~*~*~*~
It should be discussed that, for one reason or another, I don’t function entirely like a normal person. I don’t sleep as much, and when I do-- as displayed in Mr. Mendota’s classroom-- I crash hard. There’s a great long list of things I’m allergic to, so I don’t exactly stuff my face very often. And… well, I was going to say that I don’t handle change well. But, truthfully, I don’t handle change at all. I think there’s a little part of my brain that senses when something is wrong, and automatically kicks into overdrive, ignoring the problem and drowning it out with something more trivial.
When I was four, I ate a peanut, and almost instantly started to swell up like a balloon. My lips turned puffy and blue, my vision was obstructed by my enlarging face, and all of a sudden I couldn’t draw life from the air. Since I couldn’t breathe, I didn’t really burst into tears; I just kind of went into convulsions, gripping my throat with my hands and looking around wildly for some kind of help.
Someone started laughing, someone screamed, and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my back on an emergency room table with crinkly paper and white, strangely opaque lights that blinded me further. A face flashed above me, a middle aged nurse with a flyaway bun and cracked lipstick. Spots appeared where they shouldn’t be, someone was squeezing my hand, and I just kept thinking, peanut, ouch, why, can’t breathe, hurts, peanut, peanut, how, why, ouch.
And then there was something that didn’t even last a second. Something that let air flood into my lungs and then be pushed out again, and something that sent a prick of new pain from my thigh to my spine to right between my eyes. Of course, the real phenomenon was probably the medicine itself”the epi-pen”but little four-year-old me only felt what the medicine had done. In a fraction of a fraction of a second, I felt my heart stop and then resume beating. The smash of blood through my arteries picked up again. And I felt it more clearly, and on a deeper level, than I’d ever felt anything. I was aware, somehow, of my body failing and then picking up right where it left off, my heart refusing to quit. Invincibility was drawn around me like a winter coat.
I think that was why I quit being afraid of anything: because of some childish notion that come rain, stormy weather, or peanuts, I’d pull through, I’d make it out okay.
Yeah… have I mentioned recently that I’m almost always wrong? Good. Then I don’t need to reiterate. Let’s just keep going, with ten-year-old me and an owl and a snowstorm and my issues with change.
~*~*~*~
There were three days left. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The Twenty Things were due Monday, before we left class for the Winter Exhibition. I want you to watch, and keep this timeline in mind. Ponder the limits set upon my shoulders as my plan was shattered and the pieces of it driven through my thin skin like knives. Remember who I thought I was.
Friday.
At ten years old, I was very well versed in taking care of myself when I was sick. This, I supposed, was just one of the many perks of living in a house where the only person who gave two wits about you was your older brother. I knew how to take my own temperature, and prepare a hot water bottle brimming full of heat and comfort. And, perhaps most useful of all, I could hold my own hair as I viciously vomited up everything I’d eaten since the previous Tuesday. A letter, cramped into the shape of my sweaty fist, rested forlornly by my knobbly knees as I practiced this very skill.
It was the third letter Harry had written me since September, and before I even read it I registered how his handwriting had changed. Before, it had all been scratchy and block-like, the lowercase letters merely smaller versions of the capital ones. Similar to my own, accept that his had been legible. Now, it was a kind of semi-cursive scrawl, with the letters running together and overlapping each other like fish scales. I gazed at the change and remembered how he’d spent three solid hours teaching me to tie my shoes when I was four. I’ll admit, it was a strange moment to think of, out of the countless ones we’d shared growing up together. But I couldn’t help thinking that his new way of writing looked like a puddle of knots.
And there I was.
I like to think of throwing up as a defense mechanism: it’s just your body purging itself of all the bad things that have found their way in. I kept my eyes squinted tightly shut as I tossed my cookies, but, to take my mind off of the rancid smell, I pictured every mean word that I’d ever heard and every blow that I’d ever been dealt collecting in the porcelain bowl along with half-digested Pop Tarts.
As my violent sickness turned to dry heaves and then faded into a lingering icky-ness, I shut the toilet lid with a clunk, wound my disheveled hair into a ponytail, and flushed three times for thoroughness. While my breathing fell back into a normal pattern (it’s pretty hard to get air when your mouth is otherwise occupied), I folded myself into a fetal position and keeled over on my side on the cold floor of the Dursley’s bathroom. The tiles were off-white, and had a little china pattern stamped on their edges in jade green. In my peripheral vision, I followed the rows of sparkling tiles all the way to the mirror-facing wall, where some had broken free from their caulking and were wrestling their way up the trim.
