The Search for the Eoz Potion

1. The Portal

It was 12:00:45 AM. The portal was about to open. Claire nervously folded up the map they had been given and put it in her backpack. She looked up from her watch over at Hailey, whose skepticism only made her appear less nervous, then nodded toward the two trees that arched together to create the portal at the edge of the quiet city park. 12:00:57. They approached. 12:01:04. Each of them took a deep breath. 12:01:17. They walked through the canopy of branches.

Nothing. It was exactly like any other casual stroll through the park except it was the middle of the night. They peered back through the portal trees convinced they had done something wrong. It was dark, but they could see the park exactly as it had been before. Nothing had changed. Wanting to be certain, though, they kept walking forward.

Claire Rosemont, a small and apprehensive twelve year old, walked uncomfortably close to Hailey. This particular trip would have been unusual for most anyone, but Claire was especially uneasy. She had her backpack of supplies to comfort her - flashlights, water, change of clothes - but she stayed close to Hailey. Hailey, who was full of good natured sarcasm, gently pushed Claire an inch or two away from her with the tip of her index finger.

"That's a little too close for comfort," she proclaimed with a wry smile.

Hailey pushed her hair - light brown with the tips dyed purple in a personal rebellion against their quiet suburban town - out of her eyes and tried her best to remain hopeful. As they walked, Claire looked uneasily around, not knowing exactly what she was expecting. What she wasn't expecting, however, was the tree root that twisted out above the ground right in front of her path. She tripped over it and fell to the ground with an umph. After a longer period of time than would typically be considered polite, Hailey reached out a weak arm and, with a roll of her eyes, reluctantly offered to help Claire up.

There had always been tension between them. They were too different for there not to have been - Claire being shy and quiet, Hailey, not so much. Somehow, though, they both shared a best friend. Claire had known Faith her whole life. They'd been neighbors forever and were friends by default. Hailey just seemed to come along with her whenever they hung out, and Claire never knew how to avoid it. She worried that if she tried too hard, like pulling out a weed that rips up the flower along with it, she might lose Faith as well.

Claire did her best to avoid the dreaded Hailey Redmond, but at the beginning of sixth grade, when Faith ended up back in the hospital after she seemed to be winning the fight against the rare blood disease with which she'd been diagnosed a few years earlier, that became much more difficult. She went to visit Faith one Saturday only to find Hailey already there and talking to the doctor. That conversation, the conversation that brought them to their current state walking through the park in the middle of the night, still stuck in both their memories.

Faith's doctor, Dr. Hampton, was a large and imposing man with thinning, messy, yellow hair. His clothes were old and tight around his body, the top button of his shirt pinching his neck so much his face turned red. This disheveled physical appearance along with the way he spoke in short, disjointed sentences, made him difficult to take seriously. And on this particular day, the subject of those sentences wasn't helping him out any either.

"We're at a loss," Dr. Hampton told them, discussing Faith's condition while she slept soundly beside him. "Just talked to her parents."

The girls looked up at him, taken aback that he was sharing this information with them so freely, but also not ready to accept that their friend's doctor was essentially conceding defeat. A million words sped through Claire's head, but she couldn't get any of them to come out. This is usually what happened that made her seem so shy to others. It wasn't a lack of things to say but rather too many thoughts that created a log jam in her mind and nothing ever made it out of her mouth. Even Hailey was uncharacteristically quiet. The only sound in the room was the buzzing of the fluorescent light bulb above them.