Of Life and Death: [A Dark Academia Paranormal Romance]

Chapter 3

EMMA

I was five when I realized my imaginery friends weren't so imaginery.

Across the long table, my mother delicately cut into her chicken. When she saw me watching, she gave a dutiful smile.

It was strained.

I could almost hear the thought directed at herself, 'Pull yourself together, Samantha.' I'd heard her say it in front of the mirror often, when she wasn't aware I was peeking in through the crack in her door. It'd been a mantra since dad's death.

Since then, she'd changed, gotten more sad. She didn't push me on the swings anymore.

"The pilot wants some of that," I'd said, a bit anxious to fill in the stifling silence.

She paused mid motion. "What pilot, honey?"

I pointed, like it was obvious.

Bunny, a gangly man with a cracked pair of googles and a razed dress shirt seemed to stare at the food through his empty eye sockets. Things I didn't want to look too closely into writhed around the rotting holes in his body. I would see a bump form beneath his burnt blazer from time to time, wiggling, before a giant worm emerged through one of the numerous holes riddling his jacket.

My mother looked behind, then paled. I breathed out in relief. She'd seen him. Seen them.

"Emma," she called in a tiny, skeptical voice that would forever etch itself in my memory. "There's no one there."

"Mum, he's right there. Look, the Reverend is here too."

Unlike the rest, the Reverend, a stooped, crane-like woman who wore a monkish headpiece, didn't have the same air of adrift and detachment my imaginery friends had. There was something...candid about her.

"Oh, and the nurse, too, mama."

My mother sat mute at the other end of the giant table. I could see the cogs in her mind turning, desperately struggling to grasp this problem, classify it, and eliminate it. Ever the CEO.

The apprehension soon left her gaze and I thought I saw her relax. She laughed like it was all so silly. "A nurse," she said. "Tell me, you want to be one when you grow up? That's a remarkable thought." She leaned in with that dutiful smile again. "What does she look like? Does she have the same plaid bows in her hair too?"

"It's a man," I said. "He's holding a knife. And there's..." I squinted, trailing the long line snaking out behind him. "Can't you see the blood, mama?"

The next time I looked up, I stilled at the expression on her face. Something skittered behind her eyes, a horrifying realization. Like her worst fear had come true...

"Do you have friends like these too?" I asked.

No response.

The next morning, I was bundled into the back seat of her McLaren. That day would eventually mark a long string of mental institutions.

Before I grew jaded and unimpressed with the kid posters, colourful offices and white, patient smiles, I thought my fifth therapist was really cool--right up until she, well, therapisted.

"Emma, right?" she asked in a southern drawl that was oddly comforting. She adjusted her glasses and looked up. A thin smile. "Some privacy for I and my patient, please, Mrs. Richards?"

My mum hesitated in the doorway. She'd since lost a lot of weight, the circles under her eyes as telling as the alcohol bottles she left scattered all over the counter. Bottles I would later start to drain. She gave a jerky nod and walked away, going over to the waiting room.

"Let's take a look at this, shall we." She brought my profile to eye level, trailing the sheet. I saw her eyes widen a fraction. "Auditory and visual hallucinations," she muttered. "Delusions, disorganized behavioral patterns, psychosis, aggressive conduct, a history of depression..."

The more she read, the more uneasy I grew, and the more resolved I got to never tell them about the anomalies.

The inexplicable reflexes, the near superhuman strength, the impossibly high hearing range. I didn't want to add more scores to my rap sheet --or in this case, more diagnosis to my patient report.

Already I felt like a boiling kettle. It was only a matter of time before something raw and scalding bubbled to the surface.

She leaned in close. "I'm going to start off light by asking how your day went, Emma."

"It was good."

"Okay... What is a normal day for you?"

We were sat on threaded mats. My eyes contemplated the exotic patterns while I thought. In the morning, I wake screaming from horrid dreams. Then I wake my mother up for school--to take me school, that is. And on the way there, I pray I don't have one of my blackouts in public. Later, I try not to lament over my lack of a social life as a thirteen year-old-girl. "Um," I began. "I go to school every day, do my homework once I get back. Repeat the whole process again the next day. It's embarrassing."

She tilted her head, watching me. "I need you to be truthful with me, Emma."

I paused. My eyes strayed away from hers. How much could I reveal? Without putting myself in a position where I could get hurt by an unintentional remark--or a deliberate attack? You see, the kids at school weren't really friendly. And when you got called names like weirdling and got tripped up in the halls--or had your locker spray painted on enough times, your confidence shriveled to nothing and your self-consciousness went on steroids. It was an ugly place to be.

Tell her about the blackouts, Em, a part of me urged. "I..." My sentence was cut by a ping notification.

"Please, hold on." She grabbed her phone, fingers flying over the keyboard. A chuckle slipped past her lips. Feeling awkward, I looked around the room, counting down seconds until she was done. It took a moment before she returned the phone onto her desk, reluctantly. "You were saying?"

"I--never mind. I was just wondering when I could stop taking refills."

Her brows furrowed. "Why? Are you noticing an improvement?"

I pulled on the neckline of my hoodie, suddenly feeling warm despite Alaska's freezing weather. "Yeah, I mean no... I don't know, the medications aren't really working." My voice lowered, weighted by embarrassment. "I still... I still see them."

For a moment, she didn't speak. Then she drew closer like we were sharing a secret. Carefully, she asked, "Are they in the room with us...?"

Silence settled over the room. I stared at her blankly.

That marked the first day I'd ever walked out of a session.

Any real motivation I had to 'get better' dwindled once every institution became a rinse and repeat situation. To think of it, my 'demons' never really scared me--which could have been the first indication that I was truly going round the bend, but the endless cycle of colourful offices, pointless talk and loaded prescription pills were done for my mother's sake.

She was the one determined to fix me. And I let her run roughshod for a while. But then the winter I turned fifteen, I pushed back.

We seemed to be doing that a lot, fighting. Wait--no, disagreeing. Fighting implied heavy involvement on the other party's end. Mum couldn't care less. I didn't know how it happened, but a whole f*cking gulf seemed to have grown between us. I could scream all I wanted, but she'd never hear me from the other divide.

It was like she'd determined to put me at arms length. Once bitten, twice shy, I guessed. You couldn't get hurt over someone's misfortune if you never cared about them.

And she'd cared about dad--and seemed to think my life was headed in the same direction. A bleak end.

And I wasn't giving her cause to believe otherwise.

Because while she'd become standoffish and cold, I'd become reckless, lost. With the same sense of adrift and detachment I felt to my bones, I thought I could pass for one of my own demons. We did share one thing in common. As they haunted me, so did I.

But soon, life got better, and things started to look up. Until Mathew Gurney came along.