Don't Rhine on My Parade, Page 2

  Chapter Two

  It started when I was twelve. I wanted to get my ears pierced. Dad thought I was too young. He said I didn’t take care of my belongings and I wasn’t responsible enough to care for the piercings. He told my Mom horror stories of infected ears and girls losing their hearing.

  My older sister Karen had pierced ears. All my friends had pierced ears. I was convinced that I was the oldest girl in the entire world to not have her ears pierced. It made me look like a baby. I knew that if only I could wear earrings a whole new world of adult emotions and maturity would be mine. I would finally be what I so wanted to be – grown up.

  I begged. I pleaded. I pouted. I connived. I tried everything I could think of. I made promises that, in retrospect, would have been impossible to keep. I tried mature, rational negotiating. I tried the silent treatment. Nothing changed my Dad’s mind.

  One day all my frustrations boiled over. A popular girl at school had just gotten her second set of piercings, and was flaunting them to the entire class.

  I could see how fascinated everyone was. How the boys laughed and joked with her. How the girls looked up to her. And I longed to be that confident and carefree. If only I had pierced ears, I would be a new me. People would like me. People would think I was beautiful.

  I had wandered too close and the girl noticed me. She’d never noticed me before, but now I had caught her attention. She stopped in mid-laugh and gave me a stare that questioned why such a lowly worm was daring to intrude into her circle of sparkling awesomeness.

  I wanted to sink into the ground, but I drew up my courage and said softly, “I like your new earrings.”

  She’s rolled her eyes, “Thanks,” she said, looking around at her friends to show how silly it was for her to be talking with a lower creature.

  “Did it hurt?” I’d asked, wanting to run and hide, but also taking advantage of the sudden lull in the conversation.

  She had half-turned away, but now she swung back, annoyed at my persistence. Her eyes roamed my body from head to toe, zeroing in on my unadorned earlobes. “What?” she’d sneered, “Is that why you don’t have pierced ears? Are you so much a baby that you’re scared of a little pain?”

  “Baby! Baby!” some of the other girls chanted, thrilled to join in with mocking someone else. It was either mock or be mocked and we all knew what side we wanted to be on.

  “I am not a baby!” I’d yelled back, my eyes welling with tears.

  “You are too!” the girl had shot back. “If you’re not a baby, prove it!” She grabbed a thumbtack off the wall. “Stick this through your ear!”

  I was trembling with fear and excitement. I wanted those earrings so bad, but I knew that if I returned with holes in my ears I would be grounded for a month. I couldn’t deliberately disobey my father like that.

  “Stick it through your ear!” she’d said triumphantly, seeing my refusal. “Stick it through your ear, baby!”

  Rage rose in my chest till I could hardly see straight. “Stick it through your own ear!” I yelled at her and raced off to hide in one of the bathroom stalls. It wasn’t until the next day that I heard the story. Heard how a girl in my class had accidently fallen and gotten a thumbtack jammed in her ear. That was the official story. The one they had told the adults. But another story circled the school in whispers. Whispers that she had taken the tack herself and violently thrust it through her ear.

  If I had stayed a minute longer, perhaps I wouldn’t have faced off with my dad that night. We were at the mall, shopping for a birthday present for my mom and we passed a piercing kiosk.

  “Please, dad?” I’d begged. “Please can I get my ears pierced?”

  “No,” he’d said, distracted and not taking me seriously.

  I’d stamped my foot. “It’s not fair!” I’d snarled quietly. “Everybody else has their ears pierced! You let Karen pierce her ears when she was younger than me! Why can’t I get mine pierced?”

  “You’re just not responsible enough yet, Piper,” he’d said calmly, refusing to budge.

  In my head, I heard all the kids chanting, “Baby! Baby! Baby!” I was not a baby! I was not scared of the pain. I would show everyone!

  My dad was already walking away and I tugged at his arm. “You have to let me get my ears pierced now!” I’d said, emotion filling me till I felt like a water balloon about to burst.

  To my surprise, he’d sighed, squeezed my hand and said, “Okay. If you really want it that bad, you can get your ears pierced, Piper.”

