Black Halo (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

  All my life I had strived to be normal, and instead I lived a life that was utterly abnormal. Every decision I made pushed me further and further away from the idyllic life that I had pictured, and I never realized that it was because that was how my life was meant to be. I had tried to have a boyfriend in my best friend, and that didn’t work out. I had tried to be the resistant daughter to a father who was on the verge of starting over, and I couldn’t. I had tried to be the vengeful step-daughter to a woman who only wanted to be my friend, and I couldn’t do that either.

  The only part that ever seemed to run along the same lines that I had pictured as the way things were supposed to be was my relationship with Robert, and even that would never come close to being normal by the standards that I had set. He was beyond what I had expected in a friend, in a boyfriend, and perhaps in a lover. I could hug close to me the knowledge that he loved me so much that he had sacrificed himself to keep from hurting me, even as it stabbed at the empty cavity within me that once held my heart.

  No. My twisted and delusional sense of normalcy couldn’t ever be realized because it wasn’t meant for me. Robert had said I was different, and he was right. I just didn’t know how so until last night, and now, ten hours…perhaps ten years later, I was finally beginning to accept it.

  I cried. I cried rivers and streams, and buckets of tears, tears that I collected and tossed into the trash because I couldn’t stand to see those little reminders of the one difference that I couldn’t—wouldn’t accept.

  And when I was done crying, when there was nothing left within me to seep out and wick the sorrow that would forever have its claws in me, I took a shower. I tried to wash away the dirt and the leaves and the layers upon layers of hurt that I hadn’t been able to cry away. I scrubbed at my skin until it was raw, and I washed my hair until it no longer felt like my own. I couldn’t use the pink shampoo that I had been using since I could remember, and instead borrowed the shampoo that had been in there for my baby brother.

  I stepped out of the shower and ignored the bruises that surrounded my throat; I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I went into my room and pulled the drawer out from the little nightstand and removed the phone that hid inside.

  I went to my bag, which Lark had brought over in the morning, and pulled out my binder, flipping through the pages before finding a jumble of scribbled notes on the corner of a blank sheet of paper. I dialed the numbers that were there and waited for the ringing to begin.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Shawn?”

  “Uh…yeah? Who’s this?”

  “Shawn, this is Grace.”

  “Grace! Hey, how are you? How are you holding up?”

  My throat closed as I thought about it, and realized that he had meant how I was holding up about Stacy. I swallowed down the bile that had begun to pool and burn the back of my throat and answered him.

  “I’m doing okay, I guess.”

  “That’s great. I mean, that’s not great. It’s not great like woo-hoo and stuff, but you know, it’s great that you’re doing okay because you know, it’s hard to lose someone you care about and things like that.”

  “Yeah. You’re right,” I replied, fighting back a whole new round of tears that seemed to spring up out of nowhere.

  “So what’s up?”

  “Shawn, I wanted to know...do you still want to go to prom?”

  A silence followed my question, which was then followed by the sound of the phone falling and hitting something hard. I winced as I heard that sound eclipsed by what I could only guess was him falling down after the phone.

  “Shawn? Are you there?”

  I heard him scramble for the phone, the clawing sound of his hand against what was probably a wooden floor reaching through the phone and causing me to pull the receiver away from my ear.

  “Grace? Grace, gee, look I’m sorry-”

  “Oh. Well, I guess it was kind of rude of me to cancel and then call you up just a couple of hours before to see if you were still interested. I’m sure you found a replacement already, so never mind.”

  “No, Grace, wait! I’m sorry about dropping the phone! And falling down, too. I guess I was just surprised that you’d call me, much less ask me to go with you to prom.”

  “You asked first, remember?”

  He chuckled and I could almost picture him nodding widely. “True that. So yeah, I’ve got no problem going if you don’t, but are you sure you’re up to it? I mean, I totally understood why you canceled, so if you’re only going because you don’t want to disappoint me…”

  “No, I want to go, Shawn. And besides, I don’t think Stacy would’ve approved of me not going after all the hard work she put into finding my dress.”

