The Awakening (A PJO Fanfic)

Good Nightmares

Readers:
(Thanks for reading. This may be a little bit dark but I hope you enjoyed it. Please comment on any suggestions. I don't really want to be part of the competition but you can vote for me if you want. Thanks, Katie)

AGATHA POV

Everybody has demons. Everyone has monsters, but few peoples' nightmares actually exist outside their dreams. I know that I'm not crazy. People tell me that I am; they tell me that every day. Not in words directly to my face but in sideways glances and whispers behind hands. Ever since I was nine I have seen monsters when no one else had. Most people had written me off as crazy or living in my imagination after I warned them about the monsters. But the monsters are real, and if you don't watch out they will ruin your life too.

The first time that I saw a monster was when I was only nine. I was walking back from the store with my mother. We turned the corner on the sidewalk and I saw a woman wearing a black dress that came down to her knees. I would have thought that she was normal if not for the brown wings on her back. We made eye contact, and she smiled at me, her forked tongue flickering between her straight white teeth. I tugged on my mother's hand and pointed at the monster, not out of fear of strangers, but of curiosity.

When she turned to look at where I was pointing and then me she asked, "Agatha, what are you looking at?"

"There's a lady over there with wings. You're looking at her right now," my nine year old self exclaimed. My mother turned one more time to look for the monster once more but she still didn't see her.

"You must be imaging things," she replied. "Come on, let's go home." She proceeded to pull me down the street and around the corner. I looked back to see if I could see the monster one last time. I made eye contact with the monster and she smiled her devil smile before we turned the street corner and she disappeared from sight. My mom just thought that I had imagined the whole ordeal, so she decided to ignore that day on the sidewalk.

The next time that this happened was a few months later, two weeks before my tenth birthday when I was at a Burger King with my Dad. When I looked out the window I saw a weird looking monster with a lion's head and snake's tail. The rest of its body was drenched with slime-covered green scales that made it look like a demented fish.

When I didn't respond to my father's question about how school was today, he snapped his fingers in front of my face and asked me, "What is so interesting that is more important than my question?"

I turned my head and replied, " Well, um..." He glared at me so I took a deep breath and said, " There's a monster next to the Burger King drive through sign."

He looked to where I was pointing and sighed. "That's a dog, Agatha. Dogs aren't monsters. You should know this by now."

I looked back out the window and saw the monster again. It paced around and it sometimes sniffed the ground like it was looking at something before it ran off into the night. I never saw it again. I heard my parents arguing and yelling at each other later that night about how they raised me wrong and how it was the other person's fault that I was messed up in the head.

I had a few more moments like this in the next year. Every time after I had an "episode" (as my parents called it), I would hear them yelling later that night. After each argument they got worse. My mom became a workaholic and was never home at all; she barely had time for her family anymore. My dad lost his job about a month ago, so he started drinking. When he wasn't at a bar he was in his old office in our house. I stopped telling them about the monsters after about the first fifteen or so times. I didn't see the harm in not telling them; they thought that I was crazy and the monsters were only a result of my slight fear of dogs, my fear of snakes, and my anxiety. The monsters never bothered me anyways; they just sort of stood there. I began to find their presence comforting in an odd way. When my parents weren't there, they were. Over time they became my friends. Not the friends that you ask for advice of talk to daily. They were the friends that were just there, you never talk to them but they were there whether you liked it or not. It slowly became harder to remind myself that I wasn't crazy.