiled at me through several strands of golden hair.
“We should hang out some time, Casey. Daytime’s better for me. I’m free most of the time, just not from four to six.”
I didn’t know what to say. No boy had ever wanted to hang out with me. Usually, they hurled insults at me while I walked by pretending to contemplate my shoes. I thought my heart would pound out of my chest, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Everything got hazy around the edges, and I felt the world slip sideways.
Blade caught me as I fell, saving my head from the stone steps. He sat beside me and helped me sit up slowly. After a few moments, the world stopped spinning, and I felt a little better. I became aware of his arm lightly touching mine, and his minty breath on my cheek.
I stood shakily and went to the door. I couldn’t look at him. My cheeks burned with humiliation, absolutely certain that I was the only person in the world who had fainted because a boy asked me to hang out. I went inside and closed the door softly behind me. I pressed my back against the door and waited for my heartbeat to slow down. When I peeked out the window, Blade was already nearing the bend in the drive. I watched him disappear behind the trees, then went out to collect the groceries I had left on the steps.
While they're reading my book, I'm going to start on a draft of my query letter. I learned a lot from writing the last one, and I think I will end up with a better one this time around. The query letter is difficult because you only have one page to catch the agent's attention, summarize your book, and give all the other pertinent information. It seems simple, but it's hard to fit it all onto one page.
For anyone who doesn't know the process, a query letter is what you send to literary agents in the hope that they will be interested enough by it to request the full manuscript. If they like the manuscript and think it is something they can sell, they send you a contract. Most of them ask for the query letter and the first chapter. I think that the first chapter of THE LAST WITCH OF NORG HALLOW is pretty catchy, but I'd love another opinion about it. I'm going to include it in this post for anyone to read and comment on.
I'm looking forward to receiving feedback on this project. I'm putting my writing out a little more, and it is scary and exciting. I've also been working on a musical with my husband, and now our good friend is going to collaborate on it as well. It's a project I have wanted to do for a long time, and I think things are finally coming together. It's going to be a lot of fun, and hopefully, when we're done, we'll have something our theatre company can put on stage. It's going to be a whole new experience, and I'm excited to see what happens.
Thought of the Day:
I love this time of day. Early morning to me is the calm before the storm. The kids are asleep. The house is quiet except for the kitten playing with his toy mouse in the kitchen. I have a cup of tea and my laptop and a little silence. I don't need anything more.
THE LAST WITCH OF NORG HALLOW
Chapter 1
The house at 1558 Bellevale Road was a sprawling old Victorian, warped out of its once graceful shape by additions of indeterminate age and time period. It looked like a Gothic castle only somewhat successfully joined with something out of a science fiction novel. The house was enormous and sat upon fifteen acres of sprawling marsh and bog and a forest of gnarled, ancient trees. The final touch was the backyard, which boasted large, colorful gardens seemingly misplaced against the muted greens and grays of an enormous hedge maze.
The house itself was massive and ancient. The boards groaned underfoot, and there were hundreds of secret passageways and false walls. I always imagined the previous owner as a thin, little man with a large, round head that shone in the firelight. I saw him slipping away into dark, secret rooms and having hushed meetings with mysterious visitors in the night. Sometimes my daydreams wandered into the realm of ghosts and vampires, but it gave me nightmares, and I had to stop.
I had lived in the house with my great grandmother, Valencia Valdala, since I was five years old. Valencia was gloomy and strange, and she muttered to herself constantly. Her wiry body was strong, though she was ninety-four the summer of my sixteenth year. She liked to be alone and rarely spoke to me, though when she did she seem to like me well enough. She took me in when my mother and father died in a car accident. I was home with Valencia when it happened. I’ve tried to remember them, but the memories are fragmented and infrequent. I remember my mother’s face, but it is fuzzy and out of focus. My father is more a scent, a certain aftershave. I smelled in once in a store when I was ten, and it knocked me down. I came to in the employee lounge, with Valencia hovering above me, anxiously gripping my shoulder and yelling at the paramedics.
