The Haunting

She had confidence in herself. In her own intelligence. She felt that she knew her mind was sharper than those of most others her age. She seemed to be able to see what they did not. She had no confidence in the greater world around her. She could see what was happening. People behaving as though they owned something that others were lacking, and because of that, they were better, somehow more elevated - certainly in their own opinion - and that allowed them to mock others, avoid them, pity them, and have contempt for them. She had learned all of that because she experienced all of that.

From the time she was small and lithe and her mother thought she was athletically-inclined and enrolled her in a dance studio for the summer, so she could gain confidence and grace, she was taught such lessons. She hadn’t wanted to go, had no intention of allowing herself to go, but what could she do? She was only six years old, and had to do what she was commanded to do. Entreated, convinced, that it would be of huge benefit to her. To be fair to her mother how was she to know that her daughter would be placed in a group of young girls who had already had the experience of two years’ exposure to the program?

Girls who snickered when she was unable to make the right moves; laughed at her awkwardness, and refused to partner with her, always moved away from her. Pay no mind, her mother said. They’d get over it once they saw that she was as competent as they were. Anyway, her mother said, that’s what girls are like. Little or older they gather in exclusionary cliques and there is always someone who looks in from the outside, spurned. She should know, her mother said, she was one of those ‘outside’ kids.

Take it from her, she always said, you’re better off being with people more like yourself. The ones who think they’re special, never are. They’re just self-absorbed, petty, vindictive and nasty and you want nothing to do with them anyway. That wasn’t how she felt, though, moving up through the elementary school grades, watching the pretty, self-confident girls gather admirers around them, girls almost as pretty, but never as confident, drawn to the stand-outs in the class, wanting to be just like them. She was always with one or two other girls who were as left-out as she was. And even then, found little in common with them. But it did represent companionship, however lacking. And some measure of social acceptance.

Now she was older, and she had become remote from all of that. She recognized it for what it was. Her mother was perfectly right; sometimes she was right, mostly not. She did come around to recognizing that this was the veneer of meaningless fluff. She was as pretty and as clever and as capable as anyone else, she simply lacked that kind of social aggression that seemed to attract the notice of others.

But she did find her niche, among girls who were social outsiders like her, but who devalued the over-rated and utter meaningless of pride in being with the in-crowd. Not the way she did, for the useless façade that it represented, but mostly out of a sense of their own pride. Still, she had to admit to herself there were other girls that were excluded from close acceptance in her own, small group. Others, refused entrée to the luxe cliques and hoping to find acceptance in the lower-tier social groups.

She would have nothing herself to do with the pretensions of these sad girls whose prodigious efforts to ingratiate themselves was so distasteful to her. She was herself. Proudly. She never made an effort to portray herself as anything but what she was, how she felt about things, her perceptions, her values. Take it or leave it, her personality and character was there, up front, visible and clearly defiant of pretension. Those who recognized that and became close to her were her companions, and from and with them she sought solace, though she would never call it that; it was self-affirmation matched by social validation.

And now that she was preparing to enter high school she knew she would be exposed to yet another level of social interaction on an even greater scale offering little gifts of humiliation and occasionally the opportunity to rise above it, continuing to be herself. “You’ll see”, her mother said “it will be different, but don’t get your hopes up, not all that different; just another level.”

Hopes up? She had no hopes. She was cynical, more given to half-full glasses, a term she detested, than viewing life rosily. She was actually, she knew, like her mother. In that sense, if in no other. She would never be like her mother entirely. She would never adapt herself to her mother’s life-style, never.

She had her own aspirations and they didn’t include what she saw of her mother’s life. Dependent on a male partner who never made an effort to consolidate the relationship with an equal effort. None of them, one after the other was worth more than a pile of crap. Losers, every one.

She hardly remembered her father, was left with a dim memory of someone on the sidelines, there but not quite there. Nothing emotional to be recalled about him, as though he’d had nothing emotional invested in her. More than adequately proven by the very fact that though he lived nearby he had never in the decade since their separation, made any effort to contact her Mom, make enquiries about his daughter.