I cannot even begin to describe to you how fascinating I found these tiles, then, in my weakest moment. It seemed like someone needed to appreciate the little things, that was all. The stubborn bathroom tiles, the glorious, light-headed emptiness that came tacked onto bad news and vomiting… the redhead pre-adolescents that got picked last for kickball and sat alone at lunch and were really just hoping to catch a break in the holiday season.
Among other things.
When you lie, you have to make it uniform. If you tell somebody that you’re fifteen instead of twelve, then you’d best be ready to forge a birth certificate and other appropriate papers, or at least introduce yourself as a fifteen-year-old from that moment on.
When you keep telling people that you’re fine, and that everything is normal in your life, then I suppose you run the risk of starting to believe those things yourself. I mean… I was practically walking up to everyone I knew and saying, “I’m Kata Potter, and I’m fine with everything.”
Fine.
There was a steadily growing list of things that I was currently not fine with. I was not fine with the fact that I was currently collapsed on a bathroom floor, I was not fine with the knowledge that I was failing sixth grade, or that I had reached the end of Alice and learned that Wonderland was all a pathetic dream. I didn’t much care for the way I had been unceremoniously abandoned”both for the weekend and when I was too young to even support my own head. I hated my age, because people saw it as a way to hold me back, I’d never liked my hair-color because I couldn’t wear anything pink,and-- to be quite honest-- I didn’t like being a witch in that moment.
Because what was the use of being a witch if you had to live like a Muggle?
I kept up that train of thought, lying on the floor and exhaling though my nose because the scent of my own breath was revolting. Anger boiled next to my heart, but I felt so cold, like I’d been transformed into an ice sculpture of Kata, and was no longer the real thing. Exhausted and freezing, I huddled on the bathroom floor, staring at tiles and wishing for nameless, unreachable dreams.
I was terminally empty; nothing was in me but memories. And I didn’t want those. Minutes tripped by, and hours swallowed them, and I was aware of the wind-brushing-the-treetops sound of the sunset. Darkness cried forlornly as it sat on the end of the day. I slept fitfully. I woke up. Never did I try to stand, or budge an inch from the rock bottom I’d reached.
I pondered the perfection of the Dursley’s house. It was all wood polish and lace, flawless posh, with no dust bunnies in sight. There wasn’t a single piece of china in that house that wasn’t chipped. When I once dropped a coffee mug and a little crack curled onto the side, Aunt P just threw it away. From a very young age, I’d understood the symbolism. I was the chipped china and the dust bunny-- the short, twiggy girl with impossible hair and a crooked top tooth and green eyes that were obnoxiously larger than the rest of her features. Everyone was finally tossing me into the bin.
Don’t tell me that’s melodramatic”it’s true. I already knew it; I only lay there to finally accept it. On my fourth grade report card, Ms. Owens had written, “Katarine has spunk, and is mature for her age. However, she lacks the patience, discipline, ability, reserve, cooperation, and obedience necessary for real-life interaction.” My faults, as displayed there, had always outweighed my strengths. I wasn’t trying to be tragic or misunderstood by thinking that, or thinking it now. It just was what it was.
Always.
I began to count the individual seconds of my night, and only stopped when a) I’d reached 1,367 and b) the tinny tone of the doorbell invaded my thoughts and shook me back into reality.
I stuttered down the stairs, disgruntled, wrapped in a navy cardigan that hung around my body and did basically nothing to chase away the chills that were sleeping under my skin. Cold sweat matted my hair, my face was clammy and ashy, and my breath still stunk of vomit. Groggy, I struggled to remember how to work a doorknob. Twist and pull, I reminded myself.
The door swung open, and my jaw dropped. Jeremy Flinker, wearing a snow-dotted parka and damp sneakers, stood on the Dursley’s front porch. He held a ceramic casserole dish and breathed shallowly in the cold.
I raised an eyebrow. “Jeremy?”
He nodded, his shoulders hunched up to his chin and his entire body tightened against the wintry weather. “Hey, K-Kata,” he greeted, stammering. “You look like sh-shit.”
I sighed. Jeremy had recently developed a bit of a swearing habit, in a valiant effort to sound more grown up and attract girls.
“Yeah,” I deadpanned. I could name at least one girl who wasn’t attracted to his new vocabulary, and her name rhymed with ‘Mata’. “I know.”
“Can I come in?” he asked quickly. “There’s a motherfucking blizzard out here.”
Surprised, I peeked over his shoulder. In the time that I’d been hovering catatonically (Katatonically. Get it?) on the bathroom floor, the sky had opened up and let loose its wrath upon Little Whinging. The snow chased after buildings and cramped the sidewalks, piling up under trees and weighing down their branches. A threatening, ominous indigo painted the sky, and the streets were pretty much deserted, except for a certain eleven-year-old boy who needed a haircut, and my loony neighbor Mrs. Figg. She sat on her doorstep, petting one of her interchangeable cats and staring right at us. It was like she didn’t even notice the cold.
