The Mirrors of Fate (3 page)

“
Oh my God, it was such hell gettin’ to school this morning. That’s why my hair looks like shit. I wish they’d given us more days off,” Ellie complained. “There’s still so much damage outside, an’ the traffic is terrible because of that thang.”

The “thang” she was referring to was a storm that had hit over the weekend. The May storm was rainy enough, windy enough and ferocious enough to put many homes in White Crest into total darkness for twelve hours. The maelstrom hit on Saturday but school did not reopen until Tuesday. According to the reports, it was one of those freak, unidentifiable weather disturbances. But were storms ever like that? The suspicious clouds over the town had apparently not been suspicious enough beforehand to expect such a heavy-hitting storm, but it certainly came.

Unfortunately for Maria, her house was the only one on her block to suffer any real damage. All the bathrooms got soaked, a small section of the roof came loose, and debris found temporary free lodgings in her room. But even with all of that, the storm did not frighten her like it seemed to do to everyone else.

She wasn’t sure why.

“
I literally thought I was going to die!” Gina declared. “When the winds started picking up, I could swear my roof would blow off. I hid under my covers.”

“
You think
that’s
anythin’?” Ellie prepared to one-up her. “I hadta go to a shelter with my family for precautionary measures,” she said with hands delicately touching her chest. “Since this was the first major storm since like, whut, four years, my family an’ I weren’t sure our flimsy house would withstan’ it. Luckily I’m alive too.”

“
What did you do, Maria?” Gina asked, turning to her.

Maria’s stomach churned uneasily. Damn it. This was what she did not want. She hesitated for a moment. “I...was outside,” she murmured under her breath.

But they’d heard and both of their jaws dropped open considerably. Soon they were exchanging looks of disbelief with one another.

“
Whut? You were where?” Ellie asked for clarification.

The memory came back to Maria and she mechanically lowered her head a little to have her long, curly auburn locks fall down in front and protect her from their stares. She forced a smile to throw them off. “I was outside, I said. Nothing big. You guys should’ve—should’ve really seen it up close. The storm was, well, it was spectacular.”

“
See it? Up close? You didn’t stay inside? Girl, you could have died!” Gina was dumbfounded, and Ellie’s face read of the same shock and confusion.

Maria raised her bony shoulders and quickly dismissed her actions with a shrug. “It’s no big deal.” She fleetingly glanced up at her friends and became vulnerable under their gawking expressions. “There’s nothing wrong with what I did,” she defended.

I am not strange.

“
Yeah, yeah! Of course there’s nuthin’ wrong with it. That’s just a bit weird an’...” Ellie bit her lip. “So long as you’re fine, I guess.”

Maria did not respond at first. Her eyes merely stared into the depths of her locker. “Yeah, of course I’m fine. But there’s nothing wrong with life being a little unexpected at times, just like the weather, school, family, friends.” She let out a weak laugh. “It’d be nice to...escape the shit once in a while though. Don’t you think?” She managed to look toward them again, but her heart sank into the pit of her stomach when she saw the impenetrable walls that had risen for them both. She suddenly realized what she had been rambling on about.

“
Escape how? And from
what
exactly?” Gina searched. A smile scratched at the surface. “What the heck are you talking about?” The tone in Gina’s voice suggested something dangerous and prodded for the truth they knew she was hiding.

“
F-Forget it,” Maria dismissed accordingly, fearful of the conversation spiraling downward any further. “I’m just rambling on. So, yeah, like I was saying, the storm really was something else, huh?”

But there was no recovering. An awkward silence had set in between her friends and was not going anywhere unless they were.

“
Well...hey, we’ve got to head to first period,” Gina interrupted with a smile. She took up her bag from the floor and Ellie followed suit. The two gave an absented goodbye wave to Maria and disappeared around the white corner of the senior hallway, whispering and giggling with each other.

The uncomfortable tension weighing down Maria’s shoulders eased up when they left. Finally the overhead school bell rang noisily. Drawing in a sharp breath, she slammed her locker door.

I’m such an idiot.

•

She had grown fearless over time; that is what she had come to realize. Fearless, or maybe rather defiant and reckless. Whichever, Maria was glad she had no remorse. She wasn’t afraid to skip a class anymore just because she could “get in trouble.” She was not afraid to talk back to most people when they pissed her off, except Gina and Ellie—for some reason only them. Those childish fears were gone. None of them could do anything to her, not the faculty, not the principal, and more importantly, not her parents.

Working hard at the Halimond Academy in White Crest City, a private preparatory school where grade eleven marked senior year, had always been her top priority because of growing up in such a strict household. Her father’s strict rules, and his announcement when she was just fourteen that an arranged marriage was in her future, sent her grades into a tailspin. When her interest in maintaining her grades worsened even more around tenth grade, they called it at first laziness, she, resistance. But that rebellion couldn’t have come at a worse time. She needed excellent grades to leave the places that stifled her. Getting into a university outside of the small, secluded White Crest City, and more importantly away from her father’s house, was the only way she could avoid that tradition which did not belong to her.

With her cheek propped up on her fist and her long auburn tendrils of hair falling down her back, Maria sat by herself at a desk in an empty classroom. The sun warmed her caramel skin and full lips. Directly outside was her favorite tree, so she had turned the desk to face one of the glass-paned windows. She was glad to see the tree had survived the storm. For a long moment she sat there in her flared green jeans, trying to get her mind lost in watching the leaves fall gracefully to the ground by the isolated wind blowing outside. Staring vacantly at objects or out into space was a sort of ritual for her, or a part of a “bad habit.” Spacing out usually offered her a comforting solitude, but not this time. Her mind was too cluttered.

