Winter Thirst

by Ilia Bera

  “I already made her father get her a therapist.”

  “Has it helped at all?”

  “No. If anything, it’s made her weirder. She’d be better off keeping that creepy mouth of hers shut.”

  Tears filled up in Hanna’s eyes as she listened to her teacher talking about her. She never “plotted” and she never thought about “hurting” anyone. She just wanted to be normal. She just wanted to be left alone. Was that too much to ask?

  Her father, because of his overwhelming social anxiety, never came to pick Hanna up from school. It was the middle of winter, and far too cold for a little girl to walk home by herself. The school’s principal ended up giving her a ride home.

  In the car, the principal awkwardly tried to start some small talk with the emotionally beaten up girl.

  “What do you like to do, Hanna?” the principal asked.

  Hanna stared silently out the window, watching the falling snow flutter past the window.

  “Hanna?” the principal prodded.

  Hanna remained silent.

  “There must be something you enjoy—Do you play any sports?”

  Without turning to look at the principal, Hanna nodded her head ‘no’.

  “What about colouring. Do you like to colour?”

  Again, Hanna nodded ‘no’.

  The principal sighed. “What’s your favourite subject in school?” he asked.

  Hanna was silent once again, still trying to contain her tears from her teacher’s sour words.

  “Do you like gym class?”

  Hanna nodded ‘no’.

  “Art class?”

  No.

  “Science?”

  No.

  “Do you like any class?”

  Hanna was silent.

  “What does your mom do for a living?”

  Hanna shrugged.

  The principal was starting to see why Hanna was such an outcast.

  “She doesn’t tell you?”

  “She’s dead,” Hanna said firmly.

  The principal went silent. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay. Neither do I,” Hanna said, before returning to her silence for the remainder of the ride.

  As they pulled up to Hanna’s house, the principal noticed a man standing on Hanna’s doorstep. He had a can of spray paint in his hand, and was finishing up a large, red “MURDERER”.

  The principal rolled down his window and leaned out. “Hey! Stop that!”

  The man turned around and swiftly began to run away, dropping his can on the patio.

  “I’ll go let the police know what happened,” the principal said.

  “Don’t bother,” Hanna said. “Everyone does it.”

  The principal stared at Hanna—beginning to understand why she was the way she was. He looked back out at the house. The tree and the house’s rooftop were covered in toilet paper. Windows were broken from thrown stones and there was spray-painted slander everywhere—on just about every square foot of the home.

  “Christ…” the principal muttered. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this, Hanna. No kid should have to deal with this kind of thing...”

  Hanna silently sat in the passenger seat.

  “I’m going to see what I can do about this. Maybe I could meet with your father to try and come up with a solution.”

  “He won’t meet with you.”

  “Why not?”

  Hanna shrugged. She legitimately didn’t know why. Francis hated talking to teachers—he hated talking to anyone.

  The principal sighed. “You’d better get inside. Your dad is probably worried about you.”

  There was a cold silence as the winter breeze died down.

  “Can I walk you to your door?” the principal asked timidly.

  Hanna nodded ‘no’.

  There was another silence.

  “Why do people hate me?” Hanna asked.

  “No one hates you,” the principal lied, trying to console the vulnerable girl.

  “Yes they do. You know they do. That’s why you’re treating me like this.”

  The principal was silent. “Sometimes people don’t like what they have a hard time understanding. It’s not that people don’t like you—it’s that they don’t understand you.”

  “Why?”

  “I wish I could say, Hanna. Have you tried asking them?”

  “Yes. They just laugh at me.”

  “Kids can be cruel. Which kids laugh at you? Maybe I can talk to their parents and find a solution...”

  “All of them.”

  There was a long silence. Hanna’s school principal unfortunately didn’t have a solution for the girl. He looked back over at the house and all of the vicious slander written all over it.

  “I like to write poems,” Hanna said quietly.

  “What was that?”

  “You asked what I like to do. I like to write poems.”

  “Oh,” the principal said.

  There was a silence.

  “It’s the only thing I like to do. My mom was a poet.”

  “Can I read your poems?”

  Hanna looked away and went silent.

  “You know, Hanna—Sometimes, when life is tough, it helps to vent—but it isn’t always easy to talk about stuff.”

  Hanna listened, but she didn’t look over at the principal.

  “And when that happens, it helps to have a way to express yourself. If poetry is your way to do that—that’s great. Lots of people don’t have a way to express themselves.

  “But an important part of expressing yourself through art is sharing. Art can be very powerful, and with it, you can say a lot more than you can through any conversation. If you want people to understand you—maybe you need to start sharing your work.”

  “But if they make fun of it, then I have nothing.”

  “You’ll always have poetry, whether they like your poems or not. Don’t let anyone ever discourage you or take that away from you.”

  Hanna smiled for the first time in a long time.

