The Girl Who Cried Wolf

by Bella James

  He stands up and I keep my eyes closed as his strong little voice is carried away on the heightened buzzing. ‘With you, Anna. All they want is for it to begin with you.’

  ***

  When I open my eyes Benji has gone and I feel lost. Where was my sense of peace? That boundless joy I had felt only moments ago. It was slipping away and I was ever more conscious of a pulling deep inside my stomach.

  I began to realise that I had lost the life I knew. I wouldn’t see Michael for a very long time; he would be waiting now outside the operating theatre with my parents, in one of those awful rooms reserved for relatives. A doctor would open the door and they would all look up expectantly, eyes red with tears of fear; fears that would soon be justified.

  ‘We did everything we could for Anna, but I’m sorry, she didn’t survive the procedure.’

  I imagine my mother putting her hand to her mouth, making a strangled sound.

  I hear the noise of something large moving through the long grass behind us. I don’t feel fear, exactly, but I am certainly unnerved as I see two magnificent beasts, similar to wolves but much larger, and made up again of those dazzling lights. I spin around so my eyes can follow their movements as they continue to the shore of the lake, less than fifteen feet between us.

  I sense vibrations channelling between them, and know it is their communication I am feeling. I have lost my voice, acknowledging there is no choice but to remain silent.

  One wolf is dark, a shimmering blackened grey. I do not have a bad feeling from him, but when his shining eyes focus on me I look quickly and respectfully away. I know I am inferior to this being, that he is much more powerful than me in every sense.

  He turns his head away and they drink from the cool waters till their actions create ripples in the water. I am totally transfixed and as I stare into the lake, its surface becomes glass-like and I am shocked to make out the scene of a classroom. As the ripples begin to settle, I see that it is my old classroom and three rows from the back, there I am. Anna Winters, aged fourteen and a half.

  At first I am fascinated by the images until a slow, sweeping feeling of dread overcomes me as I recognise the day that the scene is playing out. This was a time in my life I had desperately, desperately tried to forget and I fought to tear my eyes away, to beg the wolves to make it stop, but I was alone. There was darkness surrounding me and I was not being permitted to take my eyes from the images, forced to relive each moment.

  ***

  I was very popular at school before sixth form, before I outgrew most of my peers. My parents were incredibly wealthy and I always had the most fashionable clothes and the latest accessories to go with them. Amongst our elite and competitive group of peers, we were far more into our looks and our possessions than our class work and studies. High school for us was simply our stage, our catwalk, and our own soap opera.

  I suppose there were about twelve of us who had clicked since middle school. Tina Westwood was my best friend, and of the twelve there were five boys who we deemed fit to interchangeably date and break up with. Daniel was my preferred choice and I revolved most of my time around flirting with him then being very cross at him moments later. At that time, nothing ever went beyond the occasional kiss, but it was all great fun and we thought we were the epitome of cool walking down the corridors hand in hand.

  As the more popular girls in school are, there were times when we could be more than a little cruel, especially when we were all together. We just felt invincible. I had a particularly mean streak and don’t know where it came from, but I carried around a lot of aggression. I wish I had some excusable reason for my behaviour, like I had been beaten by my parents or bullied as a younger child, but there is nothing I can remember. At times I was just inexcusably nasty.

  Maria Stapleton was not a popular girl. She was almost completely blind, and when she spoke to you her slightly cloudy eyes focused somewhere beyond where you were standing. Maria had a school assistant who went everywhere with her, and this was where a lot of the problems started. Her assistant was huge. She clambered behind Maria, bumping into our tables and chairs with her colossal hips. I suppose she was quite young and sweet, probably mid-twenties with a quiet disposition that contradicted her size. In a dreary lesson, with a bored-looking teacher droning on about algebra, Maria and her helper were our favoured source of entertainment. I used to pretend to struggle with a sum and ask the assistant for help while one of our crew swapped her chair for a broken one. She would sit back down and go crashing to the floor, skirt billowing around her ample thighs and Maria would get the fright of her life at the clattering noise. We would convulse in hysterics while the hurt-looking woman would try to compose herself.

