Holy Creatures: Life as a Paperback

An excerpt from my work-in-progress, Holy Creatures To and Fro:

I wish life came in paperback. Books have symmetry of character and language. Everything’s clear and, if not simple than at least discernable. A book would have given me foundation and conclusion for that mess with Karma and Cheerio. I might have seen them walking hand-in-hand afterward, or found secret love notes passed between them… or maybe even from her to me. But no — I got none of that. Neither of them spoke to me after our showdown in the hall. I’d occasionally see each of them off in their own corners, but if they remained friends or not afterward, I couldn’t say. It was one more high-school mystery, another blank spot that made me want to leave.

I’d always preferred my own company until then. After Karma’s betrayal, though, the loneliness felt crushing. I’d wander the hallways between classes or after school, plagued by whispers and shadowplays. Were people still laughing about me by the time summer finally rolled around? Or were the chuckles that I heard in every corner simply products of my isolation? I felt so empty by summer that even insults would have been welcome. Instead, I got silence. And so silence is what I returned.

Before then, I’d been quiet. Now I was speechless. Teachers gave up on the idea of calling on me at all. They graded my papers with workmanlike disdain, marking time until I was no longer their problem. Occasionally, some teacher tried to engage my interest or inspire my confidence. One of them, Mrs. Egglehart, even tried shocking me out of my silence by insulting me each morning in class when she took attendance. I didn’t bother to respond — just filed it away with the din of voices in the background of my life. Eventually, she gave up. I slid through the cracks without making a sound.

It’s not that I wasn’t paying attention. Quite the opposite. The weird shattering of my pack had shown me just how important it was to watch for signs. My alpha had denounced me, out of nowhere, in front of strangers, and then turned me out alone. If there’d been signs of trouble, I hadn’t seen them. And so, like a lone wolf in a forest full of hunters, I watched every twitch and tilt in my surroundings. I noted shifts of mood and gossip, even as I stayed downwind of them. By summer, I could tell you who Jeniah Morrison was sleeping with that week, how many beers Gale Forrister had downed between classes, how much further along her pregnancy Alabaster Smith had gone, and how scared she was about still hiding it. I could tell who was on the rag by the scent of their blood in the trash cans, and watched the bags grow dark under the eyes of honor students whose study nights had grown too long. I caught snatches of conversation each time I passed nearby. I knew who was breaking up with whom and why. Through it all, I never got involved. I drifted through the rest of my sophomore year like the ghost beside my bed — always present, always silent.

This girl is seriously starting to get inside my head and under my skin. As I told Dami this morning, writing this book has become a strange hall of mirrors. I'm drawing bits of inspiration for Silk (the narrator) from several real-life people and incidents in my life. She's a bit of various people, a lot of me, and a fair amount of invention all swirled around. The real-life elements are the most disconcerting, though. As things are, I'm recalling - in great emotional detail - events in my life, both from my own perspective and from the imagined perspective of the other people involved. It's a very... interesting... emotional ride - and quite an inspiring one.

Stay tuned!