  But her moment of relief was short lived. The next day, the story of Hanna’s frustrated assignment had gotten around the whole school. As she walked into the school, the halls went silent and everyone began to whisper with one another. Judging and glaring eyes looked down upon her as she walked with her face pointed towards the floor.

  Hanna’s locker had once again been vandalized. This time, with the phrase, “Just kill yourself, psycho.”

  On her way to class, Kristi Platelle, a notoriously cruel female student shoved Hanna, prompting laughter from Kristi’s buddies. Momentarily popular during elementary school, Kristi was a vile girl.

  “Watch it, shitgirl,” Kristi said, prompting more laughter from her mean friends.

  Hanna did her best to ignore the cruelty. She would soon find out the origin of the mean nickname, shitgirl.

  During class, when the teacher wasn’t paying attention, someone slipped a note onto her desk. She reluctantly opened it up and read it.

  “When you shoot the school up, will your dad be the one to strap you to the chair?”

  Hanna crumpled the note up and threw it onto the ground. Students laughed at her expense. She’d suddenly become a cheap joke—an easy way for kids to stroke their pre-pubescent egos.

  At lunchtime, Hanna went to her usual spot under the stairs. It turned out, her locker wasn’t the only victim of vandalism—someone had left a big lump of dog shit right in her usual sitting spot.

  The echoes of the snickering Kristi filled the long stairwell as the cruel chubby girl looked down at Hanna.

  “Shitgirl!” Kristi’s voice rang out.

  Hanna’s eyes filled up with tears. Turning her back to the cruel torment was becoming harder and harder. She was quickly running out of directions to turn.

  “Hey,” someone said to her in the empty back stairwell.

  Hanna turned around. It was the young, beautiful blonde haired Megan Gold.

 
Hanna just stared at her.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” Hanna said, wiping the tears away from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry people suck.”

  “I’m used to it—thanks though.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” Megan asked.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Do you want to come over to my house this weekend?”

  “For what?”

  “To hang out. Maybe we can have a sleepover.”

  Hanna stared at the most popular, beautiful girl in the whole school.

  “I mean—you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I just thought it would be fun.”

  “Really?” Hanna asked hesitantly.

  “Yeah. Do you like movies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have a favourite?”

  Hanna thought for a moment. “I like The Shining.”

  “That’s the scary one, right? Based on the Stephen King book?”

  “Yeah. It’s really cool.”

  “My parents own the book, but I’ve never read it,” Megan said with a genuine smile.

  “The book is totally different from the movie. The director put in a bunch of secret messages and stuff.”

  “Really?” Megan asked.

  “Yeah—Stanley Kubrick... He was really smart.”

  “That’s so cool. You’ll have to point them out to me.”

  “Okay,” Hanna smiled. She looked quickly down at her feet and blushed.

  “I’m not good with scary movies, so you’ll have to keep reminding me that it’s not real.”

  Hanna smiled. “Okay.”

  “Cool—It’ll be fun,” Megan said.

  “Yeah.”

  “See you around, Hanna.”

  Hanna watched as Megan walked back up the stairs.

  “Megan?” Hanna said.

  “Yeah?” Megan asked.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure—what is it?”

  Hanna hesitated for a moment. “What’s it like being normal?”

  Megan smiled. “I don’t know. Maybe you should ask someone who’s normal.”

  Hanna had never been invited to anyone’s house before. Whenever people invited others to their house, they would always whisper so that Hanna wouldn’t overhear, fearing she would randomly show up.

  For the rest of that school day, Hanna was immune to all of the torment and laughter. She was too excited about her weekend plans to care about anything that anyone said. She felt a tingling in her bones—a tingling she’d never felt before in her life.

  She hurried home after school to tell her dad about her upcoming weekend.

  EIGHTEEN

  a cruel life

  The young Hanna’s moment of glory was short lived.

  Since Francis started his new job as the prison’s resident executioner, he had always been home long before Hanna, making sure dinner was in the oven and the house was tidied up.

  That day, the house was cold and silent.

  “Dad?” Hanna called out as she walked through her door, which was still prominently painted with the word “MURDERER”.

  There was no response, which was strange seeing as the front door was unlocked. Hanna made her way through her nice little living room, to the staircase which led upstairs. At the top of the steps, something began to feel wrong.

  Her father’s bedroom door was wide open, but it was totally silent.

  Hanna walked up to the door. The house groaned and creaked as her feet stepped down on the old floorboards. She turned into the room.

  Then, her heart froze. There was blood everywhere—on the walls, on the floor and even on the roof. The sheets had all been pulled off of the bed in an violent struggle, and there was blood all over the pillows.

  And on the ground was a cold, dead body, dressed in a prison staff uniform. Hanna felt sick and faint. She stumbled away from the room, and then fell down to the floor as her body became overwhelmed with emotional weakness.

  Completely traumatized, she began to cry uncontrollably. She slowly lifted her trembling hands up to her face and she tried her best to wake up from her nightmare—but she never did.

  It took nearly an hour for Hanna to muster up the strength to crawl over to her father’s body.

