The Patron Saint of Monsters

Chapter One Part Three

Valerie stood and approached Oleander’s stereo, Oleander adored her motley crew of banded together misfits who worked together even though if they were puzzle pieces they would not have matched up, and the images covering them would not have been cohesive, but Oleander was very particular about her music and disliked people fiddling with her tunes. When Val surprised her and only turned up the bass heavy English band that her iPod had shuffled to, she smiled. Valerie gave her head a shake, tossing her long blonde hair around, and sang along to the accented wailing of the repeated chorus about blood getting thin at the sight of a girl. The girls catcalled and laughed while Valerie returned to her seat across from Oleander. The girls started to place their dainty fingers on the planchette, when 

Rebecca yanked her hands back saying “Wait! We need to light candles first.” 

She got up and gathered some of the candles that Oleander had strewn about her room, before returning and setting them in a circle, Oleander reached back and grabbed the pack of matches she kept on her night stand without looking, accidentally knocking her cigarette case onto the ground with a soft thud. Trina, the most superstitious of the girls, jumped and then shuddered a giggle. Rebecca, who was the darkest of them, leaned forward conspiratorially  “I think we should spill blood.” 

Valerie rolled her eyes in sync with Oleander, and Trina heavily gasped and said “Like murder?”.  The stereo was briefly silent before a woman singing “Tainted Love” began, aside from the classic bells tingling to the beat there was a noise accompanying it that sounded vaguely reminiscent of nails tapping on a chalkboard all the girls shuddered, even the invisible Trent shivered. 

“No dumbass,” Rebecca laughed once she had recovered, “like cut ourselves and spill the blood over the planchette.”

Trina and Valerie hopped on board the idea, feeding on the spooky energy of Oleander’s expansive home.  

Oleander was wary, “I don’t know you guys, that sounds like asking for trouble.” she meekly mumbled with a slight shake of her head.

She didn’t want the girls to know how afraid she was of her room, she refused to talk about her fear of monsters, she knew if she did that everyone would consider her insane and her parents would quickly have her committed, that is why she never asked her parents to let her change rooms. Sometimes as Oleander lay in her bed tightly tucked in she thought that maybe she was insane; but what really was crazy anyway? Was it just being different? What made the majority of society able to distinguish what was insane and what was normal? Was it just because there were more of them? She asked herself those things a lot.

“Come on fraidy cat, just because you have a pussy doesn’t mean you should be one!” Valerie tauntingly encouraged with a light punch to her shoulder. 

Oleander took a deep breath to steel herself, she wanted to be fiercely brave like one of the ingénues in the books she was always engrossed in. If those heroines had never done anything that frightened them then there would not have been novels written about them. “Alright, I’ll go get something to do it with and while we’re at it we should be blood sisters.”  

Her friends grinned greatly and squirmed in anticipation and in fear. It was almost like a twisted game of Chicken, each girl egging the other further with the expectation that things would stop, but each girl quietly resolved to follow through for fear of embarrassing themselves in front of each other by backing down. It was a volatile assemblage, the type of friendship that begat the stories that meeker groups told each other at their slumber parties. 

Oleander strolled the main corridor of her homes’ second story, she toed into the middle bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet behind the mirror reaching in to remove her father’s spare straight razor, the one he kept in case her mother was taking too long to primp and he was running out of time to shave. She set it on the porcelain sink and took a deep breathe, looking at her reflection and trying to calm herself down. It was then that she remembered something she had read once in one of the stories about the girls she wanted to be more like. She returned the razor and quickly and tacitly padded down the spiral staircase, avoiding all of the creaky stairs in a manner that only a practiced resident is capable of.