Phobia
Lacey lived in fear of falling, in every sense of the word. Heights took her breath away, and not in the thrilling, more pleasure than fear way the rest of us felt. Cliffs left the rest of us awe-struck. Lacey they struck down, sent her fleeing into herself and closing the door behind her eyes so none of us could reach her. Her every step was measured, her every action controlled -- a little stumble, she'd relive for days. It would have been funny, except it wasn't. We saw, and understood; who better than we?
Colin's demons all lived in the dark. They whispered to him in dry voices, sandpaper-rough and holding all the seductiveness of any certain destruction. His keychain bore a tiny flashlight, and he checked the battery religiously, heart pounding in anticipation of the day it would fail.
Rachel couldn't bear silence. Of us all, she had the most reason for her fear. Her beautiful green eyes had never seen the sun rise on the day of her birth, nor on any day since, and neither the doctors' efforts nor her parent's money could give her the one thing she wanted. Her world was sound and touch, and silence, to her, was living death.
And I? I was most crippled of all, though it was harder to tell. I flung myself headlong into feats that made me seem fearless, that made Colin's whimpering and Lacey's slow tight control seem pathetic, but which only covered the dry horror inside. They were my friends because they knew me better than anyone, and because it was Lacey, one grey day, who had put her finger on my heart, put a name to my flaw.
Athazagoraphobia.
And so we went, we the broken, until the summer I turned twelve; that summer. We played, we talked, we plotted of adulthood. We swam at the lake, even Rachel, noted curiously the changes in each other's bodies, and were by turns unbearably mature and suddenly childish. We played at jumping ropes -- Lacey and Rachel could be counted upon to turn them steadily, and Colin would sometimes jump in, though most often I jumped alone, while they chanted the rhymes around me. I can still almost hear Rachel's glad soprano, with Colin's light tenor winding around it, and Lacey's voice, surprisingly deep, supporting them both. That was our childhood's anthem, the pattern of our days, until it found us, or we it, and everything changed.
Shop of dreams... and nightmares.
Was it Lacey who saw it first? It's hard to remember, now, but I think she was. How she found it, she never said. But we saw the change in her, sudden as one of the July thunderstorms that would roll in without warning. Lacey, our truthteller, became, like the storms, an elemental thing.
There is this to say first of Lacey: we loved her. Perhaps I should say I loved her. Her quiet voice and deliberate gestures brought a sort of calm to our days, and her mind was quicker than anyone's. We were five when I met her, the new girl next door with her steady gaze and ready store of songs and stories. Her sharp eyes saw everything, and her hands were quick to comfort. There was sadness behind those eyes, even then, and we all knew why, but never talked about it. It was enough to save her treats our own mothers made, to slip away to our special spots without speaking, and pretend her home was just like ours. Our houses were close together, and I could hear through my open window the shouting and even the blows, sometimes. I've often wondered why I never spoke to anyone about it, never challenged the concealing shirts and the bruises that couldn't be hidden. Perhaps it was just easier to pretend not to see. And then again, perhaps it was just that we never saw Lacey cry, and lived in a sort of dread of being the first to make the tears fall.
And maybe, given all of that... maybe it makes sense, then, that she would be the one to grab on with both hands when the chance came to be free. But I guess we all expected -- and me most of all -- that while she might leave her parents behind, she'd never walk away from us. That we would go on, just as we were, through all those days and years that stretched so far away from us into futures we could hardly imagine, let alone see. Had she left us physically -- moved away, perhaps, or even died -- we might have understood it better. We would have cried, and missed her, and told each other all our stories of her, and then moved on to other things. Instead, we lost her in every other sense of the word: she taught us every way that a person could leave without really going away. I came to feel that that was fitting, somehow... that we had failed her, and that all that happened after was just the universe's way of making things even, balancing the scales.
It was the tag end of summer break. The last weeks, when the time had just started dragging, and we had each begun to harbour the tiniest, traitorous, unvoiced bit of eagerness to go back to school. And, as if to make up for that, we threw ourselves even harder into play; we camped along the riverbanks until the first stars and the mosquitoes chased us inside -- then we trooped home with Colin, who carried a big flashlight that used to be his father's, leading the way. We climbed every possible tree, Colin and I, often picking fruit trees so that we could dare each other to reach the very highest fruit, with Lacey and Rachel as judges. I ripped three skirt hems that particular week, to say nothing of the shorts I wore underneath them, and my mother threatened to keep me indoors until school started. After that, I ignored her notions of propriety, taking off my skirts and leaving them in a safe place, then putting them on again just before going home.
We had parted in our usual manner, and the night was a bad one at Lacey's house. Long into the night, the arguing continued, and there was even the occasional sound of breakage. It was only after the slamming door signalled that one of her parents -- her father, most likely -- had left the house, that the screaming stopped, and I fell asleep. Not surprisingly, I slept late the next morning. I looked over at Lacey's house when I left to go down to the riverbanks to play, but I wasn't surprised to see no sign of anyone, and I ran off, expecting that everyone would be there before me.