  I use to stick Post-its on the back of Maria’s school jumper and wrote words I shouldn’t repeat. Daniel and I liked to sneak up behind her when she was sitting alone outside at lunchtimes and suddenly shout things in her ear. She would give out a little scream and we’d shove her roughly and say we were only messing. I once spent a lesson flicking bits of screwed up paper at her and as the boys around me laughed, the paper was flicked harder till she was literally jumping out of her seat.

  Her parents knew she was being bullied because one day, Maria did not attend school and our registration period was interrupted by the Headmaster. Mr Langley could strike a pang of fear in even the boldest of teenage hearts, and we all fell silent as he ranted at the front of the classroom about our intolerable behaviour. He mentioned unacceptable conduct and told us if he had received specific names then the offenders would be punished.

  ‘Some of you seem to think you have means of authority within this classroom that supersedes our school policy and code of conduct.’ To my absolute horror, he was making an obvious point of staring directly at me. I tried my utter hardest to look nonchalant but I felt my cheeks starting to burn and everyone watch me intently. This obviously had the desired effect, because his burning eyes never left me and he was shouting with increased anger. ‘Some of you seem to think it is OK to make someone else feel too afraid to come to my school! What gives you the right to make a person feel that way? Are they different to your perfect self? If I receive the names of these culprits, which I have every intention of doing, I will be forced to punish them. This will result in permanent exclusion, and a blackened mark for ever against their name as a bully.’ A gasp emanates from my captivated audience but his tirade is losing a little of its venom. He shrugs his shoulders as my eyes fill with tears and my peers stare harder.

  ‘Some of you seem to think you are better than others. But the truth is, and one day everyone will see this, the truth is that some of you are rotten to the core.’

  I was literally burning with humiliation. Not shame at this point, just hate for singling me out so obviously, and I hated Maria Stapleton more than you could possibly imagine. She had humiliated me in front of everyone, and I knew they would never forget this.

  Of course Maria knew our names and I wondered why she didn’t give them. Maybe she knew it would only make things worse. Things got worse anyway, horribly worse.

  For two days it transpired that she would not be coming to school with her assistant. She would be as independent as she was at home, and relying on her cane to guide her around the building, with the teachers offering extra support until a new helper was allocated. One can hardly blame the last one for throwing in the towel; I was surprised she hadn’t left sooner.

  This made Maria an easy target, not that anyone dared to say anything to her now. She just sat two rows in front of me, looking like every fibre in her body was tensed, anticipating the inevitable attack. I was still seething but I knew I had to tone it down; I couldn’t go through another face off with the Head like that.

  I just wanted the last word, a final laugh at her expense or something to hurt her, like she had hurt me.

  The teacher was writing on the whiteboard, her back to us. Everyone else was copying her words, looking down at their books as they scribbled
away. This was my chance. I dropped my pen so it rolled down the classroom towards her table. I crept forward and as I knelt down beside her in the pretence of picking it up, I whispered nastily in her ear, ‘It’s such a good thing you’re blind so you can’t see how ugly you really are.’

  With a smirk on my face and a few pupils raising their eyebrows at me, I returned to my seat and hummed a little satisfied tune under my breath as I finish the paragraph I was writing. I look up a few moments later to see Maria staring straight ahead and completely motionless, apart from a single tear falling from her pale eyes and making a slow trail down her slender cheek. In that instant I was hit by a crashing tornado of shame, and it has never, ever left me.

  The tear from her cheek falls onto the ground that is now the lake. My tears are flowing freely and the water where I am kneeling collects them and carries each one away on the ebbing tide. I have felt her pain, a pain so acute I am overcome once more with guilt I could ever have caused it.