Oh well, I thought. She’s loony.
“Please?” Jeremy pressed. His lips had a faint blue tint.
“What’s in the dish?” I asked disinterestedly as I stepped aside and allowed him to scuff into the foyer, spewing snow everywhere as he shed his jacket and boots. Before answering, he made sure to shake out his snow-infested hair and spray me with cold, dirty-smelling water. I grimaced appreciatively.
“It’s, uh… potato-noodle casserole,” he explained dubiously, eyeing the dish as if it was actually toxic waste.” My mum made it, not my dad, so you might want to just chuck it. But she talks to your aunt, and found out that you were home alone for the weekend and didn’t know if you could cook for yourself.”
I had to smile. Jeremy’s family was just so… present. They were the kind of people who said they loved each other before they went to bed, and when they got up in the morning, and when they left for work and school. They had two cats and a handful of fish, and all three kids”Jeremy, his sister Mattie, who was in my year, and his much older brother Finn”were just generally happy.
“I’m home alone all the time,” I pointed out, hooking a wild curl behind my ear. Ponytails could only contain my feral mass of hair for so long.
“She was bloody worried about you, though,” Jeremy shrugged. “I dunno. I think she just has a lot of time on her hands.”
I just stood. After a few seconds of dripping silence, he seemed to finally take in my pinched, stoic expression.
“What the hell, Kat?” he quipped softly, gazing at me nervously. “Are you all right? You look like someone punched you in the face.”
Immediately, I lost it. Anger pumped a boil into my blood and fury pinched my hands into fists while I closed my eyes and emptied myself into the bottomless, unfeasible rage that I was shot through with.
“I’ll bet I do,” I seethed bitterly. He looked taken aback, but I was made of stone. “I mean, why not? Why doesn’t everybody just come up and punch me in the face? You can go first, Jeremy. Right now. Just give me your best shot. Let’s see if I feel it!”
He took a step back. “What the fu--”
“You’d better finish that sentence with ‘funnel’!” I shrieked hotly, crossing my arms and glaring passionately. He gave me a look that suggested I was crazy. It didn’t offend me, though, because I was. In that moment-- with a letter and a casserole and a best friend who needed a censor button-- I was fairly insane. “Because lately, every other word that comes out of your mouth has four letters, and I’m getting really sick of it! You sound stupid. Go suck on a bar of soap.”
Temporary shock rang in my ears.
He scrambled for an argument, still giving me the Kata is crazy look. “I sound stupid?” he repeated, anger entering his voice. His arguments were slow-coming, but they picked up speed, shaking off their dust. “I’m not the one screaming about funnels and having people punch me in the face! I’m not the one who’s been acting like I’m from bloody Mars since August! And I’m definitely not the one constantly sulking about nothing, or whining about my fucking Twenty Things, or ditching school and failing all my classes, and then blaming the whole damn mess on the world!”
“Who do you want me to blame?” I demanded desperately at top volume, throwing my arms up and taking a defensive step toward him. “Myself?”
“That,” Jeremy screeched passionately, boxing me in with his hands, “would be wonderful! For once, Kata, just admit that the world isn’t screwing you over just for fun. Yeah, life can suck, but other people have problems, too, and””
“I challenge you to find a person with more problems than me!”
He groaned, exasperated. “Oh, look at me! I’m Kata!” he imitated, throwing a falsetto into his cracking voice. “Everyone’s out to get me--”
“People are out to get me!” I retaliated, remembering Halloween night.
“”and everyone hates me because I’m a lunatic--”
“You’ve got no idea what they say!”
“”and I’m so alone! No one gives a damn about poor! Little! Me!”
His tongue sliced me open. His words drew blood from my core, and I stood shell-shocked. I shivered from cold and pain and the unavoidable truth of what he’d just said. Sometimes things just hit you. I’d been avoiding the truth so long, and it couldn’t wait to get its restless hands on me.
I didn’t even know what lies I was telling myself anymore.
Jeremy knew me well enough to see that his taunts had stuck. “Kat,” he whispered. I climbed inside myself. Him: “I’m sorry.”
I peeked up from under my hair”which was flailing around my head like a mop now”and glared. There was nothing kind or forgiving left in me. “You think that’s funny?” I hissed quietly, staring at my hands as tears clambered into my eyes.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he objected hurriedly , but I cut him off by lifting a commanding hand. My fingers were as straight as bone.
“There isn’t anyone who does give a damn about me, Jeremy,” I whispered, chuckling ironically. “Not you, apparently. Not my aunt or uncle. Not my brother.”