The locals think the house is haunted. It was owned briefly by a man who went crazy one night and cut up his wife. He kept her in a giant walk-in freezer, one of the uglier additions that jutted off the western corner of the house like a big, metal boil. Her ghost is said to haunt the addition and walks the halls every night at midnight. I’ve never seen her, but I avoid the freezer. There are many rooms in the house that Valencia has deemed off limits, usually to keep her many knick-knacks and antiques safe, but the freezer wasn’t one of them. She didn’t use it. It was only slightly cooler than the rest of the house. Valencia had filled it floor to ceiling with her stuffed animal collection. She had dogs, cats, monkeys, and jaguars. The largest was a massive grizzly bear with teeth that looked like long, glistening knives. Its claws were longer than my hand and looked razor sharp. It was terrifying.
I had seen it only once, the one time I visited the freezer. I had heard the kids at school talking about it and wanted to see if anything weird happened. Nothing happened. The room just seemed sad to me, filled with death and left to sit forgotten and gathering dust. The grizzly was the only thing that frightened me. I had dreams about it for months. It was alive again and hunting me. Wherever I went it was always just behind, and I would feel its hot breath on my neck before waking in a cold sweat with my heart pounding.
The kids at school kept away from me, as if the house had tainted me with its grisly past. In addition to the rumored haunting, Valencia was deemed a witch because she went about talking to herself and glaring at anyone who met her eye. She dressed in dark dresses and long, flowing skirts, and her hair was a halo of gray frizz. I tried asking her to tone down her erratic behaviors, but she only looked down at me and gave me a rare, beaming smile.
“Let ‘em talk, dear. It’s good for the imagination.”
I had started doing most of the errands in town myself to avoid more speculation, and I walked into town at least once a day. The house was located at the end of a mile long drive that twisted through the tall pine trees surrounding the house. The drive joined a dirt road that led into the town. At the corner sits the only house within four miles of ours, a large brick monstrosity, dotted with windows like sleepless eyes, staring back at you without blinking.
It stood empty until that summer. I had just turned sixteen, celebrating this milestone birthday with a small, store bought cake that I purchased myself. Valencia serenaded me with her crackly voice, and when I blew out the candles I made a wish. I had never done it before. The only wish I ever really had was for my parents to still be alive, and that wasn’t possible.
My sixteenth birthday was different. The end of tenth grade was approaching, and summer loomed before me. The other kids still avoided me. My name was something that could only be spoken in hushed tones amidst a tight group of bodies huddled against the lonely outsiders. During the entire last year, only four students had even said hello to me. One was Tiffany Brenwick, the bubbly blonde whose smile was like a flame, attracting others to her. There was a choreography to it. The jostling of bodies as they each tried to position themselves closest to her. She was nice to everyone, and she made a point of saying hello to those of us who could not be accepted into her sphere.
I was thinking about Tiffany, who had already been assured her place on the varsity cheerleading squad next year, as I trudged home, carrying two bags of groceries and my backpack. As I neared the drive, I noticed a large moving van parked outside the house on the corner. Two burly men in Rick’s Moving Company t-shirts and dirty jeans were hefting a sofa, while a tiny, beetle-like woman scuttled back and forth, nervously giving them directions.
There was a squeal from inside the house, and a teenage boy raced out of the house carrying his little sister on his shoulders. She had her arms flung up in the air and screamed with wild joy as he ran across the lawn toward the edge of the forest. The mother paused and shot a frightened look at her children before smiling and turning back to the two goliaths still grunting under the weight of her floral printed couch.
The boy swung his sister down to the grass, and she ran to embrace her mother. He looked at me, and I blushed and looked away. I’d grown used to being ignored, and I reacted with terror when someone actually looked me in the eye. His eyes were a startling light blue, ice blue is what it should be called.
I walked a little faster and kept my eyes on the road. My bags were heavy. I had planned to stop and rest at the house before continuing up the drive, and my shoulders were burning. The handles of the bags were cutting into my palms, and my fingers felt numb. There were footsteps behind me, going faster than mine, catching up to me. I looked up, and he was standing beside me. He smiled, a sliver of white in his tanned, handsome face. He brushed a strand of golden hair from his eyes and reached out to take my bags.
