I woke up in a bed that didn't belong to anyone. It had yellow sheets, and a gold comforter, and matching pillow cases, lined up perfectly on my end. The other end was thrown about, as if the person who had been laying there had been kicking in their sleep all night -- maybe was throwing the blanket on and off as she got too hot in the night, then too cold, then too hot. Summer was starting. The fan was able to move the air conditioner fine; I had installed a small fan above the floor vent, as well, one of the several-setting oscillating kind, to blow the weak air from it up to the ceiling fan, back onto the bed. The filter upstairs hadn't been changed in years. Not that I knew about, anyway.
This was a few years before the floor became oily and smelled of cat pee. This bed had once been my mother's and father's, but we were free of my father. It didn't yet feel real, but it was true. He wasn't allowed to come near us, or even look at us. My mom had moved downstairs to sleep on the couch, a few months before she divorced my father. She was still sleeping on the couch. The living room (or the room my dad had called the "play room," where us kids were caged up all the time) was her room now. She slept on a futon that was slowly falling apart, causing her extreme back pain. But this bed was still here. It has a mirror in the headboard, that my mom had tried to destroy before, or at least get rid of. I didn't understand why, at the time. I was 14. I had been raped before, but I preferred to think I was fine. That it didn't really happen to others, and that maybe it really was consensual.
In the headboard there were also condoms, chewed by Ditto the cat. Ditto the cat was the reason I was born. My dad wanted us aborted. My mom was upset by the simple thought that she wouldn't be giving birth to Twin and I, because she required a c-section. She would never have aborted her babies.
The carpet was yellow, too. I had put some effort into decorating the room. My real room was downstairs, my real bed too. But it was a small bed, and I didn't want to try to share a twin bed with Brandi. I didn't feel that close to her yet.
Though, we had been naked the night before. But I woke up with clothes on. I had put my clothes back on, and I checked that as I sat up to see where Brandi was. Sunlight was pouring in through the windows, also very yellow, even through the blinds right at the foot of the bed. Those blinds were weirdly blue, clearly designed in the late 70s and early 80s. I didn't understand why I knew that. It didn't bother me at the time.
I wasn't Fungus yet. Though, there was Silence. But she was enough like me to make sense. I thought it was pretty obviously she was me. I thought it was pretty obvious that "Silence" was a character name. Her name was Whisper. Her mother's name was Silent. It was based off of her name in a fiction writing site. Silent's Whisper. You know, names a role playing group of kids make.
There wasn't really a demon in her head. I knew that. I knew H. didn't exist. But he was beginning to feel real, the more Brandi acknowledged him. I had grown to want his approval, his friendship. He was important to me. He was curious about me, like I was curious about him. My mind registered him (though I knew he wasn't real, and I was not schizophrenic nor was I hallucinating -- psychologists called him an imaginary friend?), standing behind Brandi. He was looking at me with his alien red eyes, his shadowy head regarding me in a friendly manner. He had dropped his regal personage. Yet his skin still had scars, and bits of royal paint. A piece of his culture, slowly falling off in a symbolic way as he became more and more human (and his son would say, "What does it mean to be human? Am I human?") We made eye contact, and I realized he was saying with his freaky expression, She found something.
I stared at him thoughtfully. How did he know so much? Yesterday, Brandi made me prove he was real. She lay naked in the bed, and had me turn my back. She told him to tell me what she was doing. She told me to say what H said he was seeing her sign. Then, she started asking H about her childhood. When he passed the test (how did he know her wallpaper was butterflies, but her bedspread was dolphins, at her dad's house when she was seven years old? How did he know that Brandi hated spaghetti?), he started asking him questions about what she was like, before she was human. He was suddenly vague, afraid to reveal something. I didn't say anything about his expression. I simply translated.
My middle school principal, unlike a professional psychologist, would say thoughtfully that he sounded like a demon, maybe a leader of some sort, based on his intricate history. But he only said it as a personal opinion. He told me he feared saying it were true. He was curious too, but knew better than to possibly cause harm.
