“‘Good morning!’ he said at last. ‘We don’t want any adventures here, thank you!'”
I was born under a full moon and a comet that only visits our sky once every six thousand years. I did not cry, or make much of any noise, really, and when my parents looked into my heterochromic eyes (one brown and one purple) for the first time, they could swear they saw there a hint of knowing well beyond the years of a newborn. It was then that they, genre savvy as they are, decided to do everything in their power to make sure I had a normal life. When I was old enough to agree, I did wholeheartedly.
It’s not easy for someone like me, but we’ve tried. My mom, my dad, and I are a perfectly normal family, with a two-story house and a yard and a white picket fence. We even had a dog, until it started speaking English and asking me to follow it.
I went to a public school and did normal kid stuff: I made friends, learned how to write in cursive, and laughed so hard that milk squirted out of my nose once. The kid who made me do that was named Sanjay, and he was so funny that even though he was always doing bad kid things he never got into trouble. At recess, me and Sanjay would climb up to the tallest part of the jungle gym and just talk as kids passed by on their way to the slide. One time Sanjay told me he’d heard a rumor that there was a secret tunnel underneath the sandbox. I sat with him while he dug, right on top of the trapdoor so he wouldn’t find it.
Throughout school, Sanjay was the only one who never seemed to mind that weird stuff kept happening to me. He thought it was funny, something to do. And I thought it was fun, having a friend around to face it all with.
High school was a string of narrowly-avoided destinies. First I was wandering the library and found the diary of a student who’d gone missing thirty years ago. I shut the book and flushed it down the toilet. In chemistry lab, Sanjay got careless, and I got a burn mark on my wrist in the shape of a skull. One gym period a fox emerged from the woods and kept following me around, and Sanjay had to scare it off. Eventually my parents started to wonder if I wouldn’t be safer at home.
Nevertheless, I made it through high school unscathed. I got into a pretty good school up the road on a full scholarship, and I planned to study something simple but effective, like business or accounting. Sanjay and I decided we had to spend as much time together as we could until he went to his school, on the other side of the country.
He had the whole day planned out. We’d take a hike up the mountains to look at the view, eat a lunch he’d packed there, and then we’d head back into town and catch a movie. We started up the trail, but eventually Sanjay got bored and said he wanted to explore “off the beaten path.” I followed him across tiny streams and over huge felled trees, and eventually we found a meadow I didn’t even know existed. The grass and the wildflowers swayed in the gentle breeze. Sanjay lit up. He grabbed my hand and pulled me along, walking backwards so I could see the joy on his face. If I hadn’t been looking at his face–if I’d been focused on my surroundings instead of how warm his hand was, how tender he was acting in this moment–maybe it would have gone differently.
I saw the toadstool circle about a second too late. I opened my mouth to warn him, tried to tug him back towards me, but I wasn’t fast enough. Sanjay backed up into the circle, and that was it. One minute he was holding my hand and laughing. The next he was gone.
I guess you can run from fate, delay it a little, but you can’t hide forever. I tried, and all it did was drag Sanjay along with me. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get him back from the fae, or if that’s even what took him in the first place. But I do know that I didn’t hesitate to step into the circle after him.
If fate wants me this bad, it can have me. Just leave my friend alone.
Recent Comments