My dreams that night were more than enough to scare me.
After sharing a silent, awkward dinner with my mother, I went straight to bed and let Cameron’s silky fur comfort me through the disturbing images my brain was processing. Memories of my childhood oddities and, of course, the generated ones that I might encounter in the future.
I woke up to the sound of my phone’s alarm, reminding me that everything else around me was normal. Everything beyond my house did not change at all.
I got up, showered, and did all the mundane things my body required. It felt weird to stare at the mirror after the strange talk with my teacher and Mr. Ryder last night. Still, my choppy, curly red hair was normal. My blue eyes were still normal. My skin, although rimmed with darkness around the eyes from last night’s lack of sleep, was more or less normal with its impertinent pinkish glow and the rust-colored freckles.
Goth ginger. Giselle the Goth ginger is what they called me because of my wardrobe consisting of dark-colored clothes. Mostly deep blues, purples, violets and tinges of neon. Purists at my school would argue I was not a proper one since I don’t exactly follow the entire lifestyle. In truth, dark colors just make me feel safer. You would never guess my favorite color is white.
My mom went out early due to the store’s start-of-season sale. Her mini beauty store, the pompously-named Margaret’s Beauty Choice, allowed me to have my own variety of lipsticks and eyeshadow palettes. We are both make-up junkies. While she used to do make-up for small-time models in New York, my earliest experience was putting on a Ruby Woo lipstick on my eight-year-old lips.
I caught up to the school bus just right on time and decided to sit further back than usual. Alyssa’s pretty face was still healing when I heard about it yesterday and she might appear today in school to get some counseling. Hah. Like she would ever listen to anyone.
Just then I noticed something out of the ordinary. Someone. Normally, Lilly Saint-Louis was the one who took this seat of the school bus. Lilly was not there; a new kid was. I’ve studied at Sheffield since last year—the longest standing school since I was six and that’s an achievement—and not once have I seen the guy. He looked like he was brooding over something, with his eyebrows knitted over his dark eyes. He was obviously of Asian descent; his eyes were single-lidded slanting towards the inner corners. He had black hair trimmed like those I read in Japanese comics. He was handsome but I would not give him the chance to see me acknowledging such a fact. My eyebrow arched up almost automatically but I just sat next to him. He acknowledged my presence once and went back to staring at the world outside the school bus.
“So… new kid?” I could not help it. I wouldn’t want an awkward start if he were a new student.
He did not answer me and just looked at his phone while he was shuffling to find something in his pocket. Thankfully it was not a knife but a pair of earpods. I would have to praise him later for not misplacing that.
“Nah. Just a stowaway. I snuck inside here last night. Typical rendezvous from the world, don’t you think?” His accent was still evident. Though he must have been some kind of a rich kid since he knew big words that no normal American teen would use, unless in an essay.
It was hard to tell if he was joking but from his deadpan face, he seemed pretty serious.
“How did you get past the bus camera?” I was completely mystified. Sheffield had the best bus cameras in Minneapolis. Heck, I could not even sneak back inside to get my bag whenever I forgot it.
He shuffled in his bag again to show me a dislocated pair of vehicle cameras. “I took it out. It’s pretty easy to do if you have god-given talent as I have,” he flashed his pearly whites briefly and then reverted to his brooding face. “We’re going to Sheffield, right? Is it cool? You do know your school buses ain’t parked in your own lot at night, right?”
He must have snuck inside the school lot downtown. I shrugged. “Yeah, it’s one of the weird things I do not understand at Sheffield but… I think it makes sense since we are a small school.” Pfft. Wow. We. As if I was ever genuinely a part of this school.
“What about life in Minnesota?”
“Great. If you mean great as dead, boring winter nights. Plus, nothing is really that good here. We just have cool frozen lakes.”
He sighed and scratched his head, “New York and Cali never gave me a break so I guess I’d love a quiet place,” he murmured and bent backward to stretch, the thinness of his lanky frame showing slightly. Underneath, he was wearing an orange shirt with weird markings too good for my poor reading skills.