“Here, let me take those. They look heavy. My name’s Blade.”
“Blade?” I couldn’t suppress my surprise.
“My old man’s idea.” He sighed. “Long story.”
We walked along in silence. I knew I needed to speak, but I hadn’t spoken with anyone other than Valencia in years. I struggled for words, any words to end the silence. I started listening to the sound of our footsteps. We were walking in sync, our steps a simple choreography. He laughed out loud, and I jumped. The sound seemed so foreign surrounded by the heaviness of the trees.
“You’re a quiet one, huh? No problem. I can talk forever. I just hope you don’t mind me rattling on.” He flashed me another pearly white smile.
“I don’t mind,” I squeaked. “I’m Casey.”
That was my first encounter with Blade. He was handsome and mysterious. My heart raced, and I felt sick with anxiety. He walked me all the way to the house. At the door, he handed my bags back to me and bowed like someone out of a Jane Austen novel.
“Nice meeting you, Casey. I hope we’ll see each other soon.”
Another flash of smile, and he was off. His shoulders were broad under his gray t-shirt, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I watched until he rounded the curve in the drive and disappeared from view. I saw Valencia watching from the window above. The curtain fell back as I looked up, and I was certain at that moment that I would never see Blade again. He must have seen Valencia’s witch-like face hovering over us like impending doom. He would soon meet other kids in town and hear the stories of the house, and he would be relieved that he had survived the encounter.
I went back to my usual summer pursuits. I made a daily pilgrimage to town to buy things for Valencia. I don’t think she always needed these things, but she hoped that I would make friends if I kept going into town, as if I could be absorbed into their group just by walking past them enough times. She didn’t know the anguish it caused me, passing them day after day as they sprawled outside the doors of the grocery store, the boys flicking bottle caps and small stones toward the girls, and the girls screaming daintily.
As I approached their eyes would skid over me, stop for a brief moment, then return to where they had rested lazily before I disrupted their space. I was forgotten as soon as I passed and caused no reaction at all as I trudged out of the store minutes later, laden down with bags, my eyes on the ground. My feet could never move fast enough when I was leaving, though approaching always felt like I was walking under water.
I hadn’t seen any of the inhabitants of the brick house since that first day, but there were signs of those who dwelt inside, a bike left in a heap on the lawn, its pink and silver tassels raised into the air like a flag, a skateboard abandoned on the front steps, and bright pansies and marigolds lining the walk. Once I thought I saw a curtain on an upstairs window fall back into place as I passed, and I imagined Blade watching me through a small gap in the fabric.
After a week, I was sure that he was watching me. He had been a moment too slow, and I saw him standing in the second floor window, the one on the eastern end of the house, closest to the forest. His face, in the brief moment before the curtain obscured my view, was troubled. There was a look of sorrow that made me wonder if someone close to him had just died.
It was a quick glimpse, and I could not be sure what I had actually seen. I had to accept that it was probably my imagination. It was certainly a romantic notion, and I was in the habit of concocting wild tales about people based on the slightest interaction. Being ignored had turned me into a storyteller, and I enjoyed the romantic tales I wove in my head, spinning out love stories like webs to trap my loneliness.
I was very lonely and had hoped many times for companionship. There had been girls, new students who were nice to me at first, but dropped me without hesitation when they heard the stories or caught a glimpse of Valencia. There was one in particular, a girl named Kristy. A perky name for a perky girl. It seems like all popular girls have names that end in a perky exclamation, making it easy for their friends to squeal their name across a crowded room without sounding dumb. I had one of those names, but no one had ever squealed it before I met her. Kristy squealed everything she said. She was confident and did not fall prey to the common new student insecurities. She was certain that she would be accepted, and I was merely a bump in the road, a required irritation that would soon pass and be forgotten. She screamed in terror when she first saw Valencia.
