Two Truths and a Liar

V • Friend or Foe

Jenna

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The room was dark and still when I awoke, weak sunlight flickering in through the slats of a small window, shapes obscured by the gentle flutter of tattered white curtains. My eyes opened, closed, and then just before darkness closed over me again snapped awake. I rolled onto my back, the creaking of a rusted wire bed frame crying out underneath me, and stared blankly at a half lit ceiling, peaked, too close for comfort. I pulled myself up by taking hold of a low hanging support beam, and looking around, wiped dust from my hand.

Apart from a few cabinets in the flat side of the wall, a chest at the foot of my bed, and a dusty grandfather clock looming in the corner, the room was empty. Cold, and cramped. A trap door in the old hardwood flooring a few feet from where I now stood---head hunched to avoid the ceiling--- marked the exit.

A candle on the windowsill found itself grasped in my shivering fingers, and after rummaging through the chest was soon lit with the satisfying crunch of a lighter. With the candle in one hand, slipping over to the chest, I pushed it open and buried my other hand inside. The usual clothes made it sprawled out onto the sheets of my bed. A pair of worn jeans. The same sweater I'd kept since the memory of my mother faded, a gently smiling yellow turtleneck clad woman trapped in photograph, taped to the inside wall of the chest. A pair of sneakers too, blood crusted on the soles but never noticed. I slipped them on, softly brushing the fabric of the clothes with my fingertips before letting them fall over my frame. Books piled up in one of the cabinets I slid into my backpack, along with three jagged wooden stakes, chipped and worn at the ends. I touched the silver rosary at my neck, placed the now cold and fireless candle on the windowsill once more, and pulled at the rusted ring of the trap door before lowering myself carefully down a thin wooden ladder into the church below.

***

They knew me, but they didn't.

I haunted the hallways, tucked away in the lines of the roll call, engaging in light conversation but not enough to give out any information on myself or when they'd see me next or a reason for anyone to remember me. Not enough for anyone to have any idea about the blood on my hands.

I did nothing wrong, didn't engage in events, discussions, or group activities. My parents were never seen at school gatherings. Never seen at conferences. Never seen at performances, or the parking lot to pick me up, or the grocery store or the bus stop or anywhere else people are seen living and existing, and I was never asked where they were.

It was much easier to forget someone than try and remember her name.

The clamour of rising voices filled the hallways of deadwood high like a syringe. I breathed it in. Breathed it out. The air was suffocating, a hundred different scents and sounds beating the atmosphere around like with a crescendo I worried would get louder and louder until we all go deaf. It wasn't intelligent talk either, filthy words and jokes with no meaning but still gaining a cloud of laughter. I was in a vacuum with no escape, I was walking down the hallway, sneakers clicking against smeared flooring until my shoulder collided with another.

"Sorry,"

"Sorry."

I looked up in time to watch a shape, just a flash of form or movement, become swallowed by the crowd. Slip away.

I squinted, craning my neck to try and catch even a glimpse. No noticeable features, clothes, nothing but two shoulders colliding, an apology. A female voice.

And an uneasy feeling tying knots in my stomach.

I knew this feeling, the same sensation that rushed over me like a sudden chill every time I came close to one of their kind. Like spiders crawling along my skin. A blood rush to my head. It came when I least expected it, but never in broad daylight.