He was so fearful that he might be called upon to contribute to raising her, not by his presence, but by paying child support - which she very well knew was required by law - that he was more than eager to maintain that distance. One her mother had demanded of him. She had promised she would never make an effort to impose child-support payments on him as long as he left them alone. So that was that.

A succession of “Dads” was history. The latest one a quiet guy who tried to be friendly with her, but whom she rebuffed since the day he entered her mother’s life three years earlier. She doubted she would ever become like her mother, so dependent on the company of a man. For companionship, her mother always explained to her. But she couldn’t quite see the ‘companionship’ angle, because it never seemed to work out that way. Seemed to her, the guys were getting a free ride, not investing anything in the relationship, a one-way-street to misery she had no intention of emulating.

But it bugged the hell out of her, having guys around. Her Mom’s guys, to be specific. She felt no attachment to them, no attraction to them, no emotional investment whatever. The one before this guy lasted three years and he was always ordering her around, like he was her father.

So she had no interest in any guy hanging around, because that’s all they ever did. Never made themselves useful, just got in the way. Whenever she wanted to take a shower, he was taking a shower. You’d think she would have priority, but that wasn’t the way it worked. It was her house, her home, not some guy who made nicey-nicey with her Mom for a while and then moved on. Mostly because her Mom got to the stage where she couldn’t stand them any more and invited them to move on. Although the way she carried on when they obliged, you’d think she had lost her one true love.

That’s another thing, she often mused to herself, is there anything like a one true love? Someone like Edward, she giggled to herself. She loved the Twilight books, but even she could recognize them for what they represented, an escape from real life. As though vampires really existed. Made for a good story-line, though. She preferred Jody Picoult, at least there the stories were honestly portrayed, taken from life as it occurred. Thank heavens she has her books, her runaway from life, her escape, her lifeboat.

Boredom still assails her. There’s just so much anyone can do to entertain themselves. She knows she should help her mother, do things around the house. Her mother. Who always speaks of herself as a ‘single mom’. She is that, sure. But she’s still dependent on having a man around. Men who don’t deserve a second thought, another look. What, she wondered, ever attracted her mother to those losers? That they were available, and flattered that a woman like her mother, trim, attractive, smart, a professional, accepted their failings?

She couldn’t quite figure it out, but did figure it to be an easy ride for those guys. Nothing to invest, just hang around and pick the low-growing fruit. She could see this clearly. Why couldn’t her mother? With the first one that she could remember, after her mother’s separation from her father, it was different. She was only four, she was encouraged to call him “Daddy”. And she did, and he did become her daddy. There was someone else who called him Daddy, a boy older than her, but not by much, who came to live with them on the week-ends. Whose mother lived somewhere else, with someone else. And this one she remembered fondly for the seven years he lived with her Mom, and her. He was interested in her, he was good to her, she relied on him. He took her side when her mother went into one of her rages at her 'atrocious' behaviour.

After that, it was downhill all the way. And she resented their presence in her life. Why shouldn’t she? “Be a little more considerate” her mother would tell her, in her better moods, at those times when she wasn’t yelling at her out of sheer frustration, calling her behaviour “atrocious”, telling her she was beyond obstinate. If she was obstinate where did she get it from? From a mother who didn’t know when to give up and who kept trying to find the perfect companion? She would have settled for a lot less than perfect, she would have settled for adequate at the very least, but she could see with her own discerning eye that the entire succession of them were far beyond adequate. On the scale of adequate they were in the dungeon.

But today her mother said she would go out shopping with her. She could look around, “refresh your wardrobe”, as her Mom called it. And it would be only her and her Mom. No hanger-on today. No guy to pull her mother places where she didn’t want to go. Who was more important, anyway to her Mom? Her own kid or some guy who she wasn’t even married to?

They went downtown together. Where a lot of the nicer shops were. To give her a chance to look around. She’d prefer being there with one of her girlfriends, but her Mom didn’t think it was “safe enough” for her to be downtown in the city where they lived, at her age with a friend. Alien abduction? Did her Mom think someone would descend from a hovering spaceship and pluck her out of the crowd?