  The images disperse and I am relieved to be away from the school and those terrible memories, but I feel so alone in this strange place that appears to be my life after death. The darkness is receding and within moments I feel the presence of a young woman beside me, and without turning to look at her I know it is Maria.

  ***

  During my second year of sixth form I received an email from Tina asking me if I remembered Maria and did I know she had been killed by a drunk driver. I recall staring at the computer screen and being unable to move for a long time.

  The feelings of guilt and regret had come flooding back, surpassing them the now irreversible fact that I had never found a way to apologise to Maria during what was left of our school years. She never acknowledged me again after the day I whispered in her ear. She made me feel invisible during a time when she blossomed and even made a few friends. In Year Eleven she started to wear a cool pair of Ray-Bans and would throw her long, chestnut hair over her shoulders, laughing while the boys in our class made exaggerated protests that they should be able to wear shades in class too. She grew tall and slender, and started to wear glossy pink lipstick which was breaking the school rules. One day I asked her if I could borrow some as she applied it expertly to her mouth, but she turned her head and started chatting to Daniel. I remember Tina looking impressed. She had never seen someone dare to snub me, and I scowled gloomily for the rest of the day.

  The last time I saw Maria Stapleton she was in the park one summer, with a beautiful golden Labrador in a guide dog harness talking to a young man I supposed was her boyfriend. She must have been almost seventeen and looked so happy, laughing in a carefree manner. I started to walk towards them, thinking maybe now she would listen to me, I wanted to say sorry and unburden myself of this ugly guilt. I wanted to tell her I had never treated anyone like that since I saw her crying, and she would see I had changed.

  As I got nearer though, I lost my courage. She had this way of making me feel small and invisible. I paused for a long time but eventually I turned around and walked away from them.

  ***

  ‘Hello, Anna.’ She is beside me, and for the first time since I have sensed her presence I turn to look at her, noticing that the dark wolf has gone and only the bright one is lying watching us, a little closer to the shore.

  ‘Maria, I never thought I’d see you again.’

  ‘We can see whoever we choose to here.’

  ‘You chose to see me?’

  For the first time, she lifts her head up and looks at me through beautiful aquamarine eyes. She holds my gaze and I take in her beauty. I suppose she was always beautiful but I never saw past her blindness. This loveliness was not limited to her appearance and her now exquisite eyes, it radiated from her, from somewhere deep within her soul. I felt a very human pang of envy and sorrow, as I realized I would never possess this nature of beauty. I look down at my hands as I imagine how I must look beside her.

  ‘When I heard you were here, Anna, I wanted to see you. I wanted to tell you I’m sorry.’

  I am completely taken aback. ‘Why would you need to apologise to me? I behaved terribly; I never forgave myself for the things I said to you, the things I did. I called you ugly; I threw things and shouted at you …’ My voice trails away as I suddenly consider she might be making fun of me somehow, she looks so peaceful and self -assured.

  ‘Yes. You did hurt me, you really did. I used to cry every night after school. I’d pray to make things better, to make me invisible to you.’

  I hang my head in shame as she continues. ‘Actually, my mother came in one night before I went to bed and begged me to tell her what was happening. She knew I could barely eat or sleep and she told me she could hear me crying in my room at night. I confided in her about some of what was happening, but I was too afraid to mention names, I knew that would lead to more trouble.’ She met my eyes again. ‘You hated me so much already. I think my mother went into school and they said they’d look out for any signs of bullying. It was the teachers who realized it was you, Anna. I didn’t tell them.’

  I look out to the lake as she continued, ‘After the day you whispered in my ear, I decided if God wouldn’t make me invisible to you, then I would make you invisible to me. I didn’t know where your hate towards me came from and I no longer cared. It was your problem, not mine. In fact, it made me stronger. I decided I no longer needed an assistant; I wanted to be independent. My support group had told me they had a dog for me who would guide me after I’d completed my GCSEs and they took me to see him as a puppy. He lived with us after his training. I fell in love with him at once and he guided me for nearly three years before I died – My very best friend.’

