Lily

Anticipating Homesickness

     Her hair is black. Her eyes are blue. Her heart is devoted to you. Her skin is fair, her beauty is there. Her feet are pale and bare. A mental teen, your worst bad dream. She escaped from an asylum, so it would seem. Her name is a secret that you soon will know. Go into the woods when it begins to snow. She will meet you at a post. It's made of wood, an abandoned ghost. If you are late, she'll cut off your head. If you don't come, blood still is shed. She will grab a needle and some thread, go into your house once you're in bed, place her hands at your neck and sew, sew, sew until you are dead. Take her home and treat her well. Bathe her whenever she starts to smell. If you be mean, just one single unkind act, she will sneak up on you in the night with her father's ax. Her name is a secret you will now know. Lily. Just like the lily will grow. And don't let this truth bend: insanity never ends.

     I wake up to the high-pitched chirps of my alarm clock. I glance at the time. 5:37, time to get up. I throw myself back down onto my comfortable bed and sigh.

     "Goodbye, room," I muttered; today was the day I would be leaving it. "I'll miss you." I heaved a sigh once again, this time it was a sad one.

     "A lot," I added. I have lived in this one home for fifteen years (I'm almost sixteen) and then, one day, ta-da! My mom decides we should move out of state to a place I've never been to or seen pictures of. I have one older brother, Gale, who is nineteen and going off to college after the summer is over; a younger brother, Tommy, who is turning fourteen in two weeks and will be a high school freshman in August. My dad is on a business trip for about a year, so that just leaves my mom to take care of everything, which sucks, because she is probably the most annoying and adventure-loving person you'll ever meet. Not that I'm dissing on adventures, but my mother loves them to the extremes, and sometimes that can be a little much.

     "Calia, you up yet?" Ah, speak of the devil. I hear my mom's voice, along with her heavy footsteps as she tromps up the stairs to my room. Then my door opens, and she pokes her head in. "Oh, you are! Good morning, hon!"

      "Mom," I say. "You're disturbing the peace."

     "Maryland today, huh?" she grinned at me, rubbing her hands together in anticipation. She was trying to get me excited, and it wasn't working. I groan, hitting my head back down on the pillow again.

     "Come on, sweetie. You need to get up. We have half an hour until we have to leave," she came over to the side of my bed and patted the lump under the covers that was my feet. I yanked the covers up over my head. She then grabbed it and yanked it off the entire mattress, winning. "Come on. I'll go wake up Tommy and Gale." She was walking towards the door.

      "Breakfast in ten," she added. She shut the door behind her.

     Downstairs, I was still groggy from sleep. I had thrown on a grey t-shirt, my baggy cotton pajama pants, and my pink fuzzy bunny slippers. I rubbed my eyes and walked into the kitchen. Gale was making breakfast. He glanced up at me as I walked in.

     "Hey, sunshine," he said groggily. Unusual. Usually he had a cheery tone to his voice in the morning, but this time was different.

     "Mom didn't give you much slack either?" I ask, brushing a wisp of my dark brown hair out of my face.

     "I was in the middle of a really good dream, too," he said, not looking at me and focusing on the omelette he was cooking, a metal spatula in his hand.

     "Really? Can I hear it?" I said, intrigued.

     "Okay, so I met this really hot blonde girl, and we were playing truth or dare, and it was her turn, so asked her 'Truth or dare?' and she said dare, so then I said--"