The Shadow Archer Twins

Walking out of the tent, I saw a girl pacing around outside the officers’ tent, and I was sent back into painful memories, the same ones I had remembered after the first round of meetings. In that moment, I remembered a day from my freshman year in high school:

I was 14. A new kid, at a boarding school outside New York City. And she, well, she was a ‘popular girl’. I remembered her dark brown hair, the color of chocolate, her blue eyes, as dark as mine, and her smile, with perfect white teeth. Even though she was a junior, she was probably the most beautiful girl in the entire school. And I had fallen for her.

Every guy had wanted to date her, but she never seemed to gravitate towards anyone. Even though she must have been a friend with a thousand people at school, but she was never seen on a date, and hadn’t gone to prom or homecoming the year before. Or so I’d been told. Like I said, I was a new kid.

Over the course of the year, I hadn’t really ever interacted with her, but one day, at our school’s football game, I had seen her walking around the back of the bleachers, and for some strange reason, I decided to see what she was doing. I was maybe thirty steps away, when a big guy, a senior, I think, walked up to her and flashed her a perfect smile. He was a certified ‘jock’, straight out of any high-school movie, complete with gelled hair and a varsity jacket. You could smell his confidence from a hundred feet away. He thought he was going to sweep this girl off of her feet, but it didn’t exactly go like that.

He tried to talk to her, all suave, and she had wanted to have nothing to do with her. He got angry, and his buddies started to insult her, calling her horrible, hurtful names. I had seen it happen before, but never to a girl that pretty. Eventually, a couple parents walked by and gave them looks, and they stopped, walking away and laughing. She had started them down with an evil look until they had rounded the corner of the bleachers, out of sight. Then, she put one hand to her face and started crying. Soft, broken sobs echoed under the bleachers as she started to wipe the tears off of her face. I felt so bad, I walked up to her and said, in a comforting voice,

“Hey, are you okay?”

She had her back turned to me, but her shoulders moved up once, and down slowly, so I could tell she was breathing deeply to get herself together.

“I’m…I’m fine,” She sad softly.

“Those guys are jerks, you know. That guy would never deserve a girl like you.”

Whipping around, she snapped, “Could you just leave me alone?”

I was frozen there. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. With her eyes red, her forehead creased in a frown, and her mousy face distraught, she was an angel telling a mere mortal to get out of her way.

I tried to say something, but all that came out was, “Oh, uh, um, sure.”

I turned around and started to walk away, realizing that it probably had been stupid of me to talk to her after what had happened. I realized that she wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a freshman like me, but then her voice, sweet and soft, reached back towards me and said,

“Oh, don’t leave, I didn’t mean it like that! I’m sorry!”

I turned around, and she was jogging back towards me, reaching out in an effort to tap my shoulder. I turned and she said again,

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you. I’m just not used to being called those names. And you’re right, by the way. Those guys are total jerks.”

I smiled, trying to look comforting to the victim of a bully. Even though I was a freshman, she was barely two inches taller than me, so it was easy to stare into her dark blue eyes. I was about to say my good-byes when she said,

“I don’t think I’ve seen you before, what’s your name?”

Surprised she’d asked, I replied, “I’m a new kid. My name’s Otis, but everyone I know calls me—”

“Tox?” She asked, finishing my sentence.

“Yeah,” I said, smiling, “How’d you know?”

“I’ve heard about you from a friend of mine. She thinks you’re cute, actually.”

I blushed, and she giggled softly. “Come on,” She said, “Let’s go watch the game.”

And so we did. And she had gotten cold, because it was October in New York and she had only a thin long-sleeve on. So I gave her my leather jacket, which warmed her up. We talked for hours, and when the groundskeeper had had to kick us off the field because he needed to shut off the lights, I had said,

“That was one of the best talks I’ve had for a while, you know. But, I never got your name.”

She smiled at me, and said, “I’ll give you something better than a name. Here.”

She handed me a piece of paper with curly handwriting on it. Being dyslexic, it took me forever to decipher what the letters said, and with her standing right next to me, that only made it take longer. But finally, I read the writing. It said, ‘Silena Beauregard’ and had a New York phone number on it.

“That’s my home phone,” She said, “My dad won’t let me have a cell phone. Or a Facebook, or Twitter, or anything. On the back is the name of my friend. Just in case.”

She had winked at me, and until now, I had never realized that she had never wanted to date me, but she wanted her friend to. She handed me my leather jacket and started to walk away when I said,

“Hey, wait up!”

She turned around, and I got out a pen and a scrap of notebook paper from my English class. I had scribbled random drawings in blue marker on one side, a picture of a dragon, maybe. I barely remember it now. I had scribbled my name and number as fast as I could, and gave it to her.

“For you or your friend,” I had said, “Just in case.”

She smiled, and got into her car. She didn’t show up the next day at school. She didn’t show up for the rest of the year. They had said that she was going to some other boarding school on Long Island. A weird storm system had blown the country apart that summer, hitting New York bad. When I had come back to school the next fall, they had had a ceremony for her at school. She had died in the storms, they had said.

The last thing I remember was checking my phone to find a message she had left me, telling me about her boyfriend, and how he had died, and how she had betrayed her friends, and how she was going to make it right. She had sounded crazy, and sad, but the last thing she had said was that she had given my number to her friend, on the same piece of paper.

The girl I had seen snapped me out of my memory. Literally. Her fingers snapped in front of my face as she said,

“Are you okay? You’ve been staring at the same spot for the last minute or so. I thought you were going to pass out.”

Blinking my eyes, I glanced at her front right pocket. Sticking out of it, was a scrap of paper so faded, you could see through it. It had blurry blue lines, marker lines, tracing themselves across it and was so see through, I could see a DC phone number on the back. My old phone number.

Just in case, I thought, Just in case.

Notes

Sorry I'm late, more on the way. Enjoy!