Preface
Hope’s Dream
I don’t know who you are
But I dream of you each night
I’ve never seen your face
But I feel you holding me tight
Though I’ve never heard your voice
I can hear you sing to me
And though I don’t know what they look like
Your eyes will set me free
I don’t know when I’ll find you
I don’t know what I’ll say
But there’s something in my heart
That longs for you each day
I don’t know who you are
I do not know your name
But something inside me is saying
That your long for me is the same
Someday I will find you
And at last I will be free
Maybe tonight you’re saying
These same words about me
There’s something in my heart
That’s begging for your soul
There’s something in my eyes
That needs you to know
I will always be here
Waiting hopefully for you
But until the day I find my love
My dreams will see me through
Chapter One: Hiding
Why did I always end up here? Sitting completely alone in a packed, filthy high school lunchroom. As I looked up from my barely touched plate of food, I glanced around and saw that I was, yet again, the only person in the full room with a table to myself. Not that I expected any different. No one ever sat with me. Even when every table was full, rather than have to go through the torture of sitting with me, people would take chairs from my table and over-fill another beyond its capacity. It made a person feel pretty unwanted when even the nerdy kids wouldn’t sit at the same table. Even the Student Body President, who was nice to absolutely every one of the other 527 students in the school, looked away from my eyes rather than make herself feel guilty about shunning me just like every one else.
When my mom got remarried and we moved to the God-forsaken town of Woodfield, Oregon a year ago, I never thought in my wildest dreams that my life here would turn into this. I was a complete reject. Everywhere I went in this city, people knew who I was and hated me for it. It was ridiculous. What kind of place do you have to live for the rumors in the high school to have such a colossal effect on the rest of the town’s civilization? If I told the few people who didn’t already know me my name, they would get a look of disgust on their face and say, “Oh… So you’re Jayde? Hmmm…” I mean seriously, where the hell did manners go? It was still considered rude to be so obviously judgmental wasn’t it? At least straight to someone’s face… I hated my life.
I looked up again from my food (I wasn’t eating it anymore, just playing with it because it was something to look at other than my empty table) and walking into the lunchroom like they owned the world was Them. The group of people I once called friends. Maybe that was the worst part of my rejection, I was once “on top” and now I was lower than the dirty, smelly kid. I looked away as soon as I recognized their flawless bodies and perfect hair. I hate them.
It was their fault I was like this. It was their fault no one would sit by me or talk to me or look at me. It was their fault I was locked away in a completely isolated world. I picked up my nearly full tray of food and left, avoiding their stares and whispers and smiles of contained laughter. I hate them.
I walked through the mostly empty hallways to my locker. This was the only time of the long, torturous school day that no one stared. My locker was in a pretty isolated place. Technically speaking I wasn’t supposed to be in this hallway during lunch but even when a teacher saw me they ignored me. So I opened up my locker and pulled out my safe haven: my iPod. I sat down in front of my locker, closed my eyes and listened to the blaring rock music, pretending I was somewhere else. Pretending I was somewhere I might, almost, begin to be happy.
After I had calmed myself down a little bit with the music, and I no longer felt like I was fighting tears, I pulled an old homework assignment out of the bag next to me and began to draw mindlessly. By the time the bell rang ending lunch I had a wilting rose on the paper in front of me. It looked really depressing. And as I went to put the paper back in the bag my jacket sleeve slipped back exposing my wrist. I cursed out loud and then silently thanked God that there was no one in the hallway to stare. I hate it when they stare. I’m not a circus freak.
I pulled my headphones out of my ears and shoved the iPod in my bag. I had tried wearing them in the halls to drown out the noises of the students who thought tit was fun to torture me but the principal said that if a teacher had to take it away from me one more time he was going to call my mom. She had enough to deal with when it came to me without me putting more useless stress on her. So I threw my bag across my body and played in my head the last song I’d been listening to before I turned the music off. It sorta helped a little…
I hated walking through the packed hallways in this school. The student count may have been tiny, but the school wasn’t even big enough for the few students it had and the tiny town we lived in didn’t have the money to build a new one. I saw the many groups standing by lockers, or whispering behind their hands as I passed. I got nudged and pushed and leered at. I knew the hallways were packed but I also wasn’t too stupid to see the people go out of their way to run into me with their shoulder or elbow. This was exactly why I’d bought the bag. One too many times someone had “accidentally” run into me and caused my books and papers to go flying all over the hall. And everyone was always in too much of a hurry to help me pick them up. They were usually in too much of a hurry to even bother walking around them. They’d step on them and rip the papers or get shoe prints on my books. I got tired of it. This bag was the best investment I’d ever made. Now no matter how much they pushed me and ran into me they never got the pleasure of watching me get down on the ground and humiliate myself. Not anymore.