“Harry?” Jeremy asked, startled. “What’s he got to do with this?”
We were still in the foyer, and there was nowhere to sit but the floor. So that’s where we plopped down, his knee brushing mine and my hair a cyclone between us. The metaphorical dust had settled, we were best friends again. I suppose.
“Nothing,” I murmured. “He hasn’t got anything to do with me. Except everything.”
“I don’t speak girl,” Jeremy declared, exasperated but trying to be patient. Our previous spat still hung over us like a wart, refusing to disappear. “So either spit it out or forget about me understanding this shit.”
I took a deep breath and tried to exhale everything I was feeling, like vomiting. Purging. Strangely, I found that I couldn’t. I felt like a much different person than I’d been when I woke up that morning. If you’d have asked me, I would have said that I didn’t believe people could change, but the evidence was glaringly obvious inside of me. My heart felt as cold and empty as a stone, weighing down my chest.
I gave explaining my best shot. “He’s my older brother,” I squeaked, voice strangled by unwanted emotion. “I’m exactly eleven months and twenty-five days younger. Which apparently makes the biggest difference in the world.”
Age felt like a chasm. I wasn’t strong enough, or important enough, or big enough to cross it.
“What do you mean?” Jeremy prodded. “I’m older than you. You’ve never complained about th--”
“It’s school,” I whispered. Absently, I began twirling my hair around my index finger. Winding it up and letting it spring back into place. “His school. I, uh… applied, but I’m too young. I can’t get out of here until next year.”
When I looked up, I expected to see some sort of sympathy from Jeremy. But… this time he looked like someone had punched him in the face. His wounded eyes hooked onto mine.
I fell deep into the many things that I never had wanted to feel. I was caked inside my own confusion. Jeremy’s lips were letting truths slide out from between them, and these stung me.
“You say that all the time,” he croaked, his gloom poorly disguised by a hair flick. “You talk about getting out of here. What’s so bad about here, Kat? I’m here. All your other friends are here. You grew up in this town. For the life of me, I can’t understand why you want out.”
Not a curse word to be found. Embarrassed, I realized Jeremy was saying what he felt. I blushed, bizarrely. Truth was becoming a little foreign.
I refused to cry, but that didn’t stop the tears from collecting in my eyes. “He never writes me,” I choked out brazenly. “He’s my brother, and he doesn’t ever write me. I”” Here, Jeremy may tell you that the tears collapsed onto my face, but I will maintain that they didn’t. “”don’t… know why. What the hell could be more important than me?”
I know that sounds egotistical, ignorant, self-centered, etc. That’s because it was. Just remember that no one had exactly explained to me the happenings of the Wizarding world. The extent of my knowledge stood at:
a) Magic is real. Woo hoo.
b) Harry was has superpowers.
c) Kata does not.
Solitary, I watched Jeremy’s face.
“People change,” he acknowledged with surprising defensiveness. “Circumstances, too. Look at us, Kata. We’re sitting in your damn foyer, you’re effing crying, and I’m spewing nonsense and shit trying to make you stop. How did we get here? I don’t have a bloody clue. But ever since you came back in August”with no explanation as to where you were”you’ve been moody and insane and caught up in this whole ‘life sucks’ parade. And now there’s the screaming and the crying and the Twenty Things, and… someone’s got to tell you. I didn’t want it to be me. But that little notebook you carry around, those pieces of paper with the words that the shitty drawings? You’re not in there.”
I stuck my head in my hands and lost track of which pieces of my body were where. “Would someone care to tell me who I am, then?” I spat, bitter and shaking and not in a rhetorical fashion. Someone”be it Jeremy or Harry or Mr. Mendota”needed to let me know.
“You’re… you, I guess,” Jeremy attempted. Key word: attempt. Good effort, though.
“I’m nobody.”
“Says who?”
“Everybody. Jilly. Verno. Hagrid.”
“Is that code?”
“Only if you want it to be.”
Irony wiggled under my skin as Jeremy started to laugh. I know, I know. I’m just so funny. “Do you plan that kind of shit ahead of time, or does it just pop out?”
I shrugged. “I’m naturally sarcastic.”
“You’re a bloody piece of work,” he declared.
“My parents are dead.”
Moments collected. Moments fell. The Earth rolled its way through another cycle, and the pure tonight-ness of the moment came upon me. Time, it seemed, was inescapable. Through the ringing in my ears, I could almost hear the sand as it whispered through the hourglass. I wanted to scream. Silence dewed on the back of my neck.
“…”
“…”
“I’m going to leave now,” Jeremy announced, after we’d both reassembled ourselves. I think I’d stuck one of my arms on the wrong way though, because it felt too heavy, like there was too much sadness inside.