  “Well, okay then. I’ll pick you up at…six?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Sah-weet! See you soon!”

  The phone clicked several times as he struggled to hang up, and I couldn’t help but chuckle. It sounded half-strangled.

  As soon as I got off of the phone with him, I saw Lark standing in front of the window. She looked stricken, and her eyes were unusually puffy. She didn’t say a word to me, just dropped two bags onto my bed and left, vanishing into a cloud of smoke before I could even think of saying anything to her.

  I looked at the bags and knew that they contained the two dresses that Stacy had chosen for me to wear to prom. I hung them up and began to get ready. The noise that I made as I did so caught the attention of both Dad and Janice, who came into my room, shock on their faces, and questioned what it was that I was doing before vocalizing their immediate disapproval.

  “It hasn’t even been half a day, Grace. This isn’t normal,” Dad said, worry and fatherly concern oozing out of him in a way that had never happened before.

  “You need time to grieve, Grace. Going out so soon isn’t good for your mental state. You haven’t truly mourned the loss of Stacy yet, and then to lose Robert so soon? Add that to everything you’ve gone through, all of the secrets you’ve had to deal with… You need to rest,” Janice insisted, but I ignored this.

  I opened the top drawer of my dresser and found a stash of makeup there that I could only assume had belonged to Katie. I began to pull out the pans and bottles and a tray of brushes, placing all of them unceremoniously onto my dresser.

  “Grace, Janice is right. You need to grieve. You spent weeks crying over Graham, and I know that as much as you care about him, it doesn’t compare to what you felt for Robert, so you not…moping and throwing things and increasing my water damage premiums isn’t a good sign to me.”

  “You need to call Graham,” Janice whispered to Dad. “Call him and get him over here. Maybe he’ll be able to talk some sense into her.”

  I saw my father’s head nod and he sat on my bed and used the same phone that I had used to call Shawn. When no one answered, he hung up, frustrated by the lack of response. “He’s not there.”

  “Maybe he’s with Lark,” Janice replied. “Call her up.”

  “I don’t have Ameila’s phone number.”

  “I do. It’s downstairs in the kitchen.”

  Janice disappeared and Dad turned to watch me as I examined the different containers that sat before me, trying to figure out what was what and how exactly they were to be applied to my face.

  “Grace. Grace, I’d prefer if you didn’t go out tonight and stayed home so that we can talk. We need to talk about everything that happened last night.”

  I lifted a bottle that I assumed was foundation and set it aside. A pot of some black goo, a tube of something that said mascara, a black pencil, a flat container that contained several tins of eye shadow, and a tube of flesh colored lipstick were also separated for later use.

  “Grace, are you listening to me? We need to talk. You’ve got a month left before you graduate and leave to begin your life as an adult—we can’t spend all that time together without talking about this.”

  Janice returned then, followed by Graham and Lark. �
��They…they just appeared. I picked up the phone and…then they were there, in the kitchen,” she stuttered, her face pale as she pointed over her shoulder with her thumb.

  “I already knew about Grace going to prom,” Lark said in a tone that sounded a lot like disappointment. “I brought Graham here because he knows her better than any of us and might be able to talk her out of this insane idea.”

  “Well, talk some sense in to her, man. She’s not thinking straight,” Dad said to Graham with as much authority as he could muster, and I tried not to laugh at the feeble attempt.

  Graham opened his mouth to say something, and soon, whatever it was he had planned on saying was joined by the voices of everyone else in my tiny room, their disapproval plain.