As it got closer to the late bell for class the halls started emptying. I knew I should hurry. The emptier the halls, the more personal the taunts became. With only one more hallway to go before I entered my History class, I turned the corner and almost ran straight into Him. I looked slowly and hopelessly up hoping that the toned body I knew so well would belong to a different face.
He was over a foot taller than my tiny 5’0” frame, so by the time I could see his face my head was turned straight up. We were the only ones in the hall since class was supposed to start in about 20 seconds. I turned to go around him and he put his arm out to catch me. I barely sidestepped it and practically ran to my classroom. When I turned around at the doorway he was still standing outside his class, laughing. I had to run to my seat at the back of the room to keep from passing out or throwing up, or just plain leaving school. Only two more hours… Only two more, long, horrendous hours… I kept telling myself over and over. Since I was the last one in the class everyone stared as I ran from the doorway to my seat. I had made a fool of myself yet again, but I didn’t care. Even the teacher was staring. This day just keeps getting better…
I hate Him. More than anyone else in this school I hate him for what he did to me. I hate him for thinking he did nothing wrong. I hate him for still grabbing at me in the halls like he owned me, like he believed I liked his attention. And I hate myself for never saying anything. I hate myself for running from him instead of telling him to go to hell. I hate the way he enjoys my fear. I hate myself for being afraid. The rest of this school wouldn’t be so bad if he weren’t in it. I can’t believe I ever actually liked him. I can’t believe I was ever attracted to him. I can’t believe I let that happen… NO. I had to stop that thought before I had a panic attack in the middle the classroom. Every single one of the 15 students was already staring. Just concentrate on the class. If only it were slightly more mind stimulating…
History wasn’t the worst subject in the world. If you had a decent teacher it could be really fun and interesting. But Mr. Ryan did as little work as he could possibly get away with. When I felt it was safe to look up and not have to see a class full of staring eyes, I noticed the ancient TV and VCR. Another movie? Seriously I thought we’d already watched every boring documentary on war that they’d made in the last 50 years. But, Mr. Ryan managed to find another mind numbing, brainless, probably black-and-white movie to occupy the next hour. I think maybe he had a weird super-power for being able to find really old, really bad movies about history. I mean, I’d seen some interesting history movies, but every single one I saw in here was mind-numbingly dull and incredibly stupid.
Most kids loved this class because it was the easiest “A” you could get. I hated it. We had at least two movies a week and movies meant torture. It was a solid hour of broken darkness where the entire class of students was free to torture me in less and less creative ways without the teacher noticing. But then again, sometimes the teacher did notice and just chose to ignore it.
No matter how many of the students talked about me and ignored me, what really got me was the teachers. How many kids can say the teachers listen to the student rumors at their high school? It was ridiculous. I used to be every teacher’s favorite student. I never missed a day and I got straight “A’s.” That was mostly due to the fact that I was in nothing but advanced classes before we moved away from Utah last year and they didn’t have any advanced classes here. But that didn’t matter. I knew all the answers and it was a nice relief to the teachers. But now… I was invisible. Every teacher knew I had the answer to every question but none of them ever bothered to call on me, not that I ever raised my hand. It was like an unwritten agreement we had. I acted like I wasn’t there and they treated me like I was invisible. I still got straight “A’s” but that was because that I had absolutely no social life so my nights were spent doing homework and my weekends working at the local gas station as a cashier.
I used to wonder if I’d get a little attention from the teachers if I stopped turning in my assignments and let myself fail. But then one day I heard a few of the teachers talking in the hallway I wasn’t supposed to be in at lunch… about me. Saying the same things the students said. That’s when I knew that I had to keep my grades up; I had to keep coming to school. I wasn’t about to prove those idiots right. I was far too stubborn to allow that.
When the black-and-white movie about World War I was finished and the bell rang I went as quickly as I could through the halls not even going to my locker before my final class: Choir. The one place in the torture-chamber they called a school where I didn’t have to hide. I walked into this room with my head held high instead of when I was anywhere in the rest of the school and I stared at my feet while I walked.
Singing was the one thing I had in my life that I never doubted. I knew I could sing and no one could take that away from me. No matter what else was going on in my life my music was the one place I could turn to and everything was okay for at least a minute.
