Dance With The Devil

Say goodbye,
As we dance with the devil tonight
Don't you dare look at him in the eye
As we dance with the devil tonight
-Breaking Benjamin - Dance With The Devil

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I was twelve years old when I first knew I was going to die.

I'd been at my best friend's house, spending the night, and my new stepdad and my grandmother came by. I didn't know why they were there, but I was having fun with Lea and didn't care.

Then they called me into the living room. They were all sitting there - my stepdad, my grandmother, and Lea's parents - and my grandmother told me to sit down. She took my hand in hers, and looked me dead in eyes, and told me my mother had died.

I don't remember now what she said. I just remember thinking, Shut up, stop talking, you're not serious, you're lying to me, she's not dead, shut up, SHUT UP.

I was so young. She was so young. My brother was only four months old, how could she be dead? I wanted her to shut up because I didn't want to cry in front of all those people. I've always been an intensely private person, more interested in the realms of my own imagination, and the places books could take me than socialising with the other kids at school. It ensured that I was teased unmercifully in elementary and middle school, but somehow I always ended up hanging out with the other kids who were teased, or otherwise social outcasts like myself, and in those kids I found my best friends.

But I couldn't say anything. What could I say? And she kept talking.

And I cried.

I spent the next several days at Lea's house, sleeping a lot and crying more. They were absolutely brilliant to me. They didn't have to let me stay, but I'll forever be grateful to them for that initial support. I think I froze, then. In my mind. A wall went up, and behind it, I was that twelve year old girl who's mum had just died for almost five years. In front of the wall, I was growing, and maturing, and I almost managed to make an effort to appear normal.

But I never quite fit in. I didn't have many friends my own age; the only ones I ever hung out with were the 'outcasts' like myself, and my best friends were the librarians, and the guidance counselor who helped me through the worst of it. One of my clearest memories of that time is Social Studies, we were going to be taping ourselves giving some sort of news report. I'd always been painfully shy, and the thought of being videotaped paralysed me with fear.

I started crying in class, a horrifyingly embarrassing moment, but the teacher assumed I was crying because of my mum, and let me go to the guidance counselor. I went and skipped the rest of my classes while she french braided my hair.

Life went on, as inexorable as the tides being drawn inwards and then further back out by the pull of the moon. I turned away from Christianity then. I'd always somewhat believed in God, though my family was far from pious. But God had never answered my prayers. Not little ones, like a prayer for friends, or the newest and brightest toys on the market, and He'd never answered bigger ones, like when I prayed for money to come to my family so that my mum wouldn't have to worry so much, or work so hard.

And God had taken my mother from me. She was only thirty four years old; she shouldn't have died. She had a baby, and a husband, and she was supposed to be there when I went into high school and when I graduated. She was supposed to be there!

But she wasn't.

And God had taken her.

At the very least, God had allowed her to be taken, and I couldn't deal with that. I turned to polytheism in the form of the old Greek gods and goddesses from the myths, and from there, the Norse gods, Loki, Thor, and Freya, and the Indian gods, Shiva in particular.

High school was a turning point for me. At first, I was the same as I'd been before, shy, bookish, gravitating towards the outcasts like myself. The biggest change came during lunch my freshman year. I finished eating, returned to my table - where I was eating alone - and I'd just pulled a book from my bag to pass the rest of the lunch hour reading, when all of a sudden a large group of people simply... settled at my table. I don't know where they came from; I never saw them coming. All of a sudden, they were there, surrounding me, and they just sat down, and continued their conversation as if they hadn't just flocked over to my table and descended en masse for no reason.

They were all upperclassmen, and for a while, they terrified me. Later, they said they'd seen me sitting there by myself, and felt sorry for me, and wanted to include me. Alex Levinson, Tonya Matt, and David/Sean Vantrile were the ones I was closest to. Alex had a way of speaking that made me feel that he was communicating on a level that was six or seven stories above me, but he was attractive and friendly. Sean was another I found attractive and friendly, but I couldn't decide which of the two I liked more. Tonya became one of my best friends during high school, and as I have a 'nicknaming' thing for people, she was dubbed Melfina, or Mel, after the character from Outlaw Star, and to this day when I think of her, I call her Mel.

Spurred on by their actions, I gradually came out of my shell. I began reaching out to people. There was a boy who rode my bus, lived on my street in Navy housing, where my stepdad and I had moved after my mum had died, because he couldn't pay the bills on an apartment by himself. He was very shy, and quiet, and reminded me of myself before The Flocking.

So every day, I said hello to him, and we gradually started talking. He too, became one of my best friends, and I found out his name was Shawn.

Later on in the year, one of my teachers came back. The entire first semester had been spent with a sub teacher, as Mr. A. was out on sick leave with his wife. (Now I'm not sure why, if she was pregnant or had cancer or what, but he wasn't there.) I had done reasonably well in the class with the Sub - I'm convinced I had a B in the class, and that becomes important later on so remember it - but when Mr. A. came back, he singled me out to hate. I hadn't learned the single most valuable piece of advice anyone gave me in high school yet, so I simply trudged through his classes as best I could.

One day, he finally pointed out the uses for the dates he'd put up on each of the four walls of the class, and he made the entire class stand up, and align themselves on the wall according to where their birthday was. I found my place almost immediately, as I'd noticed the dates when I'd first arrived, and then as everyone else settled into their places, I noticed a tiny girl wandering around, looking lost.

Shawn had literally blossomed when I reached out and started talking to him, and bouyed by The Flocking and my success with Shawn, I overcame my shyness, and asked her what the matter was. She was lost; couldn't figure out where she was supposed to stand.

I offered to help. "What's your birthday?" I asked.

"June 27th," she replied innocently. I was stunned. I said,

"Come over here and stand next to me. My birthday's June 27th, too. What year? What's your name?"

Her name was Jamie, and she was born a year before me, so I made her stand in front of me, and we began talking. When we were told to choose seats again, the two of us sat at a table together, and I learned that she was a most incredible artist. I'd long admired a piece of her artwork hanging in another classroom without knowing it was hers - it was anime, and it was gorgeous, two things I loved (I've always been surrounded by artistically talented friends. My attempts in fifth grade at art class, however, were a resounding failure, and I threw it over in favour of continuing on in Chorus when I went to sixth grade. The end result of this is that I can sing quite well, or so I like to pride myself, but my artwork still looks like something drawn by an epileptic penguin.)

I was ecstatic to find someone else in the school who liked anime, and it turned out that she loved video games as well. We hit it off amazingly. My grades suffered that semester; I was more interested in talking to Jamie, passing notes with Jamie, and generally goofing off with Jamie than I was with actually paying attention to what a boring teacher who hated me was saying.

I'd always liked video games - I grew up playing Mario, and Zelda, and Final Fantasy, but she turned the last two into an obsession of mine. Final Fantasy 9 - the game that brought us together, really - remains to this day one of my favourite games ever because of her.

We hung out after school, and called each other on the weekends and over the breaks, often calling at eight or nine in the morning, and remaining on the phone literally all day, sometimes until ten, eleven o'clock at night. To this day, I don't know how we found so much to talk about all the time.

One day, I began what would become - well, almost a trend - when on a note we were passing between us, to spruce it up, I wrote, "And now, a word from my voices." (The 'voices in my head.') I created a few wild and wacky characters, and to my surprise, she already had some, though I don't think she referred to them as 'voices' until I did. The interactions between our 'voices' took hold of us in an iron grip, and refused to let go with the tenacity of a bull-dog with a bone.

I didn't know it until later, but that was when the wall came down, and Amber finally let go of life and died, making room for Amy to be born.

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TBC...

(This is a true story. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent.)