  I’d sat down on the chair in a daze, hardly believing my good luck. I didn’t understand why he had changed his mind so quickly. What had I said to convince him? I didn’t even feel the pinch as the needle shot through my flesh. I was just so happy. Now people at school would take me seriously. Now I would be a somebody.

  As we drove home my dad kept looking over at me and shaking his head. “I can’t believe I let you do that,” he’d said in wonder.

  “Thank you so much, daddy!” I’d smiled. “You’re the best!”

  “Your mother is going to kill me,” he’d muttered.

  She didn’t. She just laughed and laughed. After all the times he had stood his ground, she thought it hilarious that he had so quickly caved.

  I went to school that next day proudly sporting my studs, reaching up to spin them gently, making sure that they were really there. I thought that nothing could ruin my effervescent mood, until I heard the whispers, saw the hooded stares, felt the nervous fear that followed me down the halls.

  That was when I knew the truth. There was something wrong with me. I was a monster.

  I tried to tell myself that I was imagining things and pretty soon it blew over, erased from memory by the latest teenage drama. I wondered though, but as the months passed, even I started to forget. Every time something happened I would explain it away. But there were more instances. Probably more than I even realized. A teacher who was notorious for never allowing extensions happily gave me an extra week on my paper. A police officer gave me a warning instead of the ticket I deserved. I was hired as a summer intern by a company who had filled their last slot the day before my interview, yet somehow made room for me.

  The older I grew the more I started to recognize the signs. The sudden change of mind in the person I was talking to. An uncharacteristic acquiescence to whatever it was I wanted, followed minutes later by a puzzled look, the person surprised at their own actions. I began to fear myself.

  I didn’t know what it was, but I called it the Voice. I could feel deep inside me a change, a way of speaking that forced people to my will. Most of the time I could control it, I would begin to experience the feeling building inside me and I would push it down, refuse to speak, or simply flee the situation that was tempting me. But sometimes it would pop out when I wasn’t expecting and turn my words into horrible weapons against a person’s free will.

  I wanted to talk with my parents. To ask what was happening to me. But I was too afraid. It was too strange. Too hard to explain. I doubted they would believe me and worried about what would happen if they did.

  Every time I slipped up I would renew my vow to not use the Voice. It was evil and creepy and I was sure that I could control it, bottle it up, and never have to face it again. I thought I was alone, the only monster in the world, and I resolved to be even more normal than everyone else. Until one night in college I used the Voice again.

  It was junior year and I was downtown, leaving the gym where I had been trying to work off my freshman fifteen at a Zumba class. The parking lot had been packed that night and I had been forced to park down the street. I had my gym bag slung over my shoulder and I trotted quickly to my car, eager to return to the dorm to shower and eat back all the calories I had just burned with a tub of ice cream.

  There was a popular club on the corner, the kind where the music pulses so loudly that conversation is impossible, and dancing involves swaying in a huge group of tightly packed people. I’d gone once w
ith my roommate, Beth, and had quickly decided that it was not for me.

  As I passed the alley next to the club I heard a familiar voice laughing. It sounded like Beth. I paused in mid-stride and debated what to do. She was an adult and I wasn’t her keeper, but I didn’t want to leave her alone in a dark alley. Something seemed off.

  I reached for my phone but stopped. I didn’t know who to call or what to say. “I think I hear my roommate down a spooky alley and I’m going to investigate” just sounded too silly.

  I bit my lip and thought about it. As a child my mother had filled my head with warnings about strangers, about strangers’ cars, about strangers with candy, about going out at night alone, about drunk drivers, and especially, as I got older, about date rape drugs. There was no way you would find a Schultz girl alone in an alley at night! And yet here I was, ready to do just that.

  I carefully arranged my car keys in my fingers so as to make a weapon which would probably be highly ineffective but made me feel slightly safer. So armed, I stepped out of the comforting glow of the street light and walked down the alley.

  I heard Beth laugh again and I was sure this time that it was her. She sounded drunk, which was not exactly a surprise. Beth had no head for alcohol and made really dumb choices when she was drunk. Choices like leaving the club and hanging out in an alley. Oh, I could slap her!

  “Beth?” I called cautiously. There were several dumpsters lined up by the club’s back door and the voices I heard were coming from beyond them. I rounded the dumpster and saw I had been right, it was Beth and she wasn’t alone.

