KISTISHI ISLAND

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

“How are your imaginary friends?”  Serena read aloud from the black marker scrawled on her locker.  Her dry lips stuck together with each word as the sarcasm stung her mind.  The janitor might scrub the permanent marker, but it would always stay faintly, a reminder of how much people ridiculed her.  The washed out marks from last week, Schizo, Fake, and Your imaginary friends hate you still showed up against the brown metal. 

“Aw, someone cares about my day.”  Krieg hovered behind, picking fuzz off her dress.  “You should answer them.  Write ‘Krieg says hi’ underneath.” 

The last thing she needed: people knowing how much she still communicated with Krieg.  Serena glanced at the hallway, but the students strolling by didn’t look her way.  Who could have written the graffiti?  Roxanne?  Her hand trembling, Serena spun the combination on her lock and jerked open the dented locker door.  The hinges rattled. 

Did it hurt them if she had an invisible friend?  As she exchanged a textbook for her social studies notes, someone bumped her butt.  She stumbled, flinging out her hand to grab the locker. 

“Whoops,” a boy snickered. 

Serena’s cheeks burned as she stuffed her supplies into her messenger bag.  One more hour of high school and she could go home.  Tomorrow, she would bring another marker to scribble out the words that branded her. 

Krieg leaned close enough for Serena to smell her peppermint bubble gum, and said, “Bludgeon them.  It’s the only way to get them to shut up.”

“No one’s talking about me right now.”  Serena’s sneakers squeaked against the tile floor as she ducked into the classroom.  Afternoon sunlight reflected off faded Holocaust posters on the off-white walls.

“It’s annoying when you allow the little rodents to torment you.”  Krieg stuck her tongue out at the few students already inside.  “Where are the beheadings and crocodile pits?  How about some maiming?  I want to hear screaming and bones crunching.”

“This is the suburbs in the twenty-first century.  People don’t do that stuff here.”  Serena took her favorite seat in the back near the globe and opened her messenger bag to remove her notebook.  Glancing around the room at the few students, she smiled.  Since the teacher hadn’t arrived yet, she could grab a few minutes to work on her novel.  Hopefully, the story would be done by her mother’s next visit.  Look what I did, Mom! 

“Whatcha doing?”  Krieg leaned her hip against the desk and rearranged the pleated folds of her silk stola.  Beneath the sleeveless dress, she wore a turquoise tunic.  A thin silver belt fastened beneath her breasts, and another buttoned around her narrow waist. 

 “I’ve got an idea for chapter seven.”  Serena pressed her pen to a clean page.  “Jennifer’s going to be caught by a gargoyle.”

 Roxanne stalked two rows over and blinked her glittered eyelids at Serena.  “Did you just call me a gargoyle?”  

Serena tightened her fist around her pen.  “No.”  Her throat constricted.  Why does Roxanne always have to single me out?

Roxanne yanked Serena’s black notebook from the desk; the metal spirals scraped against the hard surface.  Serena’s pen slipped from her hand and struck the tile floor, the sound eerily loud.

 Fail – she hadn’t made it through that last hour of the school day.  “I wasn’t talking to you.” 

“Who were you talking to?  Your imaginary friends?”  Roxanne bent the notebook, her biceps flexing beneath the short sleeves of her skull-and-crossbones T-shirt.