I can't remember why my middle school principal knew anything. I must have gone to him for help. I must have been unable to get help. His daughter's name was Faith, and she led the student Christian organization. Perhaps they were superstitious. Maybe he tried to help and I can't remember.
H didn't look like a demon to me. He had the face of a politician. He remarked often that our government would be less corrupt if he were in charge of it. He enjoyed debating that. He claimed it helped him. He had political enemies he was skilled at impressing.
I learned later that his own son was one of these people. But he was very proud of his son. Unlike most of his kind, he only had one child... well, two, but one was adopted. He adopted Fungus's son on accident. (Long story that doesn't belong here.) And he had a daughter, but right now, in this innocent moment, he didn't know she existed. He thought he had a lost son, destroyed to humiliate him. Revenge for "wife borrowing."
In this innocent moment, he didn't look like a king at all. He looked weirdly vulnerable, weirdly helpless. He was used to being in control, but here, he wasn't. He wanted to control what Brandi knew and didn't know, to protect her. Or, that's what he said. The older I got, the more I questioned it, until I was old enough and brave enough to ask. I asked him how he could love his wife if she were living her life as a child. He said, "When you have a significant other, you'll see. You don't look at her baby pictures and think she's sexy. You find her cute and endearing. A source of power in the making."
Here, he couldn't touch her. The reason why was extremely unclear. It -- the game -- shouldn't have ever needed logic.
But it was about to.
Right...
-- now.
I sat up, and I sleepily saw Brandi at my computer. It was old, even for the time, a Windows 95 Professional. It was a fast computer, and simple to use. I had worked on this computer and brought it back from the dead about a year ago, with my father.
Brandi wasn't slumped in the chair, like she normally would have been. She sitting straight up. At attention. From behind, she looked determined.
H was staring at me with a desperate expression. I realized his expression was urgent, and he was upset, concerned somehow. I saw the tinge of blue on the edges of his eyes (a hormonal change that proves he has been violent before) and realized he was not completely innocent.
I remembered, suddenly, Brandi commanding him to scare me for her. He had done it playfully, but I didn't like it. She had a strangely smug expression on her face.
In the same stroke, she demanded that he not refer to his slaves as slaves. He felt it was honest. Brandi, who claimed she was always honest and valued it over all else, preferred the term "employees." H thought this was ridiculous.
"What's all this?" were the first words Brandi said to me that morning.
Her words did not match the room. The small amount of yellow I heard in them were so small they were meaningless, clearly my own reaction. My ears and senses told me, through color, that her voice was a simple mix of blue and red, together but not as purple. There was brown, too, and bits of an ugly green I hadn't heard from her before. It reminded me of something from my past. It unsettled me. I felt my cheeks become hotter, my stomach tense, my arms get frigid.
I sat there, stupidly. I felt nervous, but I wasn't sure why. I remembered sexual things from the night before, vaguely, and wondered if I had ruined something. I remembered her saying she wouldn't touch me in my "no no square" even with gloves on. I was too gross.
I started to worry.
"[A character] and I have been emailing back and forth," Brandi continued, her voice oddly accusing.
"Oh, really?" I said, playing along. Playing the game.
"I found a picture on here, saved in this folder. It's of an eye that looks weird."
I sat there.
"[Character] told me to ask about [the character's] eyes."
My heart sank even more.
"Come here," she said quietly.
I did. I got up, controlling my slight shaking so well that it would not be seen. She didn't turn around once. She was staring at the screen with an odd expression, until I slid beside her. She was fat, so I had to squish in a little. I stood with my back to another desk, or maybe a pile of boxes or books. She liked me because I was smaller than her, yet hated me for not being fat.
Any time anyone brought up being fat, she would have a full breakdown, a terrifying one, where she would start trying to cut herself and hit herself in the head. She would bring it up later, constantly.
(New idea: maybe this is why my little brother trying to cut himself with his sword traumatized me so much -- that, and that I know it was preventable.)
Even bringing up that I had once had a boyfriend caused her to do that. She cut herself with her fingernails and fought me and beat herself up literally, and the rest of the night was absolutely miserable. She said she was angry and jealous that a freak and weirdo like me could do things in life. What did that make her? I was at her dad's house, so I couldn't ask my mom to come get me. I didn't even realize it was an option at that time.
