1st 5 Pages July Workshop- Hicks

Name: Heather Hicks

Genre: Young Adult Fantasy

Title: BALANCE KEEPERS: THE WALKING SHADOW

The first time the fire came to me, I woke up with a broken nose and a mouthful of silt and stone.  I was twelve.  It was the middle of the night.  And I felt the cold, for the first time in as long as I could remember. 

I’d gone to Fuller Brook to hide.  The painful cramping had been coming so often, and the hallucinations…well, they were no longer possible to hide.  Being a student at that first pretentious boarding school was hard enough.  Being the weird, adopted kid with the sweats and vacant looks was damning.  So, I’d sneak out.  Every night.  Some nights I’d take a pillow and blanket.  Most nights, I’d just fall asleep at the water’s edge, fingers dangling toward the easy current. 

After a while, the other girls began to look the other way and the teachers stopped asking about my mud-stained uniforms.

Until the fire came again.  Then, there were nothing but questions.  From school officials.  The police.  The court-appointed therapist.  None of my answers would have been even close to plausible.  So, I told them lies.  They didn’t believe those either, of course, but that’s the thing about adults and unlikely situations—they like to create their own truths. 

It’s funny, how a single truth can take so many shapes.   

I was in Juvie for only a few days that time.  Learned some great life skills in Juvie, actually.  You never know when you might need to pick a lock or take a punch. 

Eventually, Jefferson showed up.  My few things were packed, and I was carted off to another school in another state.  This pattern repeated itself a few times. 

Of course, that was before I became more than just a girl who seemed to always be present after a fire.  I became something worse.

After a while, the police began thinking beyond Juvie.  I overheard whispers of psychotherapy and institutionalization. 

When I saw the look on Jefferson’s face the last time, I hated myself.  And everything that I am.  Whatever freaking thing that is?  That’s when I knew I had to figure things out.  I had to learn to hold it in.  To control it. 

The truth was—the real truth—I didn’t want to hurt anyone.  Most of all Jefferson. 

Somehow, his lawyer managed to talk the state prosecutor into sending me to one of those camps for teenage delinquents.  Camp Gyossa, or, as we inmates called it: Camp Get Your Shit Straight.  Lots of talk therapy with sociopathic bunkmates.  Lots of journaling.  Lots of becoming one with ourselves in the middle of nowhere, Utah. 

Mostly, that summer really stunk.  And not because of the poor shower pressure and open-air latrine.  It was the first summer, since I was five, when I couldn’t visit Jefferson, the only living human being who hasn’t thrown me away.  I resent anything that keeps me from him, but, I’m woman enough to admit, that summer—that camp—saved my life.  All that time spent walking alone—with a tracking bracelet (of course)—so I could become one with myself and nature?  Not a total waste.  It really did help.  Not in the way the counselor’s expected, but it helped.  The topography was nothing but rocks and hard-packed dirt with a pathetic-looking shrub thrown into the mix, so I was able to practice letting the fire loose without the concern of burning down something.  Or someone.

Small fires.  Explosions of fire.  Hours of heat and madness and everything in between.  After a month, I could not only control the fire’s comings and goings, I could target it, make shapes, twist it, and will it to turn directions.  I was uninhibited.  Unbound.  Free. 

For the first time in my life, I felt powerful.

The camp therapist might not have seen that summer as one of progress, but I did.  Every morning when I’d bare my soul to my fellow crazies, she’d frown, her disappointment obvious over my perceived lies about how I could light up like a blow torch.  I can still hear her frustrated sigh.  Can we take this seriously, please?  If you want to make a change in your life.  If you want to get better.  To have a hope-filled future amongst society.  You have to take this seriously.

Well…I was taking it seriously.  Even if she was too narrowminded to see it.  And, anyway, society’s overrated.

Mornings were for truth/lie telling, afternoons were for introspection/freedom fire.  By the end of each day, I felt light, relieved of all the pressure of maintaining control, maintaining a fake persona.  I tried to tell the therapist that she really was helping me, but it was no use.  It’s like that weird French guy once said: “Truth, like the light, blinds.  Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.” 

At the end of the summer, there was a totally crap graduation with certificates and bogus awards.  Everyone got one.  Even the boy who never said a word to anyone and mostly just slept through every activity.

I stuffed the phony certificate into my suitcase and was shipped off to another school with the promise of a sealed criminal record, if I kept my nose clean.  This time, I was hopeful that I just might be able to do so. 

I’ve spent the past year at a boarding school outside Boston, laying low and trying to blend in.  Mostly, the kids and teachers at my new school see me as just another quiet kid.  Someone who isn’t real social but does her homework.  Someone who arrives on time to class and keeps out of trouble.  If I spend too much time alone, walking near the cliffs, sometimes coming in late to dinner, smelling like smoke, everyone just thinks I’m sneaking cigarettes.  Luckily, their little minds can’t comprehend a teenage sin outside of the spectrum of a CW episode.  Those cliffs have become my Fuller Brook. 

At the moment, I could really use those cliffs, or even a Utah desert. 

Instead, I’m inside a tin can with wings, where very flammable oxygen is being pumped into the air all around me, trying not to panic as we hit another batch of turbulence. 

A plane (flying through a storm) filled with people + a girl that can spontaneously combust = not a good ending for anyone.  I’ve been trying to keep it together for the past six hours.  While the rest of the unsuspecting passengers have been doing what passengers do on a Trans-Atlantic flight—sleep, watch movies, whatever—I’ve been practicing my Yoga breathing and making a trip to the toilet every half hour to…relieve the pressure.  At this point, the flight attendants definitely think I’m a chain smoker.  Even the nice one, who let me keep the entire liter of water, warned me in a whisper when I got back a few minutes ago that I could get into trouble for smoking on an airplane. 

If only my primary concern was emphysema as a geriatric!  I doubt I even live long enough to be a senior citizen.  But I’d certainly like for the rest of the people on board to have that chance, so I’ll deal with the judgmental attitudes.