  When she flipped the corpse over, she was frozen by another grizzly sight. His throat had been violently ripped out, and his face had been torn almost completely off. It looked as though he was attached by a shark. Deep lacerations penetrated the entire length of his indistinguishable mess of a face—a grizzly image.

  Franticly, Hanna fell back and began to cry. “Dad!” she screamed. “Dad!”

  Someone on the street heard her cries, and called 911.

  Minutes later, Hanna’s street was filled with every police cruiser in the town of Snowbrooke.

  The school principal showed up to take Hanna away from the scene while the police began their investigation. Hanna stayed with the sympathetic principal for the next few weeks—too distraught to go back to school.

  The man who had been killed was not Hanna’s father.

  The man who had been killed was a man named Aaron Stevenson, a co-worker of Hanna’s father. They never found Francis’ body, but the DNA test proved that much of the blood in the room and on a dropped hunting knife belonged to the missing father. Fingerprints showed that there was another assailant in the home—three people altogether.

  The investigation dragged on for months. Police scoured all of the alleyways in town. They searched the dump, the nearby woods and all of the highway ditches, but they never found the body of Francis, or the mysterious third person.

  Finding suspects was difficult. Usually, the police would look for people who had possible intent, or people who were known to hate the victim. In Snowbrooke, nearly everyone hated Francis. It was impossible to find a usable lead, as Francis received death threats on a daily basis.

  The investigation quickly went cold. The final theory was that two men—Aaron Stevenson and the unidentified intruder broke in to murder Francis. Francis put up a fight—killing Aaron after being repeatedly stabbed. The unnamed remaining man took Francis to dispose of the body—or to further torture him before he died. Investigators concluded that no one could survive with the level of blood loss Francis suffered without immediate medical support.

  Hanna was moved into a foster home where somehow, life managed to become worse.

  Her new foster parents—The Clarksons were terrible human beings. They were a religious couple—probably less than forty years old. They fostered ten children, including Hanna. For each child they fostered, they got six hundred dollars from the government every month—tax free. The district only allowed a limit of five children per foster parent, but because of an old loophole, the Clarksons were able to exceed the limit.

  Because the money wasn’t considered “income”, both of the Clarksons also collected their monthly welfare, as well as their monthly disability cheques. Neither of the Clarksons were disabled, but they claimed that they couldn’t work because of persistent headaches they suffered from being rear-ended by an important army official—Sam Quick. Sam claimed that he was stopped at a red light, behind the Clarksons while he was on his cell-phone with his wife, who was in labour.

  In reality, the Clarksons noticed the distracted army official talking on his phone behind them, and they intentionally reversed into him in the hopes of receiving some insurance money. There were no witnesses to back the official’s story up, so the Clarksons were free to get away with their tale.

  The money they got for fostering the children was meant to pay for the children—their schooling, food, clothes, allowance, and daycare. The money they got for their “disabilities” was to pay for their “headaches”. In total, the Clarksons made over one hundred thousand dollars every year, completely tax-free, and they used none of it for their “headaches” or their fostered children.

  Hanna had to share a small bedroo
m with three very young girls—one baby and two toddlers. Every kid in the house was at least five years younger than Hanna. Because of her older age, the Clarksons expected Hanna to take care of the children, and make sure they didn’t cry at night. When they did cry, The Clarksons would scream at Hanna—reminding her that they “took her in when no one else would!” A phrase they used on all of their foster children.

  The saddest part of it all was that The Clarksons truly believed that they were good people. They taught Hanna how to cook and how to clean—explaining that they were valuable lessons to have in life, and that she could work a plethora of jobs if she mastered them.

  But in reality, they were just looking to get out of having to cook and clean for themselves. Hanna cooked and cleaned, every single day. Effectively, the Clarksons were getting paid to have a full-time employee working for them. The bastards.

  The absolute worst part of The Clarksons’ apparent altruism was their effort to “fix” Hanna’s compulsive shyness. But The Clarksons had no psychological training whatsoever—nor did they have any patience whatsoever. Every “session” would end with them yelling at Hanna and screaming in her face, “we only took you in because no one else would!”

  Every Sunday, The Clarksons dragged the whole “family” to church. As they became increasingly frustrated with Hanna’s silence, they started to demand that Hanna “pray” to be cured.

  The fact that Hanna never changed led The Clarksons to believe that Hanna may be some sort of psychotic Satan worshipper.

  In case life at home wasn’t bad enough, life at school hadn’t changed at all.

  When Hanna finally returned to school after two months of grieving absence, she once again found herself the victim of relentless emotional torment. Students continued to spray paint her locker, pass her upsetting notes, and mock her in the hallways.

  Hanna was initially excited to go back to school, and possibly see Megan again—thinking Megan would be the solution to her lingering unpopularity.

  But Hanna was upset to learn that Megan was no longer a student at the school—apparently having run away from home just a couple of weeks after Francis’ murder.