“I think that’s a very good idea,” I said to my knees. The light bulb in the foyer illuminated us. Home is where one hangs one’s hat, I recited internally, remembering reading that somewhere. Jeremy and I”among the coat closet and the shoe bench and the umbrella stand”were in the very essence of home. And I could not have felt more out of place.
The door shuffled shut behind him.
Before then, I hadn’t believe that a person could cry herself to sleep. When I cried, I was usually so preoccupied with it that my mind could never settle down enough to sleep. But it isn’t about settling down. When you feel so dead inside that your body is only lolling out of one unconsciousness and into the next, that’s when it happens. When you’re so hopeless and wrecked that there is nothing left to think about pain… you sleep. When you would rather die, you mind substitutes the next best thing. Endlessly, I slept.
The world slept with me.
~*~*~*~
For the next few days, I was decidedly uninteresting. But, would you like to know who was interesting? Mr. Mendota. As I’ve tried to convey, he was an extraordinary sort of man. There is a dense, surviving kind of humanity to him. He parted his hair on the right side, ironed his pants, and smelled of drug store soap.
Loneliness was written all over him, even if I didn’t care enough to see it.
He had a small house in the outskirts of town. The best that a teacher’s salary could rent. In his den, he had a desk, where he sat to grade his student’s papers and pound away at the novel he’d been trying to write since he was twelve. On this desk, there were several desk-ish items. Pens, memo pads, chewing gum, newspaper clippings. However, there was also a computer, where he typed the aforementioned dead-end novel. Taped to the upped-left corner of the computer monitor, there was a photograph roughly the size of a playing card.
It did not move. But it shivered with its own meaning.
A girl of about seventeen sat on the lip of an outdoor fountain, wearing tight gray jeans and a man’s red sweater. This red clashed gloriously with her hair, which was a carefree auburn. There was a smudge of mascara above her left eye, and a peppering of freckles on her cheeks. Her smile made the sun look like a flickering forty-watt bulb. This girl’s name had been Kailey. A car accident, five years previously, had ripped her from the world. The edges of where she had been were still sharp, and they dug into Robert Mendota’s skin every single time he looked at her photograph.
Having a sister or brother is universal. There is a kind of easy, enduring love that comes with it. A company of blood and of unfaltering understanding. I tried very, very hard not to miss Harry that year, but I didn’t try nearly as hard as Mr. Mendota did.
We were in a remarkably similar position. A world was between my brother and I, and a lifetime was between Kailey and hers.
Mr. Mendota had promised himself that he wouldn’t see her in me. All the teachers had been talking of Harry Potter’s mysterious disappearance and ‘scholarship’” Harry was far beyond me in academics, but quite average”and he had immediately remembered that Harry had a sister. A sister with red hair and a name that started with ‘K’ and an older brother that she was now separated from.
He taught me indifferently, at first. Maths and science and English. I was another face in a classroom in a school in a world choked up with sisters and brothers. But soon he noticed the way I played with my hair, and became fascinated with why I couldn’t be bothered to pay attention, and wondered at the things going on behind my glassy eyes as I stared disinterestedly out the window. Innocent curiosity boxed him in.
I thought I was unreachable. But I was alive. I suppose when you lose someone, you’ll grapple at any opportunity to feel what it was like to be with them just one more time. Me… I was in denial. But Mr. Mendota had begun bartering with the world.
He taught me chess, and forced me to read about Wonderland, and hoped that I could find my Twenty Things. No, he wasn’t delusional. I wasn’t Kailey, and that was clear to him. But I’d become his newest mystery, and he wanted to solve it. He waited for the gorgeous comprehension to enter him.
We were so alike it stabbed him.
He didn’t know very much about me, though. And I, of course, didn’t know that story way back then. All I could see was the result.
But how do you see something you think you saw, when you know you didn’t really see it?
~*~*~*~
Saturday and Sunday were spent in much the same way. I flitted between sleep and ill-fitting awareness. My dreams stormed my mind, and shocked me into reality, but reality numbed me to the point where sleep came automatically. In addition to being Katatonic (Katatonic! What a katastrophe. What had katapulted me into this state? What was the katalyst?), I had also gotten sick from lying around in my snow clothes for hours. I sneezed so much that my throat felt like someone had stabbed it with a rusty railroad spike. I sweated and then shivered and then sneezed again. Just generally miserable.
The Dursleys came back late Sunday afternoon, and did nothing to acknowledge me. I kept my door locked and”to help pass the time”imagined what I was going to do to everyone when they finally got around to giving me a wand.