My cheeks were flushed and hot to the touch. I realized this meant that I was terrified, squished between her fat and the pile of things. I realized she was scrolling through my notes, and she had pulled up the picture of the eye.
"What's this?" she quizzed me.
I glanced at where H was supposed to be. I knew he wasn't there. For the first time, that thought made me feel empty, uncomfortable. Like life was not worth living.
I could see him, almost clearly but for his face, in my head. He was looking at me with interest. But I couldn't see what his reaction to her behavior was supposed to be.
This had not been expected, even by his weirdly knowledgeable nature.
"I found it on the Internet," I said truthfully. "I thought it was cool."
She clicked away from it, started searching through all my personal files. I started to feel even more violated. These were very personal. None of her business.
"If I can trust you, then you'll let me go through your files," she said. "I'll treat you how my mom treats me. Can you be trusted?"
I nodded. Of course I could be trusted. I knew I was not allowed to have secrets. Not from Brandi.
Once, she got scared she didn't know everything about me, on a quiz made through Facebook. She started to have a panic attack. I had made the questions easy, to avoid this. I started regretting asking her what my favorite color was, because it made her angry that she didn't know something about me, furious.
I wish I knew what I had said my favorite color was. I wonder if it was blue, or silver, or grey, or even yellow or hazel.
She opened every single file. She added, "I wouldn't have fallen for that picture anyway. I saw the logo on the bottom."
Confused, frightened, and nervous, my heart started to flutter, the way it did before my dad was about to take his anger out on us. The world was turning weird noises of colors. I felt like I was going deaf. I wanted to block out the sunlight to make the world less colorful, to make me stop feeling overwhelmed.
(Flashback to doctors taking away my anesthesia on accident, me not knowing what the world was anymore.)
I let her go through everything, no matter how personal it was. She found my notepad of usernames and passwords, and took a picture with her cellphone, a black and yellow phone whose screen would slide up to give access to a number pad.
During this time, I had come to a very, very, very difficult realization, then a difficult decision. I was going to have to tell her that I lied, that H wasn't real.
I wasn't sure why she thought he was. When I had been hospitalized about five months ago, she obviously got no emails from any of the characters. The characters were clearly made up. When I didn't want to play during that week before I was hospitalized, when I was severely depressed, she didn't make me.
What had even happened? I wondered.
I told her I wanted to go to the backyard, into the woods. I had something important to tell her.
(Flashbacks to every single time I said "I have something important to tell you." She would accuse me of having something to confess. I just wanted the game to end.
One of the times I was a freshman in college. I knew I had to give it up. I wasn't sure how to do this.
(Suddenly finding myself surprised I'm not in my freshman dorm room).)
In the shade of the edge of the forest, she looked calmer. I did not imagine H being there. I forgot about him momentarily.
Brandi was looking at the forest. "I feel like I belong here," she said, looking more peaceful.
I stood there, afraid to speak. But I knew I had to.
"I have something I really need to tell you," I said, taking a deep breath. This is it, I thought. I'm going to end this now. We'll become better friends. It'll be my last secret.
She looked at me suspiciously. She told me, "Just tell me." The same tone she used to force me to tell her things I didn't want to share.
The light coming through the trees was green and yellow. The smell of the woods were rich, full of rotting wood and leaf litter, and of the smell of fungus growing in rich soils. The air was humid enough to itch, and small bugs enjoying the sunlight kept landing on us. This was my element, where I spent most of my time.
Brandi claimed it was hers to. I took her hiking once, and we had a lot of fun. But I wasn't supposed to go after that without her anymore. And she never wanted to hike again. I lost one of my biggest ambitions, my biggest safe place. But I would go in secretly, to write. I had a hideout not even the police or the pedophile knew about.
I knew the natural world extremely well.