Nothing was different here. Everyone in this room hated me as much as everywhere else in the school, maybe more. But because of Mrs. Greely, this was the one place in this retched building I could actually stand. Mrs. Greely loved me. She was an angel in my living hell. No matter what she was told, by teacher or student, she never believed the rumors. She knew more of the truth than any other living person. She even let me hang out in her classroom when things got to be too much. As long as I kept my grades up and didn’t skip too much she never said a word. Sometimes she’d even unlock the practice room and let me spend the period playing piano or singing by myself. Without her generosity I don’t think I would have survived as long as I have.
I grabbed the leather folder with all of my music in it from the far wall and went to my seat in the front row of the soprano section. I pushed my bag under my chair and watched the other students come slowly into the room in small groups. It wasn’t a very large choir, 15 people. So it didn’t take long for everyone to be in the room, besides the small group that talked in the hallway until the last second.
Mrs. Greely came out of her office a few minutes before the bell rang and smiled at me. I was grateful for that. Sometimes if she stayed in her office until the bell rang a few of the more malicious students would taunt me until she was there to stop them. But they knew better than to say anything once she was there. She’d had two students transferred out of this class after they wouldn’t leave me alone. It caused a lot of problems considering this was the elite choir in the school. Their parents went to the principal about it but Mrs. Greely held her ground and stood up for me. Since there were even numbers in all of the sections, she’d had to find replacements for them. It wasn’t an easy task. We were still missing one tenor. It just showed how far she’d go to make sure the rules were followed. At least that was the excuse she used. I knew she was protecting me.
When the bell rang and the last couple students rushed to their seats, Mrs. Greely automatically played a chord on the piano and the entire class stood without being told. We sang warm-ups and then sat down, just like every other day. She told us to pull out the music for the current Latin song we were working on… And I was in heaven. I let the music fill me and take me away. Even when she would stop us to work on weak spots in the song it didn’t matter because she was always playing the piano or having a particular section work on a few measures in the song.
Music was everywhere and I didn’t care that the girls behind me were whispering about me when Mrs. Greely was working with the bass section. I could hear every voice individually, and the section as a whole, and I could hear things in the simple music that I wondered if anyone else heard. I could hear each flaw but somehow the music was more beautiful to me because of it. I didn’t care that the people making it hated me. The music was beautiful and it made me happy like nothing else in the world could. It made me feel like maybe there was a purpose to my hell…
When the class ended and everyone put their folders away and headed to the door, I stayed behind. This was a daily routine. I stayed in her classroom at the end of the day and played piano or helped her clean up the room for ten or fifteen minutes while I waited for the hallways to clear before I left. I loved having this class last. It made the rest of the day almost bearable because I had my sanctuary to look forward to at the end.
Today, I looked around the room and saw that there wasn’t much cleaning that needed done so I sat down at the piano while Mrs. Greely studied some music at her desk. I played a soft, slightly morose sounding song for a few minutes and, lost in the music as I was, I didn’t hear Him come in. He came up behind me without me noticing and put His hand on my back. I jumped and my hands, automatically tensing from an unexpected touch, slammed several keys at once on the keyboard. Somehow I knew he was smiling.
Mrs. Greely turned around at the unexpected change in sound and saw him standing behind me. “Do you need something Kevin?” She said in a confused but slightly cold tone, probably due to my obvious discomfort.
“I actually wanted to ask you if you have any classes available next quarter. I need another fine-arts credit and this is the fine-art that interests me most.” He said in his sickly-sweet, fake voice.
I cringed at the sound and stood, automatically pulling away from his touch as soon as I could. I went to where I’d left my bag and picked it up, slinging it across my body and pulling out my iPod. I put the headphones in my ears, ignoring the conversation going on behind me. Before I turned on my music, I called out to Mrs. Greely “See you tomorrow.” working to keep my face and voice from showing the fear and panic I felt.
I had to consciously work to keep myself from running out of the room. When I got to the hallway, it was more packed than it usually was when I left because He had interrupted my usual stalling. I hurried to my locker and grabbed the books I needed for homework tonight then headed for the closest door leading to the tiny school parking lot.
I wasn’t fast enough. He knew my basic path and where I usually parked so it wasn’t hard for him to intercept me when he wanted to. I saw him coming down the hallway toward me and thought about turning into the girl’s bathroom that was about halfway between us. But I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t follow me and I could NOT be alone with him. So I continued down the hall praying he’d let me walk past him, knowing he’d try to stop me.
When we were about ten feet apart he said, “Hey, sexy.”
I ignored him.
“What, you don’t want to talk, baby?”
I ignored him. There were only a few feet between us now and I started to swerve to the side. He mirrored my movement. “I need to get home,” I said, weakly. What a freakin comeback…
“Let me walk you to your car. I know you miss me.” He said in such a smug way that I wanted to hit him. What the hell was there to miss??
