She crept up to the edge of the woods and peered through the shadows made by the leaf canopy. Tiny sun rays danced on the fallen leaves with every sway of branch, making it difficult to distinguish movement at first. But soon the little fawn came into view. It staggered and fell, breathing quickly before picking itself back up, only to fall again. From where she stood, she could just make out a spray of tiny holes on its side, where blood trickled out.
Knowing she would get punished if she crossed the tree line only made her hesitate for a moment. But she knew that she couldn’t let that poor little thing suffer and die alone. She went to the fawn, afraid to touch it at first. It made a strange sound, and she couldn’t tell if it was wheezing or crying. Before she knew it, tears were falling down her cheeks. She cradled the fawn’s head in her lap and stroked its soft fur.
“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”
Daddy killed a buck every fall. Just one. It was enough to feed the family all winter. He didn’t take pictures with it or put its head on the wall. He only took what he needed, and they always thanked God for the gift that was provided. He never shot at a doe, especially one with fawns.
She cried for the little thing in her lap and watched its chest rise and fall rapidly. She prayed for its pain to end, for its suffering to go away quickly. Over and over she repeated her prayer, “Please, God, no more pain.”
She was hardly aware of the warmth in her hands.
As she stroked its fur and sobbed, she was finally aware of the heat, but there was no pain. Soon, the heat was inside of her, and she felt like she would burn up. Through blurry eyes, she saw something miraculous happen: tiny silver pellets bubbled up from the fawn’s wounds and spilled out onto the red and brown leaves. The blood ceased to trickle, and the animal’s breathing slowed.
She sniffled and stopped crying. The heat in her hands subsided, and the fawn shakily stood up and blinked at her.
When Daddy came home from work later that day, he was introduced to his daughter’s new pet. Mama couldn’t help but giggle at his expression.
“Can we, Daddy?!” his daughter begged.
After some coaxing from Mama, he said, “Okay, Lyla. But just until she’s big enough to take care of herself, okay?”
“Yay!”
***
“Hey, Lyla! Heal this!”
She turned around just in time for a dead mouse to hit her in the face. Ignoring the laughter from the kids around her, she scooped up the mouse, thinking it might have been alive, but it had already passed. The boys had been teasing the girls who all screamed at the sight of it. Lyla was the only one who didn’t scream and carry on. This made her a bigger target, and now even the girls laughed at her.
Not wanting the boys to keep throwing it around, she tossed the little body over the fence, careful to aim for the flower bed.
“You gonna date that mouse, Lyla?” It was Logan Williams, the one who bullied her the most.
“I bet you wanna marry it, huh?” added Taylor Marcantel, who had a huge crush on Logan. She stood there with a disgusted sneer on her face, a hungry look in her eyes. It was the look kids get when there’s a fight about to start—when they want a fight to start. It was the look of a pack of wolves getting ready to take down a deer.
Lyla tried not to show her embarrassment but felt her cheeks flush anyway. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing her cry, so she walked away with her head down, counting the lines in the cement walkway to keep from hearing what they were shouting as they followed her.
Taylor and her best friend Tanya skipped on either side of Lyla and sang in unison to the tune of Frosty the Snowman: “Ly-la, the freak show! What a stu-pid, ug-ly girl! She makes love to mice and to the rats that eat her eyes and nose! Oh, Ly-la, the freak show! …”
She saw Miss Doris and Miss Lydia on duty by the gym. They were chatting with each other, laughing about something. Lyla kept a calm, even pace and changed course for the gym. If she ran to tell the teachers that would just make it worse later. But if she got close enough to them, the other kids would hang back.
Taylor and Tanya stopped their singing, but kept skipping. Logan’s best friends, Bobby and Skeeter, hung behind him, laughing because Skeeter had just spit in Lyla’s hair.
Why won’t the teachers look this way? Why don’t they shut up for two seconds and look this way and see what they’re doing to me?!