The sounds of the wind were comforting, the air still enough and still cool from the night air before. The sun had fully risen, and its light felt hot, but the air itself was not yet hot. There was a lot of yellow, but slowly.. more and more of something else was drowning out all the colors, making me feel confused. I felt confused of where I was, yet I slowly realized that the colors I was sensing now were coming from me, not the outside world. I was scared. My own anxiety was deafening me.
Get it over with, I thought, encouragingly.
"It isn't real," I blurted unceremoniously, "None of it is real. I made it up. It's a story. I've been writing it since I was twelve. I can show you."
(Twelve was only two years ago.)
For a moment, I felt a small sense of relief. So powerful that I can still feel it now.
At first, Brandi's eyes widened in the most innocent shock I had ever seen.
Regret consumed me for that moment. A deep sadness told me that I was ruining her, that she was depending on this to be real. It was important to her, undeniably critical. It must have been my fault.
(It was the same fear I had when I told her the final time, "I am littleoc," in Fungus's voice. I couldn't sleep that night, completely overrun with guilt that I had ruined her life. I felt like a murderer -- the same feelings I had when I killed Thunder.
But I didn't kill Thunder. It wasn't my fault. I didn't know. I hadn't intended that. I was just a child. A child taught my actions by my father, who is much more guilty than I am.
Same for what happened between Brandi and I. It was not my fault. I have a right to be free from guilt. It was not my fault.)
Then, her expression changed.
My therapist tells me that that innocent moment of shock must have been her true reaction, for that moment. But then....
She switched to something else.
She started to panic. She started to cut herself, to hit her head against the trees, to hit herself in the thighs and jaw.
She said something about how life was not worth living -- how she had never been able to keep a boyfriend for more than a month.
She was referring to the one too old for her, who cheated on her with another man, after asking her masturbate in front of a webcam.
Very f*cked up. I understood how it felt to feel used. I understood how it felt to know that there was technically the choice to say no, and yet not understand why you didn't.
(I cry over this tragedy of hers. I don't know if she cried for me, after she hung up. She told Fungus she didn't.)
And to Jamie, who had broken up with her recently for being too clingy.
Then, Brandi said I deserved to die.
I agreed, but I was scared. I didn't want to die, despite thinking I wanted to. And I was weirdly self-aware about this, knowing that my suicidal ideation was just an instinct, just like my will to survive. Because I was nothing but an animal.)
"I wasn't talking about that," I said, casually, the way my dad used to say he hadn't really been that mean. I should have just said I didn't want mustard. If I had, then there wouldn't have been that disaster!
She stopped. She looked at me, and I saw a scratch on her face. I saw that deep scar on her hand, from when she was sad that Jamie had talked to someone. She had cut it on the bottom of a desk, so deeply that it was scarred even when she was 23 years old, in the modern world we live in now.
I realized dully that this was not normal. But I felt the most extreme pity.
"Really?" she asked, looking at me with that innocent shock again. She laughed a little. "That wasn't funny. What were you talking about?"
I searched my mind, the same way a computer does -- like another character she was married to once, seeing everything with the same clarity I see it now.
I told her, "I made up that story about the eye. I saw it and I thought it looked like your eye."
"Oh," she said, looking innocently confused. "[Character] was going to send me a picture of his eye whenever his camera started to work. It will prove that all this" (the infamous "this") "is real. Then I'll know how much I can really invest in all this."
I nodded understandingly. There was a bird watching us, a grey blue and tufted.
She didn't want to be taken for a fool, to be thought of as an idiot. It made sense to me. I knew she was scared. I knew what that was like.
We went back in. She napped for a while.
When my mom woke her up later, she got angry at her. She got payback by throwing her contact on the carpet where even I couldn't find it. She said it was my mom's fault that she had lost her contact when my mom kept asking us if we were awake, so we wouldn't be late for whatever we were going to.
Later that week, my cat Fuzzy found it. I lied to Brandi and told her that Fuzzy had nearly choked on it, because I was angry that she had done that, because it could have happened. I needed a reason important enough to make it worth discussing, because my own feelings were meaningless.
She insisted it was my mom's fault. My mom's, for waking her up and then checking on her more than once. While my mom was checking on us, I was getting increasingly scared.
I was scared of Brandi, even at the start.