Here is what else I thought about:
Twenty Things That Make The World Go ‘Round. An assignment, a ceremony, and a quest. What means something to you? What can’t you live without? Who are you, and why? How did you become yourself? Make a list. Write a letter. Gather a box of things, or paint Styrofoam numbers, or just come into your own using the method of your choice. You have until December 19th. Now, away with you, on a quest to find meaning! I hereby sic you on the unsuspecting world!
What kind of hopeless case was I? Did nothing matter? I’d managed to make a list, at least, of twenty items. I planned to turn it in, but now… it wasn’t even worth the passing grade. Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped caring about the schoolwork aspect of the project, and started challenging myself to just become. I wanted to find the key to all my problems, through a project that I had been doomed to fail from the start.
Question: When did I decide that I didn’t know who I was?
Answer: When they told me I should be looking.
The questions festered like disease in my mind, and I rotted from the inside out. Loneliness was a shell, and I crawled inside myself, not sure that I ever wanted to come out.
I watched the clock and dozed off and on.
After a long bout of nightmare-packed sleep, I awoke to a clock that read 8:21. Morning. Clearing my raspy throat, I sat up and gripped the window with my eyes, wondering how it could still be dark. Yes, it was winter, but the sun had usually risen by this time. School would be starting in about half an hour… Was it worth it?
Barely bothering myself with pondering this, I creaked to my feet, my bones sliding and squeaking. Indifferently, I yanked back the curtains and”
Died.
Or maybe just blacked out for a moment. Not only had the snow been driven into dense, tenacious piles on the sides of the road, but it was illuminated by streetlamps. The amber circles of light from these also tossed parked cars, in safe driveways, into vision. Verno’s SUV-of-the-week was standing guard in the driveway. And he never, ever left the house after eight, unless it was Dudley’s birthday.
Which I was fairly certain it wasn’t. Unless they’d started celebrating it twice a year. Let’s not rule out that possibility.
It hadn’t just slept through a weekend: I’d slept through a day in school. The last day before winter break. The day that the Twenty Things were due.
I’d slept it off. How had I not felt it?
Identity teased me, hovering just out of reach. Abruptly and completely, it didn’t much matter whether or not I knew what my Twenty effing Things were. I’d given it my best shot, and gone down fighting, and the room closed in around me as I was drenched with renewed purpose. In the distance, in Town Square, the clock sang out the half hour, and time sliced me open.
It was Christmastime. School was over for the term, I was more alone than I cared to be, and I had a completed assignment snoozing in my backpack. What do you think I did? I plunged my feet into my sneakers and my body out of the smallest bedroom. I”with a chessman in my pocket and a letter still gripping the tiles of the bathroom floor”began to fight.
It was a fight I’d been fighting since a scarlet engine had evaporated into the horizon, leaving me behind: I’ll-Show-Them-All.
Still coughing and wheezing and sneezing from my run-in with the snow, I tramped downstairs in a hodgepodge of clothes. Everything felt very far off, as if I were at the bottom of a deep well. My breath came in great, frenzied slabs, and my vision kicked about. The same ratty cardigan I’d worn the night Jeremy had visited was flung over my shoulders, my jeans were ancient and holey.
I didn’t even want to know what my hair looked like. I imagined that by now it had gone from mildly unmanageable to murderously feral, and that was not something anyone wants to see. Small children have been known to get lost in my hair.
“And just where are you going?” Verno demanded almost semi-cordially from the sitting room. This was one of the three or four phrases he traditionally directed at me. The others held expletives.
My insanity gushed onto my face in answer. He didn’t say anything else.
I couldn’t quite hear myself tumble through the house and out the door. Phantom hands snagged my school bag on the way out. Routine. The ice-caked sidewalk pounded at my feet as I sputtered and coughed to the garage, digging my stone cold bike out from under a tarp.
The night was cracked open wide, the streetlights flinging their beams down my throat and the stars bobbing indifferently in the sky. They skirted along the edges of the moon, watching me as I pedaled and coughed and sneezed. My chest metaphorically bled. My heart barely beat, lazily stirring my blood around. All I could feel was the dense sensation that air had replaced my legs and my arms were now listless, skin-colored noodles. The pieces of me were there, certainly. They just weren’t doing a very good job of behaving as a whole.
I didn’t even know what I wanted to feel. All I had was a backpack slung over my bones.
It was December 19th, 1991. I don’t suppose I’ll ever forget that night, though sometimes I wish I would. As the solemn tolling of the clock crawled off into the night, silence collected around me. My legs strained as I pedaled for all I was worth (Which was approximately three letters, a pawn, and a potato-noodle casserole.).