Logan said, “Why are you so ugly, Lyla? Why are you so stupid? I’m gonna come to your house while you’re sleeping. Know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna fill your bed with rats and mice.”
Almost there. Don’t run. It’ll be worse if you run.
“And you know who’s gonna stop me?” continued Logan. “Not your mom and dad! They couldn’t stop anything. They suck at being cops!” The other kids all laughed. “Maybe that little retard friend of yours will save you.”
More laughter.
Lyla rounded on Logan and punched him in the face, clipping his nose. He would have fallen to the ground if Bobby hadn’t caught him. He felt his nose and checked his hand. There was blood coming from his left nostril.
“Lyla!” It was Miss Lydia from near the gym.
Taylor pushed Lyla down and kicked her leg. “You stupid freak!”
Lyla grabbed a handful of dirt and threw it in Taylor’s face, getting some in her eyes. Taylor screamed.
Lyla started to get up, but Logan tackled her, and the two started going at it: hair pulling, fists flying, yelling, kicking, biting.
Just before Miss Lydia and Miss Dorris arrived to break up the fight, Lyla grabbed a handful of dirt and shoved it in Logan’s face. He swallowed some of it and rolled over in a coughing fit.
***
Lyla sat in the plastic chair in the hall, staring at the floor outside the nurse’s office. Logan was treated first because he was in worse shape. When the nurse was finished with him, he was sent to the principal’s office to wait for one of his parents to come pick him up. Taylor was mostly fine, but Miss Lydia took her to the girl’s restroom to flush her eyes with water.
Lyla had gotten the lecture about fighting from Miss Dorris, who sat in another plastic chair, waiting for the nurse to come out and get Lyla. Miss Dorris, two years from retirement, scolded Lyla for starting the fight, telling her that violence is not an option when others are calling you names. She concluded the lecture with the old saying, “Sticks and stone may break your bones, but names will never hurt.”
Liar.
Nurse Philip had left his position at the school to work at a hospital in Shreveport at the beginning of the school year. Lyla was sad to see him go. She had been in one other fight before this (the first of many to come over the next couple of years), and Nurse Philip was sympathetic, saying that he used to be bullied, too. He joked around with her and told her to keep her head up. She even thought he was pretty cute.
There was a new nurse whom Lyla had never met. She was very pretty. Long blond hair, blue-eyed, gorgeous smile, about thirty. When she stepped into the hall to call Lyla into her office, a heavy French accent fell from her lips.
“Go ahead and sit up here,” she said, patting the paper-lined patient table.
Lyla set her booksack down, boosted herself up and waited while the nurse—Eloise, according to her school badge—gathered her materials. The office smelled different from the last time she was there. Nurse Eloise wore a ton of flowery perfume, but there was something else beyond the scent of gardenias. It reminded her of the time she and Jonathan dug for earth worms on the edge of a meadow once when their parents took them fishing. There were wild gardenias nearby. After they had collected enough worms, they went to pick some flowers, but found a wasp nest. They screamed and laughed as they ran away, lucky that they hadn’t gotten stung.
“So,” said Eloise, “You seem to have won your fight, no?”
Lyla, who was mentally still in a meadow digging for earth worms, said, “What?”
She br
ought some cotton balls and alcohol to the silver tray near the table. Lyla winced when she saw the alcohol. “You won your fight I believe,” said Eloise, taking Lyla’s chin in her gloved hand and gently turning her head to the side. “The other boy looked worse. You just have a little cut below your eye and some swelling. Not too bad, no?”
Lyla shrugged and stared at the floor.
Eloise smiled and patted her knee. “We’ll get you all fixed up.”
When she was done, Lyla opened the door to head for the principal’s office. She dreaded seeing who was there. It wasn’t so much that she would be in trouble. She hated seeing the disappointed look in her parents’ eyes.
Eloise was taking off her gloves to throw them in the trash when Lyla turned around to go back for her book sack by the table. When she turned, she saw Eloise’s profile and something that made her gasp: a tiny black spider had crawled out of the corner of the nurse’s mouth. It scurried away from her lips, down her slender neck and then into her shirt.