  “Could you all just stop it? Just stop it,” I yelled. “I get it. You guys don’t think I’m ready, but could you at least trust my judgment to know for myself when I’m ready or not? I told Shawn that I would go with him to prom. I backed out because of what happened with Stacy, but now that Robert’s gone, too, I realize that life is too short, even for those who can live forever, to sit at home and cry and be upset by something that I can’t change. I’m going to prom. I’m going to put on that dress that Stacy picked out for me and I’m going to try and have a good time like Robert wanted, both for me as well as for Shawn. If you don’t approve, then so be it, but could you leave me alone so that I can focus on trying to figure out how to do this makeup thing?”

  Graham’s face dropped, as did Dad’s jaw. Janice looked confused, and Lark was…well, she just stared at me with her unseeing eyes, taking in the different perspectives that came to her through the eyes of everyone else in the room, including my own. I looked up and saw the sticky residue of tape on my mirror and felt a slight pang inside of me as I remembered what it was that had been taped there.

  “Do you need help with your hair? Makeup?”

  Janice’s voice was like a warm candle to the cold darkness that had sneaked up on me, and I nodded, glad for her change of heart.

  “I’ll get the wrinkles out of your dress,” Lark sighed, and picked the two bags up before heading downstairs.

  Graham shook his head and grabbed my dad by his arm, dragging him downstairs as well. “Come on, Mr. S. Your daughter’s more stubborn than an ink stain.”

  Dad took one last look at me before being disappearing. I closed my eyes and thanked Graham silently for doing that.

  “Okay, so let’s see what we’ve got here,” Janice said as she sifted through her sister’s supplies. I saw how difficult this was for her and tried several times to get her to simply tell me what was what and how to apply it, but she shook her head and insisted that she do this part for me.

  “She kept the foundation that’s closest to your skin tone. What color is your dress?”

  “It’s black—black and silver,” I answered.

  She nodded and pulled out a large, rectangular looking object from my drawer and opened it. It was filled with several small circles of eye shadows in varying shades of purple, silver, and black. “This will work,” she said before she began to change my face into someone unrecognizable.

  I watched as she covered the purple circles that had formed beneath my eyes, and made the red splotches that covered my face disappear. Her hands shook as she brought a sponge to my neck, dabbing gently at the dark spots that circled my throat and gave evidence to just how close I had come to not being here.

  She shook her head and took several deep breaths before she added a pinkish brown streak of color to my cheeks, buffing it out with a fat, fluffy brush. “Close your eyes,” she said before approaching me with a brush, the palette of colors in her other hand.

  A few minutes later, Lark appeared with the two garment bags in one hand, a small bag and box in the other. “I’ve brought your dresses, and something else, too.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered, but she was gone again. “I don’t think she’s ever going to forgive me.”

  “Forgive you? For what?”

  I looked at Janice and realized that despite what she knew, despite what she had been told about the world my father had lived in his entire life, and the life that I had accepted as a part of my own, she could not know the truth about Robert’s death. All she knew was that he was gone.

  “Nothing,” I said quickly, and winced as the bristles of the brush stabbed me in my eye.

  “Oh, oh, I’m sorry!” Janice apologized, dabbing at my eye with a wadded up piece of tissue she grabbed from my nightstand. “Dammit, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her, and tried to block out the pain as my blurry vision began to clear. “It’s no worse than what I would have done.”

  She quickly brushed my hair and began tugging at it, clipping it up with things she pulled out from the small bag that Lark had brought with her.

  “There. Now all you need is mascara and you can get dressed,” she said with a wry smile before handing me a red tube. “You remember how to put it on, right?”

  I grabbed the tube and shrugged. “Sure. It’s just like riding a bike.”

  She left me to remove the dresses from their bags and I took a quick glance at myself in the mirror, not recognizing who it was that I saw. I rationalized it as me simply seeing myself with so much makeup, but I knew that it was because the person in the mirror was only half of one, the other half having died in a forest at the hands of the person who loved him the most.

  “Well, I do have to hand it to Stacy; she sure knew how to pick a dress. These are beautiful, Grace.” Janice held the silver dress out to me and I took it with an appreciative smile.

