I was sitting on the pedestrian bridge handrail beside my best friend, giggling over her brand-new iPhone. A fizzy soda breeze ruffled our hair (hers, long blonde highlights, mine, short choppy chocolate) and I felt gloriously special. My parents were letting me hang out with a cool kid with no supervision and she had a big-kid phone. I swung my sequin-jean legs against the warm metal rails in delight. This felt like an important life movement. Practically as important as my first step or the loss of my first baby tooth. I didn't realize how true it was at the time.
"Let's take a Selfie!" Kendall squealed, pulling me close with her long glittery nails. I scooched over, smushing my face against hers, trying to fit into the tiny glass universe held in her palm. She winked, I grinned (flashing creamsicle-striped braces) and the flash burst with a digital shutter click.
In hindsight, neither of us knew how to take a proper selfie.
"So cooooool," Kendall cooed, drawing out the middle syllables like the last syrupy-sweet slurp of a milkshake. She tilted the phone back and forth, aiming for that perfect angle where it didn't catch the sunlight and the photo results would be visible.
A furrow appeared between her penciled-in eyebrows.
"Hey, Cici — is that weird or what?"
She shoved the screen towards my face, making me sway backward precariously over the twenty-foot drop into the San Gloriel river below. I grabbed the phone, cradling it with the reverence reserved for a friend's baby sibling or Daddy's credit card. I squinted at the tiny screen, half-blinded by our megawatt smiles and cringe-worthy poses. That's when I noticed it: a dark smudge, hovering over my left shoulder.
I screamed.
The phone dropped.
I toppled.
The world blurred.
It's funny, I don't remember the fall. My memory leaves off there, and begins two hours later, laying on the ER table in soaking wet jeans and blearily wondering if all this red liquid was the result of my first period.
Spoiler alert: it wasn't.
Instead, it was six staples across the back of my skull, nine stitches on my leg, two broken ribs and a cast swaddling my whole right arm. My parents were freaked out. Kendall was a big snotty sobbing mess, though whether over my accident or her shattered phone wasn't clear. One thing was clear, though: I was grounded.
Fortunately, this gave me lots of time for things — like eating neon Froot Loops, unearthing the Barbies buried in the backyard, and collecting every photo of me in the house to compare them.
Mom says the results of an experiment are called a conclusion. According to her (Mrs. 5-time Teacher of the Month College Biology Professor herself) the conclusion can either prove or disprove the hypothesis of the experiment.
The conclusion of my experiment was very clear: my life was far, far more sinister than I had ever imagined.
There it was: a blurry, humanoid-shaped smudge, blurred into the background of every photo I was in, from my first Birth Announcement portrait (a wrinkly pink blob shadowed by the faintest tinge of darkness, suspended between my parents' beaming faces) to my Homeschool-Elementary Graduation snapshot (too-tight ponytail, jagged buckteeth, sparkly jacket standing on the lawn, with a dark figure hovering behind me like a creepy bodyguard).
A few things were obvious:
1: as I got older, the shadow got larger and darker.
2: it was definitely person-shaped.
3: it only showed up in photographs.
4: I had never noticed this before.
Being a sensible 6th-grader with a colored cereal obsession, I made the logical decision, decided I was hallucinating from the fall, and promptly began ignoring the specter who was slowly stalking me through my photos.
It was relatively easy...
Until, on the night of my sixteenth birthday, he spoke to me.
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I'm working on adapting this into a longer story — consider this a teaser for now! 😋