Hearing the gasp, Eloise turned to Lyla and furrowed her brows when she saw the little girl staring at her. “What is it?” She smiled, a puzzled look on her face.
“My book sack. I …” She picked it up off the floor and headed back for the door. “Um, thanks.”
“You’re quite welcome,” said Eloise, still smiling, puzzled.
Lyla closed the door and went to the office where Maw Maw Clo was waiting for her. She looked pissed.
That night, Lyla dreamed that millions of tiny black spiders were crawling over her house, through the chimney, coming out of the faucets and the toilets. It creeped her out, but what made her wake up and scream was the part where the tiny spiders started coming out of her parents’ mouths as they sat in their recliners, watching TV like everything was normal.
***
Mom and Dad were talking about Uncle Lucas needing to find a woman, that it was a shame he was single. Mama let a bad word slip about Jonathan’s mom, and Dad corrected her.
“She can’t hear us. She’s out like a light,” whispered Mom.
But she wasn’t. Not yet. She was lying uncomfortably in the back seat with the belt fastened across her lap, her eyes closed, almost drifting off while Mom and Dad spoke in hushed voices, and the radio droned softly with commercials on the oldies station. She and Jonathan had worn themselves out swimming and playing in Uncle Lucas’ new pool.
She was just about asleep when Mom yelled, “David!”
Lyla was jolted violently to the side and would have crashed into the door if not for her seat belt, though she did feel like someone had punched her on the side of her gut. The car felt like the Tilt o’ Whirl at the fair for a few seconds, swerving out of control before it careened into a ditch, hitting a cement culvert with a loud crash. Her body wanted to propel itself forward, but it was stopped again by the seat belt, once more feeling like a punch in the stomach. Tiny shards of glass flew at her face, slicing into her skin and piercing her eyes.
She screamed and put her hands to her face. Every tear that welled up in her eyes stung like someone stabbing them with hot needles. The cuts on her skin burned every time the salt hit them. She panicked for a second, but remembered what she could do. She cupped her hands over her eyes and felt her palms heat up until it was coursing throughout her body. The tiny shards of glass slipped through her lashes with her tears until her eyes were cleaned out, and she felt the wounds close up on her face. Even the pain in her gut subsided.
Realizing she could see again, she removed her hands and understood why Mom and Dad hadn’t made a sound yet.
She didn’t know how long she spent trying to heal them. It seemed like a long time. Her body was drained, sweat drenched her clothes, and her breathing was shallow. She tried to open the door, but it was at an angle, trapped with the wall of the ditch. She couldn’t even roll down the window because of the electric locks. Not that she even had the energy to crawl out, anyway. She closed her eyes and passed out.
When she woke up, there were headlight beams illuminating a woman in the road, who spoke frantically into her cell phone. Lyla felt her energy had returned enough. She did the only thing her mind thought of: she screamed to let the lady know she was alive. She screamed and didn’t stop until Uncle Lucas pulled her from the car.
2
The New Kid
The new kid’s nickname was Panty Waste. His real name was Peter Waits. Logan had christened Peter with his new name in P.E. two days after he arrived in the sixth grade class of St. Ignatius elementary. Peter, a small boy of ten who was intelligent enough to test out of fifth grade when he transferred, was as inept at sports as he was smart. And the fact that he had a strong southern drawl didn’t help much.
It was January, and they usually stayed indoors to play basketball, but the gym was being worked on that day and the sun was shining, so the coach had them play softball instead. The first time Peter was up to bat, he shrank back when the ball flew too closely. He struck out all three times, and only tried to hit the ball on the last pitch. He blindly swung the bat but hit nothing. On his way back to the end of the line, Logan muttered, “Nice job, Panty Waste.” Some of the kids in line laughed. Lyla was one of the few who didn’t.