  She was leaning against the dirty alley wall, shoes held in one hand and laughing up into the face of a young man I had never seen before. He was hovering over her possessively, one hand on the wall by her head and the other placed on her bare thigh. I disliked him at once. This was clearly the sort of stranger that my mother had tried to warn me about.

  I marched up to them, determined to take Beth home to safety. “Oh, there you are!” I said cheerfully. “I’ve been looking all over for you. It’s time to go home.”

  She laughed again in surprise. “What’re you doing here?” she slurred.

  The man refused to back off of her, his eyes glittering strangely in the dark. I didn’t want to get close to him, but Beth wasn’t leaving me a lot of options. I approached gingerly and took her arm.

  “It’s time to go home,” I said gently, trying not to make eye contact with the man.

  “I don’t wanna . . .” she trailed off. “Let’s get ‘nother drink!” She squealed with laughter.

  I got a firmer hold on her arm. “Let’s go, Beth.”

  The man spoke, still not taking his hand off her leg. “She doesn’t want to go.”

  I finally got a good look at him and it gave me the chills. It wasn’t just that he was tall and ripped, or that he had a spider tattoo covering the side of his neck. He was creepy. I wanted to run away and leave Beth behind. My heart was pounding in my chest and I felt like I was going to faint.

  “I’m going home with him,” Beth slurred with a smile, poking the guy in the chest. My eyes widened. There was no way I was letting her go home with this guy. I couldn’t. And suddenly I knew what I had to do.

  My brain protested. I had promised myself that I would never use the Voice. But I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t force her to come with me physically. And she needed to come with me. It was for her own safety. I had to force her with the Voice. It was the right thing to do.

  “Beth, come with me now,” I commanded.

  The young man’s head shot up and he stared at me. I felt like a deer in the headlights. Part of my brain was screaming at me to run, and another part was frozen in fear, hoping that if I stayed still he wouldn’t see it.

  He knows what I’ve done, I thought.

  The whites of his eyes turned black and became bottomless pits that threatened to pull me in and drown me. I tore my gaze away and grabbed blindly at Beth.

  “Wait,” the man said and I caught a glimpse of his teeth. I swear I saw his canines grow longer. It sounds crazy now, like a bad B movie, but I know what I saw. Even though what I saw can’t exist, doesn’t exist, I knew what he was, and it scared the living daylights out of me. But all that mattered then was that he was a predator and I was lunch. I knew we had to get out of there fast.

  I grabbed Beth and pulled. The man grabbed her other arm.

  “Stay,” he said seductively.

  I used the one move I had learned from my semester of Karate and kicked him as hard as I could in the crotch. He stumbled back with a puff of expelled air, but he wasn’t rolling on the floor screaming like my dojo master had promised. In fact, he was smiling like he was enjoying this.

  I looked frantically around for a weapon and saw a length of two by four lying in between the dumpsters. Dropping Beth’s arm I snatched it up.

  “This will be fun,” the man said, flashing razor sharp teeth at me.

  He leaped for me as I swung as hard as I could. I would have missed if Beth hadn’t chosen that moment to try and intervene. She stumbled between us, colliding with the man and knocking his head directly into the path of my board. It connected with a wet slap and the impact stung my fingers into numbness.

  The young man fell face down to the ground, blood pooling under his head. I was sure I had killed him.

  “What did you do?” Beth shrieked, finally realizing what was happening.

  “I killed him,” I said dropping the board in shock.

  We stood there, hearts pounding, staring at the corpse.

  “We have to call the police,” I whispered. I reached into my pocket for my phone and the body on the ground stirred.

  Beth screamed.

  “Forget the police,” I said, grabbing her arm and racing down the alley. My hands were shaking so badly that I almost couldn’t unlock the car, and I ran every red light from there to the campus, but we made it to the dorm safely.

  Beth was sobering up quickly, the adrenaline forcing the alcohol from her system. “What happened?” she asked me, after we triple locked our door and stood panting on the other side.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  I couldn’t explain what we had seen. Not without sounding crazy. I knew how hard I had hit the man. My blow should have killed him, but as we’d run away, I’d looked back and seen him climbing to his feet.

  One thing I was sure of: I was a monster, and I was not alone.