  Sighing, I agreed. “Yes. Yes she did.” I removed my shirt and pulled the slip of fabric over my head, the slinky material sliding down my body and I imagined it was the silver gaze of someone else…

  “So, this black webbed thing goes over that?”

  “Yeah. Stacy found that in an antique shop and she said she knew that this was supposed to be my prom dress. It’s vintage, over a hundred years old.” I held back the part about Robert being the one to purchase the dress, and stepped into it carefully, allowing Janice to ease the black creation over my hips and up to my chest where she held it out so that my arms could fit through the sleeves. She pulled everything back and then began the laborious process of attaching all of the hooks that closed up the back of the dress.

  “This is why progress with women’s rights took so long—we were taking far too long to get dressed,” she quipped when she finished the last hook. “Okay, so turn around and let’s see the finished product.

  I looked at myself in the mirror, again, watching as she put something around my neck. My hand reached up to touch it; it was the wing pendant and necklace she and Dad had given to me for my birthday. I hadn’t worn it since Christmas. “I thought now would be a good time to wear this,” she said as she handed me a pair of silver earrings. “I suppose when I gave it to you, it had a lot more significance than I originally thought.”

  I nodded as my fingers gently traced the engraved feathers. “Thank you.” I looked at my feet and realized that I had no shoes. Janice saw this and grabbed the box that sat on the bed.

  “Here.”

  I pulled off the lid and saw the pair of shoes that Stacy and I had bought after we’d purchased the silver dress. I slipped on the strappy sandals and tried my best to remain upright on the slightly high heels, teetering just a bit before regaining my balance and then seeing my reflection for the last time.

  “I guess I’ll do,” I commented before heading downstairs.

  Graham and Dad both stood up, Graham now wearing a tuxedo—the same one that Robert had helped him pick out—and Dad wearing a tearful expression on his face.

  “Grace, you look beautiful,” he managed to say before dabbing at his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “Thanks,” I said to him, my mouth twitching to the side at the awkwardness that I felt at that moment. I didn’t care if I was beautiful
or not. The person who mattered the most wasn’t there to see it.

  “Why are you wearing a tux?” I asked Graham as he began tugging at the dark, almost blood red bowtie at his neck.

  “I was forced to go.”

  “By who?”

  “By me.” Lark stepped in from the kitchen wearing a dark red dress that was slit in the front just high enough to cause a scandal, while the front was actually cut far more demurely, the hem resting just below her collarbone, with sleeves that capped at her shoulders. Her hair was done half up, curled and looped in lazy piles at the top, with loose curls that ran down her back. She wore no jewelry, but her face was immaculate with lips that matched her dress. “You’re not going to that dance alone, Grace.”

  “I wasn’t planning on going alone,” I retorted before the doorbell rang.

  “That’s not what I meant and you know it,” came Lark’s biting reply before she put on a smile as Shawn walked in, a clear box in his hand that held some generic corsage.

  “W.O.W.” Shawn said before whistling, enunciating each letter with the typical Salsa flair. “You look…hot. Burning hot. Scorching hot.”

  “Could you not describe my daughter as hot?” Dad commented, a slight growl of disapproval in his voice.

  “Oh. Um, sorry Mr. Shelley,” Shawn quickly apologized, his face turning red from embarrassment.

  “Thank you. So, where are you taking my daughter Mr…”

  “Bing. It’s Shawn Bing, Mr. Shelley. And I’m taking her to the prom, sir. Just to prom. Nothing else. And definitely not to have sex.”

  Shawn’s forehead beaded up, his jaw hanging down in shock at his words, and I moved forward to grab his arm and drag him towards the door. “Okay, I think that’s enough for one night; let’s get going. I’ll see you later, Dad. Thank you Janice,” I called out before my heeled feet began their click-clack staccato on the pavement outside.

  “Wow. That was intense. I’m sorry about what I said; your dad is kinda…strict. I didn’t peg him for that kind of guy, you know?”