Hush Baby, Hush

There Will Be Blood

Thursday came faster than I would have liked and with it an uncertainty. I laid in my bed with my fingers intertwined atop my hot coverlet as I stared up at my ceiling. There wasn’t anything special about it at all but I got this feeling that something wasn’t right. I couldn’t place the feeling but there was something….

There!

My blurry eyes blinked through the fuzz and I held my breath in at the sight of the light water stain the size of an orange. I dug my elbows into my pillows and pushed myself up to get a better look, blinked my eyes two times to get rid of the fog and buy myself time to realize that I was absolutely positively bat shit crazy. It was still there. A slight tan amongst a field of pristine white, it flared into a deep brown around the ruddy perimeter.

Logical reasons came up, maybe it had rained one day when I hadn’t noticed and the water had leaked through. Except that even at its worst the storms rarely caused water stains to pop up like that. Had something leaked in the attic above? Why hadn’t I seen it yesterday or the day before?

“Get a grip,” I threw my heavy coverlet to the side and sticky with sweat swung my bare legs over to the edge of the bed.

“Crystal! You gonna be late for school!”

I squeezed my eyes and pressed my forefinger to the center of my brows at my dad’s shitty take on a normal persons inside voice. What was he doing home anyway?

“Be right down!” I lied. Obviously I couldn’t snap and magically have other clothes besides my dingy boxers and tank top on. But a lie would satisfy him for a few minutes.

I pushed the water stain to the back of my mind and brushed it off as mere coincidence. Once I’d dressed myself in a pair of khaki shorts, tank top and vans I made my way down the stairs.

Daddy raised an eyebrow at my choice of clothing from where he sat on the family couch, “Isn’t that against dress code?”

I smoothed invisible wrinkles out of my loose flowing tank top and shook my head, “Last I checked it wasn’t.”

Though the shorts weren’t bad in my opinion they were the skimpiest I had ever worn and stopped a few inches above my knee caps. Normally I wouldn’t have worn something short enough to show off my knobby knees but I was in a hurry and didn’t have time for self esteem issues. Whatever I had on I was going to rock like a rock star.

Daddy eyed me over his book when I passed by the couch, he shook his head disapprovingly and I shook mine back tauntingly before I passed through the dining room and into our kitchen. My satchel bag thumped against my hip, a soft rhythm to the movement of my vans slapping against the marbled tiles.

“Shorts in November!” he shouted from the front room.

I rolled my eyes and opened the Frigidaire, reached in and pulled out the biggest apple I could find. I had no time to boil up my trusty steel oats and barely had time to stoop down and get the apple much less enter a fight with my dad about my choice of clothing, “its 85 degrees outside!”

That same feeling of abnormality washed over me. What was it? I stood up ramrod straight and held the apple in the palm of my hand while my eyes scoped over every inch of the kitchen. Everything looked normal from the impeccably clean jade marble counter tops to Karens annoying coffeepot cozies. Nothing screamed strange but I certainly felt it. The atmosphere pulsed with it; if I licked the tip of my index finger and held it in the air I’d probably catch one hell of a shock from it.

The girl or the figment of my imagination crept to every corner of my brain, teased my nerves and immersed herself into every crevice of my cerebrum. Did it have to do something with her?