I rode through a town, and saw it. The houses clustered on the edges of roads, blinking their windows shut for the night. Our Lady of the People, on Dashwood Place, was half shrunk into the shadows, so dark I wasn’t sure if it was there. Slowly, the houses turned into businesses and office buildings. Quick Mart glowed, its proud ‘Open 24 Hours’ sign parked in the window. Marc sat at an empty register, propping her feet up on a conveyor belt and thumbing through a tabloid. Flinker’s had closed down for the night, but the shape of it still resided across the street from the bank where Jilly’s mum worked as a teller/love goddess. Halfman Park sat off to the side of Town Square, hovering ominously. I got the odd, eternal feeling that I was being watched.
And, of course, the clock. Always the clock.
The fact of it was, this: a thousand people had lived and worked and been in this town. Maybe some of them had died here. I was just a tick mark on the history of Little Whinging. I wouldn’t be the last person to pedal insanely through deserted streets that seemed to crowded even without the presence of other human souls.
Stonewall Primary rested at the barest edge of town, which was still only about five blocks from where I lived. By the time I arrived there, cold sweat was crowding my skin and a stitch was pressed into my side. My backpack bit into my shoulders. I can stop with the descriptions, right? You get it. I was a right bloody mess.
Cars were jumbled into every available space”I’d missed school, but I hadn’t missed the dreaded Winter Exhibition. Just a bunch of parents being proud of their kids.
I now feel the need to take the time to outline a very important detail: I didn’t exactly miss my parents. I wasn’t especially sad that they were dead, as I’ve mentioned. A bit ticked off, certainly. But I was hardly the type to cry over something that had just been a constant in my life for ten years. I missed the idea of parents. In essence, I was a little girl who wanted to feel like someone cared.
Another very important detail: I was insanely jealous of Harry. When we’d gone to Diagon Alley”when I still thought I was getting to go to school with him”almost every single person we met told him that he looked like James. I wanted someone to look at me and say, “You look quite a bit like your father, too, Kata. Your mother as well.”
You know what else would have been amazing? If (literally) every wizard or witch we meant hadn’t said, “A sister? Harry Potter has a sister? Who knew!”
Yeah. That would have been sort of neat.
Another description: The cold parted around my body as I pressed my way up the steps and to the mouth of the door. A ribbon of wind played with my hair as I once again struggled with a doorknob. I got it open and skimmed inside, the peeling rubber bottoms of my sneakers complaining against the newly-waxed linoleum.
The sound slapped the halls, which were deserted and a bit forlorn. The finger-paintings and lockers ran along the walls.
Fear”the cold, jittery kind”fell down my throat, but something made me keep walking. I sensed, oddly, that if I didn’t walk this road now, I’d just be postponing it for later. People have defining moments when they’re young, particularly when they’re searching for them. And one of my biggest moments, when I look back, is wandering slowly down the empty, desolate halls of a school.
I sort of got the impression that fear was just as scared as I was.
The smell of spotlights leaked out from under the doors of the auditorium as I stood outside. Numbly, I yanked hard on the handle and slid in without letting the door slam behind me. Every single human being faced the front.
I couldn’t have timed it better. Winnie was belting her lines, while Robin prepared to melt. Liam, Brady, and Alec slouched, Jilly held her spear with frightening intensity, and Sherrie hid behind the curtain.
I was supposed to close that curtain. Vaguely, I remembered this, but it didn’t do anything.
Or… perhaps it did.
When I sat down to tell this, I knew there were going to be parts I’d want to gloss over. That moment in my fifth year, for instance, with Adam Null. You guys won’t be hearing all of that. Or the moment in the graveyard where it will all begin to unravel. Those are times when I won’t go into as much detail as maybe some of you would like”by choice, though. Right now, when I skip over things, it’s because I honestly don’t remember. I suppose I ran.
I’ll bet I kept going even when I heard the door roar shut behind me. My sneakers probably pounded the floor. I stormed the school. If you were there, you wouldn’t have thought of me as Harry Potter’s little sister. I was the Kata, for whom people clapped and hallways parted. I feel like you could have known me if you’d watched me run. Just for a few seconds. Maybe.
It was like swallowing that peanut. Standing in the crevice between the theater and the hallways, I felt my heart cough to a stop. It didn’t start again until I found myself spread across the floor in front of a door that read: 201: Mendota 6.
I heard him rumble down the hallway. He was laughing. The sounds of it raided the walls. I picked at a scrap of resilient nail polish on my thumb and waited patiently. Sherrie Parker and a careworn-looking woman with a professional suit and well-worn shoes followed him. She apologized frequently.
“I’m so sorry,” she announced for the billionth time.
“It’s fine,” my teacher assured her. “I’ve got the keys. We’ll find her coat.”
“I’m sorry. Sherrie can be so forgetful.”