I chose to not argue. I was sure there would still be people in the parking lot. Would they care if he did something I didn’t like? I wasn’t sure. But fighting him only made him fight back twice as hard so it was useless right now.
“Fine!” I half-growled, half-whispered. I disgusted myself. I was so weak.
“I thought so,” he said stupidly as he stepped out of my way and turned around to walk next to me. He reached out his hand and tried to wrap his arm around my waist but I sidestepped him. He snickered. Disgusting bastard. Thankfully, he stopped trying to touch me… For now…
When we stepped out into the cold, bright February day, I was blinded momentarily. Damn snow. The sun was bad enough without the pure white snow reflecting it and making it twice as bad. It would probably melt soon though. Snow never stuck around here long. There was always rain that melted it pretty quick. I was surprised the sun was out. But I could see clouds not far off. It would be overcast again soon.
There were a lot more cars in the parking lot than I was used to since I was leaving so much earlier. But I still didn’t have any trouble finding my dark blue Jeep with its black hard top. I parked in the same spot everyday.
For a second I forgot He was next to me and I smiled. I loved my Jeep. I loved that I almost had to jump to get into the cab. I loved the way the engine roared just loud enough to make you know it had power but not so loud that you couldn’t hear anything else. I loved the way people looked at the contrast of my tiny body driving the big Jeep. It looked like it should defy the laws of physics.
This Jeep was the one thing I had to thank my biological father, George, for. He and my mom had never been married, and he never really seemed to want me. He did what was necessary. He paid the child support and sent me a card on my birthday and Christmas. Sometimes he even called, though when it came to my birthday he was usually a couple of days late. He sort of tried. But just over a year ago, about 3 months before we moved, this Jeep showed up in the driveway. He called later that day and told me it was an early sixteenth birthday present. He’d found it for cheap and fixed up the engine (he was a mechanic) and he had left a gift certificate to get it painted in the glove box. He said the guy who was doing it was a friend so he’d do a good job. He bought me a brand new, really nice stereo for it too. I hadn’t known what to say. George had never given me anything that wasn’t required. I didn’t know how he’d known the perfect car for me, because he barely knew me, but I would always be grateful.
Little did I know that the Jeep was sort of his farewell gift. I hadn’t heard from him since he’d signed the title over to me and helped me get it registered. He’d never said goodbye but I couldn’t blame him. What do you say to a daughter you barely know? Neither my mom or I knew where he was. But neither of us resented him for leaving. Every month, the child support still showed up in my mom’s account but we didn’t know where it came from. He was never much of a father and he’d chosen good timing. My mom had finally found somebody new who could take care of us. Maybe he did that on purpose. I don’t know if I’ll ever know. I sometimes wonder if somebody would inform me if he died. I wasn’t sure. Not many people knew he had a daughter.
As my mind came back to reality I realized we were only about ten feet from my Jeep so I opened the bag at my side to grab the keys. I was not going to be stuck standing next to my locked car trying to find my keys with Him next to me. I was grateful when I found the small set of keys with only about two feet to go. I put them in the door as soon as I was close enough. But he wasn’t going to let me go that easy.
“What’s your hurry, baby?” He smiled as he faked like he didn’t know.
“I told you I have to get home.” I said with as much determination as I could mange. But it wasn’t much. Something about him turned me into a weak, pathetic excuse for a human being.
“Didn’t seem to be in such a hurry when you were playing that song in Mrs. Greely’s room before I came in.” I had unlocked the door and I was pulling on the handle when he grabbed my waist and pulled me close to him, trying to kiss me. My tiny body was no match for his toned muscle; but I still had the keys. I jabbed them into his stomach, knowing that they wouldn’t do any permanent damage, but that it would hurt. He cringed but didn’t let go of his firm grip on my stomach. I brought my knee up straight between his legs in an instinctive move. I was not going to let him hurt me again. I might already have bruises from where he had his arm wrapped tightly around me.
When he felt my knee hit his groin he groaned and let go of me to hunch over. I pulled open my car door in one swift move and basically jumped into the driver’s seat. I put the key in the ignition as I saw a couple of kids who had been in the parking lot coming over to make sure The Creep was okay. Sure, now they were watching. But maybe they had been watching the whole time and just didn’t care what happened to me. That was a serious possibility.
“Bitch!” I heard him half-moan half-yell at me before I started the ignition and drowned out anything else he might have said. The tires on my Jeep squealed as I shoved it into first gear and gave it a little too much gas. I pulled recklessly out of the parking lot, getting out of there as fast as the Jeep would allow.
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