Valencia came to meet me after school one day. I had made the mistake of mentioning Kristy the night before, so convinced I was then that she and I would become best friends, giggling over magazines and walking arm and arm down the hallway, a united front against the hostilities of high school.
I think Valencia was excited for me. In her youth, she had been surrounded by friends, adored by all who met her. The house was covered with framed photographs, snapshots of brief moments in her life, capturing her happiness, her laughter, her thorough enjoyment of everyone and everything around her. Valencia lead a peppy life, always the center of the group. My lack of popularity devastated her, though she had already outlived her multitude of friends. She had once had hundreds of them, collected over the years like porcelain figurines. The last one passed when I was ten. Valencia was eighty-eight but acted more like a sixty year old. Something happened when that last friend passed. Valencia seemed to shrink into a shell of her once boisterous self. She stayed inside the house, wobbled from room to room muttering to herself. It was monotonous, turning into a chant, a low guttural sound located deep in her throat. I couldn’t understand many of the words, but the few that did reach me were disturbing and disjointed.
That was when Valencia turned from eccentric to the kind of strange that people only spoke of in whispers, the kind that made the speaker pause with a theatrical raising of the eyebrows, which was met with a commiserating look and a tactful change of subject. She became obsessed with finding me friends, including setting up a few embarrassing and futile play dates. She eventually gave up, too exhausted by her efforts to continue. The woman who had always seemed at least twenty years younger than she was had grown old before my eyes. Loneliness ruined her. She didn’t have my ability to withstand it.
But, back to Kristy. Valencia was waiting outside the main entrance of the school. It was Kristy’s second day, and the depth of my unpopularity was becoming clear to her. She was starting to distance herself from me in her polite way, a slow process that I would willingly stretch as long as possible. Her look of horror when she saw Valencia, looking more witch-like than usual with a smear of red across her lips, is seared into my mind. The humiliation I felt as she turned from me to the haggard crone on the sidewalk and back again was painful. I have never hated Valencia as much as I did at that moment. I wanted to strike her wrinkled, grinning skull, barely covered in a thin layer of frizzled hair. Instead, I ran. I ran all the way to the house, threw myself onto the bed, and cried until Valencia returned home hours later.
Kristy was absorbed into the popular crowd immediately after. They helped her through the horrible trial she had endured in seeing Valencia, and by the next morning she was all smiles and new friendships. She was the last new student I tried to befriend. There had been others, it seemed as if there were always people moving into Crystal River, but I ignored their hesitant advances, let them flounder for a moment before they moved on to the next kid in line, a huge girl with round glasses too small for her large face and man sized hands. She had permanent sweat stains under her arms and a best friend named Marjorie, which ranked her slightly above me on the popularity ladder.
I was thinking about Kristy the second time I saw Blade. He was hunched over the flower beds, pulling weeds for his mom. I’d seen her a few times as I walked home. She was a small, fragile boned woman who wore a large man’s shirt and faded black capris when she gardened. She topped them off with gardening gloves and a large, floppy brimmed straw hat, which hid her expression in shadow whenever she raised a timid, glove covered hand in greeting as I slouched by with my bags. I would briefly raise my eyes to glance at the eastern, second floor window and glance over her small greeting before turning back to my flip flops.
Blade turned at the sound of my steps scuffing the dirt. He smiled and wiped his brow, leaving a brown smudge above his eyes that seemed to enhance his good looks rather than mar them. He dropped his pruning shears on the grass and walked toward me. I’ve replayed that walk a thousand times, slowing it down and savoring every second. Blade Connor was my first crush, and it started at that moment.
I stopped and waited for him to approach. He was an athletic six feet tall and seemed to be a year or two older than me. He hopped the fence, took my bags from me, and we continued up the drive. He flashed me another blinding smile.
“Miss me?”
I was too shocked by this whole encounter to form sentences and could barely manage a slight nod. I could feel my face getting hot. He was staring at me, oddly detached as if I was an exhibit in an art museum, and he was trying to understand the depths and complexities hidden beneath the surface.
“Man, you are a quiet one. That’s cool, though. I like a girl who’s serious.”