Forgetful Sherrie didn’t object to this description. She twiddled a piece of hair with her first two fingers and appeared deeply interested in the pattern of the ceiling tiles. She saw me before the two adults did, and a brief kinship extended between us.
“Mr. Mendota,” she quipped matter-of-factly. Her voice was kind of high and breathy. Out-of-sorts, like it was a big deal for her to form coherent sentences. “Kata Potter is on the floor.”
And the kinship evaporated. I missed it already.
Mr. Mendota, Sherrie, and the woman that I assumed was Sherrie’s mum all gazed at me. I swallowed and dragged myself into a standing position. My expression was businesslike, and my body felt hollow. There wasn’t much I had to say, but there were still things that needed to come out. They gathered in the back of my throat, frothing at my lips. I shook. Sherrie raised an eyebrow, and Mr. Mendota nearly dropped his keys.
“Kata!” he cried. “What are you doing here? Are you feeling better? Are you all ri”Kata, breathe!”
I obeyed, grudgingly, taking in the air through my nose. See, if I opened my mouth, the words would have come out in the wrong order. They’d mean the wrong things. As I bent over, unzipped my bag, and extracted one green notebook, I kept my lips dutifully stitched together.
“Hey, Mr. Mendota,” I greeted, my voice brittle. “I just figured I’d stop by and tell you.”
He asked the obligatory follow-up question, while Sherrie’s mum looked at me in the way that most people’s mums look at me. I call it ShockPityDisgust. An unusual combination.
“Tell me what?” he demanded in his teacher voice. I was impervious to the command behind it, though. I was strung out on a mysterious, adrenaline-like substance. It broke over my blood and gripped my veins like reigns. “Kata, are you here alone? It’s really late. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“No,” I said clippingly. The truth felt… good. “I’m not okay. But whatever. I’m here to tell you that… I give up. There are no Twenty Things for me. You told me that the secret to winning at chess was sacrificing all that you can. Mr. Mendota, I’m standing here and telling you that I have absolutely nothing left to sacrifice. Some people aren’t attached to anything. They don’t have things that make their worlds go ‘round. I’m just one of those people. I don’t even know what kind of person I’m supposed to be. But things change too much for me to have Twenty Things.”
My fingers released that notebook, and it kissed the floor. He stared at me openly.
I knew how to make a speech, I suppose. None of them said a word. Sherrie went back to staring at the ceiling, her wide hazel eyes distant and dreamy. Mrs. Parker fiddled uncomfortably with her jacket sleeve, and Mr. Mendota did something that I didn’t expect. (What else is new?)
His eyes whispered shut. His face fell slack, slipping out of its composure and calm. As he spoke, his lips barely touched the words. Still, they came. “This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. This is how the world ends. Not with bang, but a whimper.”
I didn’t realize that I had run away again until I found myself in Halfman Park, sitting on a bridge hovering above a small, crusty pond. My feet dangled over the edge, reaching for the surface. The stars battled to be seen in the bottomless, watery sky. Random clusters of snow freckled the open lots where people played cricket and Frisbee in the summer. I closed my eyes and breathed shallowly.
There’s a piece of good news here: I’ve almost reached my worst. Things will spiral a bit more downward, but they’ll eventually rise. I don’t really have the patience to tell a sad story. This one is sad, yes… but I wasn’t. Not when I sat there, feeling numb and hollow and thoroughly enjoying the way the sky looked against my skin.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted, but I dearly hoped I got it someday.
Twenty Things That Make the World Go 'Round by eva_writes
Chapter Notes: Hello, beautiful people! Hiatus officially over! Special shout-out to everyone who reviewed during my absence, especially Maggie Bee. You’re my favorite stalker, and knew just what to say to get me going again. My junior year’s been hard, and I’ve had a couple of thing happen that’ve made it a lot harder than it should have been. However, it wasn’t fair to stop the story when there were people who actually wanted to read it. My original idea was that this plot was so overdone and no one would miss me. Thanks to everyone who said that this isn’t the case. This chapter is self-beta’ed, so don’t be too hard on me. Also, it’s very depressing—though very, very important to everything that will come. As of now, I have very chapter planned out, and a few written, so don’t expect another six-month hiatus. Oh, one more thing: this would have been up yesterday, but I needed to add a strong profanity warning. If you’re offended by f-bombs, and such… don’t read the scene between Jeremy and Kata. Otherwise, y’all should be good. Read on, and enjoy!
Chapter Endnotes: So, that’s it for this chapter. To prove to you that chapter nine is already in progress, I give you this quote: “This is the most incredible, inspirational, and raw answer I have ever received to the question, ‘What are the twenty things that make the world go ‘round.’”
Take from that what you will… ;)
~*Eva*~