It was hot, and humid, and looked as though it was going to be a tough slog. When the sun went in and they got a bit of relief then dark clouds loomed on the horizon, gradually nudged the white ones out of the way and threatened to benefit them with a cloudburst.

She felt kind of gloomy, and didn’t want to. Wanted to make the most of this occasion, having her Mom to herself for a change, just the two of them, out shopping for stuff she needed.

And then, walking up to the enclosed mall, sitting on the sidewalk, there was that girl. She couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than herself. Sitting on the sidewalk, her back hunched forward, behind her a brick wall, the side of a building they were passing. It was gritty and more than a little unappealing with all kinds of detritus lying about. And there was the girl, just sitting there. Her hair long and dank, although it looked as though it would be really pretty, washed and clean and shiny. Which it was anything but. Then she lifted her face, and their eyes locked. She knew the girl was looking directly at her, had raised her head as though aware that someone had fixed a stare on her. That face was utterly devoid of expression. Dead hollow, like her glassy eyes with no depth, just a huge vacancy.

She tried to turn away. To pull her eyes away from those of the girl. The girl remained as she was, her head lifted, protruding like a turtle's though her back was still hunched into her body. The girl’s stare at her was unwavering. She wanted to look away, she didn’t want the girl to think she was intruding on her. Intruding on her? In this public place, where she sat, a forlorn figure, a young girl who was obviously homeless. She had seen other people, shambling men who looked like human wrecks, sitting on the pavement and asking for “spare cash”. Few people, she noted, bothered to acknowledge their presence, let alone hand anything to them.

She had seen other young people, guys and girls, but they seemed like they were kind of comfortable being there where they were, hanging around, occasionally approaching a passerby, speaking briefly, then moving off again, re-joining the others. Her mother pulled her along, told her not to stare. She wasn’t a little kid, she didn’t need to be told not to stare at these anomalous figures. She’d seen them before, on other occasions. And took their presence for granted. Part of the background. Like the buskers, the entertainers, the musicians and singers whom people did notice, and for whom there was always an audience who offered coinage in appreciation. Her mother had told her they were university kids, some of them, making some extra money to help further their education. They weren’t down-and-out, her mother stressed, they were enterprising young people.

So who and what was this girl? A stray. A runaway. Homeless, friendless, hopeless, miserable. These thoughts crowded her head and made her feel queasy. She did, finally, look away. Left the girl sitting there, because they were striding onward toward their destination. No longer in sight, she could forget the girl. But she couldn’t.

Her head was crammed with thoughts she had no wish to contemplate. She felt as though her forehead was being compressed toward the back of her head. Why didn’t she say something to the girl? Anything. “Hi” would have done. She was a person. She ignored that girl as though she was worthless, as though she existed only as a freak, sitting on a sidewalk, abandoned and utterly alone.

It seemed to her, much later on reflection, that the girl had not perhaps felt entirely alone. And this thought gave her a truly eerie feeling, as though something was creeping outward from her interior. She remembered, that while she was locked in eye contact with the girl, she had become aware of a sound, deep within her. It was a voice, a voice she had no idea existed. What was it doing there, screaming, screaming endlessly? And then, silence. Just as she felt she was about to panic, the voice was silenced. And it was at that point that she had turned her head away from the girl.

What would she do if she ever had the kind of misfortune that had obviously led to this girl being alone? How could she look after herself? She knew about predators. She knew about the helpless submission of girls to the pestering nuisance of the guys at school. This was a whole lot different. This girl, how could she defend herself? How would she feel, seeing a girl like her, privileged, walking along with her Mom, someone who couldn’t bother even noticing her other than as an object of curiosity, walking away, not a care about anything.

She felt as though the air had become suddenly dark and thick, crowding her lungs, making it difficult for her to breathe properly. She fell back, no longer matching her mother’s pace, in the crowd of people they had entered as they came closer to the entrance of the mall.

“What’s wrong? Keep up!” her mother said. And then she stopped, looked at her daughter and said “You feel okay? Something wrong?”

“I’m okay. Just didn’t feel too good for a bit. I’m coming.”