“New York, huh? Ever heard of a camp?”
He frowned. “Camp? There are tons of camps in New York. Camp Crystal Lake. Yeah, Crystal Lake is a thing. Camp Eisenhower. Lazo Jersey Camp. A whole lot of camping sites upstate. Well, I was not really from New York but I camped a lot for some time. Pretty cool for hiking and canoeing, too.”
Hiking and canoeing seemed way better than staying at Walmart as a cashier.
“Oh, if those things were boring, you might have been looking for more difficult challenges, huh?”
“I’m looking for a quiet life. Away from the go—Goths. I mean, Goths.”
“Goths?” I almost snorted a laugh.
“You don’t look like a Goth to me, Miss Ginger.” He looked at me up and down before he went back to staring at the crumpled love letter lodged in between our seats. Not one of us read it. I shuffled my ankles.
“I am Giselle, by the way. Giselle Blair.”
“Too much information, Giselle. Can I call you Gee?”
“That’s a no.” Though Mom does call me Gee sometimes.
“You sound like the late Simon Cowell, bless his soul.”
I did not know who Simon was but it turned the light chat into a long, awkward silence.
“Haruto,” he said as the bus took a turn from the intersection.
“What?”
He looked around as if he was being watched before carefully placing his lips next to my ear. “Call me Haru. My name is… Haruto.”
A blush rose to my cheeks. “You know you could just tell me your name without getting too close, right?”
Haruto chuckled. “Don’t be such a priss. I don’t like ginger girls anyway. I was just being—ahh… never mind me.”
He began to look again at the scenery outside. We were almost at Sheffield but this time, something strange happened.
The moment we entered the tunnel leading to the school gates, the bus began to act up, as if it was being pulled in all directions. Dark liquid began to creep up our windows like anti-gravity crude oil and all of the students began to scream. Even the bus driver screamed curses at what was happening.
Only Haruto seemed to know what was happening. He hissed but it was as if he knew this was going to happen.
“Stupid me. They know I am here!” He growled, running towards the bus door and slamming it open. A scrawny kid knocking down pneumatic bus doors? That was fascinating… if we ignore the fact that we were not attacked by a giant shadow sludge.
The bus driver tried to gather us all up at the back of the bus but I knew in me that it was wrong. Instincts drove me to the edge, letting me slash my way outside the bus.
“Haruto!” I screamed around while the bus was slowly swallowed by the dark sludge. For a second I was about to be convinced Haruto was just an imaginary friend my mind created for the sake of coping from yesterday’s mysteries. The shadows seemed to leave the bus alone, as they receded from the shuddering vehicle and unfortunately came at me.
I knew I should have been a huge ginger slush right there at the gates of Sheffield if not for the spine-tingling explosion over me. The exploding rocks were about to shower down on me if not for Haruto, who suddenly rolled into the scene and led me out to safety.
Son of Zeus! You still have not learned from your mistakes in Anaheim! A voice made from a thousand ones grittily scolded Haruto. It seemed that it was coming from the dark mass of shadows around us.
Haruto just looked at the shadows with utmost distaste. “A dark shadow… attacking a school at 08:00 in the morning. Clearly, you guys are just desperate!”
The swirling mass of shadows and fog seemed to solidify into a shape of a large, muscular man. Its eyes were as bright as the stars on a clear night. Though his intense stare at me made them look like headlights about to send a doe to deer heaven.
Bah, you are not what I am here for. I will finish you before I get my hands on the girl!
Haruto gave me a sideways glance but I was totally clueless at the moment. I was sure that maybe one of the girls in our school had summoned a shadow demon and the experiment went wrong. Now, the shadow demon wanted to seek vengeance and he probably mistook me as the one who summoned him. There were at least three people in school with red hair.
Boy, was I all wrong.
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