After school that day, all the kids waited under the big shed (a large area of the covered walkway just outside the main office) to wait for their busses. This time of day is usually loud with excited students grateful to be out of class where they can talk and cut up with their friends. It was even louder today because it was Friday.
Uncle Lucas would be picking up Lyla and Jonathan, as he usually did on Fridays so that she could spend the night. She loved going to his house because he spoiled the kids on Saturdays by bringing them breakfast in bed while they watched Saturday morning cartoons. They usually had to wait until 4:00 for him, though, because he didn’t leave the police station until around 3:30.
Peter Waits was always one of the last groups of kids to leave. His bus was the last one, the one that went to Erath. He usually didn’t leave until about half past three. Unfortunately, neither did Logan.
Lyla saw Logan and his entourage huddled together, every now and then one of them leaning over to look at the back of Peter’s head, and she knew something was coming. She managed to see what the boys were doing: they had wadded up a big ball of paper and took turns spitting on it, laughing in hushed whispers.
Lyla felt a knot growing in her stomach. She knew if she confronted them, she’d get the brunt of their prank instead of Peter. She thought quickly about what to do. Mr. Travis, the theatre teacher, stood near the front door. She and Peter were in the same theatre class. Mr. Travis told them that they’d start doing group projects on Monday. She knew that when it came time to pick a partner, no one would pick Peter because he was new.
“Jon, follow me,” said Lyla.
Jonathan followed her as she went up to Peter, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Hey. I’m Lyla. This is Jon.”
Jonathan waved happily at Peter, who looked guarded and probably wondered why someone was talking to him after a day of being picked on by Logan.
“Do you want to be in a theatre group with me on Monday?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “I guess.”
Behind his shoulder, she saw Logan and the boys headed their way. Logan had his hands behind his back.
“Well, Mr. Travis is over there. Why don’t we go tell him now?” she said.
Peter shrugged again and followed Lyla. She glanced back at Logan, who looked irritated that his target was moving toward a teacher.
“See ya later, Panty Waste!” shouted Logan.
“That’s very mature, Logan,” said Mr. Travis, giving him a stern look. “Language of that nature truly shows how low your intelligence is, and that is a true waste. Now knock it off!”
Logan rolled his eyes, and his friends laughed at him, making his cheeks flush.
Peter looked down at his shoes and looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole in the ground
.
“Don’t pay any attention to those guys. They’re a bunch of dicks,” muttered Lyla.
Jonathan tugged on her shirt and whispered, “You’re not supposed to say that word!”
Lyla shushed him and then turned to Peter. “Hey. You wanna come to my house tomorrow afternoon? Jon and I are going to see if we can catch some turtles in the bayou.”
“What do you want turtles for?” said Peter.
Lyla shrugged. “We race ‘em and then let ‘em go.”
“I’ll ask my mom.”
***
“Do you think we can go visit your aunt in New Orleans?” said Jonathan.
“Yeah, I talked to her today. She said we can go to the aquarium,” said Lyla.
“That’s so cool! I want to see the sharks!”
“I think you can pet them, too.”
His eyes widened and his mouth flew open. “Really?!”
“The baby sharks.”
“Aw, well that’s still really cool, though.”
Pieces of stale bread floated on the surface of the water. They had been trying to bring the turtles out of their hiding spots for the last twenty minutes.
“I think it’s too cold for them,” said Lyla. “We’ll probably have to wait ‘til March or at least after Mardi Gras.”
Jonathan kicked at the ground. “Aw, man.”
They were quiet for a little while, sitting on an old fallen cypress trunk, digging their heels in the ground while watching the water for the first signs of a turtle.
“Can I tell you something?”
Lyla shrugged. “Yeah.”
“I’ve been having bad dreams again.”
Lyla froze, a memory of the Dark Man flashing before her eyes. “About him again?”
“Huh? Oh, no. About my dad. He dies.”
Nancy K. Duplechain - Dark Trilogy 03 - Dark Legacy Page 9