We walked on in silence. I didn’t know what to say, and he seemed content to just walk. I wondered if he had somehow managed to miss seeing Valencia the first time he came to the house. Only that could explain why he was still speaking to me. I didn’t have to wonder for long, for as we rounded a bend in the drive, Valencia came into view. She liked to walk the length of the drive three times a day, and one of them usually coincided with my return from town.
My spine stiffened, and I had an immediate urge to retreat. I felt Blade place his hand on my arm. I couldn’t tell from his face if he was afraid or disgusted. His brilliant smile never wavered as we approach the old crone.
Valencia’s reaction to us was even more surprising than Blade’s calm countenance. Her face started to stretch into her usual, hideous smile, but it faltered when her eyes landed on Blade. She hesitated, which was something I had never seen Valencia do. There was not a moment I could remember when she had not spoken her mind in her careless, brash manner, but she seemed to shrivel before Blade, showing all of her ninety-four years.
We stopped to greet her, and she extended a withered hand cautiously, as if touching Blade’s hand would cause her pain. Her voice was weak and husky, the words smoky and fleeting, barely understood before being whisked away by a soft breeze. I was horrified to have Blade meet her, and even more horrified when he bowed and kissed her hand. His smile never faltered as his lips touched the parched skin. Valencia gave a yelp and pulled her hand away.
My embarrassment and rage were about to boil over, so I quickly ended the awkward conversation and started back to the house. Blade followed. He turned and looked over his shoulder, and his smile grew larger. I turned. Valencia was where we had left her and stood staring at the ground muttering. I wanted to run into the house, lock myself in my room, and never leave again.
Then Blade laughed, and my anxiety disappeared. We laughed all the way to the house, where he stopped and handed me my bags. He smiled at me through several strands of golden hair.
“We should hang out some time, Casey. Daytime’s better for me. I’m free most of the time, just not from four to six.”
I didn’t know what to say. No boy had ever wanted to hang out with me. Usually, they hurled insults at me while I walked by pretending to contemplate my shoes. I thought my heart would pound out of my chest, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Everything got hazy around the edges, and I felt the world slip sideways.
Blade caught me as I fell, saving my head from the stone steps. He sat beside me and helped me sit up slowly. After a few moments, the world stopped spinning, and I felt a little better. I became aware of his arm lightly touching mine, and his minty breath on my cheek.
I stood shakily and went to the door. I couldn’t look at him. My cheeks burned with humiliation, absolutely certain that I was the only person in the world who had fainted because a boy asked me to hang out. I went inside and closed the door softly behind me. I pressed my back against the door and waited for my heartbeat to slow down. When I peeked out the window, Blade was already nearing the bend in the drive. I watched him disappear behind the trees, then went out to collect the groceries I had left on the steps.
Friday, October 23, 2009
who I am
I'm a writer. I've tried to be other things, but I always comes back to writing. I've just had my first play published. AN EMPRESS, A FAUN, AND...OLIVE LOAF? is available at www.playscripts.com and is a lot of fun for middle or high school students. I've self published my first novel through lulu.com, and I am currently revising my second novel.
I love fantasy and sci-fi and write primarily in that genre. I have a plan for success, and I am planning a major marketing plan for my first novel, AZENDALE, starting in February 2010. This blog is a record of my journey.
I'm also the Artistic Director of Mountain Road Productions, Inc., a theatre, music, and film production company in northern Vermont and a theatre director for middle school students. I need a lot of creative outlets and am constantly creating new projects. I am currently working on a musical with my husband that we hope to have ready for performance in the next couple years.
Life is good.
I love fantasy and sci-fi and write primarily in that genre. I have a plan for success, and I am planning a major marketing plan for my first novel, AZENDALE, starting in February 2010. This blog is a record of my journey.
I'm also the Artistic Director of Mountain Road Productions, Inc., a theatre, music, and film production company in northern Vermont and a theatre director for middle school students. I need a lot of creative outlets and am constantly creating new projects. I am currently working on a musical with my husband that we hope to have ready for performance in the next couple years.
Life is good.
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