  I listen to her voice fill with warmth and love as she talks about her dog. It had surprised me that it had been her decision not to have assistance at school. I was surprised and impressed by her bravery.

  ‘He wasn’t with me the night I died. I had been out for dinner with friends and thought I could manage alone. I’m glad he wasn’t there, he couldn’t have saved me. The car came from nowhere and crashed onto the kerb when I was about to cross. He would have been killed also.’ A tear falls from her lovely eyes and she smiles sadly. ‘I still feel lost without his senses to guide me. I would have liked him here with me, Anna, but it wasn’t his time. I think he was needed to help someone else.’ She frowns and I ask her what is wrong.

  ‘We used to connect with each other often, he pined for me and I was able to comfort him. Animals are much more aware than we could ever be. As we grow older we are manipulated so much by the world around us, we are taught what to believe that we forget to use the insight we were born with. I can often reach animals and very young children, but rarely grown-ups.’ She shakes her head and the little frown deepens. ‘I haven’t been able to reach him, he is getting old and I fear he is in jeopardy.’ She touches the water in front of us, which ripples then returns to cool stillness.

  ‘Nothing.’

  We sit quietly for a little while as I don’t know how to comfort her. I wish I could. I break the silence eventually, ‘What did you call your friend?’

  ‘Marley,’ she says, a smile breaking through her saddened features at the sound of his name.

  ‘So we really do all come here. Even animals?’ I wonder where my beloved Tulip might be.

  Maria is clearly another one to communicate in telepathy for she laughs gently and tells me, ‘Your little friend is here somewhere, Anna. But it is only those that we truly connected with, on an eternal and spiritual level, we are reunited with in the immediate afterlife. You can wait for your loved ones to come, or find them waiting for you, and all the while you learn to live with the intuition you were born with before life begins to take it all away. I’m learning forgiveness, and that’s why I came to find you. To tell you that I’m sorry I didn’t forgive you when I knew you were sorry for what you had done.’

  ‘How did you know? I was never brave enough to tell you.’

  ‘When you lose one sen
se, your others become heightened. The energy when you were near me changed, your voice was different, the way you behaved. I knew you were sorry. I just wanted to punish you.’

  ‘I was sorry, Maria. I’m still sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ she says, placing my hand on top of hers. ‘We were young, and if I hadn’t been so stubborn we might have even been friends. Perhaps we’re friends now, after all.’

  I reach towards her and she puts her slender arms around me. We hold onto each other tightly as I cry helplessly on her shoulder, my body wracked with relief as her energy dissolves all the shame. As she strokes my back I hiccup loudly and my tears turn to sudden giggles till we’re both laughing uncontrollably. I open my swollen eyes over her shoulder to see the bright wolf look briefly towards me, bowing its beautiful head before walking away.

  ***

  I must have fallen asleep because I wake up alone. I open my eyes to a sky of magnificent blue. It reminded me of those glorious summer days when everything almost seems to stand still. There are only endless sapphire skies, and the occasional sound of laughter is carried towards you by a gentle wind. I step towards the lake and cup my hands to drink from the cool waters. As I lean forward I catch my refection looking back at me. I have long, dark blonde hair, my natural colour, and my skin is bright and glowing. I have thick eyelashes which frame my eyes, all the greyish traces of illness gone. I’m wearing my green dress and see that I was lovely once more. I feel at peace again within my new existence. I know that Maria is gone, but the memory of our talk and laughter filled me with contentment.

  I decide to stop waiting by the lake and want to try and find Ben. I still have a lot of questions for him. As I follow a footpath I walk past a young deer that seems entirely unafraid of me, and communicates a greeting through its soft brown eyes. I reciprocate this exchange and continue down the path, my heart filled with joy at this new world.