In the empty white-walled, gray-carpeted room with its cleanly rubbed marker board at the front and its slowly whirring overhead ceiling fans, the atmosphere was supremely quiet. As quiet as Saturday night had been before the storm came so abruptly.

Dangerously loud. An empty house. No one at home except for her. The storm had come too suddenly, almost supernaturally. She was sitting on her bed, listening and observing. She refused to close the banging window above her bed. The side ones too she left alone as the surging wind viciously blew in leaves and golf ball-sized pellets of clumped dirt into her room. Lightning struck several times, illuminating her shelves of books and making stuffed animals look like the fearful things in horror films. She remembered feeling strange, as if those electric bolts wanted to come in, as if their mission was to strike her unmercifully where she sat.

The storm seemed to carry a venomous personal vendetta against the town it unleashed its fury upon. She had gone outside to see that fury firsthand. She was drawn to its whirling winds and its pouring rain. And even when sharp whips of wind bruised her skin, when unknown debris sliced and pricked at her and caused her blood to trickle down her calves, she remained where she was.

She could unmistakably feel something ominous in the air.

But Maria would never tell her friends about how she felt. In fact, she barely told them anything. Speaking too much can only lead to hating yourself later on when you say something stupid. Today was more proof of that theory. She had ended up sounding like a damn fool this morning.

But there were times when she would reach the limit of keeping all her feelings and stresses inside, and then a dream would manifest. It was either in the form of a nightmare or a strange reliving of a past event in her life. In the latter, she felt as if she had three selves: one who actually relived the event, one who witnessed it like an omnipresence, and one who told of the reliving to some other presence who acted as therapist and condemner.

The self who relived the event could feel the air and hear the sounds so amazingly. The omnipresent self watched and spoke helplessly, like a chorus from a Greek play, interjecting whenever it felt to and commenting on what was happening. The final self, such an intermediary presence, was the in-between who relived the event and commented on it as if she was laid down on a therapist’s couch, telling the sympathizer and judge every unadulterated detail about how she felt when it was all happening.

The last dream like this seemed such a long time ago. Something about a garden. But the dreams all came because of one common denominator—mistakes.

Mistakes of the past were like permanent knives stabbed into your chest with the skin long hardened around the wounds. If you wanted them out, you had to be ready to cut through flesh for it. Maria often looked for little windows of opportunity in which she could allow herself to open up to Gina and Ellie and say the things she felt. Each time was a failed, embarrassing attempt. Too embarrassing to forget and too embarrassing not to punish herself for later so she would not repeat such stupid sharing.

When she got home she would have to remind herself of all her mistakes.

“
Damn it,” Maria cursed aloud and checked her watch. She did not plan on waiting all day for her teacher, Mr. Lohan.

Almost on cue, the door opened and in walked the tall, middle-aged Mr. Lohan in a black shirt and straight-legged jeans. He barely looked around the room to see if he was alone before turning to close the door again.

“
Mornin’!” Maria shot out quick to scare him.

He jumped, dropping a few of the files from the stack he was holding. She smiled.

“
Hell!” he expelled through clenched teeth, then took a breath to calm himself. “Damn it, Maria,” he said looking back at her, “you’re like a ghost. I didn’t know anyone was in here.” He made his way over to the teacher’s desk, placed the heavy files down and picked up the ones that had fallen. “What are you doing in here all by yourself? I have Life Skills class in here for second period. Shouldn’t you be in math right now?”

Maria would have answered straight away if his strong cologne had not struck her so suddenly. The assault to the nostrils made her nauseous.

“
Are you okay?” He smiled after realizing she caught a whiff of his scent. “You look stunned.”

His pleased grin hid nothing. He was hoping for the same blushing reaction all the other female students gave him when he even entered a room. The hazel-eyed counselor with long brown hair was the “cool” teacher, the one young-at-heart who always opted for jeans and a nice shirt rather than a suit and tie. Mr. Lohan had become known for trying to seem younger than he actually was by rebelling against the “cliché chains of adulthood,” as he liked to elegantly put it. No teacher liked him because of his rebellious nature.

“
Do you like this scent?” he asked directly.

“
It’s a nice cologne, sir.” Her tone was neutral. “Anyway, I have to talk to you. You said we could discuss...”

“
Eh? Discuss what?” He scratched his perfectly trimmed beard and then exclaimed “Oh!” when his memory was quickly jogged. “About the universities, you mean. I’m sure I meant
not
during your class hours, but if anyone asks, I’ll tell them you and I were certainly not doing anything of the teacher-student-porn persuasion.”

She did not give him the laugh he wanted. “Okay then, sir.”

“
So, what is it you want to tell me?”

“
Not tell but
show
you.” She dug into her sweater pocket and pulled out a few pamphlets stuffed in there. She crossed to her bag lying in the corner and pulled out a few more crumpled ones. She set them down eagerly at his desk. “I’d like you to take a good look at these places and tell me what you think. Pay special attention to requirements. Do you think it’s possible I can get into any of these universities?”

Mr. Lohan looked at the crumpled pile sketchily for a second, as if they were bothersome orphans dropped on his doorstep. But eventually he sat on the edge of the desk and began to read through them.

Maria’s hands folded across her chest nervously. He looked for a good long moment, making the occasional grunts and nods which suggested he was scrutinizing what was in front of him. This time around, Maria felt slightly more confident.

After a lengthy time of what seemed like careful consideration, he looked at Maria with his fashionable, black-framed glasses on the bridge of his nose.

“
Maria,” he began with a tone of gravity, “these schools are...pretty hard to get into.”

Maria hesitated a moment, knowing ahead of time what he was going to say. It would be the same answers as last time:
You really don’t have a chance/ I don’t think it’s possible/ Maybe you can just accept staying in White Crest.